New York, as they say, is a hell of a town.

Sometimes literally.

I’ve lived in or near New York all my life, and for the past seven months I lived right in the heart of Manhattan, in a neighborhood affectionately known as Hell’s Kitchen. But is there devilry (and devilish cooking) truly afoot?

According to Hollywood and certain comics, you bet.

Unlike DC’s superheroes which exist in New York substitutes like Gotham City and Metropolis, the brain children of Marvel patriarch Stan Lee were living it up in the very real New York City. Spider-man swung from the Empire State Building. The Fantastic Four’s headquarters are found in midtown Manhattan. And Daredevil, the man without fear, has chosen my old neighborhood, Hell’s Kitchen, as the area he’s going to defend.

When aliens attack the Earth, they’ll often start with New York, but fortunately the Avengers will always be there to make a stand. (The same was true of the X-men until those lousy mutants recently defected to San Francisco. Boo.)

And there’s more than just the Marvel clan. Hellboy, after all, resides in New York and fights off the demon spawn that may attack it. And then there’s the Watchmen, those angsty heroes desperately in need of therapy, who also patrol New York City, although really they’re just defending us from themselves.

But before you think it’s superheroes who have the market on the supernatural goings-on in the city that never sleeps, take a look at the staggering amount of fantasy or fantasy-esque movies that have taken place here.

The occult has a long history with the Big Apple. One of the scariest movies I’ve ever seen, Rosemary’s Baby (based on the novel of the same name), has its demonic activity going down in the Dakota, the building in Central Park West where John Lennon was tragically killed.

And for the mother of all ghost stories, who can forget the immortal film Ghostbusters, that standard-bearer of 80’s comedy, along with its less favorable but still admirable sequel? Surely the sight of the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man strolling through the streets of Manhattan will go down as one of the most infamous images of cinematic New York of all time.

And deep below the streets, in our very sewers, there dwell a clan of four heroes known as the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, protectors of the weak and devourers of the pizza. What would they be without New York as their backdrop?

The much-maligned action-fantasy Last Action Hero took the cinematic ideal of Los Angeles and juxtaposed it with the “reality” of New York, much to the dismay of the fictional-turned-real action hero played by Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Monster and disaster movies thrive in a setting like New York; how many other cities have such a memorable skyline upon which to wreak your havoc? King Kong, Godzilla, and most recently Cloverfield have done their best to wipe clean the buildings of beloved Manhattan with their monstrous paws, and Independence Day and The Day the Earth Stood Still have brought that destruction from above. The Earth herself has turned against New York in The Day After Tomorrow and the upcoming 2012.

Will Smith memorably carted himself around a New York that had succumbed to the rule of zombie creatures in the apocalyptic I Am Legend. (And what a fascinating future New York it was, with its glimpses of skyrocketed fuel prices and an ad for a Batman/Superman film!)

And perhaps the most iconic image of a post-apocalyptic New York comes from The Planet of the Apes, in which Charlton Heston sees the buried Statue of Liberty, leading him to realize that mankind had destroyed themselves, ushering in the rule of sentient apes. (Oh, by the way, spoiler alert! You’ve all seen the movie, right?)

But I’m going to truly geek out here and admit that might my favorite fantasy film of recent years to feature New York is the slightly sappy yet utterly amusing Disney film Enchanted.

Now, hear me out!

Yes, it’s soft fantasy. Yes, it’s Disney. Yes, there are musical numbers and talking animals. But with Enchanted, Disney really gave its own movies a send-up for their occasionally laughable sappiness, and particularly the shallowness of some of their older stories — a princess and a prince fall in love in a single day?

Maybe it’s just that I’m getting older (I’m in my seriously late 20’s now), but the sight of Amy Adams blissfully singing her way through Central Park is a pure joy, considering how most people doing so in real life would have a hat on the ground for you to throw change into.

Yeah, I’d rather watch that than a monster topple skyscrapers. So what?!

New York is the place to be for some of the finest culture, cuisine, and entertainment in all of the United States. It’s also, as it happens, the place to be for your choicest assortments of ghost, demons, and magical spells. Keep that in mind next time you’re searching for vacation hotspots. After all, as the song goes, if you can make it there, you’ll make it anywhere. Even another plane of existence.

It’s no secret that most horror films follow pretty specific formulas (varying somewhat depending on their sub-genres — slasher, supernatural horror, thriller, etc.)

In fact, the idea of the formulaic horror film was even parodied in the classic self-aware horror movie Scream, a movie so chock-full of meta-consciousness that it even started its own horror sub-genre: scary movies that feature characters who have seen all the scary movies.

But perhaps no horror movie cliche is more observed and understood than that of the Final Girl — the lone female who survives to the end of the movie, long after most of the other characters have been killed, and inevitably confronts whatever Big Bad may be threatening her. It is with this character that we have come to discover the term “Scream Queen.”

The phenomenon is particularly noteworthy given that most other movie genres still either mostly ignore female characters, or portray them in superficial or stereotypical ways.

Perhaps the Final Girl that sparked the current trend in horror is Laurie Strode, a young babysitter played by Jamie Lee Curtis who was stalked by a masked serial killer in John Carpenter’s terrifying masterpiece Halloween.

In many ways, Laurie is the prototypical Final Girl: she begins the story as a normal, unassuming young woman, a student in high school, in fact. She often questions her own abilities just in everyday life.

But when the going gets tough (and her friends get hacked and slashed), she discovers an inner strength she didn’t know she had and becomes capable of fighting back against the bad guy, and often succeeds in vanquishing him.

In fact, it almost sounds like your standard Hero Myth.

So does this make the horror genre, well … feminist?

It’s true that these movies sometimes include scenes of women being victimized, enduring things that male characters are rarely subjected to — and sometimes seemingly for the “entertainment” of the audience.

And let’s face it: these movies are almost always written and directed by men.

But unlike almost every other film genre, women are usually the “movers” in horror films — the protagonists, the central characters who drive the action.

What a concept!

Some even see a kind of feminist symbolism at work: the killers, who are almost always male, symbolize the misogynistic hatred that some men have for women, and are often armed with a knife or stabbing instrument — a representation of the phallus in its most violent form — which they then use to murder the Other (women) along with their own rivals (men).

The Final Girl, in order to defeat the Killer, must then assume a phallus of her own — grabbing a butcher knife from the kitchen, finding a shovel in the garage — that she then turns upon the owner of the true phallus, the Killer/Man.

Once the Killer is slain, the Final Girl will often look with revulsion on her murder weapon — a symbol of her momentary descent into masculinity — before she casts it aside, hoping to never be forced to wield it again.

In many ways, this is unabashedly pro-female. And yet usually these movies are targeted to young, adolescent males, with the promise of not only gratuitous gore, but the high probability of seeing a young woman topless.

But that’s specifically slasher films. What of horror films that deal with the supernatural?

Recently, there was a spate of horror films based on Japanese movies, such as The Ring, The Grudge, Dark Water, etc. All of these films featured a woman as the protagonist who goes up against not a flesh and blood male killer, but evil spirits and ghosts.

Intriguingly, these films place the female’s intellect above all their other attributes — as the stories mostly involve them having to solve some sort of mystery in order to discover why they are being plagued by the restless evil dead.

But what about when women are also the antagonists? In 1968, Roman Polanski terrified the world with Rosemary’s Baby, a chilling demonic thriller about a young urban couple who move into a creepy old apartment building that hosts some eccentric neighbors.

Rosemary, played by Mia Farrow, soon becomes pregnant, and is attended by her elderly neighbor Minnie, who, it later turns out, is conspiring with just about everyone else in Rosemary’s life to help bring the devil’s child — Rosemary’s child — into the world.

Never was a kindly old woman creepier.

And in 1996, goth high school girls had their day in the sun (or, more likely, their day hiding from the sun) when The Craft opened in theaters. The film featured four girls, all outcasts, who spend their day learning spells and magic, which they use to their own selfish ends.

When one of the girls, Sarah, realizes the harm they might be doing, the alpha girl of the group, Nancy, turns the other two against her, and the suspenseful plot leads up to an all-out magical battle as the two girls take each other on.

Despite the stereotype of horror films being a guy’s-movie type of film, anyone who’s gone to see a horror film in the theaters in the past decade knows that girls and women are extremely well-represented in the audience, often outnumbering the men.

Why would this be? Well, women no doubt enjoy seeing other women on the screen in powerful roles, not as militant post-gender warriors, but as realistic women who become heroic when the situation calls for it. Duh.

Filmmakers, of course, know full well the price they must pay to be able to tell these “feminist” stories: in order to draw the adolescent boys into the theaters too, they have to offer more than a little gore and a female nipple or two.

But when you consider that in 2009, these female-driven stories still aren’t really being told anywhere else, well, that’s a price worth paying, don’t you think?

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