[Pride 2021] Bathsheba has Logged On: Finding Representation of the Extremely Online Monstrous Queer in The Conjuring

Late one night around 2003, my mother awoke to a strange sound coming from my bedroom, which should have been dark and silent at 3:00 am. Instead, a pale, flickering light was glowing out from under my door. When she eased it open she saw something strange inside…possibly even frightening; I was sitting totally alone in the dark, staring into a bright, glowing square, laughing and nodding my head like I was carrying on a conversation—but with who? There was no one else there!

It was every parent of the early Aughts’ worst fear: her kid had made friends on the Internet.

It’s also a scene well-known to every horror fan, especially those familiar with films like 2013’s cinematic universe-spawning hit, The Conjuring (dir. James Wan); a child alone in a room, talking to someone that only they can see, who turns out to not be an imaginary friend but actually a presence from beyond the grave. 

The Perron family

Based on the reportedly true story of Ed and Lorraine Warren’s encounter with the Perron family in 1971 Harrisville, RI, as they dealt with a “malevolent case” of demonic haunting, The Conjuring is a singular entry in 2010s horror, and represents many things to many people. However, one thing that reviewers and scholars consistently come back to is the film’s blatantly pro-Christian, pro-family politics. In her essay on The Conjuring in the collection Scared Sacred, Alex West correctly points out the film’s overt pro-Christian agenda*; similarly, upon its release Andrew O'Hehir summarized it in his review at Salon with the scathing line, “Nothing new here in terms of horror movies, or borderline Judeo-Christian theology, or generalized male panic.” The Huffington Post’s reviewer declared it dangerous conservative propaganda, saying, “The Conjuring fails utterly to rise above its reactionary politics. The brothers Hayes wield their faith message like a truncheon.”

These criticisms of the film are the same ones I’ve made myself, and yet somehow The Conjuring remains one of my favorite supernatural horror films. It’s incredibly well-crafted despite the “truncheon-like” script…especially if you’re a fan of bombastic soundtracks, creepy basements, jump scares that actually pay out, and Lili Taylor in general. The specters that matter most to me in The Conjuring aren’t necessarily regressive conservative family values, or even those of the real-life Ed and Lorraine Warren, who were likely a far cry from the aggressively kind saviors they’re depicted as in the films. What grabs my attention is the incredibly over-the-top villain, Bathsheba, and how much she mirrors the villains of my youth, particularly those that adults seemed to think were lurking on the Internet.

As a young person who was very online during the period of “Internet stranger danger” in the early 2000s, the ghosts that haunt the Perron house appear to me like a cautionary tale of “Meeting Strangers Online.” A strange, unexpected item appears to the youngest daughter, April, like a sinister AOL Online startup disk in the mailbox, through which she makes contact with an unknown person who wants to be her friend. She talks to this stranger when left alone, leaving her mother to wonder if she has a new imaginary friend. April tells her that this isn't an imaginary friend, though—he’s a young boy named Rory that only she can see. Soon we find out that Rory is the least of their worries, that the Perrons have logged onto a veritable pHp forum of ghostly presences. Rory and two others are all trapped there by a single malevolent entity; head moderator Bathsheba Sherman, the queen bitch of the Harrisville home. 

It almost feels too obvious to point out the monstrous queer/abject female lines that run through Bathsheba. It’s as if script writers Chad and Carey Hayes flipped through Carol Clover’s Men, Women, and Chainsaws or Barbara Creed’s The Monstrous-Feminine and circled all of what they thought were the most shocking bits, then cobbled together a queer-coded villain from what they found. Bathsheba is peak conservative horror scare-mongering; a desexualized, hairy, “ugly” old woman (she’s played by a cis male actor in the film, which gives her a distinctly “unfeminine” look and a gravelly voice, an overtly transphobic move that the film seems to use to signify a truly insidious presence).

Like any good online Millennial in the early 2000s, she comes awake mostly late at night, tormenting the family at the religiously significant time of 3:07 am with bad smells, loud noises, and destructive behavior. She curses those who would dare to “take her land” at a time when many women legally couldn’t own property, but her most disturbing act is to attack the very foundation of American life: the nuclear family. Her favorite trick seems to be a reenactment of the notorious Pat Robertson quote on feminism as an “anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.” Bathsheba not only kills her own child, rejecting what Lorraine Warren calls her “God-given gift,” she also she possesses other mothers in order “to kill the child,” driving good women to kill their children to demonstrate Bathsheba’s loyalty to Satan, rejecting what the film suggests is their sacred duty to bear children and flying in the face of God Himself.

Bathsheba isn’t just bad, she’s a bad influence. She dared to lay claim to something — herself, her baby, her property — and reject the path that society had laid out for her, and then drove other women to do the same. In the context of a film desperately concerned with the actions of women, her suicide and declaration of ownership are the ultimate middle finger to God. She’s not just a demonic threat, she’s the threatening, hairy, lesbian feminist lurking in the shadows of every conservative’s mind.

Ultimately the figure of Bathsheba isn’t only familiar to me because she’s a threat, but because of how ludicrously amped up the threat is. She’s everything that our parents warned us about people online in the early 2000s; that we would meet someone who would lie to us about who they were, who would pretend to be friendly but secretly mean us harm. The people we would meet online, we were told, would not just harass us in cyberspace, but threaten us in real life. They would track us down from the most innocuous of shared details, similar to how Bathsheba uses a forgotten photo of the Warren’s daughter to follow the couple home and torment the young girl by proxy. Like Bathsheba, these people could even be corrupting influences, seducing us into doing horrible things like meeting IRL, learning depraved new secrets, or even discovering terrible things about ourselves, lurching out from their dark closets to drag us down into their own perverse ways of life (the sexual subtext of such a threat was often unspoken, but always there).

Of course, only real “threat” I encountered around that time was the specter of early 2000s feminism, on a single forum and an associated IRC chat that I now realize was my first brush with queer community. I made my first trans friends online; I talked to people whose lives were very different from my own, people who were older and younger than me, who struggled with depression and self-harm and relationship problems of all stripes. The early 2000s were a harder place to be an openly gay young person than I think many younger people now may realize—the only out gay kids I knew IRL in high school were openly mocked and physically bullied—and many of my online friends, like myself, lived in isolated, rural areas where queer representation felt out of reach. My online friends were far from monsters themselves, but I think at times we all felt, and maybe wanted to be, monstrous, especially as we grew from nervous pre-teens to awkward, angry teenagers. There was something exciting and dangerous, but also somehow secure, in feeling gross and weird amongst a group of other gross weirdos. 

Maybe it’s because Bathsheba is such a blatantly gross, blatantly visible villain that I’ve come to appreciate her presence so much in such a pro-Christian, pro-family, and anti-any sort of difference horror film. While the other ghosts in the film seem content to just spook the Perron family from the shadows, sometimes literally even hiding in a closet, Bathsheba takes action, throwing herself at the family from atop said closet, refusing to be shut inside. When the Warrens try to exorcise Bathsehba from Carolyn Perron in the climax of the film, she essentially tells them to go fuck themselves, lifting Carolyn’s body into the air and almost shooting the Ed Warren with the shotgun their pet police officer brought into the house. She wields very real, physical power in a film universe that quickly became so over-the-top with its funhouse scares and religious demonology that it’s almost slapstick.

She’s the “mad scientist” of Harry Benshoff’s description of queer activism in Monsters in the Closet: Homosexuality and the Horror Film, which he notes is often “seen as unruly, defiant, and angry: like the mad scientists of horror films, queer proponents do want to restructure society by calling attention to and eventually dismantling the oppressive assumptions of heterocentrist discourse.” I see a shadow of her rage in myself as a teenager, struggling to feel any sort of control over myself or others, and to define my own revolutionary queer politics without fully realizing that was what I was doing. I thrashed against the constraints of high school heteronormativity, feeling out-of-place and invisible yet somehow far too seen, often running back to my computer and to the online community of other monsters I knew I would find lurking there late at night.

The spectacle and discussion of the “monstrous queer” and gay subtext versus queer representation in horror has erupted in the past few years, in tandem with a general increase in positive queer representation in many forms of media. A generation of LGBTQ+ people have come of age and started making changes in the films they make, and demanding change from the films they want to see. It’s widely acknowledged that positive representation isn’t enough to force major change (the news still provides dozens of examples of this daily), but it is something. It’s undeniably good to see yourself portrayed in a positive light in media, and it’s vital that we stop letting straight people define what gay people are, especially when they consistently turn back to absurd negative stereotypes that can do real damage. 

And yet, I don’t feel ready to give up the monstrous queer and its capitalism-hating demons, and I think that some of us still don’t want what much modern “respectable” queer representation has to offer. Positive stereotypes still flatten nuanced identities, and as Andrea Weiss notes in her book Vampires and Violets: Lesbians in the Cinema, the common depiction of a gay person who is otherwise “normal” to heterosexual society but “happens to be gay” is “another form of invisibility” in how it denies the reality of cultural difference. Until society—including “mainstream” LBG society—is ready to accept radical change, there will always be a monstrous queer lurking in the shadows. So I return to the monsters, to queer-coded villains who are visceral and gross and want to destroy what is held up as the ideal as rather than be assimilated into it. 

Like Bathsheba turning from an invisible figure under a sheet to a hideously real, bile-spewing demon when she possesses Carolyn Perron, when I finally embraced my own queerness I began to search for visible, tangible community offline as well as online. I began trying to physically embody the ideals of an anti-capitalist, anti-racist, queer feminism much larger than what I learned about in the early 2000s, larger than what the writers of The Conjuring could ever imagine in their black and white framework of “good versus evil.” I realized that I didn’t want the baptized, straight, white American family that The Conjuring tries to force on us, or whatever the sanitized “acceptable gay” version of it was, and that many of my friends didn’t, either.

A chosen community of monsters and weirdos is better than a biological family that insists that God and the Devil are real, and that we must pick the correct one or be forever condemned to Hell (a toxic carceral mindset if there ever was one). The only fairy tale that’s real is the one we write for ourselves, with the help of the community we find wherever we can cobble it together; it’s not enough that we simply exist, but that we’re seen in our entirety, sometimes monstrous, ugly, and angry, online and off—and that often we like it that way. 

*“Onward, Christian Soldiers: Eyes of Believers in The Conjuring (2013) and The Conjuring 2 (2016)”

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