Interviews
The Horror is Really Inside of You: Josephine Decker and the Powerful Ambiguity of ‘Shirley’ [Interview]
With everything going on in the world you might have missed the fact that one of the most fascinating movies of the year came out on Hulu a couple weeks ago. Shirley, an intriguing amalgam of biopic and fictional thriller, stars Elisabeth Moss (The Invisible Man) as author Shirley Jackson, one of the most important horror writers of the 20th century, who forms an strange, erotic and possibly horrifying relationship with a young tenant as she writes one of her most celebrated works in the 1950s.
Although not explicitly a horror movie, the film explores the social context in which classics like The Lottery and Hangsaman were created, and eventually steers into twisted territory as the story Jackson writes and the life of her and her tenant, Rose (Odessa Young) bleed together.
Shirley comes from acclaimed filmmaker Josephine Decker (Madeline’s Madeline), who spoke to Bloody-Disgusting shortly before the film’s release via Zoom.
A few SPOILERS lie ahead, but speaking of spoilers, the first scene in Shirley features Rose reading Shirley Jackson’s the-recently published The Lottery. The story has one of the most famous and controversial twists in horror history, and it’s a twist that Rose describes out loud, with nary a spoiler alert in sight.
Then again, according to Josephine Decker, the audience needs that information before the story can begin, and they probably know it anyway.
“I think it’s important that people know that going into the movie, and I think… I don’t know, I had to read The Lottery in middle school, high school, and I have a feeling that most American audiences will be familiar with that story,” Decker says. “So it’s probably a good memory jogger that that’s what Shirley writes about, and that’s the level of wild that her stories get to. So yeah, I think that that felt very organic.”
“And also that you get to see how The Lottery works on Rose. That feels like an important part of the storytelling that something so gruesome kind of turns her on,” Decker adds. ‘It’s a character trait.”
Rose’s married life is sexually rigorous for the first half of Shirley, but as the story continues her relationship with her husband becomes distant, and her relationship to Jackson becomes more intimate. Decker points out that although aspects of the film are fictional, the portrayal of Jackson and her muse as sexual beings adds to their complexity.
“In my mind it’s not a biopic because, well, partly because it takes place over such a short period of time, but also because it’s so invented,” Decker explains. “Many of the details of Shirley’s life are inaccurate, and kind of purposely, because we wanted to be like ‘this is fiction.’”
“But yeah, I wanted her to come across as a very complex human, which I think Sarah [Gubbins] did so beautifully in the script. And I think what Sarah did really well in the script and one of the reasons I was really excited by it is that there is a sensuality and a kind of seduction of the muse, in a way. But it’s between two women and I don’t know that we’ve seen that story all that much,” Decker says. “I mean there’s a subtle lesbian romance, basically.”
The romance between Jackson and her tenant peaks in a scene on their front porch, where their personal connection turns physical for the first time. It’s one of the most striking scenes in the film, and Decker says it evolved in the editing room.
“That scene actually had a lot of dialogue and then at some point one of our editors was like, let’s try taking out the dialogue and see what happens? And then it became this kind of silent eye contact sex scene, basically,” Decker laughs. “I mean it was really funny to shoot in person too, because we shot it I think towards the end of our shoot and so everyone was pretty comfortable with each other, and I think… they’re just such great actors and they were just really locked in.”
“I just love the way that Lizzy, as Shirley, looks at Rose, and I love the way that Odessa, as Rose, feels so almost blindsided and sort of like… wait, are we here? And are we there? And if we’re THERE I’ve been ready for this!” Decker recalls. “There’s so many layers to what happens throughout the scene. Yeah, it was a fun one to shoot.”
Rose’s questioning of her reality in that scene reflects much of the film, as Rose finds herself blurring fiction and reality, and possibly becoming a character in Shirley Jackson’s latest mind-bending story. Decker says that ambiguity was in keeping with Jackson’s work, and intentionally incorporated into Shirley.
“Even just reading the script I remember thinking I had wanted to shoot in the ending in a way that the audience would be questioning what they had seen. I think Shirley does that so well in her writing. You kind of fall between worlds in a really beautiful way. You’re inside of a world that seems very stable and then all of a sudden it’s very unstable and then all of a sudden you’re questioning the last 20 pages that you just read,” Decker explains.
“I think that’s something that’s really exciting about the way she writes,” Decker says. “And also that the horror is really inside of you. When I think of The Haunting of Hill House, it’s sort of like the house becomes an expression of this girl’s loneliness in a way, and that loneliness gets exaggerated to such a degree that it’s really, really destructive.”
“I think stuff like that we were kind of playing with in our film too,” she adds. “How do you take something that’s very personal and that’s a character trait and then exaggerate, exaggerate so that it kind of explodes into a bigger encounter?”
Ambiguous endings often give audiences an opportunity to decide for themselves what “really” happened, but according to Decker, the end of Shirley doesn’t work that way. Rather than ground her storytelling in what actually happened, the filmmaker decided to keep the story poetically ambiguous even for herself.
“I try to keep that ambiguity. I always like, and it’s not just in this film,” Decker says. “I think in a lot of the films that I make, I like to make films where there’s maybe an ambiguous ending and I feel like if I knew what the ending meant then the audience would feel it too, you know? And I kind of think it’s important to me to sort of let there be that ambiguity, also for myself, so that I can interpret it multiple ways also.”
“Because yeah, I think if I was like ‘Well it’s like this, we’ll see if they get it’ it just feels like it might be a little more contrived,” Decker explains. “I come from a poetic [background], my family, my dad is a poet and so ambiguity and letting things be open for interpretation feels really natural to me I guess.”
Shirley may be steeped in Shirley Jackson’s life and stories and style, but how necessary is it for the audience to be familiar with the author’s work in order to pick up on those cues?
“I don’t think that it’s necessary to read any Shirley before you see the film,” Decker says. “I think it’s certainly fun if you HAVE read Shirley. I think there’s a lot of little things that are fun tributes to her in it.”
“But I think part of the thing that drove us to want to make it was that we felt that Shirley is, as famous as she is, she’s not necessarily a household name in a way that other horror writers are, and just really wanting to feel like we were allowing a space for Shirley to be this magician of darkness,” Decker laughs. “And that you could meet her there and then discover her in our film.”
“But yeah, there’s a lot of little fun odes to Shirley throughout the film that are fun to find,” Decker hints.
Whether you pick up on the Easter eggs or not, Shirley still dramatizes the way Jackson used her writing to react to the patriarchal society she lived in. Her husband, Stanley (Michael Stuhlbarg), is a philandering college professor and their relationship is not always viewed as even-handed or healthy.
“My sense is that Shirley’s writing was a great love of hers, that it was a place that was safe and that she could go and have adventures. It brought her love from the outside world. It brought her Stanley’s love in some ways,” Decker says.
“And I think just happenstance, she was not always in the most supportive emotional environments,” the filmmaker explains. “In real life her mom, she had a fairly emotionally abusive relationship with her mom, her mom being the abuser. And then she kind of chose a husband who maybe was an extension of that kind of relationship.”
“So I think it’s not… you know, it’s so funny because all I can do is project,” Decker considers. “I know that possibly choosing to be an artist allows you to speak in a language that gets praise when the language that you maybe are trying to speak in is unheard otherwise? So I don’t know.”
“I think that that maybe, that’s again totally my projection, but I don’t think you have to be mad to create art. I just think that if you don’t have to create art, and if you could go make money doing something that actually is a little bit easier, you probably end up choosing that,” Decker laughs. “So I think people who create art, I feel like maybe they’re relying on it for survival in a certain way, because otherwise… yeah, you wouldn’t put yourself through it? I don’t know. But I do think you can make art and be a very happy person as well.”
“And then the patriarchy thing, I think she in a way had a very unorthodox, ahead of its time relationship. I mean they had an open relationship, although obviously that was kind of troubled and troubling, but they also… you know, she was the breadwinner of their household,” Decker reminds us. “And that said, that may have sparked some of the conflict between her and her husband, and I think we kind of played with that a little bit in our film.”
“But it’s definitely, I think some of the questions of Shirley’s life are questions that are still in play today,” Decker says. “You know, how does a female artist upset gender roles without upsetting, maybe, their household? And how could a famous female artist… you know, I think the time of her life when we were showing her, which is right after The Lottery came out, she was really kind of… there was such a reaction to The Lottery, and her own town felt like accused by The Lottery and so she kind of shut herself in for a while.”
“I guess what I’m trying to say is the exposure, exposure can be terrifying in any time period, and I think in that time period there was her working against the way that her writing was perceived maybe in her own community is, but I think now there’s exposure obviously on a different level,” Decker continues. “There’s young people who are artists, are super world famous stars at the age of 13 and 16. So I don’t know.”
“I think it’s complicated in any time period but the patriarchy never helps,” Decker laughs.
Shirley is now available on Hulu and On Demand.
Interviews
Paul Tremblay on Fighting AI with Horror in New Novel ‘Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep’
Paul Tremblay didn’t start his writing career believing he’d be battling machines over the sanctity of his job, but like so many writers of his generation, the battle found him. In the years since Large Language Models (LLMs) and neural networks started gaining traction as an advertised shortcut to creativity, Tremblay has been active in lawsuits to prevent the use of his works in training AI models, and he’s found that, with each new project, he has to consider the possibility that some LLM, somewhere, is going to latch on to what he’s creating.
“Now I feel like I’m thinking about, ‘Man, how am I going to write things that would be really hard or impossible for an AI to replicate?’,” Tremblay told me, speaking by Zoom from his home in Massachusetts. “Maybe some of that is ego. I’m sure every writer thinks, ‘Oh, an AI could never write what I write.’ Yes, I’d be lying if I said that wasn’t part of the thought process.”
While that’s something Tremblay might consider with any new work at this point in his career, the Bram Stoker Award-winning author of A Head Full of Ghosts, The Cabin at the End of the World, and many other novels and short stories tackled it in a more direct way with his latest book. Inspired by Philip K. Dick, Harlan Ellison, and the quirky humor of the Coen Brothers, Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep is Tremblay’s attempt at a sci-fi-horror mash-up that’s both darkly funny and existentially nightmarish. It’s also, in his own words, a screed against the movement by AI companies to supplant human artists.
“I didn’t want to make it too didactic, but no, I playfully described this book as an anti-AI screed,” he said. “This book, in particular, was driven by anger and frustration, for sure. Not every book is going to be driven that way.“
Despite the emotions that fueled it, Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep does not read like a screed. Instead, wielding offbeat humor and tech concepts that feel both lived-in and frighteningly tactile, the book lays out tandem narratives all building to the same conclusion, each of them exploring our relationship to machine learning in a different way. One of these narratives belongs to Julia, a former gaming streamer looking for a new challenge in life, who gets a call from a California tech company with an interesting offer.
Paul Tremblay in documentary series “First Word on Horror”
The company has, it seems, implanted some new technology in a brain-dead middle-aged man which will, in theory, allow them to pilot the man’s body through a rudimentary, still-developing system of controls. Julia, with her gaming background, would be the pilot, in her own way just as much a test subject as the human vegetable she’s controlling.
Julia is a Gen Z streamer with an omnivorous pop culture appetite, inspired by Tremblay’s own adult children, who riffs on The Big Lebowski constantly and calls her strange new meat puppet “Bernie” in reference to Weekend at Bernie’s. Her wide frame of reference, and her interest in art and stories far beyond video games, is in part informed by Tremblay’s own experiences with Gen Z, and in part a response to AI companies who scrape art and culture as a means of consuming it for reference without really experiencing a story.
“I know that one of the arguments that OpenAI and other tech companies are trying to make is like, ‘Hey, you writers, you artists, you take pop culture, you take your influences, and you create something. That’s just the same thing that the bots are doing.’ And it’s just not,” Tremblay said. “I wanted to have Julia have her outlook informed by all this pop culture, and I wanted to make that feel really human as a way to show how inhuman the AI is.”
The other side of the story belongs to “Bernie,” who’s addressed in his point-of-view chapters as “You.” In these chapters, the technology in Bernie’s body starts to flicker images through his seemingly dead brain, delivering half-remembered imagery and perspective in a nod to the “hallucinations” of an AI model groping for understanding it can never reach. These chapters in particular show off Tremblay’s flair for formalist shake-ups, and echo the kind of hyperstimulated writing that Dick and Ellison made so influential.
“I think it was more just the general Philip K. Dick feeling of ‘The world is so strange,'” Tremblay said. “He’s a lot funnier, I think, than maybe a lot of people credit him. That’s definitely what I was thinking of when writing the book.“
Bernie’s chapters embody the strangeness of Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep, presenting imagery that’s at times puzzling, at times eerily filmic, and always unnerving. They also mirror Julia’s own journey in fascinating ways as the odd couple – the Gen Z gamer and the middle-aged vegetable – traverse the United States, and the tech in Bernie’s body wakes up to the possibilities of using his flesh for its own purposes. It’s a compelling narrative technique, but it presented some new writing challenges for Tremblay.
“I quickly realized I couldn’t write this book the same way I have in the past,” he said. “By that, I mean all my other novels I had written in the order in which it was presented, even things that are nonlinear, which is most of them. I knew I couldn’t do that in this book. It’s not a spoiler, but hopefully the readers figure out pretty early that the Bernie chapters are a little bit of a preview of the next chapter from Julia, what’s actually happening with Julia. It’s all refracted from him.”
Mary Roach’s Stiff
Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep began with a simple image, inspired by Tremblay’s reading of Mary Roach‘s book chronicling the history of our treatment of corpses, Stiff. As he read, Tremblay imagined a body sitting on an airplane, remote-controlled by someone else. At the time, it was a “silly what-if” concept, filed away in his head. Years later, when he became an author suing a tech company to keep AI from scraping his work for ideas, it started to feel frighteningly plausible, taking the “silly what-if” into the territory of a high-concept horror show about what happens when we try to exploit and commodify uniquely human aspects of consciousness.
“It stuck with me,” Tremblay said of that what-if imagery. “And then a few years later, when I was a part of the case suing OpenAI on behalf of writers, that what-if suddenly didn’t seem as silly. The more I learned about how that corporation operates and without really any sort of ethical thought to anything, I was like, ‘Oh, I’m going to play with that. That’s actually happening.”
So, what if someone actually in favor of generative AI picks up Tremblay’s self-described “anti-AI screed?” He hopes that, at the very least, he’s made the ride enjoyable in a distinctly human way that might begin to reshape the conversation.
“I think that was another reason why I wanted to have the humor,” Tremblay said. “If people are reading this book who aren’t on the side of like, ‘Hey, LLMs taking authors’ books is bad,’ maybe if they read something that’s cut with some humor, that maybe they’ll be more easily swayed.”
Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep is now in bookstores everywhere.
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