Feminist zombie fiends REJOICE! The Primitive Screwheads, a Bay Area horror theatre troupe is performing their parody ShEvil Dead this weekend in the San Francisco.
I am a lover of all things zombie. I like rotting flesh and the appetite for brains. One of my favorite pastimes is envisioning the inevitable zombie apocalypse, my weapon of choice (double-sided battle axe) and whom I would team up with (probably Simon Pringle-Wallace, he seems nimble).
Needless to say, when I read that the Screwheads created a parody of Evil Dead and Army of Darkness (utter classics), I was intrigued. However, it is not because they are staging the story; there is already a musical adaptation. It is due to their choice of making it an all-female cast.
Both the Evil Dead series and Army of Darkness center around one character. Ash is a courageous, charismatic and dastardly good-looking hero. His mission is to protect the living and annihilate the undead. Throughout the films, the only women Ash meets are detestable zombies or damsels in distress, who then die shortly thereafter. But the Screwheads, with their all-female cast turn Ash, the epitome of manly-manliness into a heroine.
However, here is the conundrum. On their website, the creators refer to the female zombie-killers as “hot chicks”. Are they empowering women, or exploiting them? Are they using subversive marketing by luring audiences in with “hot chicks”, but then bombarding them with feminist theatre? I don’t know. I would have to see the show to really put in my two cents. Personally, I think that female sexuality can be empowered by such terms, but the intent to empower needs to be there when referring to the heroine as a “hot chick”.
This story is particularly tantalizing to me after seeing The Lady Hamlet this weekend. I want to know if the actress playing Ash is playing a man or a woman pretending to be a man, etc. If the intent is to empower women, maybe it is more effective to go the Joss Whedon route and write a story about a female heroine instead of adapting a man’s story. Nevertheless, I wish I could see it to evaluate their tactics or at least get sprayed with fake blood.
2 Comments
ccleary7 posted on October 17, 2011 at 2:37 pm
A. I think about this question of female-empowerment a lot. B. Can we fly out to see it?
kmjiang posted on October 17, 2011 at 7:49 pm
Ahahahahaha. I have no interest in zombies (though I do have an interest in feminism)… I just want you to know that I almost choked on my tea at “probably Simon Pringle-Wallace, he seems nimble.”
A+++
🙂