Transcription
Hate to be the one to tell you this, but if you're currently in the house with a woman, you need to get out now. Because of everything my film studies has taught me is true, women are dangerous. Women are monsters.
If, like me, you were an annoying film school kid, you've probably heard the term "the Monstrous Feminine" before. The name alone has an alluring quality that piqued my interest all those years ago. And the more I learn about the Monstrous Feminine and its roots in horror, the more I found myself entranced by the ideology. Probably because I myself am a [ __ ] monster.
So let's get stuck into it, starting with the basics. What is the Monstrous Feminine? Also, content warning: my hair is blue. I didn't do it on purpose, and I hate it, and I don't want to talk about it. Thank you.
The term refers to the arguably subconscious ways in which women and femininity appear in horror as villains, monsters, and evil forces. Something achieved by making associations with the female body, the reproductive system, and matriarchal traits. The Monstrous Feminine counteracts the positioning of women in horror as one-dimensional victims. As it occurs in film, it is sometimes subconscious, even to the filmmaker. And sometimes it's the filmmaker's intent to affect the subconscious of the audience.
And the idea really can't be discussed without talking about its creator, Dr. Frankenstein herself, Barbara Creed. Barbara Creed is an Australian academic, most known for her use of feminist theory in the study of film and culture analysis. In other words, she's a badass [ __ ]. And her concept of the Monstrous Feminine, coined in her 1993 book of the same name, changed film studies forever.
Pointedly, Creed avoids the word "female monster" in her work, as it has slightly different connotations. The term "monstrous feminine" doesn't just describe a monster that happens to be female, but accentuates the significance of gender in relation to the monstrosity itself.
And what are the traits that we consider are so horrifying? Barbara Creed recognized that as the male gaze is often a central focus on screen, women in horror films have frequently been portrayed as submissive, weak, and highly sexualized. And these are not, in regards to the male gaze, negative traits. But the damsel-like qualities of a teen love interest or tragic woman in need of saving. The way female sexuality is often addressed in horror is to quickly indicate who we should be rooting for. The bad girlies who like to have sex will die, and only the virginal and pure will survive. This stereotype that has come up over and over in horror enforces the idea that sexually active women deserve death and torment, and that the only way to survive in this world is to remain pure. Basically, if you're a woman, virgin equals good, and sex equals bad. And bad equals virgin.
So alongside purity, youth and fragility are the undesirable and feared traits of femininity. And these traits, certainly in films of the past, do not appear in the protagonists and the love interests, but in the possessions, witches, aliens, monsters, mothers, and villains.
So let's talk about them. The mother is one of the most played-out archetypes of femininity, covering the full scope of nurturing and protective to overbearing and possessive. We see the mother with all of her sickly motherly qualities cast in a terrifying light in the likes of Psycho. Where Mrs. Bates presents looms over her son after he kills her. When Norman is attracted to a woman, his possessive mother alter ego takes over. He dons his most sickening drag, and then it's time.
There's also Misery, where Kathy Bates' Annie, they're not actually a mother, is made horrifying by her controlling and dictatorial nature. Dictatorial. She's brimming with fake sweetness and good intent, using icky, kitty language to patronize the trapped Paul. Paul. Oh, that was Jennifer Coolidge. Paul.
There's also the Other Mother in Coraline, who wants only to obsess over and then neglect child after child. A concept that's been explored a few times recently in TV and film is Munchausen by proxy syndrome. The urge is to mother, to care for, to dote, but with deadly and dangerous consequences. And I'm actually not going to give my main example of Munchausen by proxy on screen because I don't want to spoil the show that it's in, as it's pretty much the twist. But some other depictions include Eddie's mum in Stephen King's It. Stephen King's wife. Stephen King's heir. The documentary Mummy Dearest. Dead, which is obviously not fiction, but is still using the story of a woman with Munchausen to inspire fear and disgust in its audience. And revered contemporary horror director Ari Aster's short film, aptly named Munchausen. Even images from films like Mummy Dearest, where Faye Dunaway plays Joan Crawford, although it isn't a horror, it taps into some of the same ideas and imagery. Thank Faye Dunaway, standing in the doorway holding the wire hanger. She doesn't look glamorous or young. She doesn't look gentle or genuinely caring. She's domineering and frightening.
Needless to say, the scary girl isn't a term that was used by Creed. I just couldn't think of a better way to describe it. But think Reagan in The Exorcist, Carrie, and even the icon that is Jennifer. These are adolescent girls developing into women in ways we're supposed to find abhorrent. Jennifer is a slightly different example in this category, but I've still used it because of her literal boy-eating habits, possibly being a parallel for a girl who starts sleeping around. But more obviously, Carrie with her dark powers, and Reagan, who is literally possessed, are both characters going through puberty. There's the shouting, the swearing, the arguing, mood swings, menstruation, and all of the fun things that come with budding womanhood. The films representing this process as something demonic or to be feared, which is one of history's most significant vilifications of women.
So much so that the phobia of witches has its own name, wiccaphobia, which has appeared in folklore and fiction across many cultures before real accusations began to fly. In the Burning Times, the famed period of time between the 14th and 17th century, in which witchcraft was a capital offense. Over these few hundred years, supposedly tens of thousands of witches were accused, tried, and sometimes executed for witchcraft in Europe and America. One of the most famous cases being the Salem Witch Trials, in which 200 people in Massachusetts were accused of the craft, and 20 were executed. And their crimes? Romantic or financial independence, use of medicines or herbal remedies for healing, associating only with other women, being infertile, and being sexually active outside of marriage were all reasons used to justify accusations of witchcraft. The witch can be used to represent a woman's independence, sexuality, and self-acceptance. But in the same vein, these things indicate an aversion to a woman's place and a rebellion against the men and higher powers in society. She's basically the opposite of a good, docile housewife who does what she's told. Depending on which side of the fence you find yourself standing, or perhaps on which side of the fire. These traits are either empowering or incredibly troubling.
Sometimes witches are portrayed on screen with grotesque features to emphasize how undesirable this type of woman is, like the Wicked Witch of the West, many of the early Disney witches, Drag Me to Hell, Roald Dahl's The Witches, or the teachers in the original Suspiria. But there are also witches on screen that emphasize their ability to seduce or trick people with their youth and beauty, such as The Love Witch and The Witch.
The Electra Complex, a theory based in Greek mythology and originally proposed by Carl Jung in 1913, is used to express male fears about female social difference and castration. Basically, how a woman who feels they lack something, that something being the penis, might end up as a danger to men. To whisper it quickly, Freud, Jung's partner in crime, used the term "penis envy" to describe the way a woman feels an inherent anger at her female form because she discovers a hole where a man has not a hole. The twist is, the person she blames for not having a penis is her mother, in turn causing her to compete with the mother for the attention, recognition, and affection of men.
Young's theory that the Electra Complex is real and present in women has been scientifically dismissed, as the theory's predictions don't match scientific observations of child development. However, the idea is present on screen with the horror stemming from the things the woman will do in order to gain the affection of men. A film like Fatal Attraction feels like it flirts with this idea, but a contemporary film where it's undeniably present is Guillermo del Toro's criminally underrated, in my personal opinion, Crimson Peak. We need more Gothic horror, or I will die.
Significant spoilers here. In Crimson Peak, the clever and curious Edith marries sexy goth daddy Tom Hiddleston and goes to live with him and his sister Lucille in their crumbling mansion in England. It's revealed in the film that Lucille and Thomas had a sexual and romantic relationship, and that when they were children, Lucille killed their mother in order to prevent them from being separated and retain Tom's affection. His name is not Tom. What is his name? Oh yes, it is Thomas. Shaw. Think me being like this is my favorite film and not knowing any of the characters' names. This discovery on Edith's part results in Lucille's death, and she remains in the mansion as a ghost, haunting it forever. Lucille is one of my favorite female monsters because, despite some questionable incest, her evil is still based in love. Though Young's theory flattens that into a female need to be desired, Crimson Peak argues for a more earnest and heartbreaking affection between the siblings. This makes it sound like I love incest.
Finally, we come to scary vaginas. What a gross sentence. I hope some people do come to scary vaginas. Pretty scary vaginas deserve to be loved as well.
One of the biggest ideas at play within the theory of the Monstrous Feminine is the use of genitalia and the female reproductive system in creature design. Sometimes this idea shows up in a very straightforward way. The vagina is a monster. If you were forced by an older cousin or fellow theater kid to watch 2007's honestly kind of underrated Teeth, then you'll be familiar. Teeth sees its protagonist Dawn dealing with the discovery of vagina dentata. Interestingly, Freud makes another appearance here, as he coined the term "vagina dentata" to describe how the folklore of a toothed vagina perpetuates the idea that female genitalia is monster-like. In Teeth, Dawn's tootsie bites the books off two incredibly deserving victims and severs the fingers of another, which aligns with Creed's suggestion that a vagina-like monster design creates a fear in men that women are actively trying to castrate them. As Wikipedia sums up, Freud frequently mentions in her work that horror movies play on this fear of the vagina dentata and even include it visually in films through enormous, toothed monsters or aliens, to settings such as dark and narrow hallways, deadly traps, and doors on spaceships, such as that in Alien.
Which brings us to Giger. People have long suggested that the creatures in Ridley Scott's Alien resemble all manner of genital joys. And as it turns out, that's pretty much the truth. Alien screenplay writer and story creator Dan O'Bannon stumbled upon the disturbing images of artist H.R. Giger, which, in his words, "had a profound effect on me. I had never seen anything that was quite as horrible and at the same time as beautiful as his work." And so, I ended up writing a script about a Giger monster. Thus, Alien was born, and Giger himself was brought on to do the disturbing creature and world design. Some of Giger's previous works include "Necronomicon 4," artworks littered with sexual and suggestive imagery, and his designs in Alien are no different. Dick-shaped chestbursters, labia-like facehuggers, fertile eggs, and womb-like caves abound. And it is important to note here, for the sake of not skewing the truth to make a point, that phallic imagery is also very present in his work. But it's the slimy, layered openings of the facehuggers that have left a horrifying mark on film history.
And Alien is far from the only film in which the creature design feels influenced by the female body. The Sarlacc featured in Star Wars with its vagina dentata and clit-like head, the face of the Predators in Predator, the mouths of the Reapers in Blade, of which Guillermo del Toro supposedly said, "You have to understand, makeup artists, they're never getting anybody, so they have to create it." Although the only source of that quote is a Buzzfeed article, so I'll take that one with a pinch of salt. And it's not just the vagina you find in horror either. Also the reproductive system and the maternal body. The maternal body is, as far as the limited male gaze is concerned, a source of anxiety for men. Bloated bodies, pregnant bellies, swollen nipples, bodies leaking or excessively bleeding. It's not exactly in line with the taut, slender bodies that the male gaze upholds.
Alien again makes some reference to this in its sequels with the giant alien mother pumping out scary egg babies and after sharing Ellen Ripley's DNA, developing a fleshy, swollen, mammalian womb. We see the Alien Queen effectively experience human pregnancy, screaming and writhing as she adjusts to her new way of birthing. And of course, there are several actual impregnations of the alien creatures into faces, chests, and the female reproductive system. Interestingly, O'Bannon himself wasn't a victim of the subconscious but actively using this imagery to build fear in his audience. Of Alien, he said, "One thing that people are all disturbed about is that's how I'm going to attack the audience. I'm going to attack them actually, and I'm not going to go after the women. I'm going to attack the men. I'm going to put in every image I can think of to make the men in the audience cross their legs. Homosexual birth. The thing lays its eggs down your throat. The whole number."
So although I haven't covered every archetype, that feels like a pretty good sum up of the ideas at play. But something very interesting has happened over time, where these depictions, once used to chill audiences' bones, have been embraced by women and femme people. So why are women and femme people so often drawn to films like this? The idea of the Monstrous Feminine has ultimately come full circle and been celebrated by a certain audience in horror, myself included. I love evil women. I love the dark implications of the female body in film. I love the idea that I'm worth fearing because it was often the opposite of the filmmaker's intentions to use femininity to inspire disgust and horror. We weren't supposed to go, "Yes, fear us. Be disgusted by us. We are ugly and tormented and evil." We're supposed to abide by the idea that the traits that we've just discussed are undesirable. We're supposed to want to be the pure woman that survives.
Modern horror has really embraced this idea that the Monstrous Feminine is ultimately a woman's power, and that embracing it is cathartic. Think The Witch, Suspiria (2018), Pearl, X, Midsommar, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, Gone Girl, even basically anything that falls into the "good for her" category. And many of the older films I've discussed too, in which feminine traits are demonized, are beloved by women. It feels good to be feared for something you've been shamed and scolded for. We aren't interested in being the delicate virgins that cinema has pushed us to idolize because we are monsters, and we know that better than anyone.
So that is the, that on that. And thank you so much for watching. And these are my pants, if you were wondering. Very much. I've been looking at my underwear the entire video.