Sometimes, we need to shift our shape in order to fully embody our true form. Shifting lies at the core of our survival. It invites us to dive way down into the very blood that courses through our veins, tuning into the primal elements within the memories of our cells.
Echoes reverberate from the past, screaming and gnashing their way to the surface – all too eager to deliver the sheer force of life we can become when we embrace that which we’ve been burying in the darkness.
When we choose to face and embrace what makes us whole, the entire world tells us that our truth is exactly what makes us wrong. Makes us unacceptable.
Makes us monsters, even.
In Jennifer Reeder’s 2023 bloodbath battle cry, Perpetrator, Jonquil “Jonny” Baptiste is a teenager just trying to survive in dire circumstances.
Resorting to theft to support herself and her deadbeat father, Jonny’s left wondering where her mother disappeared to – a mother she’s never met. As Jean Baptiste says, “Young women disappear all the time. It’s not that uncommon.”
She’s just… gone, leaving Jonny with more questions than answers, not just about her mother, but about herself.
As Jonny approaches her 18th birthday, she’s shipped off to stay with her Aunt Hildie – a family member she’s never met. Special family, who will guide Jonny through a world of primordial becoming and ancestral reclamation; of shapeshifting – with the help of a birthday cake containing a deep, decadent, crimson filling.
The cake holds “fuel for the fury,” to help usher Jonny along her newfound path – a path nothing could have prepared her for, but a path she must follow, nonetheless.
“I call it Forevering,” Hildie tells her. “It’s profound spectral empathy. You are one in a long line. We are proxies, surrogates, mimics, mirrors. We turn, we fake. We follow, we bend. We shift, we shape. We tune way in.”
This shift… this transformation catapults Jonny into the throes of madness, ferociousness, hysteria, and mania. An almost hallucinogenic trance thrusts her into an animalistic state, one that is terrifying and mystifying and fascinating.
“A kind of possession in reverse. We are women feeling all the feelings,” says Hildie, ruminating on the bottomless well of possibility this becoming bestows upon the women of their bloodline.
A bloodline roaring with centuries of power, persecution, fear, ferocity, of shifting back or forward – elevated to a being of intuition and instinct; to fascination, fluidity and wonder. To neither here nor there, but something totally unique. Something special. Something powerful. Something ferocious. Something magnificent.
Sometimes, accepting our own uniqueness and power can lead to miraculous things. Sometimes, just being ourselves can inspire others to do the same.
Sometimes, being ourselves can save lives.
When we tune way in, it’s a song only blood can sing that we hear. It’s our pulse, reverberating through our hearts and heads. It’s the chthonic river running through us, informing us. Because the blood is the key. Blood in the cake, blood in the toilet, blood flowing and pooling and taking shape, creating a portal that invites Jonny in to plumb the depths of the specters that lie in the deep.
A girl, screaming, lost. One from a group of teenage girls who has gone missing recently, all from the private school that Jonny is now attending – the same school where Aunt Hildie was once a student.
A school led by an eccentric male principal who is obsessed with training the girls how to fight- how to hide – because there’s danger all around them, and even though it seems bad, it can get so, so much worse.
“Escape. Evade. Engage. Most of you are going to die today.”
If Jonny decided to turn away from her gifts, from her new super powers, things may have gotten worse – but she chose herself. She chose to get curious, to be present, to flex her new sense of awareness and reach down and out, watching her face take on the face of one of the missing girls; watching that girl’s eyes shine through hers; listening, as that girl’s voice spoke through her lips.
She exercised her sensitivity and empathy to shift in order to find the lost teenagers. And with the help of her new girlfriend, Elektra, she is able to uncover the one common denominator between all of her kidnapped classmates – the guy who plays all the sports. The guy who’s a good kisser. The guy who all the girls had been with before they were taken. Kirk.
By becoming one of Kirk’s “girls,” she places herself in the crosshairs of the perpetrator.
Male domination; male aggression; male desperation – this is what Jonny awakens to in the lair of the beast.
A mask and apron obscure a grown man who is siphoning Jonny’s blood – the power, the life – into his own body.
When she rejects him, he becomes unbridled, spewing incel rants and knocking Jonny unconscious. She awakens in the room where he’s been keeping the girls everyone is looking for.
Once again, Jonny summons the blood, and once again, a portal is created. A place where she could find protection and support – an ally. The perpetrator couldn’t resist the allure of this bubbling pool, and he was immediately pulled, shoved, and kicked down into the thick abyss.
The abyss that held him long enough for Jonny and her classmates to make their escape. The abyss that held eons of pain and punishment and ostracization, all fueling its fire as it freed Jonny and her friends from the grips of one in a long line of sadistic madmen.
Jonny and the girls were under attack for being who and what they were. They were under attack by someone who felt so weak and less than just by being in their presence. They were under attack by someone who was threatened by their very essence – their very truth.
In the end, Aunt Hildie gathered those girls together for a very special cake, inviting them into a lineage of community, protection, and solidarity; of shifting from one state to another. A space where they could listen, learn, grow, explore and empower each other, together.
Shapeshifters have existed since the dawn of time. It’s a birthright that’s been stripped through denial, persecution and oppression in the name of patriarchy, conformity and rigidity.
Reclaiming this state of being is a sovereign cry of preservation and protection – of belonging and community in whatever way that looks and feels right to any one of us. As the Summer Solstice approaches, allow this culmination of life – this shift from dormant to verdant – to inspire you.
The earth is transforming, coming into, and feeling itself. Nature takes its own cues and abides by its own rules. It knows itself.
It survives by being exactly what it is – nothing more, nothing less. It accepts its ancient strengths and wisdom and knowledge. It feeds its thrumming pulse, the very same pulse that feeds and fuels us.
The earth shifts with the seasons, shedding and emerging over and over again. We, too, shift. We shed. We emerge. We create new skin to hold us through each season, and are free to change. Free to be. Free to own ourselves and our inherent radiance and ferocity in any shape or form they take. That’s for us to decide, because this is a lifelong road we’re all traveling.
There will always be pressures to ignore our intuition, to doubt ourselves, to either blend or isolate in the name of acceptance – of survival. But by honoring those parts of ourselves that others protest, we’re building our intuition. We’re building self-belief.
We foster taking up space and being seen. We create acceptance where there was once none. By choosing ourselves, over and over and over again, we become more like Jonny; we become more like Aunt Hildie. We become more like ourselves, and that’s the strongest, most powerful, most beautiful creature we could ever be.
You can stream Perpetrator now on Shudder!
