At least since the original Nosferatu in 1922, vampire films have often been marked by a strong sexual charge, most often involving the mesmerizing erotic mastery of male vampires over their female victims. However, variety has been the hallmark of vampire cinema in the twenty-first century, and the exploration of gender issues via vampire films has been no exception. Films such as Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive (2013), with its sophisticated indie-film vibe; Sweden’s Let the Right One In (2008), with its suggestion that vampires might be post-gender; and Ana Lily Amirpour’s Iranian-inflected A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014), with its avenging feminist vampire; and the German-British entry Blood Red Sky (2021), with its emphasis on the motherly instincts of a female vampire amid the chaos of its vampires-on-a-plane, air-terrorism action plot, have made important new contributions to the vampire genre in a number of areas, including the exploration of gender issues. Another 2021 film, Travis Stephens’ Jakob’s Wife, particularly foregrounds gender relations with its emphasis on the emancipation of its downtrodden titular spouse, liberated from domestic drudgery by the energies gained by becoming a vampire. This film, meanwhile, can be linked to even broader issues concerning Western attitudes toward the world in general, suggesting the power of the vampire genre as a tool for the exploration of a wide range of issues concerning power and domination.
Who’s the Vampire?: Jakob as Husband, Anne as Wife
The basic scenario of Jakob’s Wife is set up very quickly as the film begins with the Reverend Jakob Fedder (Larry Fessenden) delivering a sermon in his small-town church. It’s a low-key sermon—Jakob is neither a fiery orator nor an evangelical fanatic. In fact, as we will come to realize, he is almost excruciatingly bland in his approach to both his professional life and his personal life. The sermon is a very mainstream Christian sermon, and most of the congregation seem to regard it as unremarkable. Indeed, the only member of his audience who seems bothered by the staggering patriarchal arrogance of the sermon is the reverend’s wife, Anne Fedder (Barbara Crampton). She looks on, critically reviewing her life with Jakob as he explains, supposedly with the authority of scripture, that men should treat their wives like Christ treats the church (that is, as extensions of themselves) and goes on further to elaborate that men should “sanctify” themselves by sanctifying their wives (women presumably being too weak and fallen to be able to do their own sanctifying).
This opening scene thus nicely sets up the film’s portrayal of the Fedder marriage, without overtly commenting on it at all. In the meantime, this sermon scene leads immediately into another scene in which Amelia (Nyisha Bell), a teenage member of the congregation with a troubled home life, walks home at night, suddenly steps into some rats on the sidewalk and then is attacked by a vaguely seen creature. We know this is a vampire film, of course, so it is pretty obvious that the creature is a vampire, though we see very little of it except its clawlike hands—which tells us that it’s going to be one of those ugly vampires, not a romantic Tom Cruise or Robert Pattinson vampire.
This scene is then followed by another that tells us something very important about the kind of film we are seeing. The attack on Amelia is immediately followed by a cut to Anne looking at her beautiful, but aging, face in a mirror. She bares her teeth in a moment that again cleverly calls attention to the status of Jakob’s Wife as a vampire film (though the fact that she sees her reflection presumably assures us that she is not, at this point anyway, a vampire herself). Anne, of course, isn’t thinking about vampires in this scene. She is thinking about aging, about all the years she has spent in Jakob’s shadow, about the fading of her beauty, about opportunities lost. Little wonder, then, that we next see her exercising in front of a 1980s-style workout video, hoping to recover some of her youthful vigor, the style of the video locating it at a point in her life before Anne chose to become Jakob’s wife.
The early moments of the film alert us to the fact that this is going to be, not just a vampire film, but also a sort of mid-life crisis film focusing on Anne Fedder, with the potential doubleness of the title of the film referring both to the fact that she has functioned thus far in her marriage as the secondary figure, almost as a possession, but also to the fact that, in this film, she will finally become the title character, the protagonist of her own life instead of the helpmate of Jakob’s. And it is also obvious early on that the two central motifs in this film will be intricately interwoven, with vampirism being the disruptive force that will explode the placid texture of Anne’s thirty-year existence as Jakob’s wife. Of course, vampirism is doubled in the film as well: there is a sense in which Jakob has been vampirically feeding on Anne throughout their marriage. That Jakob is a minister also evokes the long-time convention that Christianity and vampirism are mortal enemies, though that opposition will ultimately be less important in the film than we might have expected, while being problematized in some interesting ways in the film’s ending.
It is also obvious early on that Jakob’s Wife is going to be an extremely clever, self-conscious, “meta” sort of vampire film, sprinkled with nods to well-established vampire mythology, alerting to look for clever allusions to vampire lore and to enjoy this film partly on the basis of those allusions, entirely part from the plot. For example, we learn early on that Jakob’s church is called the “Embrace Eternity Church,” which might seem a perfectly straightforward reference to the importance of the notion of eternal life to the Christian religion, but which (in this context) surely also makes us think of the immortality that is such a central part of vampire mythology. That Christianity and vampirism thus compete for ownership of this eternity theme, meanwhile, reminds us of the long tradition of seeing these two forces as the bitterest of enemies and rivals.
Even the casting of this film alludes to a larger horror film framework, given that the two central characters are played by Fessenden and Crampton, firmly established iconic figures of the horror genre—Fessenden largely as a director (including of the interesting 1997 vampire film Habit), but increasingly also as an actor, and Crampton as one of the great scream queens of the 1980s, but whose career has turned out to have a surprising longevity. Crampton herself has suggested that Anne’s situation in Jakob’s Wife parallels her own career in some interesting ways.
“There’s something about this story that I connected to on a deeper level because I had left the business for a long time when I was in my mid-30s. I wasn’t getting many parts. I didn’t have anything to audition for. I thought, ‘OK, that’s it, I’m done.’ I was fortunate enough to meet the man of my dreams and get married, and I have a great home life and family life. But then when I got called back to do You’re Next, that was like Anne getting bitten by a vampire” (Tallerico 2021).
Interestingly, Crampton’s comeback as a horror star has been loosely linked with Fessenden’s increasing prominence as an actor in recent years. Thus, while Fessenden has continued to work as a director—with the 2019 Frankenstein film Depraved arguably being his finest film—he has also made many appearances as an actor in such horror films as You’re Next (2011) and We Are Still Here (2015), the former of which is a small role, but the latter of which (in which Fessenden’s turn as a man possessed by demons gives him a chance at a tour-de-force scene in which he comes off as a sort of poor man’s version of Jack Nicholson in The Shining) is perhaps his most impressive performance. Interestingly, both You’re Next and We Are Still Here feature Crampton in prominent roles as well, the former being the film that initiated her comeback (though she has also appeared in many other films between 2011 and 2021)[1].
The very presence of Crampton and Fessenden provides a special pleasure for horror fans, while supplementing the film’s many clever, self-referential turns. At the same time, one of the keys to the success of the film is that these veteran actors play their roles with absolute seriousness, delivering subtle performances that effectively convey what they are feeling with very little in overt verbal exposition. For example, at dinner with Jakob’s brother and his wife, Jakob and Anne discuss Amelia’s disappearance, and Carol (Sarah Lind), Jakob’s feisty sister-in-law, suggests that the girl might have simply run off with her boyfriend. Anne quickly suggests that this idea seems unfair. “Amelia wasn’t like that. Her mother had problems, but Amelia was loyal to her. Good people don’t just leave their families.” But if Anne seems distressed as she makes this suggestion, we can tell that it is not just from concern for Amelia. There is also an implied “do they?” at the end of this last sentence, as if Anne wishes she could run away but feels honor bound not to. We can read this, but the oblivious Jakob clearly can’t. He simply announces that all they can do is pray for Amelia, though it’s pretty obvious that won’t help in this film. Then he condescendingly pats Anne’s hand. “She’ll turn up. Don’t worry,” he assures her, leaving unsaid the implied “your pretty little head” at the end of his statement. This dinner scene is then followed by a cut to Jakob aggressively brushing his teeth while Anne looks in an exasperated way that makes it clear that she has observed this sort of thing far too many times. Then she seems even more alienated from her husband as she later lies awake in bed, while he blissfully snores away next to her. Awake or asleep, Jakob clearly treats Anne as if she is just part of the furniture—his furniture—so that he need not worry at all that his behavior might be unpleasant for her.
Given all of these early indications that Anne is less than happy with her marital situation, it is obvious that trouble might be brewing when we learn soon afterward that Tom Low (Robert Rusler), Anne’s “old flame” (as Jakob jealously describes him), is coming back to town after a long absence to serve as a design consultant on a project to convert the town’s historic cotton mill to a trendy retail space while retaining the features that make the facility an important part of the town’s past. Compared with Jakob, Tom is a dashing and romantic figure, a handsome and talented man who travels all around the world in his job as a design consultant. He also doesn’t seem to have many scruples about moving in on Jakob’s wife after all this time, and he clearly feels superior to Jakob, which becomes clear when he announces that he was surprised to learn that the once adventurous Anne had married Jakob and become a “church mouse.” She explains that Jakob and the church offered her comfort after Tom left town and her mother died, and it is fairly clear that she herself is now realizing that the past thirty years of her life have been governed by a conservative decision made at a time when she was young, vulnerable, alone, and heartbroken. A quest for comfort and security seems to have been the hallmark of her life to this point, but she is clearly having second thoughts—and Tom provides an opportunity for her to pursue that rethinking.
When Tom and Anne arrive to check out the mill, it is clear that they both remember it fondly as a make-out spot during their high school days—suggesting that the mill had been shut down even back in the 1980s[2]. As they explore the mill, they find some mysterious crates that seem to have suddenly appeared in the long-abandoned building. Tom invites her to sit with him on one of the crates. “Have a seat,” he says. “I won’t bite you.” “I’m not so sure,” she says flirtatiously, and when he moves in to kiss her neck, we’re not so sure, either.” Is he a vampire? Are these his crates, which seemed to arrive in town simultaneously with his own arrival, bearing the soil in which he sleeps during the daylight hours? Anne interrupts his advances, though, concluding that “I just can’t do it to Jakob.” Soon afterward, meanwhile, it will become clear that Tom is not the vampire when he is attacked (and killed) by a swarm of rats from one of the crates. However, turning to run away when Tom is attacked by the rats, Anne apparently encounters the real vampire, as a large, batlike creature (resembling the one that attacked Amelia) suddenly looms over her.
When Anne returns home that night, late enough to make Jakob deeply suspicious, we’re suspicious as well, though we’ll soon see enough signs to make it clear that she has been bitten and is becoming a vampire herself. Jakob’s Wife makes extensive use of the fact that vampire mythology is so well known, so that it can drop in numerous (and humorous) hints of her impending transformation without going into detail. She undertakes her exercises with renewed vigor. She begins to talk back to Jakob, abandoning her once-submissive demeanor and shocking him with her new forcefulness. She also begins to find ordinary food distasteful, but relishes drinking the animal blood that she acquires from her grocery store’s butcher, sipping it from a wine glass (though we can surmise that she now never drinks … wine). She also begins to be a much sharper dresser, though she is always careful to keep her neck (with its fresh vampire-bite wound) covered. It’s pretty obvious what is happening, though the film also teases us by showing a couple of shots of her in front of mirror, with a reflection (though one of them is shot at such an oblique angle that we don’t see her reflection at first.
Anne’s musical tastes also seem to change as she drinks blood and dances happily about the house, listening (of course) to a song entitled “Bloodletting” (aka “The Vampire Song”). The version used in the film was recorded by the duet “I Speak Machine” (featuring the vocals of Tara Busch, who also wrote the score for Jakob’s Wife). However, the original (and better known) version of this song was the title track to the important 1990 goth-inflected album by the group Concrete Blonde. In short, Anne is not just listening to vampire music—she is also listening to music from thirty years earlier, roughly the time when she chose to follow Jakob on her life’s path but could have chosen a much more unconventional (and exciting) path—onto which she is now apparently beginning to swerve[3]. At this point, Anne also starts to rearrange the furniture, easily moving large, heavy pieces with what is clearly superhuman strength. If there were any doubts that she is transitioning into being a vampire, those doubts are now over (though the transition still has a ways to go, as signaled by the fact that she, at this point, over-exerts herself and vomits blood all over the living room rug).
One complication to what appears to be Anne’s emancipation from Jakob thanks to her vampire bite is that she now might be falling in thrall to the “Master” vampire, which is itself vaguely female (a genuine innovation for “Master” vampires), though it is really a sort of post-gender monster[4] that is nevertheless charged with sexual energies. Thus, accompanied by their rat army, the Master appears outside the Fedder home and projects energies that cause Anne to start masturbating vigorously as she looks out the window at them. Meanwhile, Jakob, already wondering what is going on with his once mousily subservient wife, walks in on this masturbation scene with the classic question: “What are you doing?”
Anne experiences other complications as well. A trip to her dentist for a routine checkup shows that she has dirt lodged in her teeth (from where she has been eating earthworms). What’s even more of a problem is that she unexpectedly has new teeth coming in, but then a whitening treatment with ultraviolet light almost burns her face off, adding another layer of complication. Being a vampire isn’t all good. Anne also seems to be losing control of her impulses, as when she murders a friendly local garbage collector and then starts to lap his blood up off the kitchen floor—just as Jakob, with his usual timing, walks into the room.
Jakob, at this point, has already realized that the main thing wrong with life in their town these days is all the damn vampires, so he is not as surprised as he might have been at finding this scene in his kitchen. In a sequence of dark comedy, he helps Anne clean up the mess, which includes staking the garbage collector, who is already reviving as a vampire. Jakob then helps to bury the body, sprinkling holy water on the grave to try to keep the fledgling vampire in place. He also blusteringly assures Anne that he will find and kill the Master, so that she can change back to the way she was. “The way I was?” she asks, and it’s very clear that she doesn’t think of this as a desirable goal.
Jakob’s surprising helpfulness in this scene calls attention to the fact that he is a largely sympathetic character when he might easily have been presented as an abusive monster. He is not a bitter misogynist, seething with resentment for Anne as a way of dealing with his own shortcomings. Instead, he is well-meaning, but clueless, his own worldview having been limited by the same restrictions that have circumscribed Anne’s world. Of course, given the patriarchal nature of those restrictions, he has more of a chance to thrive and to have rewarding experiences within that worldview—largely because he has always had Anne there to back him up while making very few demands of her own. Now that she is changing and starting to demand some recognition (and especially as she is doing it from a point of view that is theoretically anathema to Jakob’s Christian worldview), one might have expected Jakob to turn on her in horror, but he seems to make a legitimate effort to try to adjust to this new situation and to support her as she explores her new identity, even if the film ultimately leaves open the question of just how far he will be willing and able to go in this quest, partly because it conflicts with his religion.
The film does surprisingly little with the conflict between Jakob’s Christianity and the conventionally anti-Christian Orientation of vampires (especially in Jakob’s reaction to the enw and improved Anne), though Jakob does, at one point, have a confrontation with a hyped-up Amelia, now in all-out vampire mode, who tells him that she no longer needs his form of salvation, because she has found a new savior, one who gives her “strength instead of fear” and has instilled in her “a love for myself.” He tries to repel her with his pocket Bible, but she just laughs and threatens to “tongue fuck a hole in your neck until I puke blood.” Anne isn’t the only local woman who has gained spunkiness from vampirism.
Jakob escapes to fight again another day, including going back to the mill with Anne to try to kill the Master. When he insists on taking the lead because he has been professionally trained to “fight evil,” Anne tells him to stop with his “Sunday school crap.” She insists on fighting the Master together, as equals, and it is clear that this is how she now wishes to pursue every aspect of their life together (if there is to be one). No sign of the Mater, but they do confront Amelia. Jakob gets the upper hand by spraying her with holy water, but he can’t bring himself to kill her. So Anne steps in and beheads the girl vampire. “I knew you’d wuss out,” she tells Jakob.
Jakob then reverts to preacher mode and predictably claims that all of this is happening because Anne had sin in her heart when she met with Tom Low. Thus, the film has its most heavy-handed moment, as Anne declares that Jakob is afraid to fight for her because he’s never had to. He’s always just taken her for granted, she complains, because “I’ve always just been there, doing exactly what you expected me to do.” She charges that he would rather just write her off as a fallen woman than fight for her, because he doesn’t know how.
She knows how to fight for him, though. When she comes home to find that Jakob, under the psychic control of the Master, is holding a knife to his own throat, Anne rebuffs the Master and reaffirms her love for Jakob. This declaration sends the Master packing for the nonce, and it also leads to a steamy, vampire-fueled sex scene between Jakob and Anne, likely the best sex they have ever had. It also leads to one of the film’s key references, a quick, peekaboo moment when Anne briefly bares her impressive left breast, reminding us that Barbara Crampton’s breasts (and their ilk) were among the iconic images of 1980s horror, despite the fact that, even then, it was clear that she was a talented and intelligent actress whose career would likely go beyond that of most scream queens. In a role that gives Crampton an opportunity to show her acting chops (and one that depends not at all on nudity on the part of the sixty-something actress), this breast-baring moment can be taken as a nod to her past and as a declaration that Crampton is proud of that past and sees no need to repudiate it.
Subsequently, Anne decides to try to fight her vampirism, though the thirst for blood becomes unbearable, until she amusingly finds—in this film’s most original addition to vampire mythology—that this thirst is largely alleviated by smoking weed. (Luckily, the ultra-square Jakob just happens to have a doobie that he earlier confiscated from some punk kids smoking in his church’s parking lot.) However, the weed doesn’t fully alleviate the need for blood, so, when a local woman dies in her bed, they grab the body and take it home to drain its blood.
By this time, the two Fedders are working pretty much together as equals, just as Anne had earlier demanded, so it comes as no surprise that, despite a few close calls, including interventions by the sheriff and by some nosey in-laws (who get eaten by the Master), they ultimately triumph over the Master. Indeed, the last twenty minutes or so of the film seem fated to be its weakest and least surprising, as it becomes fairly clear that the Master is likely to be defeated long before this defeat is actually accomplished (by Jakob and Anne working in tandem). It also becomes fairly clear that Anne is now going to be able to assert herself, Jakob is now going to appreciate her more, and the two will look forward to a better life.
The final confrontation with the Master, probably the film’s peak action scene, is thus a bit anticlimactic. Despite the Master’s obvious supernatural power, they are easily dispatched by a combination of Jakob’s faith and Anne’s spunkiness, possibly foreshadowing the couple’s future together as a team. That future, though, contains one last twist. To Jakob’s surprise, Anne remains a vampire even after the death of the Master. Moreover, she likes being a vampire and refuses to try to find a cure. In this film, the expected triumph of the white male hero is not so simple. “I like who I’ve become,” she explains to her husband, and it’s not clear where they go from here, given the seeming incompatibility of his Christian faith and her newfound vampire identity. The film then ends in mid-scene, with Anne possibly on the verge of biting Jakob and Jakob possibly on the verge of staking Anne.
Jakob’s Wife as Political Allegory
Ending the film in mid-movement like this gives the ending a comic twist by intentionally making the final moment seem contrived. But this ending also leaves open some powerful questions about whether Anne and Jakob will be able to co-exist going forward, given that she has changed so much, while he might not have changed enough to be able to deal with his new, strong, independent wife. That he, in fact, might be on the verge of attempting to kill her rather than to accommodate her new liberated self gives this ending a dark twist indeed.
Surveying the many new directions taken by vampire films in the past few decades of the postmodern era, Sorcha Ní Fhlainn notes that recent “postmodern” vampire films have often suggested that “it may, in fact, be truly liberating to embrace an undead existence” (Ní Fhlainn, 248). Ní Fhlainn’s observation, though made before the release of Jakob’s Wife, would certainly appear to apply to Anne’s potential liberation through vampirism. Ní Fhlainn is particularly interested in films that address larger social and political issues, such as the AIDs crisis or climate change, but Jakob’s Wife does not seem overtly concerned with such issues, even though the worn-down nature of Anne’s pre-vampire life does vaguely rhyme with the exhausted nature of the town in which they live. Indeed, the film even reinforces this connection by locating the headquarters of the Master vampire precisely in the abandoned textile mill that serves both as a reminder of the town’s status as a marker of the decline of manufacturing in many parts of the U.S. and as a locus of potential renewal via the conversion to a retail center that Tom has come to town to help facilitate.
Most of what we know about the economic and historical situation surrounding the mill comes from a breakfast-table conversation between Jakob and Anne early in the film. As the conversation begins, Jakob is reading a local newspaper, the Kinski County Reporter. As far as I have been able to determine, there is no Kinski County anywhere in the United States, so this newspaper gives us no information as to the actual whereabouts of their town—other than the fact that it exists in the land of vampire films, the “Kinski” here surely referring to Klaus Kinski, who played Count Dracula in Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979), Werner Herzog’s sound-era remake of Nosferatu (in which Isabelle Adjani plays a classic frail female victim of the vampire). Among other things, Jakob’s reading of the newspaper, which he holds up in front of his face, blocking out Anne, is a typical example of his lack of regard for her, while his loudly, smacking, annoying chewing while he reads is typical of his behavior in general. Anne then nervously informs her husband that the proposal she has been contributing to for the “gin mill” has gone through and that the Historical Society believes “this new retail space will provide a lot of tourism and jobs.” “While gutting our history,” responds Jakob (still chewing loudly), thus pettily dismissing his wife’s project even before she informs him that Tom Low is coming into town to consult on the project as part of their effort to ensure that the conversion will, in fact, preserve the important historical resonances of the mill. When she informs Jakob that she will be meeting with Tom to discuss the project, Jakob refers to Tom as Anne’s “old flame” and then poutingly sticks his nose back in the newspaper, directing his wife to “tell Tom I said ‘hi.’”
Jakob’s defense of the mill as a historical maker thus quickly descends into petty jealousy, and nothing further is really made of the historical status of the mill in the film, but the notion that the mill has played a prominent role in the history of the town suggests a past strongly linked to the textile industry, one of the industries that has, in fact, been essentially eradicated in twenty-first-century America. That Anne would refer to the facility as the “gin mill,” though, suggests that the mill might not be quite as revered locally as Jakob’s reaction potentially indicates. After all, while the term here clearly refers to a cotton gin, it has come, in wide usage, to refer to a tavern or bar (especially a dive bar), where, presumably, gin (the alcoholic drink) would be served.
In any case, this dark, abandoned facility provides a perfect hangout for the Master vampire, though it is also occasionally used by the local punks as a place to take drugs. This facility thus identifies the small town of the film with American industrial decline, while also suggesting that this decline opens up a space of opportunity for renewal, though it is also open to question whether the planned renewal as a retail space is already a bit outdated by the 2021 release of the film. Meanwhile, Jakob’s attitude identifies him with the failing industrial past (which might well, given the cotton connection, include strong links to slavery and thus to a past that is hardly a proud one), while Anne is linked to the renewal project and thus presumably to the idea of moving into a better future (while her husband remains mired in the past).
Such potential associations, though, are seemingly peripheral to the film, which focuses mostly on the private, domestic situation of the Fedders. But the dynamics at work in the Fedder marriage also have implications they go well beyond their personal situation. For example, this marriage is clearly representative of a quite wide range of conventional American marriages, especially for couples of a certain age, though Jakob’s position as a minister also makes his marriage something of a special case that calls attention to the fact that Christianity (as Jakob’s opening sermon reminds us) is shot through with patriarchal attitudes. Meanwhile, that Jakob’s ultimate loss of patriarchal power is subtly aligned in the film with American industrial decline potentially suggests that the same ideology of entitled masculine domination that had hitherto governed Jakob’s behavior as a husband is aligned, not just with the Christian religion that he professionally represents, but also with the kind of ideology that drove American industry (and capitalism in general) to such a dominant position in the first place (but that has also caused it to begin losing that position).
Indeed, the film’s clear link between Jakob’s patriarchal attitudes and the American industrial past (whose long legacy of exploitation of workers is epitomized by the textile industry) suggests that we should seek larger meanings in the private story of the Fedder marriage. Those meanings can be usefully accessed, I would suggest, via Richard Slotkin’s well-known exploration of the roots of American national identity in the nineteenth-century conquest of the Western frontier. For Slotkin, the American national identity was shaped in violence, a phenomenon that was reinforced in the twentieth century in Western films that helped to create an agonistic vision of the United States as defined in its very existence as a nation built through triumph over “savage” enemies. For him, the Western, with its visions of victories over wild-eyed Native Americans, embodies this sense of national identity perhaps more than any other cultural phenomenon. He notes, however, that, by the 1970s, the Western was being displaced in its role as a cultural expression of the American national identity (partly because it often morphed into a critique of that identity), even though this identity itself remained largely unchanged. In particular, for Slotkin the displacement of the Western from its place on the genre map did not imply the dissolution of the “underlying structures of myth and ideology that had given the genre its defining cultural force.” Rather, those structures were abstracted from the elaborately historicized context of the Western and parceled out among other genres, including the genre of horror (Slotkin 1998, 633).
Importantly, though, just as phenomena such as the 1960s counterculture and the American defeat in Vietnam were beginning to challenge America’s identity as a nation built on victories in “savage wars,” the turn to horror, for Slotkin, suggested an inversion of the Myth of the Frontier: “The borders their heroes confront are impermeable to the forces of progress and civilized enlightenment; in anything, the flow of aggressive power runs in the opposite direction, with the civilized world threatened with subjugation to or colonization by the forces of darkness” (635).
Slotkin’s analysis here is highly relevant to Jakob’s Wife, with the Master vampire representing precisely these forces of darkness—and with Anne’s refusal to disavow vampirism demonstrating just how difficult these forces are to defeat (while also calling into question whether they should be defeated). Read this way, Anne’s revolt against Jakob’s domination suggests a revolt against a long Western legacy of smug domination of others on the basis of, not just gender, but also race and class. And, finally, the supernaturalism of vampirism introduces a weird element that reminds us that the world might be a bit richer and stranger than the dominant rationalist ideology of Western society is able to comprehend. It thus urges us to reconsider the self-righteous complacency with which the powers-that-be in the modern world have dominated, not only other humans, but the nonhuman, natural world. The film’s obvious warning that men such as Jakob need to reconsider the extent to which they have taken for granted their domination of their wives is thus accompanied by a less obvious, essentially allegorical, caution that the wealthy white male movers and shakers of the Western world also need to reassess the sense of privilege that has caused them to feel authorized to conscript, not only women, workers, and people of color, but also the natural world for their own use, while disastrously failing to respect the vital needs of other humans and of the natural world.
Works Cited
Ní Fhlainn, Sorcha. 2019. Postmodern Vampires: Film, Fiction, and Popular Culture. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Slotkin, Richard. 1998. Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.
Tallerico, Brian. 2021. “Horror Legend Barbara Crampton on Jakob’s Wife, You’re Next, and Her Favorite Role.” RogerEbert.com (13 April 2021), https://www.rogerebert.com/interviews/horror-legend-barbara-crampton-on-jakobs-wife-youre-next-and-her-favorite-role. Accessed 16 January 2022.
Notes
[1] Crampton (though not Fessenden) also appears in the 2017 film Death House, which was specifically conceived as a showcase for a cast of well-known horror actors from past decades.
[2] Most textile manufacture in the U.S. was done well before the 1980s. For example, attempts to renovate the Savage Mill in Savage, Maryland, somewhat along the lines we see in Jakob’s Wife began as early as 1975. This project had many initial difficulties, but by 2010 the revamped space was attracting more than a million visitors a year.
[3] The original “Bloodletting” was used on the soundtracks for the horror films Blood & Doughnuts (1995) and Night of the Demons (2009), so the song has an established pedigree in the genre.
[4] The Master is played by Bonnie Aarons, perhaps best known for her role as the demon nun in The Nun (2018). However, here she wears such heavy monster makeup that her gender is obscured almost entirely—much as it had been in what might be her most iconic (if brief) role, that of the dumpster bum in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001).