HAGS 10 • Ma (2019) and the future of hagsploitation

I'm Mama's little angel, and Papa says I'm good as God. The stars are angelous. I'll make this man back for his daughter, Miss Robbie, stay in her place. No one ever leaves a stall. You brought this on yourself. At the start of the series, which in itself is an experiment of form for this podcast, I had a guiding question. Our expectation films demeaning or empowering. After dozens of hours watching a hardcore from the 50s onwards, and now in our 10th hour of the series, the conclusion I've reached is perhaps unsatisfying. They're both. Hackspotation is the genre of the past, because it depends on a movie star industry that has transformed so extremely that we can't really have Hackspotation in the same way anymore, because we don't have the same kind of movie stars to exploit anymore. The system that was in place, the system that made movie stars, just doesn't exist anymore. You can't throw a stone without hitting a think piece or two about how movie stars are extinct. And in and within that system, where actors were very much products and ownership of a studio system that owned the means of production, the means of distribution, and up until one point also the means of exhibition, aquar films were exploitative. They were exploitative because they're a way of regaining control of the movie stars who were now freelancers, and who perhaps did not have as much access to roles as they had in their heyday, partly because the system in which they had operated the most was disappearing. Some of the films that I've covered and a lot of the ones that I've chosen not to are really just concerned with ugly and uglifying and putting movie stars or former movie stars into situations where they will be laughed at, and very much not a part of the joke. However, that has changed. Over the past decade in particular, horror has become the site of some of the greatest female performances across all ages and subgenres of horror. We've had a new generation of actresses break through in films like The Witch It Follows Mid-Somar, St. Maud, or X series like The Haunting of Hill House and Swarm. We've also seen established actresses, not particularly associated with the horror genre, turn to it and give phenomenal, often Oscar-snubbed performances like Tony Collette and her redditary Carla Cogino and Gerald's Game, Andrew Reisberg and Mandy and Possessa, S.E. Davis and the Babadook. These films are all stand alone and you couldn't really associate them with a haxploitation in any meaningful way. My point here being that over the past decade horror has evolved from the genre that was considered to be the graveyard of good performances, to being one where actresses could find some of the best roles of their careers. And then, there's Ma. Okay, everybody listen up real quick. My only house rules are, don't take the Lord's name and fame. Sorry. And don't spit on my floors, please. Oh, and you, I'm going to meet your keys. You got to check in with me before walking out that door because I got to know you're safe to drive. Cool. Yeah. Okay. Oh, and nobody go upstairs. That's my world and right now it's a mess. So you guys are free to do whatever you want to do down here, but, you know, hell yeah. Heck yeah. Thanks, lady. I'll get you some cups and ice. Excuse me. What's your name? Sue Ann. What yours? Welcome to the Final Girls Podcast. I'm Anna Buketskaya, a podcast host and in this series of The Final Girls, I've been journeying through the off-forgotten underdiscussed and surprisingly commercial genre, known as Hacker, PsychoBitty, Grandam Gignol or just Plano Hacksploitation. In this final episode of the series, I'll be discussing the 2019 horror film Mah and arguing how it is the only true great example of contemporary Hacksploitation, as well as name checking some other films that have pushed at genre forward and considering what does the future of Hacker hold for us. If you have an experience, Mah, please go find it right now. Pause this episode, go watch Mah. I cannot imagine a better way to spend the weekend. Unfortunately, it has just been taken off of Netflix, but it's not hard to see online and it's already a film that you can spoil. There's not that much for plot, it's more of a mood, but please consider this your spoiler warning. So let's first of all set the scene as to what exactly happens in Mah. Sue Ann is a veterinary nurse in a small town in Ohio. She's introduced to us as the only adult willing to buy some local teenagers boo so they can hang out and drink under a bridge, as you do when you're a teenager. Soon enough, this arrangement becomes a regular thing and Sue Ann, seemingly with all the goodwill in her heart and no weird intentions at all, offers her house for the teens to come and drink at, as any adult would. Soon enough, the kids and Sue Ann are sending each other facetimes or video voice notes or whatever it is that apparently kids used to do in 2019. They're all hanging out with her and her basement dancing to Kung Fu fighting, they've nicknamed her Ma and all the while. She is hiding her sick daughter in her upstairs bedroom while she gets drunk with other kids from her daughter's school. The thing is the kids are all the children of Sue Ann's high school classmates who played a very cruel joke on her when she was younger. So this is all a revenge plot but it also isn't. You might be thinking oh where are the parents in all of this situation why they're letting their teenage children hang out in the basement of this random woman. Well first of all neglect is a real thing. Secondly, they do try to get involved Ben Hawking's, who's a local contractor and Dilf who also happens to be the one who played the terrible prank on a teenage Sue Ann and the father of one of the kids that she's been fraternizing with, tries to warn her off. So she kidnaps him, subdues him and gives him a dog blood transfusion, threatens to cut his dick off and then kills him but not by cutting off his dick, by slicing his wrist open. She also runs over his girlfriend with her truck, just cause in the middle of the day, in the middle of the road. And when the kids that she's been helping secure booze for start distancing themselves from her because she gets a bit intense, she drugs them, ties them up into her basement and tortures them. She saw shot the lips of one girl, irons the stomach of another boy and she paints white the face of the only black boy of the group. Things escalate pretty quickly and Sue Ann's house then catches fire. She gets stabbed, her daughter escapes and Sue Ann lays down to die next to the corpse of Ben waiting for either the police or the flames to take her. Ma is nuts and I love that about it. Now I believe in the death of the author, meaning that once a piece of art is out in the world, it belongs to the audience who can imbue it with meaning that wasn't originally intended by its creator. And I say that because I don't think Tate Taylor, the director of Ma or Octavia Spencer, it's star director Tate Taylor or Octavia Spencer or Jason Blum had a expectation on their mind when they made Ma. But having watched all of these movies almost back-to-back, I genuinely think it's the only film in recent years that has done Hakora Wright. Hear me out. It's not just about the tic-boxes. Those recurrent elements that have discussed over the episodes of the series, the secluded house, the isolated older woman, the failed mother, the arrested mental development, the disturbed sexuality, tic-tic-tic-tic. It's mostly about Octavia Spencer and how the film knowingly upends our image of her as an actress and deploys her substantial abilities to create a truly sinister and deeply unsettling character. "Girls, girls, you guys want a party like rock stars or what?" "No, I got to clean the house up when my mom gets some, hey, maybe next time." "Damn, mom, don't you got a job?" "Yeah, I guess I should work a double since you guys don't have time for me." "Girl, you need a man." "Girl, you need to watch him mouth." "Now, when Mark came out, there were tons of fanfare and memes about it, primarily centered around Spencer and the superficial hilarity of the one syllable title, and the film might not be perfect. But Octavia Spencer is a goddamn actress, and she's acting in every single frame. By all accounts, the film evolved substantially once she came on board, as some of the best hackware films did, they really take into account what the star persona is and what the image of the actress at the center of the film is and how they can use that to the advantage of the horror." Spencer, at this point in her career, was not struggling for part. She was the only black woman in history to have received three consecutive Oscar nominations after her first domination and win for the help in 2011, but she was in her own words frustrated by the kinds of parts that were coming in, the so-called best supporting actress curse. Even though she'd won that Oscar not that long ago, Spencer was anxious for a meaty role, something different that she could play and have fun with. She said that she was sick of being offered the same role and never getting to be a lead, and no one knows how to use Spencer's talents as much as director take Taylor. They had met ages ago when there were both PAs on Joel Schumacher's courtroom drama a time to kill. Since that point, they had been friends and have collaborated on all of his movies by one. They even lived together for seven years and used to watch forensic files together, which is how Taylor knew that Spencer would probably be up for something quite dark. Taylor had had a general meeting with Blumhouse Chief Jason Blum, saying that after the help and his James Brown biopic get on up, he really wanted to do something really fucked up. The day before, as it happens, Blumhouse had just bought a script about an older woman who lured teenagers into her basement to kill them. The script needed some work, but Taylor immediately, and I mean immediately, took this to his friend Octavia Spencer. When Taylor called her literally in the hallway outside of that meeting with Blum, about this horror film he wanted her to look at, she quipped that every black act dies within the first fifteen minutes and she wasn't interested. Spencer would know because the only other horror film world that she had done was as a nurse in Rob Zombie's Halloween 2 in 2009, where she got brutally murdered by Michael Myers in the first fifteen minutes of the movie. But when Taylor told her that she wouldn't die first, in fact that she'd get to do all the killing, she said yes without even needing to read the script. With both Taylor and Spencer on board, the project started shifting. Taylor Spencer herself talking about it. I said yes to this script because I am a true horror genre psycho thriller fan, and I've never seen a woman of color headline a film like this, and so I wanted to be a part of it because it was, it's a lot of fun, but some of the social messaging in it means a lot. I also think of it as a cautionary tale. At first the script for Ma, which was written by Scotty Landies, had Ma written as a white woman, which is a several critics pointed out, one of the main drawbacks of the film, the way it is uninterested in engaging with the racial dynamics of play by changing the race of the lead character. The only moment in the film that seems to nod or acknowledge the fact that the dynamic shift once you cast black woman in the lead role is when Ma paints white the face of the only other black character in the film, and whispers to him, there's only room for one of us. Both Taylor and Spencer have said in interviews that they weren't particularly interested in engaging with that conversation in the text of the film. That said, the death of the author again, just because that was not the filmmaker's intention does not mean that the audience cannot question that. And on top of that, Spencer was very aware of the dire absence of women of color as leading characters in horror films, and that was one of the motivating factors for her to take on the role. In an interview, Spencer said, "These types of roles haven't really been available to women of color, and I think it's about time that changes. It's exciting to play something outside of the three archetypes that people like to see me in." By all accounts, that initial script was a much more straightforward slasher. An older woman lures teenagers into her basement and kills them. Full stop. It was Spencer that insisted that they develop the backstory for the character a bit more, giving her a reason for her violent and obsessive behavior. Ma would be Octavia Spencer's first leading role, once again directed by her dear friend who "out of love and admiration wanted her to be a fucked-up teen killer." Taylor thought that, "For me, when movies are successful, your lead is not so honorable. You relate to them and you feel bad for them." Like a lot of other hagg characters, Su-Anne is obsessed with the past. She both wants to rewrite what happened to her and who she was when she was a teenager herself. This place could be incredible. You know what you need? Okay, hear me out. Couched there, snack wall, bam. Maybe like a projector situation going on over here, hang weird lights, speakers, over there, rugs all in here and then just like a real table for flip-cup beer pong. You get it. I'll get right on that as soon as I win the lottery. Then I can turn this place into the Taj Mahal. I mean unless you hate being cool. If you don't want to be cool, that's on you. Just saying. You want to see something cool? Sure. Pretty cool. Through flashbacks, we learned that Ben Hawking, the aforementioned Dylf, had been the one to play the terrible prank on Su-Anne when they were teenagers. He could jolt her into giving a blowjob to a boy that she thought was him and got the whole school to witness it, making Su-Anne's humiliation painfully public. Now, regardless of any quibbles I might have with a logic, Mah lives and dies by Octavia Spencer's performance. We are used to seeing her being sweet, endearing, quick-talking and helpful. She is widely beloved both on-screen and off. When she picked up her Oscar, the entire room stood up for her and she was visibly shaking, started crying before she could even finish her speech. [Applause] [Cheering and applause] Oh, thank you. [Cheering and applause] [Cheering and applause] [Cheering and applause] Thank you, Academy, for putting me with the hottest guy in the room. Um, I have to thank my families, my family in Alabama, the state of Alabama, my LA family, watching at Stevens or at Gata, my help family. [Cheering and applause] She often played characters that are supportive in every single sense and would often put aside their own needs and wants. But in Mah, there is an edge to her. When we first see Su-Anne, she's walking a three-legged dog in nurse's scrubs, but she's already on the defensive. She basically barks at an unhoused man, then at one of the teenagers who is asking her to buy them beer. She sort of coiled up and lashes out at the smallest things. She only relents when she spots that the van belongs to the contracted company owned by Ben Hawking's, that same boy that she had a crush on him who's so cruelly pranked her. While her motivations are murky, Mah and Spence's performance in particular never let us leave her side. Much like the best hack horror films, we stay with her while she loses control, while she simmers with anger and resentment, while she manipulates, while she kills. We are watching Ma for her, to see Octavia Spencer get up to no good, to see her break bad, and the fact that Spencer had become so well known and so lauded for very warm and welcoming sort of roles plays in her favour. A su-an, she's switching gears from friendliness to iceiness in a single blink, and this destabilising vibe is the strongest element of her performance and the whole film really. There's precious few jump scares. The film builds its unease when the camera stays on Spencer, waiting for her to react to something, because her reactions always off balance, a little bit out of sorts, like somebody who's trying to figure out on the spot how to be a person, what to say in any given situation, how to be cool. You couldn't call Ma scary, really, but it is sinister. Oh, okay. Well, I see what's going on. A man sent in a girl to do his dirty work. Guys, I used to do the same thing when I was your age. We're sorry. Could you hook us up, though? I wouldn't be able to live with myself if you got into an accident. Oh, well, I'm driving and I don't drink. We were just gonna go to the rock pile for a little bit. I promise you. I know where that is. Shoot. We used to hang out there all the time when I was a kid. She's lying. Sue Anne didn't use to hang out under the bridge with anyone, let alone the cool kids. The quickness and the messiness of her lies is the thing that always gets me. Sue Anne just doesn't see herself the way the others do. My favorite scene in the film is a clever little montage that all takes place on a phone screen. In quick succession, we see Ma's desperate ploy to get the kids back into her good graces. Are you guys mad at me for something? I mean, I risked my job so that you could have fun and we definitely did. The least you could do is, you know, say, "Thank you." Hey guys, it's Sue Anne. Look, I really need you to meet me at the rock piles after school tomorrow. It's an emergency. Please. Sue Anne is also a somewhat messy movie, deeply entertaining, but flawed. That said, though, Sue Anne is a perfect encapsulation of what Hackhor did so well in the '60s in its heyday. She stuck in this time warp, obsessing over the kids at her high school and their mistreatment of her and projecting that obsession onto a whole new generation of kids that have not done anything to her and that she has no business interacting with in the first place. Their meeting is completely arbitrary, but she clings onto them. When she starts hanging out with a teenager, she visibly regresses. She's volatile, switching gears with her emotions when she senses that she's being made fun of. The whole thing with her daughter who she hides and locks in her room upstairs and forbids from walking, forcing her to use a wheelchair when she's in school. I. the film does not explore it in depth, and I wish it did, but it is giving me big moon chalice by proxy vibes. Much like how she treats her own daughter there is precious little logic to the way Sue Anne operates. Why did Sue Anne just run over Mercedes with her car, seemingly at random, if she had this elaborate plan all along? Why did she grab Ben's penis and threaten to cut it off, but then didn't? What did she get from that? Why did she just slash one of his wrists? Why did she forbid her daughter from walking? There's details that don't quite make sense, but. and personally, I think the film spends too much time with the kids, I want more Sue Anne and less teen drama. You might call this a script flaw, but I do love the randomness of her. There is no real explanation about why she does anything. When she's at her most demented, her behavior gets erratic, more cash even, but it's the unpredictability and that randomness that actually puts me on edge when watching her. Because as any horror fan, I'm always trying to predict what a character is going to do, no matter how much the film sells them to me as completely deranged on an inch. There are patterns of behavior and we're so much more familiar with how people might behave just because of the sheer amount of films that we've watched at this point. But Sue Anne makes little sense, which puts me on edge. Sue Anne is clumsily manipulative. She is jumping from convivial to angry to clawing, trying out different approaches to see what works to get what she wants. She even pretends to have cancer at one point. And my favorite part of Spence's performance is Ma is how effortlessly she moves through all these different tactics without her eyes ever changing. They're always completely empty. What you did to me, the humiliation, it never goes away. But then it hit me. Sue Anne, you're thinking about this the wrong way. You see, you treated me like a dog, because that's what you are. You, you're no man, Ben Hawking. Please do it, I was just a kid. I'll go back to my original question. Are hack horror films demeaning or empowering? These films, my included, all these hack horror films that I've seen and the ones that are yet to be made, they don't really belong in the empowerment narrative. But I don't think that's their intention, and I don't think that's how we should be watching them either. They are character films, they're actress films. They work because we get to see actresses try something out that no other genre outside of horror will ever allow them. These films work because they allow them to play characters who refuse to be ignored. Sure, not in the healthiest of ways, but mentally stable people rarely make great horror characters, do they? There's a few other films that I wanted to shut out that really play around and update the hack horror formula. Greta, a 2018 thriller, starring Isabel Hupair as a woman who uses tricks to lure an orphaned woman into her orbit and becomes dangerously obsessed with her. This is very much a B movie with an a-list cast, and no one does continental crazy quite like Hupair, who is icy in her determination to stalk this young woman. And then there's Axel Carolyn's The Manor, which is available in prime video as part of the Blomhouse Presents Anthology of Films, which stars horror icon Barbara Hershey as a former dancer whose family moves her to remote nursing home after she develops Parkinson's disease. Soon after she settled in, she noticed a strange behavior amongst the other residents and starts suffering from terrible nightmares at night. Both of these films use their stars in interesting ways, with Greta very much updating the psychosexual thriller model of the 90s with an older woman predator figure, and the manner playing on the haunted house rope and the eeriness of abandoned folk who become menacing otherworldly figures at nightfall. While Hupair's character plays the part of an older woman in distress who turns out to be the villain, Barbara Hershey's character is an elderly update on her final girl roles of the past. These are fabulously entertaining films, but there's hags beyond horror. Freudian critic, Mary Wilde. has a particular theory about the Kardashians that she's very passionate about. You know, I feel like there are new hags on the scene outside of Jess Horror. Like, and I say this with utmost affection, like no shade intended at all, I feel like, I mean, it might not surprise you to hear, but I feel like there are some ladies out there of a certain age that are bringing a lot of drama to the table. I'm thinking of real housewives. I'm thinking of someone like Chris Jenner, you know, I mentioned her before on the show. She is totally enmeshed with her family. Like, there are no, I don't feel like there are healthy boundaries in that family, like because she's the manager of all her children, so it's literally her business to be in their lives and to manage their lives and manage their careers. She gets 10% of every kid. So she has invested financial interest to be enmeshed with them. That is a recipe for like hags' exploitation right there, you know? Like, so she's literally profiting from being enmeshed. So there is that aspect, but also like, you know, when you look at pictures of Chris Jenner when she was like in her younger days, and she was classically gorgeous, like she did modeling, you know, she was like a beauty queen. She was a fashionista in Beverly Hills. And now she's obviously in her 60s. She's still a very glamorous lady, like, extremely so. She's got amazing taste, but there is that temptation to kind of like compare her to back in the day, compare her to her daughters who are all very gorgeous too. And so there was like, I feel like there's certain tropes that you could apply, like in terms of hags' exploitation to the Kardashians. And the fact that she's also very powerful, like she can influence her daughters, even in their marriages. If she doesn't approve of a guy, then he's in the doghouse, you know, like there's you know, it's a very weird situation. I could tell for ages about Chris, you know, she's, she's sort of like a star to me, but yeah, she's really fascinating. And there's also the fact I've mentioned to you this before that there's a rumor going around that Chris Jenner is the leader of a Coven of Witches. I have not heard of this except from you. I'm the sole driver of that rumor, I think. Yeah, I think like you, you started up the rumor online. Oh my god, Ms. Jenner, if you're listening, don't sue me. But yeah, just heard it online. Maybe it was on these like subreddit forums where people were saying that it seems like every man who marries into the Kardashian Jenner family comes out like destitute and broken. And it's because Chris Jenner is, you know, casting a spell on these poor men and ruining their lives. I mean, obviously it's very sexist to like blame the bad decisions of these men on Chris Jenner, you know, it's very convenient to attach the witch label to Chris Jenner and say it's her fault. But nevertheless, it's just the myth that injures in the culture. And people start to think that she's even using like dark forces, you know, to control people. I mean, it's like Hague City. I'm even thinking of like Madonna, you know, like she's in her 60s and her Instagram is so messy, but she doesn't care. Like she owns it. And she's coming back on tour. And she does talk about ageism, you know. And but also, this says, I don't know if this person was on your list, but I'm feeling like, I don't know, I feel like Lydia tar is a bit of the hack. And finally, what can horror do for the figure of the Hague beyond knowing how to properly weave in the abilities and public persona of an actress into the story? I'll leave it to producer and filmmaker Jen Handorf to offer her closing thoughts. I am in development on a film that has a character's ultimate evolution is into a crown, is into an all-knowing crown. And whenever I pitch this film, and I say she's an all-powerful crown, people make a face like you, like ah. And I think culture is on the cusp of saying how not only not disgusting, but amazing and beautiful and powerful that woman can be. I'm not sure we have recontextualized the crown or the Hague as much as we'd like to think we have, but I hope we do soon and I can feel it on the horizon. And as we come to the end of this episode and this series, there's something to be said about endings in Hague horror films. All of the hacks that I've covered in this series end up dead, locked up or completely out of their mind. How about we give a Hague a happy ending for a change, huh? Thank you so much for listening to The Finals Podcast and for listening to this series on Hague horror. This format has been very much an experiment and a complicated one at times for me, so I appreciate everyone who's listened so far. You can find me on Twitter and Instagram and Adam be Demented, and I encourage you to dive into the previous seasons of The Podcast on this very feed. There's going to be a break for a few weeks, and then I'll be returning with the next season of The Finals Podcast, which will return to the conversational format of the previous seasons. Watch out for the theme reveal on our socials in the next couple of weeks. [Music] , you. you. you.