Women and Queerness in Horror: Heavenly Creatures

Warning: This article contains discussion of mental illness, mentions of rape and murder, mentions of suicide, and spoilers for Heavenly Creatures.

This week brings me back to 1994, and the heady blur of thriller, horror, and true crime that is Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh’s Heavenly Creatures. For those who aren’t familiar or those who (like me) first watched this movie when they were probably too young to fully understand or deal with it, here’s a brief idea of what you’re in for. Heavenly Creatures is a dramatization of the 1954 Parker-Hulmes murder case in Christchurch, New Zealand. Said case involved Pauline Parker and Juliet Hulmes (then 16 and 15 respectively) who were both involved in the murder of Parker’s mother, Honorah Parker.

Many of our readers will, understandably, recognize Peter Jackson’s and Fran Walsh’s names from The Lord of the Rings. It bears situating Heavenly Creatures in context, though, as Jackson produced the documentary West of Memphis in 2012; he and Walsh also contributed to the defense fund for the West Memphis Three. The pair’s relationship with true crime and the pursuit of sympathetic yet honest depictions of events brackets their involvement in The Lord of the Rings franchise. Though they may be more widely recognized for the latter, their commitment to careful handling of this subject matter and the individuals involved in it is clear.

Now, of course, Heavenly Creatures, unlike West of Memphis, is not a documentary. It is heavily rooted in the facts of the case and in the writings contained within Pauline Parker’s diaries between 1952 and 1954. However, there may be little doubt that some license was taken with how those facts were presented and discussed.

What’s important here, though, is that Heavenly Creatures is a prime example of dramatization of a real event or series of events done well, if not expertly. It balances artistry with sensitivity, and empathy with neither glamorizing nor condoning the actions that culminated in the girls’ trial and sentencing. That is something that a great deal of true crime or true crime-adjacent media widely misses the mark on.

In other words, I have a deep, genuine love for this movie, despite how difficult, painful and at times even ugly as it is. Perhaps it’s the tangibly intelligent, respectful balance between style and substance. Perhaps it’s simply that the film avoids titillated yet moralizing efforts to depict Pauline (Melanie Lynskey) and Juliet (Kate Winslet) as incomprehensibly and even monstrously alien. Maybe it’s all of the above. Ultimately, Heavenly Creatures tells a story that could have happened to anyone. It is a story that is unquestionably tied to the time and place, but still resonates with something very real and honest.

This article is going to get personal, if you couldn’t already tell. As a rule of thumb, I am deeply opposed to people feeling compelled or obligated to divulge their histories of trauma, mental illness, or other such experiences to be “allowed” to explain why they connected with something. Still, I feel it’s difficult as a queer, feminine person who has struggled with trauma and mental illness to discuss Heavenly Creatures honestly without speaking to the very personal aspects of my relationship to and with this movie. In other words: hold onto your hats.

In a departure from my norm in this series, I’m actually not going to dissect too many individual story beats. Heavenly Creatures is a movie that’s best watched on its own if you haven’t already. What I’m going to do instead, is talk through why it sits so close to home for me, and why it’s still so important to me as an adult. Let’s dive in.

The bulk of Heavenly Creatures — indeed, everything except about the last fifteen minutes of the film — is focused on the development of the relationship between Pauline and Juliet. Particularly it involves the hows, if not necessarily the whys, of the Parker-Hulme case’s culmination which only takes up the last ten or so minutes of the movie. It establishes the class divide between Pauline and Juliet without fanfare, while also demonstrating the impacts that long-lasting illnesses had on each girl. It also illustrates in detail the ways that these experiences first brought them into each other’s orbits in an overall very regimented, Catholic all-girls school, Christchurch Girls’ High School.

As this relationship unfolds, so too does it quickly intensify. While the story contained within the film (and the case itself) spans over nearly two years, it wasn’t long before a partnership of convenience born of being paired up for an art project became an intensely bonded, progressively consuming connection. This on its own was already vividly recognizable to me. I daresay it translated — and continues to do so — closely for a lot of feminine queer folks growing up with this movie in their lexicon.

I had those friendships with other girls, at the same age that Pauline and Juliet were. We spent extensive amounts of our free time at each other’s houses or, failing that, on the phone or instant messaging back and forth. We thought each other’s parents were so much cooler than our own, and felt immeasurably cool when people started treating us like a package deal, even like sisters. Yet, at least for me, underlying those relationships was the vague awareness that I didn’t feel sisterly; or even that I felt sisterly and a much less familial form of intimacy, simultaneously. I felt that those feelings somehow didn’t contradict each other.

While it’s worth noting that Juliet Hulme as an adult has maintained that while their relationship was obsessive, they were not lesbians — as is her right and prerogative — it is nonetheless difficult if not impossible to ignore the ways that her relationship with Pauline at the time resonates with the experiences of many young queer women. Particularly queer women that are navigating their first very intense involvement. Further, this is an experience that many young queer women never have explained to them until well after the fact, even in the absence of the pathologization of homosexuality that was characterized the 1950s.

Indeed, Heavenly Creatures leans into that awareness, with a perhaps surprisingly modern sensibility for a film released in 1994. A time when the problematized and ostensibly ableist Single White Female only preceded it by two years. It’s frank about the physicality of Pauline and Juliet’s relationship, not shying from their intimacy. It does so while never producing it in a titillating or exploitative way that has often been a mainstay of both male directors of intimacy between women, and male directors of teenage girls in horror/thriller movies and elsewhere.

With this honesty, though, comes a distinctly fantastical element. Pauline and Juliet weave their own imaginary world around themselves and each other, going so far as to piece together a royal family. They create an elaborate narrative, and indeed an entire fictive religion in which to take solace.

Well before their circumstances and choices take a turn for the violent, they are half in and half out of their lived reality. They play characters and insist on being called by their fictive names well after their peers have stopped playing such games between the ages of 14 and 16. They have long, romantic dreamscapes that blur the lines with reality, and while Pauline and Juliet do in many ways seem to drag emotionally behind other girls their age, the roots of this seeming immaturity are clear.

Their fantasy-scape is one in which they can be fully realized and in which they can take refuge from the struggles of their home lives. They can escape the restrictions imposed on them at school. Additionally, as the story progresses they also are able to escape the traumas of parental abandonment and infidelity in Juliet’s case and sexual assault in Pauline’s case.

Indeed, it’s honest and unflinching about these aspects of the girls’ botched attempts to cope through escapism, while also using it as a cinematic tool to execute traumatic sequences respectfully. Pauline being date raped was entirely unambiguous and deeply unsettling, yet never felt gratuitous or indeed even sexualized. The vast majority of that sequence followed her as her imaginary landscape was first comforting and then menacing, rather than over-fixating on the actual details of what was done to her.

That’s in many ways a simplification of that experience, but it’s similarly difficult to translate. Still, much like the convoluted intensity of the girls’ dynamic, it rang very true for me with something from my own time being that age. In simple terms, I was that kid. On the one hand, I was fortunate to have the supportive, accepting, forward-thinking and very present family that in some ways Pauline and Juliet lacked. Additionally the sexual assault Pauline experiences and uses this landscape to escape from didn’t happen for me until much later in life.

On the other hand, I felt the sharpness of that anger and frustration, as a lonely and on-again-off-again suicidal teenager. I had a very similar bond with my closest childhood friend, where she and I were working on a novel together. We were reimagining ourselves as fantasy creatures, and becoming so absorbed in the stories that we wove that we started to halfway believe them.

It’s a game. Most of you knows it’s a game you’re using to retreat and play at your ideal self without supervision or constraint. Yet then the line gets blurry, drifting sideways into something that consumes more and more hours of your day, and takes on a dissociative element that hasn’t been previously present. Heavenly Creatures doesn’t shy from understanding that this progressive detachment — and the ways that Pauline and Juliet encouraged it in each other, tacitly or otherwise — contributed to their later actions. However, even this it manages to treat with sympathy.

It understands the tragedy and violence that resulted, while comprehending that this dissociative experience can be (and is) frightening and overwhelming for those who become entrenched in it, too. I know I freaked myself out — and attracted the concern of those around me — when the line between what I imagined and what I was truly experiencing became unclear. Heavenly Creatures understands the fear that comes with struggling to translate your lived experience if you start believing that perhaps the imagined landscape is the real one. It also doesn’t hesitate to draw a straight line between this fundamental unsettling and the choices the girls ultimately made.

I know. By this point you may be thinking: wait, did Zoë just say they think they’d be capable of killing their parents? That’s not what I mean — but I think it is what the movie means. Yet it manages to do so without ever vilifying the relationship. It doesn’t shy away from confronting their actions as awful and tragic, but it’s very much committed to understanding that these kinds of relationships between teenage girls and young women existed, continue to exist, and aren’t of themselves monstrous, or dangerous.

At its core, Heavenly Creatures is in many ways two movies existing side-by-side. There’s the story that the girls are in, which is frightful and ugly but in its own way beautiful, too. Then the adults exist in a separate film that hews closer to the horror genre. The “horror” for them is their daughters’ ostensible queerness, and how it has their daughters expressing interests, desires, and selfhoods that have nothing to do with them as they become young women.

A lot of true crime (and dramatizations thereof) has a propensity toward trying to understand what makes its perpetrators so different from the audience, in ways that are at once essentializing, glamorizing, and even fetishizing. Heavenly Creatures does neither: it understands that Pauline’s and Juliet’s ostensible queerness is in no way the cause of their violent actions. Simultaneously it contends that, under the same alignment of circumstances, they could have been anyone.

In a landscape full of movies about fictional women who kill because they’re queer from creators who depict that as a monstrous way to live, Heavenly Creatures to this day gives me an unexpectedly empathetic moment to breathe.