October Horror Challenge 2019 #62: "The Yellow Wallpaper (2016)"

"The Yellow Wallpaper" is one of those stories that English majors have probably read a million times and written about in a million essays. The story is a favorite of English teachers, because there is so much symbolism and subtext in the story, a lot of imagery to dissect, and it's not too difficult to explicate these details, so this is a good story to assign to students. I had fun analyzing this story and writing papers about it. It's not a fun story, in fact it's pretty horrific (hence why it was made into a few horror movies over the years) but it's still a favorite of mine, for everything it has to say and everything it taught me.

In the original story, a woman is taken to a secluded house in the country by her husband so she can "rest." Over the course of the story it becomes clear that she recently had a baby, and her hormones and emotions after the birth cause her husband to think she is unwell, so he ships her off and locks her in a room hoping she'll "calm down" over time and return to the wife he once knew. Unfortunately, excluding her away does nothing good for her mental state, and she starts seeing things, mostly centered on the yellow wallpaper that covers the walls of her room. She believes there is a woman trapped in the wallpaper (how telling) and the woman is trying to break free.

This movie doesn't tell us as much as the story does, instead preferring to keep things mysterious and allowing us to draw our own conclusions about what happens to the woman. I like this, though the original story is more terrifying for everything it shows about how women's mental health was treated in the past. This version takes place in the present, so it seems to be saying that we still have a long way to go as far as addressing mental health issues and treating them thoroughly and properly. I think I would have liked it better if this movie took a more faithful adaptation of the story and truly showed us the horrific consequences of how our heroine was treated, but it's still a good movie and worth checking out. Alex Childs delivers a great performance, and this would be an interesting movie to show students along with the story as a way of helping them visualize what might happen if this story were to take place today.