[Pride 2022] "You Smell Pretty": Satanic Lesbianism in 'The Blackcoat's Daughter'

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Possession narratives have a tendency to act as vehicles for queer transgressions onscreen. In “Demons Are a Girl’s Best Friend,” Andrew Scahill notes that possession allows girls to be “able to transgress and overcome patriarchal power, to turn its pathology against itself, and cover it with the putridity of queer abjection.” It’s here that the spectator is granted a glimpse of women in revolt, not against her possessor, but against societal assimilation and hegemonic pressures. It’s a complicated rendering that indulges homosexual deviances under the guise of supernatural manipulation. Variations are found in The Exorcist (1972), Alucarda (1977), Night of the Demons I (1988) & II (1994), The Last Exorcism (2010) The Evil Dead (2013), Luz (2018) and, The Blackcoat’s Daughter (2015). 

Originally titled February, The Blackcoat’s Daughter is exceptionally bleak, delivering a disquieting exploration of loneliness through a young woman’s devoutness for female companionship. The debut feature for Osgood Perkins (son of Anthony Perkins) was delayed to the point that his second feature, I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House (2016), managed to find a home on Netflix a year before its predecessor. Initially released into the festival circuit in 2015, it would take the film another two years to receive a wide-scale theatrical release. 

Following two simultaneous stories, set nine years apart, Perkins’ film observes its sad girls with care and precision. The film opens with the story of Kat (Kiernan Shipka) and classmate Rose (Lucy Boynton), abandoned in their remote all-girls Catholic school over winter break. Immediately the film settles into an uneasy nightmare. Kat, while dreaming of her parent’s death, sleeps under a white veiled curtain, her hands clasped as though in restless prayer. We soon learn that her dream is prophetic; a car accident has left her orphaned. Rose is similarly stranded, becoming the erotic fixation of the grieving Kat. It’s soon revealed that Rose has intentionally delayed her parent’s arrival in order to deal with a suspected pregnancy. 

In The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, and Psychoanalysis, cultural theorist, Barbara Creed, examines the womb as a vehicle for abject dread, claiming that historically, the uterus was drawn with devil horns as a means of demonizing child-bearing bodies. Creed further states that the maternal figure is typically positioned as a threat to a horror film’s patriarchal order. In the case of The Blackcoat’s Daughter, the potential pregnancy threatens Kat who relies on Rose for companionship, her predation growing increasingly invasive as a result. It’s no coincidence, then, that Rose later finds out she’s suddenly without child. It’s never explicitly stated, but can be argued that Kat — through supernatural means — eradicates the pregnancy as a way of ridding Rose's familial ties. It’s one example of the film’s many dedications to abolishing the heteronuclear family. 

The film’s second storyline takes place nine years later, following Joan (Emma Roberts), a lonely drifter recently released from a psychiatric hospital hitchhiking her way back to the Bramford school. A well-meaning couple approaches her with a ride that she accepts hesitantly but is desperate to make her way “home.” In the final act, we learn that Joan is in fact, Kat, a decade older.

There’s an unshakable discomfort to the film’s sprawl. Once described as an “unsettling hum,” The Blackcoat’s Daughter inflicts a low vibrating dread onto its viewer. Owing much to its expansive cinematography, the camera possesses a hovering gaze, becoming its own anxious entity. Julie Kirkwood, who also served as the cinematographer for Karyn Kusama’s Destroyer (2018) and Perkin’s second film, observes the isolation of the film’s empty settings through long, tracking shots. Her lens casts permeating dread in the vast, hollowed landscapes, exposing a notable absence of living creatures.

As viewers, we may be accustomed to certain cinematic pacing, cues and formulaic frights. This conditioning allows Perkins to subvert the laws of satanic cinema. In withholding its violence, expectations violate our relationship to the film in a disorienting reversal that queers our cinematic muscle memory. Such delayed violence allows the quiet horrors of the film to slowly encroach the screen in full until we are desperate for the loud hysterics Kat ignites into the cold. 

Demonic possession is an excellent enabler of both bodily and spiritual excess. Through such narratives, there’s an allowance for a typically-feminine body to extend towards forbidden portals of flesh, fluids, and fetishism. These stories allow for the kind of breach in boundaries women are often prohibited from. Here, the feminine body is encouraged to rupture the tightly governed borders between hetero-enforced embodiment and the unconstrained freedoms that accompany the possessed. While acting as an outlet for “unladylike” behaviour, spiritual invasion is particularly threatening to a film’s men (e.g., priests, doctors, fathers, boyfriends); another form of displaying women’s rage as dreadful. Because victims are typically young girls rarely in control of this process, possessions signal a loss of agency and control on the part of the occupied girl, rendering her a vessel of nonconsensual violations. 

But The Blackcoat’s Daughter is different. It provides an alternate trajectory of pleasure for its possessed girl. The devil instead becomes a libratory force of kinship for Kat, allowing her to satiate certain temptations. The extremity of this co-dependent bond is illustrated as she mourns the entity’s disappearance during a successful exorcism, quietly pleading for it not to leave her. Because hetero-patriarchy is so ripe for overturning, the influence of this demonic invasion is a welcoming presence for a closeted Catholic girl. Her return to Bramford as Joan is indicative of her inherent need to reclaim the union between girl and demon.

With an insular woman-centred cast, the film marginalizes its patriarchal influence. Fathers die and never arrive, priests vacate the premises only to return too late, and boyfriends are obscured in dark cars, only making a singular, vague appearance. The film’s men never fully materialize, becoming obsolete shadows, as though Perkins himself has exorcised the priest, the father, and the boyfriend as intrusive presences in the women’s lives. This absence feels like an intentional cleansing for the viewer, too. 

In this sense, the film presents a queer potentiality within this hermetic world of women and girls. In the film’s director’s commentary, Perkins mentions that the school’s two remaining nuns — spinsters cohabiting in a farmhouse on the outskirts of campus — are intentionally painted as “hairless, satanic, lesbians.” Through Rose, Kat becomes privy to this grotesque folklore. As she describes the urban legend one can imagine cross-generational tales of lesbian lore whispered in the school’s hallways and sequestered bedrooms. It’s a clear misdirect as Kat becomes the film’s monstrous queerling, her carnal fascination for Rose haunting every desolate nook. “You smell pretty,” she snarls at her, an unkempt sapphism permeating the boundaries of her senses. In multiple sequences, we watch as her rough, dirty finger strokes the clean, glossy surface of a yearbook photograph of Rose. 

Later, Kat kneels by the glowing boiler, contorting in satanic prayer. Her curiosity about the women as heretic figures becomes a reciprocal offering as both the demon and nuns are treated as spectres of queer kinship, community, and solidarity. It’s through them that Kat locates agency to disrupt the Catholic school system that represses her. Notably, all but one of her victims are women, and the penetrative tip of her knife perpetuates a further queering of the narrative. In Men, Women, and Chainsaws, Carol Clover reinforces this assertion by stating “Knives and needles, like teeth, beaks, fangs, and claws, are personal extensions of the body that bring attacker and attacked into primitive, animalistic embrace.” This interpretation speaks to Kat’s predilection for female victims as an outlet for repressed homosexuality. Ultimately, instead of being released from her demons, she’s desperate to continue to feed, indulge and pleasure them. 

When considering The Blackcoat’s Daughter, amongst the earlier mentioned films, one can argue there’s an opportunity for a collective reclamation of the Demon Dyke trope via a strong embrace of a Sapphic4Satan sensibility. In all of these films, horror’s impulse towards queerness hinges on supernatural interception, with possession cinema allowing for an excess of taboo eroticism. The Blackcoat’s Daughter facilitates an outlet for its filmic women to explore their sexuality outside the heterosexist confines of respectability. 

Scahill’s essay concludes with this sentiment: “the conceit of possession offers a bounty of transgressive pleasures to explore onscreen.” Kat’s inability to recapture the initial possession from years ago is a loss of such “bounty'' that, quite literally, fulfilled her. It’s indicative of a future of queer potentiality now excised by men. The snowscape permeating the brutalist, concrete buildings of the school is a bright, haunting glare back towards the viewer with every pan of Kirkwood’s camera. In the end, Kat’s body is left vacant, as hollow as the windswept landscape she mourns so openly in. 

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