In the Dead Girl Show, the girl body is both a wellspring of and a target for sexual wickedness.

the maternal element returns “via horror, repulsion, the uncanny, haunting, melancholia, depression, guilt.”

It’s another case of destructive masculinity requiring both one’s self and one’s enemy to be larger than life.

reflecting the Freudian model of existence that, according to Nelson, “turns our lives into detective stories; our innermost selves, into culprits.”

or, conversely, had somehow not yet begun to exist.”

a dream nemesis who is inevitably a reflection of themselves.

Fairy tales are weird, distilled expressions of our inherited desires, and the Dead Girl Show, with its idyllic, uncanny small-town setting, is absolutely in the same tradition—it is no wonder that Sigmund Freud believed fairy tales could be interpreted like collective dreams.

Externalizing the impulse to prey on young women cleverly depicts it as both inevitable and beyond the control of men.

making the question not “What have I done?” but “What happened to me?” Nonetheless, memory and the self are presented as riddles to be solved.