Editorials
Finding Unexpected Empowerment in “Poor Things”
A young person, raised by a scientist and seemingly simple minded by design, discovers their inner hedonist. In their quest for pleasure, they leave their home and embark on misadventures involving sex, sugar, an abusive relationship, and various enlightenments, all before returning home to confront their past so that they may move towards their future. This is the streamlined arc for both Poor Things protagonist Bella Baxter and myself. When I saw Poor Things in theaters in January 2024, the only things I knew about the film were that Yorgos Lanthimos directed it and that the cast included Emma Stone, Ramy Youssef, and Willem Dafoe.
You can imagine my surprise when I not only felt the impact of Bella’s arc, but also felt seen and even empowered in a way that I rarely do as a queer disabled man.
Discovering Bella Baxter in Poor Things
Bella, an adult woman who exhibits childlike behavior, is under the care of scientist Godwin Baxter, who has taken on the role of her father figure. Conversations with his student Max reveals that Bella’s body is the resurrected corpse of a woman that Godwin discovered, while her brain had originally belonged to the child the woman had been pregnant with. It’s important to note that Godwin didn’t know the circumstances of the woman’s death before he pulled off this macabre miracle. More on that later.
Bella eventually has her first sexual experience through masturbation, is instantly hooked on the gratification she feels, and tries to achieve constant satisfaction proclaiming “Bella discover happy when she want.”. Those around her, such as Max and Godwin’s maid Prim, are less than elated about Bella’s newfound desires, but Bella shamelessly persists. Godwin, in response, decides to try to arrange a marriage between Bella and Max, with the condition that the pair live with him for the rest of his days. While Max agrees, Bella ultimately decides to leave their home in London to embark on a whirlwind affair with Godwin’s lawyer, Duncan Wedderburn. Duncan, enticed by the contradicting nature of Bella’s innocence and sexual hedonism, pursues and woos her with promises of worldliness and sex.
Subverting Disability Stereotypes
One of the most common stereotypes in media around disabled people is the belief that their disabilities render them either asexual or unable to obtain any type of sexual gratification at all. When one reads Bella as disabled-coded, as I do, she becomes one of the strongest subversions of the “disabled equals asexual” trope seen in recent, mainstream film history. A disabled-coded reading also makes Bella’s hypersexuality much less problematic than it would be if the character was only analyzed at a surface level. The juxtaposition of disability and hypersexuality is an aspect of Bella’s character that I greatly identify with.
In early childhood, I was diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder, and as an adult, I also tend to chase this type of gratification for the sake of leisurely pleasure or even as a way to cope with stress. With Duncan, Bella travels first to Lisbon, Portugal, where the two spend their time together having sex and eating exotic foods and sweets. Bella’s constant craving for more pleasure proves to be too much for Duncan, who grows to resent her as he is unable to keep up.
His resentment is compounded by Bella’s social ineptitude, as she repeatedly embarrasses him with several faux pas during a dinner party at their hotel. For example, after taking an extra moment to understand her female dinner mate’s sex joke, Bella makes a comment about the taste of Duncan’s penis. When Duncan reprimands her and restricts her to a few choice phrases, she describes the death of her dining companion’s relative as “delightful”; she later interrupts the dinner banter because she wants to “punch [a] baby” that’s annoying her.
Bella’s Misadventures with Duncan Wedderburn
Bella’s unfiltered comments and inappropriate responses are painfully reminiscent of my own past social failings, from remarks about my former partner’s genitals, to intrusive questions about the suicide of a classmate’s uncle, and finally to vocalized violent inclinations towards small, annoying children. Thankfully, like Bella, I was stopped before any harm could come to the younglings.
Despite their growing tensions, Bella and Duncan stay together, even as Bella goes on to binge alcohol and have sexual encounters with other men. Duncan eventually lures her out of Lisbon with a cruise to Athens, Greece. Bella is quite displeased with this change until she befriends two fellow patrons, Martha and Harry, who open her eyes to pursuits beyond her hedonism, and introduce her to philosophy and literature, irking Duncan.
Bella’s Intellectual and Emotional Growth in Poor Things
Bella embraces the intellectual stimulation presented to her, leading to a debate with Harry over humanity’s potential for cruelty in which Bella argues that humankind is not inherently cruel. Harry retaliates when the cruise docks by showing her the conditions that poor people must endure. Bella gives her and Duncan’s money to members of the ship’s crew with the (ultimately ignored) instruction to distribute it to the poor. The rash decision results in Bella and Duncan being left to fend for themselves in Paris. Bella, to Duncan’s outrage, finds work in a local brothel, a job that she views as merely a means to an end. She ends their relationship and gives him money to return to London. Bella continues life as a sex worker, taking on many lovers in the process, including a fellow sex worker named Antoinette.
The trajectory of Bella and Duncan’s relationship evokes a situationship I had years ago with an older man that would prove to be formative. Like Duncan, he presented himself as a mature man of many sexual interests that he would help me dip my toes into. And, like Duncan, he seemed to be attracted to me only when I was entirely compliant with his whims, and had an issue with me having friends and connections outside of him. I, like Bella, also managed to have a much larger libido than the supposedly adventurous gentleman, which amplified the tension as I was always wanting more. Finally, after ending this affair, I, like Bella, learned an important lesson or two and threw myself into my personal development and goals.
Returning Home and Facing the Past
Bella’s story eventually sees her return to London. She learns the truth about her origins and reconciles with Godwin, whose health is failing. She also meets Felicity—a “new Bella” that Godwin and Max created. This is a subplot that deeply resonates with me, specifically Godwin and Max’s treatment of Felicity in comparison to their treatment of Bella. Godwin doted on Bella and Max fell for her, whereas the pair grew frustrated with Felicity and essentially abandoned her to be cared for solely by Prim. It’s easy to view Bella and Felicity as higher and lower-functioning disabled people, with Bella as the preferable one because she can mask her symptoms better than Felicity can.
Several times, I have been in Bella’s position of being a preferable disabled person to interact with compared to others because of my higher functioning and less obvious presentation. I’ve even experienced this dynamic in my childhood with my sister having ADD and ADHD, which was deemed more draining for our parents compared to my own diagnosis. It’s been a journey to overcome the internalized ableism that these experiences created, but it’s one that I’m glad I’ve embarked on. Among other things, it makes Bella rightfully directing the disdain she has for Felicity towards Godwin and Max so much more satisfying, even if she does offer both men forgiveness.
Uncovering Bella’s Tragic Origins
In London, Bella learns that her body, pre-reanimation, had belonged to a sadistic woman named Victoria Blessington, who, along with her husband Alfie, abused their servants. Alfie informs Bella that Victoria died by suicide, likely due to her hatred of her unborn child, which she referred to as “the monster.” Alfie plots to imprison Bella and subject her to female genital mutilation. Bella ultimately escapes and takes Alfie back to Godwin’s home, where she performs her own surgery—one in which she replaces Alfie’s brain with a goat’s.
Although Godwin dies shortly after Bella’s return, Bella remains ever the optimist and becomes a scientist, following in Godwin’s footsteps. She builds a life with her chosen family, including Max and Antoinette as her partners, Felicity as her surrogate sister, and Prim and Alfie as her servant and pet, respectively. The film’s ending is not the traditional “Good For Her (™)” conclusion we tend to see, but rather a “Good For Bella” ending that empowers her, as a person, uniquely.
Bella Baxter’s Queer and Polyamorous Awakening
The conclusion of Poor Things brings home my feelings of kinship with Bella in two ways. The first being her completed arc from the cruel and hateful Victoria to the joyful and sincere Bella. When I was younger, I was definitely more Victoria than Bella; my younger self was a bully who enjoyed using my sharp tongue to bring others down as hard as I could. It was a lot of work to become a better person, one that I struggle to maintain from time to time. Like Bella, I have found kindness to be more rewarding than cruelty and wish to believe in the inherent joy in humanity.
The other way this conclusion resonates with me is through our—Bella’s and my own— late queer awakenings. For over half of the film, we have no indication that Bella is queer besides the likely unintentional hint of Bella rejecting Godwin and Max’s heteronormative ideals of marriage. We don’t see anything concrete until the montage of her sexual escapades in Paris, concluding with her and Antoinette having sex. It awakens Bella’s queerness in her adulthood to the point where she ends up in a throuple with Antoinette and Max, revealing that Bella is both queer and polyamorous. Similarly, I did not have my queer awakening until I was twenty, and I had my awakening as polyamorous only last year. Bella is a fictional character, but it is comforting to know that it is possible for others to have those awakenings occur later in life.
Embracing My Disabled and Queer Identity
When I look back at Poor Things, I see it as a messy and polarizing film by design. The questions of whether we should be offended, intrigued, or feel something else entirely regarding the plot of a woman being reanimated with her baby’s brain in place of her own and eventually embarking on a quest of hedonism are valid ones that do warrant discourse. I don’t resent those who are outraged by the film and detest the film’s critical success.
However, I can’t find myself outraged, especially when the film’s protagonist’s experiences mirror my own, with Bella becoming a comfort character to me as a result. In the time since my initial viewing of Poor Things, I have found so much more pride in being disabled and queer that I keep surprising myself. I used to be embarrassed to discuss my disability in any detail, because I feared that I would be treated differently or viewed as merely trying to excuse my own faults with my neurodivergence.
On the contrary, those who care about me now understand me better, and I have a film that I can point to for them to have a glimpse into my lived experience. I’ve even become more proud of my queerness to the point of going to my first Pride celebration last summer, as well as having an awakening in regards to my polyamory. I cannot begrudge a film like Poor Things for its messiness when it has empowered me so much in the way that it ultimately empowers its protagonist.
When Creature from the Black Lagoon splashed onto screens in 1954, it gave birth to a very specific kind of horror lineage. The Gill-man became shorthand for aquatic terror, spawning sequels, remakes, homages, and an entire design language of webbed hands, dorsal fins, and rubber-suited menace. Decades later, Hollywood is still wading in that same water. Shark thrillers, deep-sea survival films, mutated piranha, colossal squids; the mechanics change, the budgets grow, but the imagination rarely leaves the lagoon. All the while, an entire ocean of water spirits: older, stranger, and far more psychologically terrifying, remain largely untouched. I’m talking about Mami Wata.
Who Is Mami Wata?
I’m Nigerian, and my first encounter with Mami Wata wasn’t through film or television but through my grandmother’s stories. The descriptions were consistent across tellings: impossibly beautiful women with flowing hair, luminous skin, and eyes that seemed to reflect light even in darkness. They appeared near rivers, lakes, shorelines — always half-revealed. The upper body was woman. The lower half, fish.
What unsettled me wasn’t just the imagery but the certainty. My grandmother didn’t narrate these encounters as distant folklore. She spoke about sightings, about people who had seen her, about behaviors one was expected to follow around certain waters. You didn’t swim in particular rivers. You didn’t wear certain colors near the shoreline. And you never interfered with offerings left at the water’s edge.
I didn’t need Universal Studios to teach me that water was dangerous. Mami Wata wasn’t a movie monster. She was real. That distinction between spectacle and belief is where the divide between Western aquatic horror and African water cosmology truly begins.
When Water Has Memory
Western water monsters tend to operate on biological logic. The shark in Jaws is hungry. The predators in Piranha are territorial. Even more fantastical aquatic beings, from the Gill-man to the amphibious figures in Guillermo del Toro’s films, are framed as species with instincts, habitats, and vulnerabilities. They can be tracked, studied, and eventually killed. The horror is physical.
African water spirits operate on metaphysical logic. They are not random predators but enforcers of balance, custodians of spiritual agreements, embodiments of moral consequence. If a water spirit targets someone, the cause is rarely accidental. Something has been violated, promised, inherited, or ignored. The fear is not of being eaten but of being claimed.
The Diasporic Reach of Mami Wata: From West Africa to the Atlantic
This cosmological framing transforms aquatic horror from a survival narrative into an existential reckoning. You cannot harpoon a covenant. You cannot dynamite a spiritual debt. If the water is calling, it is calling for a reason, and that reason may predate you.
Part of what makes Mami Wata so cinematically rich and so underutilized is that she is not a singular entity but a vast spiritual continuum stretching across regions and diasporas. There are a thousand different variations of this spirit, and no one is truer than the other.
Senegal, she manifests as Mame Coumba Bang, a river guardian presence tied to protection and retribution. In Haitian Vodou, her energies merge with La Sirène, a mermaid lwa associated with beauty, wealth, and the depths. In Brazil and across the Afro-Atlantic religious sphere, her echoes appear in Yemanjá, the maternal oceanic force honored in coastal ceremonies. This Yemanja is just a transliteration of the Yoruba Orisha (celestial spirits of the Yoruba culture) called Yemoja, revered as the “Mother of All” or “Mother of All Fishes”, and the guardian of water, motherhood, and fertility.
Despite regional variations, core iconography persists: mirrors, combs, serpents, flowing hair, radiant adornment, and the promise or danger of prosperity. She is seductive but sovereign, generous but exacting, beautiful but never harmless. That multiplicity alone gives her more narrative elasticity than most cinematic monsters, whose mythologies are often fixed and biologically bounded.
Mami Wata (2023)
Mami Wata in Contemporary Horror Cinema
Film has approached this cosmology cautiously but meaningfully in recent years.
Nikyatu Jusu’s Nanny (2022) offers one of the most psychologically layered depictions. The film follows Aisha, a Senegalese immigrant working in New York, whose life becomes threaded with visions of Mame Coumba Bang. Water appears everywhere: bathtubs, swimming pools, reflective surfaces transforming modern infrastructure into spiritual thresholds. The haunting is tied to grief, migration, motherhood, and sacrifice, presenting the water spirit as an emotional and cosmological force rather than a jump-scare device.
C.J. “Fiery” Obasi’s Mami Wata (2023) takes a more mythic approach. Shot in stark monochrome, the film portrays a coastal village structured around devotion to a water deity embodied through a human intermediary. As belief fractures, so does communal stability. The horror emerges not from attack but from spiritual imbalance, aligning the film more with atmospheric folk horror than creature features.
Even outside explicit depictions, diasporic media has drawn from the imagery. Lovecraft Country incorporates mermaid and water-spirit symbolism tied to Black feminine transformation. Beyoncé’s Black Is King floods its visual language with aquatic rebirth imagery; flowing fabrics, submerged figures, reflective ritual spaces invoking water as passage. The archetype is already present onscreen. It simply hasn’t yet been centered within a full-scale horror framework.
Erotic Horror and the Siren Archetype in Mami Wata Lore
One of the most cinematically potent aspects of Mami Wata mythology lies in how it intersects with erotic horror, though not through the framework Western audiences might expect.
She is not typically described as maintaining human lovers or demanding sexual exclusivity in the manner of succubi or possession demons. Her seduction is visual, atmospheric, and spatial. In many riverine and coastal accounts, she appears to fishermen or travelers as a breathtaking woman poised just above the waterline, adorned in jewelry, her hair impossibly still despite the wind.
Her beauty is disarming rather than aggressive. She beckons without words, drawing men closer step by step, deeper into the water, past the point where retreat is easy. By the time the illusion fractures, the shoreline is distant and the water heavy around the body. She pulls them under, sometimes violently, sometimes with an eerie calm inevitability. This places her closer to siren mythology than to Western erotic demons, her beauty functioning as a gravitational force.
Literature Has Long Understood Her Terror
While cinema is only beginning to explore these waters, literature, particularly African and diasporic speculative fiction, has spent decades charting them.
Amos Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard presents one of the earliest surreal landscapes where seductive river spirits and feminine supernatural entities blur beauty with existential threat. The protagonist’s encounters unfold in dream logic, where attraction overrides caution and spirits operate according to unfamiliar moral rules. The instability of desire wanting to move closer despite danger mirrors the psychological pull found in Mami Wata lore.
Ben Okri expands this cosmology in The Famished Road. Though centered on an abiku (a child destined for an early death), the novel’s watery metaphysics are constant. Rivers function as liminal highways between worlds, and feminine presences tied to water drift through the narrative like half-seen memories. Okri’s horror is not violent but permeable. The material world feels thin, easily breached, as though something vast waits just beneath its surface tension.
Helen Oyeyemi’s The Icarus Girl channels similar unease through psychological haunting. Mirrored selves, spirit doubles, and invasive presences echo Mami Wata’s reflective themes, especially the idea that one can be watched, claimed, or shadowed by a presence from beyond visible reality.
Nnedi Okorafor’s Akata Witch and its sequels places water spirits within a broader African magical system. In these books, wealth and power connect to spiritual forces older than modern nations. Even when Mami Wata is not directly named, the cosmology she belongs to, rivers as sentient boundaries, spirits as binding forces, remains intact. When she was talking about describing the beings from her Akata series, Okorafor noted, “You would be shocked by how much I don’t have to make up.”
Literature succeeds where film often hesitates because it can inhabit interiority. It can describe the humidity of river air, the hypnotic shimmer of reflected light, the emotional dissonance of wanting to step forward even when danger is understood. Readers feel the seduction and the dread simultaneously. The terror lies not in attack but in recognition in sensing the water knows you.
Why Mami Wata is Horror’s Most Untapped Goldmine
Modern horror has already shown an appetite for spirit-driven fear. Films like Hereditary, The Witch, and His House prove audiences are willing to engage with spiritual systems, ancestral consequence, and metaphysical dread. Aquatic horror, however, remains largely trapped in biological threat models.
Mami Wata offers something far richer; a mythology where water remembers, seduces, rewards, and reclaims. Where beauty is as dangerous as teeth. Where drowning can be spiritual as much as physical. For Black History Month especially, I’m sure engaging these features through horror is cultural storytelling; preserving oral traditions and diasporic continuity through cinematic language. Hollywood has spent seventy years circling the same lagoon.
Meanwhile, somewhere between the rivers of West Africa, the diasporic Atlantic, and the reflective surface of a midnight pool, a far older presence waits for the camera to find her. Preferably through a mirror she’s already holding.
Henry Selick’s return to the director’s chair after Coraline, represents righteousness, anti-authoritarianism, and the subtle art of not giving a fuck. With the support of Monkeypaw Productions and Jordan Peele in the writers’ room, Wendell & Wild crossed the cult classic finish line with a new round of applause from the wide intersections of punk rockers of color. A community, might I add, that historically has never stood to be disrespected.
Who Are Wendell & Wild?
The title refers to a witless pair of demon brothers, voiced by Peele and former Key & Peele co-star Keegan-Michael Key. In its early stages, the pair, along with Sister Helley (Angela Bassett), would lead the story. To explore themes of navigating trauma, anti-capitalism, gentrification, and how our justice systems set Black youth up to fail, though, Katherine “Kat” Koniqua Elliot (Lyric Ross) had to have taken the helm.
Kat’s character design forced a shift in Wendell & Wild’s sound. Heavily inspired by Brooklyn’s Afropunk festival, her hair is green, she rocks facial piercings, what I imagine are a pair of Demonia boots, and a DIY school uniform. The social commentary already aligns with the framework of original punk values. Why not make it a 3-for-3 and line it with the real world soundtrack of Black punk, as a young one reclaiming the righteousness left by punks before her. When we first meet the Elliott family, Kat and her father are seen wearing matching Fishbone band tees while their song “Ma and Pa” plays underneath. This small detail stands out, as punk these days is commonly hereditary, and used to teach positive righteousness in communities of color; not always simply born out of rebellion.
Henry Selick, Fishbone, and the Afropunk Connection
What the general public failed to see under the shadow of The Nightmare Before Christmas, was the strong allyship between the art of Selick, and generational Black punk movements. His love of the sound led him to direct the music video for Fishbone’s “Party at Ground Zero” in 1985, and his appreciation for the Afropunk next gen basically created the look and idea of Kat. Selick and music supervisor Rob Lowry knew that “punk songs offer more than energy and rebellion; they show the deep connection between Afro-Punk Kat and her father, Delroy, a first gen Black punk fan”. Delroy isn’t present for Kat’s journey, but his boombox is, allowing his songs of Black punk to drive and support his daughter through a system we know wasn’t meant for us to succeed.
After the death of her parents, Kat acts out, and lands in the “Break the Cycle” program, offering benefits to struggling schools from the government when admitting troubled youth. She realizes her position as a pawn for cash immediately, but carries on. Her first day at Catholic school is decorated by legendary Poly Styrene of X-Ray Spex, chanting “I am a poseur and I don’t care. I like to make people stare” as the nuns in the hallway plug up their ears in judgment of the alternative. Styrene’s vocals mirror Kat, from her stubborn nature to her unapologetic vibrancy, and right back to her (almost) fragile confidence.
Black Punk Soundtrack Breakdown: Songs That Define Kat’s Journey
Even more than dressing a scene with a song that fits, Kat’s character development is literally narrated by the sounds of her boombox. Her boost of confidence navigating hell, earth, and the system is echoed by the lyrics of generational punk Black women. “Young, Gifted, Black, In Leather” by Special Interest is not only an affirmation, but a window into Kat’s understanding, and foreshadowing into the hellmaiden she was born to be. “Every night the law is on my back. That’s why we fight, ‘cause we are young, gifted, Black, in leather”. Tamar-kali’s “Boot,” and “Fall Asleep” by Big Joanie offer the same, while throwing an “I told you so” at the erasure in a genre Black folks had a large hand in creating back in the day.
If I were to break down every weighted needle drop in this 105 minute runtime, you’d need some eyedrops. The toughest track moment takes place during the confrontation between private prison company Klaxon Korp and the locals of Rust Bank, soundtracked by “Wolf Like Me” by TV on the Radio. Even if Rage Against The Machine is the only punk name you know, it’d be impossible to ignore the feeling of how integral Black punk is to the soul of this story. I don’t mean to get preachy on you, but besides the hell of it all, you might still be able to relate off-screen.
Black Punk Representation and Why It Still Matters
I would like to be able to say “many have tried, few have succeeded” to wrap this up, but the truth is, Black punk is fighting monolith status when it comes to representation. Shazam any of these songs- the low play count despite the community fame, and street cred that runs for decades is problematic. Punk is a tight community that relies heavily on the “iykyk”, leaving room for misconceptions on what it’s about, and the undeniable fact that Black punk is larger than you think. It’s not just an edgy sound you can brood in your dorm room over. It’s a vibrant, independent lifestyle filled with war cries of freedom of expression, power to the community, and sticking it to the man. Fuck the prison system. Wendell & Wild got it all correct.
Don’t miss a beat. Listen to Kat’s playlist, straight from the boombox.
The Horror Press Podcast Episode 57: Backrooms & Jigglyspot
‘Undertone’ Review: A24’s Scariest Since ‘Hereditary’
‘Silent Warnings’ (2003) Review: An Unknown UFO Gem
Mami Wata and the Untapped Stories of Water Spirits in Horror
Southern Black Gothic Films and Where To Find Them
Four Seasons of Fear: Queer Holiday Horror Anthology from Stacked Deck Press Coming Soon
Yes, ‘Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2’ Does in Fact Rule
The Black Punk Framework of ‘Wendell & Wild’
The Price of Admission is Death in ‘The Last Matinee’ (2020)
What Does Modern Black Horror Say About The 2020s?
‘The People Under the Stairs’ Review: A Brilliantly Bizarre Horror Classic
‘Five Nights at Freddy’s’ and The Story of William Afton Explained
Slappy Was the Blueprint: How the Dummy from Goosebumps Became A Horror Icon
Glen and Glenda: Don Mancini’s Reverence for Queerness in ‘Seed of Chucky’ (2004)
‘Truth or Dare’: Who Did it Best?
V/H/S Franchise Ranked, Best to Worst
Everything You Need to Know About Jason Voorhees
The 11 Most Disturbing Horror Movies Ever, According to an Actual Horror Fan
[REVIEW] ‘Cherry Falls’ (1999) Brittany Murphy Shines in This Cult Classic Slasher
