Angel Anxiety: Alice Angel as the Uncanny Presence in Bendy and the Ink Machine

Abstract

Exploring the roles of gender performance through the experience of digital gaming provides an arena for discussing the power of fear and anxiety as cultural tools for counterhegemonic forces. The power and function of gender performativity in its varied and multiplicitous forms is a newer branch of game studies research. In this article, fear and anxiety are explored as a game procedure and cultural tool used by the character Alice Angel in Kindly Beast's Bendy and the Ink Machine. By enacting Barbara Creed's uncanny gaze and the monstrous-feminine, Alice Angel calls attention and visibility to the function of the abject as a form of visibility for the oppressed. The monstrous-feminine as a theoretical concept for horror media texts provides a framework to explore the posing, behaviors, and actions of game characters and their relationships to the player and culture at large.

Bendy and the Ink Machine (Kindly Beast, 2017−2018) (Bendy going forward) was released in an episodic structure between February 2017 and October 2018. The video game shows the first-person survival adventure of Henry Stein, a retired animator, as he becomes ensnared in the nightmare of Bendy, the Joey Drew Studio's most famous animated character, during a trip back to his old animator's studio. With a total of five chapters, Stein finds himself falling deeper into the caverns of the studio, facing off against characters he helped design and bring to life, before coming face to face with Bendy himself where Stein must fight for his freedom and his life. Bendy received moderate to good reviews for its narrative (Metacritic.com, 2019) and had a number of supplementary texts released in the years after the game's initial release including novels, a YouTube series, including the sequel Bendy and the Dark Revival (Kindly Beast, 2022) in 2022.

Bendy (2017−2018) focuses on the survival of Stein as he meets an array of animated characters in his old animation studio while attempting to figure out what happened to the studio workers. Many of the workers have become animated incarnations of the characters from the Bendy cartoon. These include Boris the Wolf, a mute companion of Stein's throughout several chapters of the game; Alice Angel, the only female character and antagonist of several chapters; as well as an array of foes including the Searchers, the Butcher Gang, and the Lost Ones, all of whom were created from the workers in the studio.

Alice Angel, despite not being the title antagonist of the story, offers a monstrous addition to the game. Alice as a character is the embodiment of two separate employees of the animation studio: Susie Campbell, the original voice actor of Alice Angel, and Allison Pendle, the voice actor who replaced Susie for the character of Alice. Susie Campbell's incarnation of Alice Angel provides the antagonist role of chapters three and four in the game. Campbell's Alice is obsessed with maintaining a pretty face for her role in the Bendy cartoon. By killing other ink characters in the studio, Alice can fix her melted face and appear as she originally did in the animated cartoon (2017−2018). Alice, through the functions of gender performance, operates as an uncanny presence and the monstrous-feminine within the game. She reflects masculine anxieties about the power of feminine bodies, which reflects back to players as a form of fear inducement. Campbell's incarnation of Alice Angel provides this fear through the establishment of the original animated Alice Angel character Stein is familiar with and the monstrous version that taunts and hunts Stein as he traverses through his old animation studio searching for an escape. Using this framework of the Freud's (1955/2020) uncanny and Creed's (1993) monstrous-feminine, Alice Angel will be explored as a feminine monster character that is in turn reflective of male anxieties about the function of non-masculine bodies within Western, patriarchal culture.

The Uncanny and the Monstrous: Theoretical Frameworks

Creed's (1993) monstrous-feminine concept and Freud's (1955/2020) uncanny in relation to the horror genre are central to my argument. Freud defines the uncanny as the sense of being frightened or uneasy due to the familiar becoming unfamiliar and unknown. The familiar becomes transformed into an anxiety-producing stimulus that comes to light through its unfamiliarity. An example of such an object or being is Creed's (1999/2020) monstrous-feminine. The monstrous-feminine becomes monstrous through its abjection, separating it from the human qualities of normalcy. Instead, the monstrous-feminine becomes only a “partially formed subject” (p. 212) where the exclusion of self that constitutes humanity creates the abjection of the monstrous-feminine through its imaginary borders of human and non-humanness.

Abjection, being central to the monstrous-feminine, manifests through the imaginary constructions of sexual difference and castration, linking the uncanny (Freud, 1955/2020) with the monstrous-feminine. Kristeva's (1982/2020) conception of abjection informs Creed's construction of the monstrous-feminine. Kristeva argues that abjection derives from the sensation of the uncanny and becomes a function in which humanity dispels the impurity of life, specifically excrement and menstruation. Creed (1999/2000) uses Kristeva's formation of the abject as a descriptive framework to dismantle the way that horror films have used the monstrous-feminine construction to uphold phallocentric, patriarchal cultural notions, especially those surrounding notions of purity.

The monstrous-feminine, according to Creed (1993), induces fear for different reasons through its various constructions. Stang (2018) breaks down some of these constructions in different feminine monsters in The Witcher (2007−2015) and the God of War (2005−2018) series. The feminine monster induces fear through her own abjected subjectivity. According to Stang (2018):

The abject exists in the liminal space between the subject and object, the self and the other, and is powerful precisely because of its ability to disrupt and disgust the symbolic order, which is also understood as the hegemonic, patriarchal realm of law, order, and propriety. (19−20)

A feminine monster's gender performance, the thing that makes her abject in a patriarchal society through sexual difference, is what causes so much fear in those who uphold the society. The monstrous-feminine decenters the phallocentric norms of patriarchal society by bringing into the light the abjected feminine distinctions of sexual difference, albeit in horrific forms. It disrupts the phallocentric patriarchy. The monstrous-feminine acts as the “freak” that produces the uncanny sensation (Grosz, 1996/2020):

The freak is thus neither unusually gifted nor unusually disadvantaged … but is a being who is considered simultaneously and compulsively fascinating and repulsive, enticing and sickening … the freak is an ambiguous being whose existence imperils categories and oppositions dominant in social life,” (274).

The horrific construction of the monstrous-feminine in horror media is what sets her apart from other feminine character constructions. Her status as “freak,” her relationship to creating uncanny sensations or anxiety in those around her, and her subsequent abjection through her nonhuman horrifying gender performance, often motivates the actions of the abjected monstrous-feminine to dispel her inherent impurities. This creates the narrative structures which entice the protagonist to engage with the monstrous-feminine as a way of helping her dispel her entire existence as a form of impurity.

The monstrous-feminine also lends itself to Creed's (2005a) understanding of the uncanny gaze. Creed argues the uncanny gaze changes the relationship between the looker and the looked upon until that relationship causes fear or unease in the one doing the looking. Per Creed, this occurs because the object being looked upon moves from being familiar to being unfamiliar, hence upsetting that relationship. “The uncanny gaze is structured in relation to the uncanny object, sensation or event in order to intensify the spectator's inner sense of foreignness, strangeness and doubleness” Creed (2005a, p. 30). As the spectator begins to realize that the object is not what was expected, the uncanny gaze then induces fear or anxiety in that spectator. Creed argues the uncanny gaze is not about controlling what a spectator looks upon, but about inducing the uncanny sensation in the spectator as they recognize that the familiar is actually unfamiliar. The monstrous-feminine accomplishes this through the use of the feminine performance but in horrific or freakish forms.

Gender performance manifests itself in the uncanny relatively often through acting as a form of sexual difference (Creed, 2005b). In the case of the monstrous-feminine, this is a necessary aspect. Gender performance is often based on expectations that are mapped onto bodies doing the performing through hegemonic, patriarchal society. The monstrous-feminine rejects these mapped expectations and instead structures their performance through their abjection. The monstrous occurs when the patriarchal expectations are not met and thus create anxiety or fear in the participants of the patriarchal society. A tension occurs between gender expectations and actual gender performance, turning the familiar into the unfamiliar and hence the uncanny. When the performance itself is the manifest form of the abjection, the monster is brought forth calling attention to these expectations and how they are being subverted and rejected. The uncanny becomes visible. For the feminine monster, this would be the gender performance falling outside of cultural norms or expectations assigned to the feminine. These subverting performances call attention to the structure of hegemonic body performance practices.

While Creed's (1993; 1999/2020) work on the monstrous-feminine has been mostly associated with film and cinematic narratives, it has found a growing use within other media forms such as video games. Scholars such as Stang (2018), Harkin (2020), Spittle (2011), Blomquist (2021), and Stang and Trammell (2020) have all completed analyses of the monstrous-feminine figures and their use of abjection in various video games. As Stang (2018) argues, the monstrous-feminine, particularly in video games, is an important site of analysis for the fear and anxiety that they induce. These so-called monsters are products of the patriarchal culture that fears female empowerment. The phallocentricity of gaming culture makes feminine monsters and the concept of the monstrous-feminine (Creed, 1993) in video games a prime area of research.

The use of the uncanny, the abject, and the monstrous-feminine is not an unheard-of concept in video game design as well; both with narrative structures and with game architecture. Indeed, Kirkland (2009) argues that the primal uncanny is the structure of the video game itself: “Architecture consequently features highly in the production of survival horror videogames’ chilling effect. These are places which confuse and confound: mazes of rooms and corridors filled with traps, dead ends, and locked doors which the player must navigate,” (2). As Skirrow (1986) argues, this winding and enclosed structure of the game space functions like a womb for the player. Players are grown and matured as they play through the space, linking play in horror video game architecture to the functions of a womb maturing a baby. Additionally, in survival horror games, this space is often small and dark to heighten the anxiety of playing. Thus, the game space itself reflects the primal uncanny through its construction of a womb-like space maturing the player. Indeed, the ink aesthetic that is rampant throughout Bendy is described by Alice Angel as a dark and moist womb that she was born out of (Kindly Beast, 2017–2018).

Christopher & Leuszler (2022) additionally assert that the experience of horror video games is reflective of the subjectivity the player brings to the horror game via the play experience. This experience is a “complex psychological interplay that may be culturally inflected but is otherwise largely subjective, if not entirely unique to each individual gamer,” (2022, p. 17). This interplay of aesthetics, perception, and player subjectivity nullifies the active-passive debate of digital gaming that has been centralized in recent horror video game scholarship. Important for my argument, however, is that this interplay experience for each player can be the tipping point for enacting the uncanny gaze through the horror video game playthrough.

The uncanny presence through the performance of gender manifests itself into the monstrous-feminine. As we watch and play Bendy (Kindly Beast, 2017−2018), Alice Angel presents as the feminine monster and engages the uncanny gaze for viewers and players, calling attention to the constructions of feminine gender performance and inciting fear and anxiety through her rejection of patriarchal norms.

A Brief Methodology

To examine Campbell's Alice Angel through these lenses, I completed an initial playthrough of the game, paying attention to character development, environmental storytelling, and the role of Stein for narrative progression. Afterward, I rewatched the game as my partner played through, paying closer attention to details I may have missed before. Subsequent referrals back to the game to examine specific scenes or interactions have been completed using RabidRetrospectGames’ (2018) playthrough available via YouTube. Specifically, I was examining the interactions between Stein and Campbell's Alice, including how Alice is portrayed as beyond Stein's reach and ultimately as the power holder in the interaction, up until her last moment.

This analysis is understandably done through an autoethnographic approach. Dunn and Myers (2020) argue that contemporary autoethnography is digital ethnography, with the modern daily lives of many involving their connection to digital technologies and spaces. This includes gaming experiences with digital games as well. Digital autoethnography aims to explore lived experiences and meaning making within the connection to, around, and with digital experiences combined with physical experiences. This type of participant-observation analysis is understandably subjective and tends toward the rhetorical of my experiences analyzing Bendy and the Ink Machine (Kindly Beast, 2017−2018).

Analyzing Alice Angel in Bendy and the Ink Machine

Alice Angel is the female cartoon character, starring alongside Bendy and Boris, in Joey Drews Studio’s animated cartoon which brought fame and fortune to the company, until the CEO, Joey Drew, became too obsessed with achieving more success for the company. Alice Angel was a singer and dancer in the cartoon with a description of being part angel and part demon. This description appears to be a hybrid attempt at the tropes of girl next door and femme fatale. The femme fatale trope comes from Doane's (1991) work on the topic which argues that the femme fatale rose out of the film noir era of classic Hollywood cinema in the early mid-1900s. The femme fatale was a stock female character used to appeal to male spectators as the manipulative and empowered female character that could not be trusted and is eventually defeated. Compare this to the girl next door trope which is another stock female character manifesting as the cute but oblivious or unassuming female in a narrative (Crutchfield, 2017). The girl next door is the good girl compared to the femme fatale's bad girl, both characters defined for the male spectators and arising out of literary and film theories.

Alice Angel's character was originally voiced by the voice actor Susie Campbell but was later voiced by Allison Pendle after the character wasn't gaining popularity fast enough for Joey Drew. As Drew became more and more obsessed with gaining popularity for the Bendy cartoon, he began to take drastic measures to ensure his success, including dabbling into magic and the occult. Eventually, Drew pushes things too far, and begins to send his workers through the studio's ink machine, turning them into the monstrous incarnations Henry Stein encounters as he explores his old haunting grounds.

The titular character, Ink Bendy, is the first product of the Ink Machine. Ink Bendy was not made using a worker, however, and as a result, has no soul. Ink Bendy's soullessness makes him a nonchalant and terrifying figure stalking the studios for his next victim. He is preceded by a hazy dark cloud that radiates from his body, giving Stein just enough time to hide or succumb to Bendy's terrifying will.

Susie Campbell becomes one of the unfortunate workers subjected to the ink machine and becomes reincarnated into the femme fatale Alice Angel. The same fate awaits Allison Pendle as well, who becomes reincarnated into the girl next door Alice Angel. Campbell's Alice Angel is soaked in ink, her halo is askew, and her face appears to be melting on one side. As Stein encounters Campbell's Alice, he discovers that she has been harvesting other reincarnated animations to fix her facial deformity. She promises Stein freedom from the studio if he performs favors for her to help her stay out of Ink Bendy's way and to become a perfect incarnation of Alice Angel, Campbell's goal from the very beginning (Kindly Beast, 2017−2018).

Stein first encounters Campbell's Alice at the beginning of episode three, “The Rise and Fall,” as she calls out to Stein via the intercom system. Alice speaks to Stein and Boris again as they enter an elevator asking them to visit her on level nine of the studio. The room leading up to the reveal of Campbell's Alice is littered with cherubic, vintage posters of Drew's animated Alice Angel. However, when Stein first sees Campbell's Alice, she is far from her cherub perfection. The familiar and expected feminine performance is turned unfamiliar when Campbell's Alice steps into the light. Campbell's Alice stares at the player, daring them to look a little longer before she fades into the black background, beckoning Stein, and the player, to come find her again (Kindly Beast, 2017−2018).

Once on level nine, Stein and Boris enter a room with Angel's slogan displayed above the door: “She's Quite a Gal!”. Inside, they find several slaughtered Boris’ bound to medical gurneys. Alice speaks to Stein again but this time her voice takes on a higher, younger pitch to it. Alice tells Stein: “I had to do it. She made me.” As Stein moves forward, he encounters Alice again, her voice deeper and more grown-up. She is killing another animated character, and offering the justification: “The choices of the beautiful are unbearable.” She tells Stein that her actions keep her from being pulled back into Ink Bendy's ink puddles to become nothing but voiceless, non-agentic ink. Alice switches back and forth with each sentence between the scared young girl and the older grown up, seemingly unable to control the monstrous-feminine Alice and Susie Campbell. (Kindly Beast, 2017−2018).

The first time we see Campbell's Alice Angel up close, and with little background detail, we are forced to stare at the half-melted appearance of her face. Safe behind a glass wall, she leans in to stare back at us, before laughing at the obvious horror of the moment. Flipping the beautiful portrayal of Alice Angel that we had been shown on the monitors just a few moments before, this Alice Angel does not follow with the Bendy cartoon Alice. Her awareness of the effect of her facial deformity is made apparent as she leans into the glass, taunting Stein with the fear of the moment, forcing us to look at her closely. Stein and the player know the Alice cartoon character. But this is not the Alice Angel Stein has a history with. In this moment, Campbell's Alice becomes unfamiliar and uncanny.

Stein's relationship with Campbell's Alice grows increasingly tense and fearful throughout episode four as she rescinds on a deal she made to release Stein and instead forces him to fall deeper into the caverns of the studio, closer to Ink Bendy. She steals his friend Boris and turns him into a mutilated and monstrous minion that obeys her commands, including to kill Stein. Even as Stein defeats his once-friend, Campbell's Alice confronts him in a murderous rage, running after him with wide eyes and mouth agape, far from the peaceful drawing Stein once had a hand in putting together. Stein never gets the chance to defeat Campbell's Alice, however, as she is stabbed right before mauling Stein by Pendle's incarnation of Alice. Stein, unsure of whether to trust this new Alice or not, follows her into the next episode (Kindly Beast, 2017−2018).

Deconstructing Alice: A Discussion

Stein encounters both Alice Angels during his exploration, but it is Susie Campbell's Alice that provides the uncanny presence and monstrous-feminine to the game (Kindly Beast, 2017−2018). Campbell's Alice illuminates the uncanny gaze by decentering patriarchal expectations often placed on feminine bodies through her performance of the abjected body. Barbara Creed's (1993; 2005a) conception of the uncanny monstrous-feminine requires that the hidden or repressed be brought into visibility, creating unease and fear in the viewers of that visibility. The monstrous-feminine does this through her gender performance, creating unease in how she can subvert and call attention to the construction of the patriarchal society through her existence as an abjection within that culture. The monstrous-feminine also enacts the uncanny gaze through her gender performance, doubling the monstrous effect. Campbell's Alice Angel gender performance does not follow the hegemonic structure of animated femininity or supportive female character. She instead acts in the space of the femme fatale and performs her tasks of hunting and destroying those who are simply a nuisance to her. Add in her deformed face (at least from Stein's perspective) and her gender performance actions are a direct result of her horrific abjection (Kindly Beast, 2017−2018).

Campbell's depiction of femininity as a female antagonist is illustrative of how gender in gameplay is often skewed toward the problematic for female characters. Perreault et al. (2016) argue that female depictions of game characters, especially protagonists, are either often hyper-sexualized or inherently sexist, both of which tend to appeal more toward traditional patriarchal or misogynistic perspectives of players. However, a turn toward female protagonist depictions that show self-sufficient and confident female characters became apparent to the authors with the release of new generation consoles and games in 2013 and 2014. Despite being a protagonist within Bendy, Campbell's Alice still fulfills these roles (even as a non-playable character), pushing back on patriarchal and misogynistic depictions of female characters and femininity within digital game narratives. Campbell's Alice ultimately controls the actions of both Stein and Boris throughout chapters three and four, sending them on errands to collect items she eventually uses against them. Her power and self-sufficiency only end when her rage consumes her at the end of episode four.

Campbell's Alice Angel constructs the monstrous-feminine through the enactment of a feminine gender performance that pushes back against Western and patriarchal cultural feminine norms. Butler (1988) argues that gender becomes performative through repetitive actions and behaviors that become aligned with the binary understandings of masculine and feminine. In Western cultures, feminine performance is associated with actions such as female bodies taking up less space, longer hairstyles, thin and able-bodied body types, and certain styles of clothing and makeup. Alice's gender performance falls into this feminine performance tropes through her long hair, thigh-length dress, and even through the voluptuous but thin body type. Additionally, Alice's voice switches from a lower, yet still relatively high-pitched voice to an even higher, young girl pitch; this establishes her performance as in the typically feminine range. This apparent switching performance of Campbell's Alice points to the construction of the classic fusion monster, according to Carroll (1990/2020). Carroll argues that a fusion monster is one in which two apparently distinct and opposed characteristics are combined into a singular monster. In the case of Campbell's Alice, the little girl persona and the adult persona are two contradictory performances placed into the reincarnated body of Campbell's Alice.

What makes Campbell's Alice uncanny and monstrous is twofold. Campbell's Alice is an uncanny character due to unresolved anxieties surrounding her replacement in the voice acting of the character by Allison Pendle. As Campbell is put through the ink machine and becomes her incarnation of Alice Angel, she internalizes her failure (from Joey Drews’ perspective) into the manifested body of Alice. This internalization of failure becomes manifested in the incomplete, melting appearance of Alice's face. Campbell is finally Alice Angel, but at the cost of not being the perfect, angelic version of Alice. She becomes the less desirable, unfamiliar Alice. Second, due to Campbell's internalized failure creating the abjectionable face of demonic Alice, Campbell's Alice aims to harm us as a form of retribution. To Stein, she is the familiar made unfamiliar and hence uncanny, made monstrous by her dedication to hunting Stein and Boris down.

In Campbell's Alice, what is brought into visibility instead of being repressed is the ugly, the bitter, and the malevolent aspects of Alice's personality. What spectators see is an angry and powerful woman who will use what is available to her to survive and become beautiful. Campbell's Alice is the monstrous-feminine that plays on her abjected and othered aspects to induce a fear in Stein and the player. Campbell's Alice rejects the theory of unconsciousness (Freud, 1990) as she is aware of not being the chosen, angelic Alice but instead works her distorted features into a manifestation of her abjection. She kills willingly to eject the impurity of how she sees herself, despite that impurity being a part of the original animated Alice Angel.

Alice's quest to become beautiful again is another aspect of the character that harkens to the uncanny and the monstrous (Creed, 2005a). While beauty standards in Western cultures are nothing new, Alice Angel takes this to a whole new level. Animated cartoon characters who tread on her space or exude a style of perfection that Alice envies are hunted by Campbell's Alice. She doesn't ask for consent before capturing and ripping into these living bodies (Kindly Beast, 2017–2018). Campbell's Alice asks us to look upon her, to stare at her face, as we learn the truth about her goals and role within the studio. She enacts the uncanny gaze by interacting with Stein and the character in strategic ways (Creed, 2005a).

Campbell's Alice enacts the uncanny gaze yet again later when Stein finds her ripping apart a cartoon character. Safe again behind a glass wall, we can now see Alice's figure entirely, and she debates if we are worth killing to enhance her beauty. She leans on her podium and bares her teeth at us as she explains how the ink works on the workers trapped in the studio. Between the still-twitching cartoon body and Alice demanding our attention, it is hard to look away (Kindly Beast, 2017–2018). By twisting the performance of the femme fatale into a murderous monstrous-feminine fusion character, Campbell's Alice forces us into an uncanny gaze relationship. Her performance doesn't fit into a typical feminine trope for the horror genre. She isn't “beautiful” or “plain” but physically represents the monstrous to upset these tropes, enacting the uncanny gaze in us as a spectator, making us question her intentions and inducing a fearful response. Campbell's Alice rounds out this performance with her obsession with maintaining a beauty standard, which she achieves by murdering other animated characters trapped in the studio (Kindly Beast, 2017−2018).

This reincarnation of Alice Angel succeeds as the monstrous-feminine through her push-back and nods to the patriarchal society that in effect created her conditions for life. Alice induces the uncanny sensation and anxious emotions in Stein and the player by calling attention to her monstrous appearance in her posing and conversations. It is this facial deformity that causes Alice to engage in monstrous actions in an attempt at ejecting the impurity of inhumaneness that causes her abjection. Her behavior is bitter and malevolent, unlike the cartoon version of Alice who enjoyed dancing and singing. By committing heinous acts of murder, Alice Angel incites anxiety in the patriarchal society in bringing visibility to her pension for bodily harm against those she deems in her way. Her obsession with perfection has placed her as a mannequin behind glass walls to be looked at and admired, to be aspirational. Ultimately though, Alice fails to uphold her end of the bargain with Stein and Boris and crashes the elevator they are in to obtain Boris to complete her beautification (Kindly Beast, 2017−2018).

Campbell's Alice exudes power through her control of the spaces that she inhabits. When a reincarnated ink character wanders into her space, she rips him apart to beautify herself and prevent them from touching her. Her control of the space is found in the fear she incites both in the characters that have the misfortune of crossing her and in how she presents herself to Stein. She holds the potential to free Stein from the nightmare he has stumbled into. But he must complete her tasks, horrifying as they are, to be free. Even then, after Campbell's Alice betrays her promise, she steals Stein's only companion, Boris, and turns him into a zombie Boris to kill Stein. A masculine character being at the mercy of a monstrous-feminine character with little to defend himself with is an anxiety-producing situation, particularly for a male raised in a patriarchal society. As Stang (2018) argues, the death of the monstrous-feminine at the hands of the protagonist is what is needed to set the patriarchal order back to its position of power. However, that is not the case for Stein and Campbell's Alice. Campbell's Alice is stabbed at the very moment she intends to kill Stein by none other than her nemesis, Pendle's Alice. Indeed, if it wasn't for Pendle's Alice Angel, Stein would have been killed by Campbell's Alice (Kindly Beast, 2017–2018). In doing so, Pendle's Alice robs Stein and the patriarchy of its moment of anxiety release.

The doubling of the character of Alice Angel (Campbell and Pendle and again as the little girl and grown-up within Campbell's Alice) harkens to Freud's (1993) concept of the double which emphasizes that children often create the idea of multiple selves that is an expression of self-love. But when experienced again later in life, these multiple selves become uncanny as they no longer reflect the child that created them. Campbell's Alice and Pendle's Alice are manifested examples of this doubling through their co-existence. Freud also suggests that the doubling of selves in childhood and later experienced in adulthood is the recognition of one self being the repression of negative aspects. It could be argued that Campbell's Alice is the manifestation of this unacceptable personality elements shoved into one.

Alice Angel's position as the antagonist of chapters three and four give her more screen time than the title character, Bendy. This may have been a strategic case to build anticipation for the final boss battle with Bendy. Alice Angel creates an anxiety in the game that points to an instability in cultural norms of masculinity through her gender performance which manifests itself into an absent but overly large male monster at the very end of the game. Stein does eventually kill Ink Bendy (at least partially; the game ends up looping as part of the final cut scene) restoring some power back to Stein as a member of the patriarchy (Kindly Beast, 2017−2018). Alice upsets the patriarchal balance of the game by being the most involved antagonist through several chapters. While she doesn't evolve into a large and faceless monster as Ink Bendy does, she still induces fear and anxiety through her interactions with Stein, pushing him forward toward Bendy to finish the job, participating in a monstrous form of underappreciated feminized labor. Without Campbell's Alice, Ink Bendy is an entity that alone doesn't induce fear within Stein as he is almost never seen.

Conclusion

Alice Angel is a monstrous-feminine character (Creed, 1993) that induces an uncanny sensation due to her rejection of patriarchy-based expectations mapped upon feminine characters in horror narratives and media texts. Alice's inducement of the uncanny is brought on by her monstrous-feminine characteristics depicting her innate narcissism matched with her horror-inducing face and murderous behaviors. Alice is aware of her own monstrosity and adds to the uncanny anxiety she induces by participating in the murder of her fellow characters/studio workers as a form of cleansing herself of her monstrous features, doubling down on her form of abjection (Kristeva, 1982/2020).

Campbell's Alice Angel is an example of the monstrous-feminine being employed in horror media texts as commentary on how abject femininity works to make visible the unwritten and unrecognized expectations mapped to feminine bodies and roles in a phallocentric, patriarchy-based society. The monstrous-feminine character “speak[s] to fears of female power embedded in patriarchal culture,” (Stang, 2018, p. 13). The need to make the female or feminine body monstrous to begin with illustrates this hidden anxiety within such cultures. Additionally, with the case of Campbell's Alice, her demise ultimately coming at the hands of Pendle's Alice, does nothing to alleviate this hidden anxiety for both Stein and the player. While Stein can participate in the demise of Ink Bendy, Campbell's Alice will always remain elusive as a foe within the game narrative. Needing yet another Alice to defeat Campbell's Alice Angel, drives the knife in further. Feminine characters saving masculine characters and/or players from certain death at the penultimate moment of the narrative doesn't do much to put the patriarchy back into positions of power. Exploring these moments of the monstrous-feminine as moments of power and subversion in the cultures of gaming as well as the larger systemic institutions the game exists within is an opportunity to deconstruct, be productive, and make space for those who have been othered, made monstrous, or oppressed in some fashion. Campbell's Alice controls much of the narrative within the Bendy (Kindly Beast, 2017−2018) game, yet is often written off as simply a supporting character. Exploring monstrous-feminine characters such as Alice is not just an opportunity to see examples of internalized patriarchy and misogyny, but also to explore the larger institutions that support such behaviors and attitudes. When the familiar becomes unfamiliar, when the uncanny is seen and experienced, that is where progressive productivity truly lies.