Author Emily M. Danforth on the Inspiration Behind her Epic Gothic Horror-Comedy
Imagine a monster mash of Henry James, Sarah Waters, and Ryan Murphy, and you might have some sense of the thrills and chills that await you within the pages of Plain Bad Heroines, Emily M. Danforth's blockbuster of a novel. At just over 600 pages, it brims with forbidden Victorian romance, footnotes, and illustrations—and multiple century-spanning timelines. It's also fun as hell.
The story begins in 1902 at Brookhants, an elite all-girls boarding school in Rhode Island, where a group of impressionable teens discover a radical feminist’s screed—a memoir turned grimoire by real-life firebrand Mary MacLane encouraging young women to eschew docility (and heterosexuality) and disclose their “real desires and the textures of their souls.” The book’s lessons possess the girls and lead to a grisly end: they're stung by a possibly supernatural swarm of yellow jackets.
Over a century later, Hollywood is making a movie out of what occurred at Brookhants. Involved in the project: the daughter of an ’80s scream queen, a Kristen Stewart–esque celesbian, and a debut author adapting her book about the school into a screenplay. For the sake of authenticity, they’re shooting the film on location. Ghostly horror and gothic hijinks ensue, with a dash of misandrist sarcasm and a dollop of sapphic love.
O's Assistant Books Editor, Michelle Hart, caught up with Danforth (whose previous book, The Miseducation of Cameron Post, became a Sundance-winning film) via Zoom from her home in Rhode Island to talk about how the author's love affair with horror began, why history has forgotten Mary MacLane, and the eerie things that happened while writing Plain Bad Heroines.
At what point did you realize there were two stories that you wanted to tell? The contemporary one, about the making of the movie, and the historical, about what actually happened at the school?
Way too long, like 350 pages in. An abandoned boarding school is creepy, and I have long romanticized that kind of location as a lesbian. I had this eerie setting that was great for filming a movie, but I didn't know why the school had been abandoned. In trying to answer that question for myself, I started doing a lot of research into women's boarding schools and colleges at the turn of the 20th century. I got more and more infatuated with what I found. I kept trying to shove it into the book, into the contemporary story in ways that just didn't work. I really just wanted to be with these characters in the past. That was several years into doing this, and it did not come easily. All of that was an eight-year-long process.
What was the research process like? This is one of those books that you read and feel the writer had had a lot of fun writing it. Did you go to weird places? Read weird books?
I did have fun writing. There's stuff in it that is drawn from reality that I don't think people expect, like Spite Tower, an actual place in Little Compton, Rhode Island.
Called Spite Tower?
Yes. It is not my Spite Tower, obviously. [In the novel, the tower, located near the school grounds, is the site of climactic scene.] I took a lot of liberties. But it does have this great apocryphal lore about being built basically as a symbol of grievance between two neighbors. In truth, everybody seems to agree that it was actually a well tower, but that is not what the New Englanders said about it. It was called Spite Tower because it was supposedly used to block sight lines.
Sometimes, though, research was immersing myself in reading Henry James and Edith Wharton short stories. They both wrote ghost stories, even though we don’t think of Wharton as doing that. But she's got these fantastic ghostly tales. I was picking up phrases from them. They’re not metafiction, but there is an almost meta quality to these turns that Wharton takes in some of them where she's invoking the pleasure of gathering to hear a scary tale, and she's saying through the narrator, "We were all gathered and put in a mood to scare ourselves." I loved that. That's the thing that I've been doing since I was in first grade, being like, "Tell me your scariest story." I wanted to get at that idea of a narrator telling the scary story and being very aware that they're telling it.
And then there’s The Story of Mary MacLane, which is, perhaps surprisingly to some readers, a real book.
Yes! One of the things I'm most excited about is that for readers who don't know her and don't know her work to discover or rediscover it.
Chalk me up as one of those readers who’d never heard of her. When I first picked up your novel, I assumed Mary MacLane was a fictional creation—a very convincing one!—and was shocked to discover that she was indeed real. I think I was mostly shocked because I'd never heard of her—this queer, feminist memoirist.
You’ve just narrated the experience that I had. I was like, "How the hell do I not know about Mary MacLane? This is my wheelhouse! She was a bisexual woman writer from Montana. How do I not know about Mary MacLane and I'm 30!" And she was hugely famous!
She wrote a memoir at the age of 19, got it published, and it became a huge nationwide bestseller. Sold something like 80,000 copies in its first month alone. It launched her onto this path of literary stardom. While researching, I spent days reading Mary MacLane stories in the press: book reviews, interviews. People just reported on what she was doing: “Now she's in Chicago. Now she's in Boston. Now she might be going to Radcliffe. Now she's in Newport.”
But she was scorned, too.
A lot of the press was negative, dismissive of the book as scandalous, a morally corruptive force. There were teen girls across the country who’d formed clubs in her honor. One of my favorite stories is that there was a young woman who was arrested for stealing a horse in Chicago, and she had been a fan of the book. And when she went out in front of the judge, the judge said, "Why would you? You're a girl of good social standing? Why would you steal this horse? You've never done anything like this before." She said, "Well, I had to have something to write about like Mary MacLane."
Why do you think she has been lost to the annals of history, despite her cult fame at the time?
Part of it may have to do with how far into the stratosphere the star was flung. She couldn't ever really follow it up with something that was that successful again. It was a one hit wonder, even though she did write other memoirs. But people knew her mostly as a sensation, like an early Paris Hilton or an influencer. That’s so dismissive of how great her story is and how she told it. The book is funny, self-indulgent, self-aware, poetic, just refreshingly honest.
In describing the tone of Mary MacLane's book, you could be talking about your own. There’re so many ways your novel could have turned much darker in tone. It begins with two girls dying. It could've easily been swallowed up by the macabre things that happen. But there's a lightness to it. Was that partially a reaction to Mary MacLane's memoir? The tone being, "We don't have to take this so seriously?"
I probably was channeling some of that in my narrator, this self-awareness, taking pleasure in this kind of storytelling. And yes, because dark things do happen in the book, I like that combination. If we’re going to some pretty unpleasant, gothic places, then I definitely also want to depict a lighthearted date night in contemporary Los Angeles.
There’s a scene in which Audrey, an actress, is preparing for her role in the horror movie, and strange things start happening. Did anything like that happen while you, the author, were writing it?
Yes! What's been really fun and unexpected is I'm getting all these yellow jacket stories from readers who have the book that I was not expecting. They’re showing up in my inbox or in a DM. In some cases, even with photos. People who have been like, "I had this encounter with a wasp." Or, "There's a wasp's nest in my grill now." I didn't expect to become the repository for peoples' wasp stories, but I'll totally take it.
I won't tell you mine then.
No, tell me!
I've lived in an old house for three years, on the third floor, and never had a problem with bugs or wasps. While I was first reading your book at the beginning of the summer, a wasp flew into our apartment, even though the window was closed. First time in three years that ever happened. I wondered if it was some sort of publicity stunt that your publisher had going on!
It's all working according to plan! I've been strangely delighted to hear these stories. I heard a similar one from a bookseller who said, "I've worked here for five years, we have never had a wasp. I finished the book and it's chasing me through the aisles of the bookstore.
Did something like that happen to you?
In the early drafting days, when I thought it was really just going to be the contemporary story of the making of the horror movie, I was home, where my mom lived, in the house I grew up in, which was this big old brick house in Montana. They had had a terrible yellow jacket infestation that summer. The whole town was dealing with them. I was at her dining room table working on early pages and there was a big nest built into the brick. I would hear the wasps flicking against the dining room windows as I worked. Eventually I went to get some wasp killer. The infestation was so bad that the one hardware store in town said, "We don't have any. You have to wait for it to come in."
They were telling me all their stories about how bad the wasps were. Then I ran into a friend who I had lifeguarded with for years through high school and early college. We were talking about these wasps. She was like, "Well, you remember when we made that horror movie?" I had not remembered. It was the summer after The Blair Witch Project had come out. We of course had decided as bored teenagers in this small town that we could for sure film something like that. There was no skill involved at all. We could obviously pull it off. With somebody's camcorder, we tried to film an unscripted horror movie. We were filming a scene with a killer chasing people down the banks of a river. Several of our little cast of lifeguards stepped into a ground nest of yellow jackets and had to jump into the river to get away from them. That was probably percolating, and it wasn’t until she said that to me that it all came back.
When in the writing process did you realize the other extratextual elements were needed to tell the story—namely, the illustrations?
The artist, Sara Lautman, was a fan of my first book, and she contacted me about working together. When I had really given myself permission to write the historic portion of the novel, and reveling in that, I was like, "This is what Sara should illustrate. It should absolutely have period illustrations, like boarding school novels had at the time.” We went back and forth, and she had all of these great ideas. And because we were working together before the book was done and sold, there were some things that Sara saw or ways she framed a scene that inspired my writing.
In the gothic tradition, characters can be voyeurs, lurking, seeing things they’re not supposed to. There’s a question of who sees what. Having these illustrations be another act of looking in at these characters and this world makes sense to me. I can’t imagine the book now without Sara’s way of seeing.
You're obviously a bit of horror film freak. When and how did that get started?
When I was eight or nine, I saw The Watcher in the Woods. It stars Bette Davis in one of her final roles and was filmed back when Disney made these genuinely terrifying movies and did not care if they scared the crap out of children watching them.
And at a junior high sleepover, I watched The Town that Dreaded Sundown. There were all kinds of shenanigans going on at this sleepover. Girls were dressed in lingerie. The house had a pool table in the basement and girls were up on it taking pictures that they were maybe going to do things with later—give to boys, I guess. And then over in the corner were some of us not doing that. We were probably playing Scrabble while snacking. We watched scary movies, one of which was Sundown, supposedly based on real murders. It’s done as a newsreel, almost a precursor to Blair Witch. It was 3 in the morning and I was the only one up watching this, in someone else’s house in the middle of Montana with screen doors looking out onto a vast darkness. My fear over that movie is imprinted in my mind forever.
To this day, because of Blair Witch, which I saw in middle school, I have nightmares about walking into a house and finding a guy standing, staring at the wall.
That's such a brilliant moment. There's no blood. That movie’s so perfectly done. It deserves the place that it holds right now in terms of its legacy as a found footage film. I saw that with friends, too. We had to drive two hours through Montana wilderness to see the 10 pm showing of it. We were all petrified driving home. I walked into my parents' house and all the lights were off, so I slept on the landing outside their room. They woke up in the morning and stepped over me, saying, "What is wrong with you? Stop watching these movies!" But I love it. For me, that's the appeal of horror stories: I want to be scared, and then I want to be able to turn it off.
Can you say which films had a direct influence on Plain Bad Heroines?
Along with Blair Witch, there's a movie called Lake Mungo, an Australian “found-footage” mockumentary, that also had a big influence on the novel, as it too plays with how the story is delivered. It felt alarmingly real the first time I watched it—the editing, the weaving together of the story’s disparate pieces was so effective. Of course, the slasher movies of the 80s and 90s inspired the storyline of Audrey’s mom [in the novel, she’s a mashup of Jamie Lee Curtis and Phoebe Cates]. Scream, in particularly, shaped the way I considered the genre forever after: it was horrifying, brutal, funny, self-aware.
There are also movies that have supposed curses or sinister incidents attached to their productions: The Omen, The Exorcist, Poltergeist. A much more recent horror film that was said to have been “cursed” was 2012’s The Possession. The fire in the costume trailer in Plain Bad Heroines was directly inspired by the prop storage facility burning down during the production of The Possession.
Plain Bad Heroines is horror epic filled with lesbians. While reading, I was struck by this sense of there being an inherent queerness to the genre of horror. So many LGBTQ people are fans of horror movies, and yet there are so few of these movies that are explicitly about us.
I think certainly there's something at least in terms of the roots of the genre. If we look at something like Carmilla, it's always been there, the legacy of that depiction of vampires. But I also think there's something to identifying the monster as an "other," right? I can certainly think of movies where—maybe it's too simplistic to say—I identified with the monster, or I identified with the creeping other. That's how we're so often made to feel. I guess also, on an even more simplistic level, there’s a real identification with all the androgynous final girls of the slasher movies, right? Sidney Prescott, are you kidding me? Laurie Strode?
So much of your book is about rewriting things: rewriting the past and portraying the people who are historically passed over. Was part of your project saying, “We’ve always existed in this space?”
Yeah, it was absolutely a conscious part of the process, of wanting the novel to just be almost exclusively populated with queer characters, and for that to be a thing. I really did want to reclaim some space in this genre. Like Mrs. Danvers in Rebecca, lesbians have been coded, erased, hidden. Those were the social conditions at the time. But my novel is going to treat these characters head on and there’s not going to be any questions about what they mean to one another.
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