[Editorial] ‘You Didn’t Know I Exist!’: The Feminist Possibilities of Mausoleum (1983)

One afternoon, in the hazy sunlight of her psychiatrist’s office, a woman is hypnotized. She lays back on the oxblood chesterfield sofa, and watches, dreamily, as he dangles a crystal over her face. Susan soon regresses to being ten years old, wailing at her mother’s graveside. But then, her crying fades away. She settles. Dr Andrews asks her where she is now. ‘Safe’ she murmurs. Then, in a much deeper, lower voice. ‘I’m in the mausoleum’. In a big close–up, she throws herself forward towards her doctor, her eyes shining with demonic green light; she bares her yellow, stained teeth and screams into his face: ‘you didn’t know I exist!’

The scrolling credits of Mausoleum (1983) don’t mention Katherine Rosenwink. But IMDB credits Rosenwink as ‘original story and screenplay’. I don’t recognize her name. I investigate: the AFI catalogue confirms her IMDB contribution. Her other two IMDB credits are as an actor, playing an (uncredited) worker in a 1973 episode of the British sitcom, Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em (1973 – 1978) and as additional crew on three episodes of the American television series Alice (1976 – 1985). 

I broaden my internet search. I trawl social media accounts, newspaper archives and film distribution sites. The Vinegar Syndrome 2019 restoration and Blu-Ray release of Mausoleum contains an original interview with the film’s special effects make-up artist, John Carl Buechler, but no–one else. I eventually locate a reference to a sixty–page fantasy novella, self-published by Rosenwink, in 2011. Her single paragraph bio reveals she was born and raised in London, then relocated to Los Angeles to write, and that ‘she also worked for a number of years for a major Hollywood Film and Television Studio, eventually becoming a Department Director’. 

There are no reviews of the novella on GoodReads. 

There are, in fact, no further leads. 

It is almost – in film terms at least – as if Rosenwink didn’t exist.

---

Susan visits an art gallery in a large, bright shopping mall. A surrealist painting takes her fancy, a rip–off of Dalí’s The Persistence of Memory (1931), but with the (somewhat dubious) addition of a naked woman riding a centaur. Naturally, Susan demands to buy the painting, as any sane person would, and when the shop manager explains it has been sold, she pops it under her arm and walks out with it. 

The shop owner is confronts her, demanding that she return the stolen goods. At this point, I like to imagine that the filmmakers are referring to the controversial feminist Dutch film De stilte rond Christine M. / A Question of Silence (1982), in which bored housewife Christine attempts to shoplift a dress in a department store and is confronted by the male owner of the store. In De stilte…, Christine refuse to return the dress, and, together with two women she doesn’t know, they murder the man in the middle of the shop. Arguably, Mausoleum diverts in its homage, though, as Susan chooses to employ demonic powers to overturn patriarchy and capitalism. Susan’s eyes glow green, the store owner levitates, much to his surprise, and he is lifted up and over the walkway balcony. Susan drops him down four floors of the shopping mall and he meets a sticky end on a table in the food court. 

From the direction, photography, editing and costume design in Mausoleum though, I'm not completely confident that the male filmmakers are ardent feminists, nor that my film parallels are spot–on. One could make a flimsy case for Mausoleum’s feminist intent: every man that sleazes on Susan dies (and practically every man in this film sleazes on Susan). She kills the guy who delivers a tree to her house, after verbally suggesting sex; she kills her husband Oliver after he gropes her amorously  while she’s in the bath and she slaughters her gardener with his gardening fork (the indignity!) after she’s had sex with him, when he’s all warm and soft and postcoital. 

The only man who doesn’t try to have sex with Susan is Dr Andrews. While Mausoleum is about demon possession, it is, at heart, a slasher, and by the rules of the slasher he gets to live. Dr Andrews is Mausoleum’s final boy. 

Despite all the murders of leery men, this is no feminist film. Susan, played by Bobby Bresee, spends most of the film nude, semi–nude or swanning around in lace-cupped white chemises with matching diaphanous robes. Without a doubt, point of primary interest is Bresee’s boobs: this is what the filmmakers imagine the audience comes to Mausoleum for.

So why am I writing an essay on the feminist possibilities of Mausoleum? The original writer, Rosenwink, is completely written out of the film’s history, while the female lead’s performance is predicated upon poorly rationalised opportunities for extensive displays of boobage.

So, I’m not saying Mausoleum is a feminist film. It really isn’t.

I’m not trying to offer a recuperative reading either, celebrating Mausoleum’s overlooked genius and demanding a place in the horror film canon.

And I am definitely not offering a ‘it’s so bad it’s good’ reading.

What I want to give you, instead, is a feminist reading of one aspect of the film:  Elsie, Susan’s maid, played by esteemed comedian and actor, LaWanda Page. 

We first meet Elsie early in the film, in the kitchen, as Susan dictates a shopping list to her. Elsie is unimpressed by Susan’s pretentious food choices and isn’t afraid to intimate it. When she asks Susan to spell ‘guava’, Susan can’t. The mistress is put out, and fudges the situation, briskly stating ‘get cantaloupe instead’. 

Such minor victories over wishy–washy Susan don’t negate the fact that, as written, Elsie’s character is problematic. Page is required to perform the kind of black–maid–to–a–white–rich–woman role that one would expect to find in a black and white Hollywood horror film. As Robin Means Coleman writes in Horror Noire, in the 1940s, ‘Blacks were still relegated to roles such as that of the primitive, jungle native or servant to Whites’. Forty years later, Mausoleum continued to rehash this tired, racist trope.

This stereotyping is compounded when Elsie tells Oliver, Susan’s husband, that there is something wrong in the house pertaining to ‘spiritual matters’. This situates Elsie within the ‘magical negro’ archetype, described by Leila Latif as ‘one of the most popular cliches for black characters’, featuring ‘a wise, folksy black character with some connection to magical forces or spiritual insight’. 

Then, Elsie is used as the sole (intentional) comic relief in this film. When she sees green smoke flooding out of Susan’s bedroom, she races down the staircase and attacks the liquor cabinet, mumbling ‘Lord have mercy I ain’t been this nervous since I been black’, accompanied by a comedic musical score. These poor choices cannot be laid at the feet of the actor. By the time she took this role, Page was an adept stand-up comedienne and comedic character actress, and an advocate for equal opportunities and better pay for black performers. The issue here is that Elsie is a character designed to be laughed at, rather than with. 

Yet, and yet. Even despite this overtly racist stereotyping, Page transcends these limitations. She is magnificent in this minor role; her screen presence overwhelms Bresee’s very limited range. Page exemplifies what James Baldwin describes in The Devil Makes Work as ‘moments’ that a black actor can offer: ‘indelible moments, created, miraculously, beyond the confines of the script: hints of reality, smuggled like contraband into a maudlin tale, and with enough force, if unleashed, to shatter the tale to fragments’. 

Elsie is, without a doubt, a moment.

---

In the hypnosis session, Dr Andrews keeps his cool, even though Susan’s inner demon has come out to play. With his beard–hair barely ruffled, he quietly pronounces, ‘when I count to three you’ll wake up and you remember nothing that happened’. He adds for good measure, ‘you will be relaxed and rested’. Sure enough, acquiescent Susan re–emerges, innocent and happy, gentle and beautiful. She clasps his hand and thanks him, kisses his cheek and leaves. Accompanied by thoughtful string music, Dr Andrews stands at his office window and watches her drive away.

This is how we could leave Mausoleum, disappearing into the distance. 

We could.

But we won’t.

Another way we could end, with a plea to this essay’s current relevance: 

Mausoleum’s seedy combination of supernatural slasher, bad wigs (don’t get me started on Aunt Cora’s grey barnet) and even worse acting (with the exception of Page) was unleashed upon the world almost forty years ago this very month. 

So, we could make a case for this essay’s timeliness. 

But there are more pressing things to think about here.

I want to end where my Mausoleum journey began.

In October 2020, critic and filmmaker Zena Sade, AKA Real Queen of Horror, wrote ‘I love Michael Dugan’s MAUSOLEUM so much! 💚 Anyone else a fan of this bizarre movie?’. I noted the year and the plot summary, and I was intrigued. 

It’s more than my love of the occult though: I value Sade’s recommendations because of her love of the history of the genre: she is no fly–by–night, new–to–Netflix film critic, she digs deep and long into long–gone decades to do her work. Her YouTube channel reveals a distinct proclivity for the 1980s and 1990s: decades which are barely covered in horror criticism (exempting video nasties) and which – notably – are the decades when women filmmakers began to make major inroads, en–masse, into senior creative film roles. These women include director–producer Gabrielle Beaumont (The Godsend, 1980), editor Debra Karen (Happy Birthday to Me, 1981), writer Elisa Brigante (Manhattan Baby, 1982), editor Edna Ruth Paul (The Evil Dead, 1982), writer–director Ling Chang (Wolf Devil Woman, 1982), producer Gale Ann Hurd (Aliens, 1986), director–producer Jackie Kong (Blood Diner, 1987), writer–director Katt Shea (Dance of the Damned, 1989), and cinematographer Kei Fujiwara (Tetsuo: The Iron Man, 1989) to name but a few examples (and that’s, of course, assuming you know all about the contributions of filmmakers Debra Hill, Mary Lambert, Barbara Peeters, Roberta Findlay, Kathryn Bigelow, Amy Holden–Jones and the whole Slumber Party Massacre franchise).

Given that Rosenwink is the only woman with a major creative production role on the film (and she isn’t even credited on screen), how do we deal with a film like Mausoleum? How do we place it within the context of 1980s women–made horror films discussed above? 

We can find a home for Mausoleum by recognising how our women–led fan communities are now building our women–led film histories. 

Critics such as Sade, or Gracie and Abbey on the Good Mourning Nancy podcast, who introduced me to the sorority slasher film 13 Women (1932) – which I had never heard of, despite the fact I’ve written a whole book on 1930s horror film – are illuminating the films and filmmakers long forgotten or thought lost. These women broaden our viewing habits and they advocate for inclusion. Their actions are the opposite of gatekeeping, that distasteful practice of researching everything about the most obscure film or (male) filmmaker possible, and then lording it over someone who doesn’t possess this knowledge.

This sharing of expertise by women who really care is, on one level, an embrace of all forms of horror filmmaking as worthy of our attention. 

More importantly though, this approach creates a diverse and multifaceted form of horror film history. This is why it is important to know about the unexceptional, the racially stereotyped, the misogynistic and the suspect, the bombing fails as well as the riotous wins. 

And this is where we can locate the real feminist possibility of Mausoleum, and films of its ilk. After finding them, we can read them through a feminist lens to glean the kind of treasures that I have talked about today. 

These treasures may be small, but they are perfect.  

They are the discovery of filmmakers such as Rosenwink whose names barely grace the internet, never mind in film history books. These absences can lead us to draw valuable conclusions about whose stories get to be told and whose stories do not.

They are also finding the unexpected, unanticipated, and yet magnificent in Page’s performance. 

Of how, through Page, we recognise Baldwin’s ‘hints of reality’ in which a Black performer can transcend the limitations of their role and produce something more. 

When Susan goes full possession, Elsie knows it is time to leave. She throws her coat on, shoves her suitcase under her arm and heads for the front door. Arguably, Elsie is the embodiment of the infamous Eddie Murphy 1983 stand-up special ‘Delirious’. Murphy points out, ‘why don't the people just get the hell out of the house? You can't make a horror movie with black people in it cause the movie’d stop’. 

Murphy's routine was, of course, the jumping off point for Jordan Peele's Get Out, Peele musing over the question, how do you get a black guy to stay in a house from which he should certainly be fleeing long enough to get him into real trouble? 

Elsie knows Murphy’s point. 

She lives it. 

She runs down the drive, and beyond our sightline, without looking back.

But now, thanks to critics such as Sade, we at least know that she exists.

RELATED ARTICLES

---

---

EXPLORE

---

MORE ARTICLES

---