A Monstress Comes of Age: Horror & Girlhood

[Applause] my so throughout the brief and noteworthy history of cinema women have often been relegated to symbols instead of characters commonly one-dimensional and serving only to further the development of the usually male protagonist these characters were love interests damsels mothers and young girls symbolizing trophies challenges nurturers and innocents in many genres women took a back seat behind the camera as much as they did in front of it but even in the earlier days of filmmaking there was one genre where women were almost always at the forefront [Music] in the words of bella lugosi it is women who love horror gloat over it feed on it are nourished by it shudder and cling and cry out and come back for more for centuries women have not only enjoyed watching and reading horror but they've enjoyed creating it you wouldn't easily find much information about the role they've played in creating some of the horror conventions we know and love today because their influence has been downplayed and all but erased time and time again films like the birds rebecca and don't look now have two things in common the first being that they are absolute horror classics and undeniably influential in the genre the second thing they have in common is that they were all written by daphne du maurier despite so many of her stories being dark and brooding tales that contemplate the paranormal she is considered to be a romance novelist okay alice blaster was one of the first female directors in the world and one of the first to embrace the horror genre she made adaptations of edgar allen poes the pit and the pendulum as well as a movie called the girl and the vampire both of which are now considered to be lost films her work in horror has been cited as a vital inspiration by alfred hitchcock and still she's almost entirely written out of history aside from the thrill of blood and guts and white knuckle terror part of the mass appeal horror has for women is seeing other women it's considered to be the first genre that really embraced the heroine with its long-standing trope of the final girl a study also found that horror tends to write women as the main character more than any other genre in the 1920s and the 1930s when it was still trying to define itself most scary movies had leading men the cabinet of dr caligari the golem films like the phantom of the opera and nosferatu featured women but they were typically utilized the same way they were in most movies damsels for the protagonist to save even in movies with titles alluding to a lead girl usually centered on a guy the monster and the girl for instance isn't so much about the girl as it is about her brother who plays in oregon should it have been called the monster and the organ player maybe but that's not my business there were also films like the cat and the canary and the seventh victim in which women were the lead characters in which we see the terror of the world through their eyes women started to become the driving force in horror often being the main character and there's been a lot of debate about why some believe women were the central focus so often because as important as it is to have something to fear it's equally important to have someone to fear for and in a world that viewed women as lesser and more fragile putting them as leads in a scary movie meant audiences would be scared for them and there's the darker possibility that horror and the mostly male filmmakers behind them like to punish women after all a study found that it takes twice as long for women to be killed on screen than it takes for men is the chase just a way of prolonging the torture is it a male gaze thing and why are they always the victim well are they though [Music] an article written in 2017 caught my eye while i was researching for this topic women and horror victims no more the article is filled with useful information about statistics and surveys and i found it very helpful but that title kept drawing me also this blurb the genre has moved from taking pleasure and victimizing women to focusing on women as survivors and protagonists it's veered away from slashers and torture porn to more substantive nuanced films that comment on social issues and possess an aesthetic vision i'm sorry i really shouldn't i i don't have that okay real quick i just need to there's this idea that lurks in art circles one that's been growing and getting louder since perhaps the witch hit film festivals in 2015. it's all about quote unquote elevated horror gone are the days of the texas chainsaw massacres and the evil deads we're in an age where horror is smart it says something about society it's artistic and most importantly it's pretty to look at for decades horror was seen as a trash genre no good stories can be found here no interesting characters or situations nothing challenging it's all brainless plastic entertainment maybe when a horror film is stripped of everything but dumb scariness when it isn't ashamed to revive the stales device of the genre the escaped lunatic it satisfies part of the audience in a more basic childish way than sophisticated horror pictures do i i can't remember who said it but basically it's this oh i don't like horror movies but i liked hereditary so i have to call it something else most of the reviews for halloween were really positive by the way but my point is that critics and the hollywood industry have always been dismissive of horror especially if slasher films even the great classics we admire today were trashed for being lowbrow and plain and well stupid the idea that horror can't be great unless it's got the cinematography of a bergman film and the pacing of of a bergman film is so grating there's nothing wrong or less artistic about a blood-filled slasher the only time i want to hear the term elevated horrors if we're talking about devil or like that one scene and final destination two okay that part's over this portion of the article suggests that no horror prior to the year 2015 ever made any sort of social commentary or that before a24's brand of horror nuanced development alongside scary stories just didn't exist and neither did the practice of writing women as anything other than the victim but that's just not the case it may have taken other genres a lot longer to start writing its female character seriously but in horror female characters almost always had complexity suggesting that villainy and womanhood has been absent is a little laughable one of the earliest films that had a woman in the role of the villain was in 1913 with a little silent film called the werewolf it was also one of the earliest screenplays written by a woman ruth and baldwin in this film a young navajo woman transforms into a wolf and murders invading white settlers it sounds cool before you remember that this is 1913 and so the navajo character likely wasn't played by a navajo actress and yeah no it wasn't there was also genuine made in 1920 in which the main antagonist was a man eating succubus called genuine and there was a slew of others basically horror had been writing the femme fatale before film noir was even a twinkle in boar's inkster's eye we can debate that later in many films the leading characters took on the role of both the villain and the victim the monster and the hero some film scholars consider cary to be the first horror film of this kind a story where the fear is lurking within the protagonist the threat is internal carrie has remained one of the most complex character studies in horror there are no cursed objects no escaped killers no poltergeist or bloodthirsty creatures there's only a girl becoming a woman in a world that is ruthlessly unkind and carrie has also ushered in what has become perhaps the most interesting practice in contemporary horror [Music] in this trend a young woman veers onto a dark path cannibalism werewolfism etc her bloodlust is sudden insatiable and typically begins either after her first period or after her sexual awakening puberty the movies seem to tell us makes monsters out of girls the terrors of gingersnaps and carrie both begin with the lead characters menstruating for the first time in gingersnaps the cycle of a period mirrors the changing of a werewolf one with the moon and all carry is sometimes considered to be a story that grieves the stifling of sexual freedom in women and since it was made during the second wave of feminism in the 1970s this seems to be the case however as pointed out by shelley stamp carrie is not about liberation from sexual repression but about the failure of repression to contain the monstrous feminine carey reads like a warning this is what happens it says when you give a woman too much power and ginger snaps the sentiment feels the same menstruation is a curse being female is abhorrent you know whisper for girls gender starts her period early on in the movie and her blood attracts a werewolf that's been attacking pets in the small town when she escapes she begins to transform into a werewolf herself her transformation happens alongside not just menstruation but with sexuality and what can be seen as a failure to comply with social norms then she kills a neighbor's dog and the school principal the janitor the local weed man who's played by chris lim chay who must have it in his contract somewhere that if he's in a horror movie his character needs to drive a van at first she insists that she just can't help it or that she had no choice but then she admits to simply enjoying it justine and raw is struggling with her desire for human flesh a longtime vegetarian she's forced to eat meat as a hazing tactic when she starts college and once that happens she finds herself craving human flesh her cravings bring night terrors and panic attacks but she doesn't kill anyone to satisfy this craving her sister alexia however makes a habit of causing car accidents to feed on the injured for all intents and purposes justine and alexia are exactly the same coming from a long line of cannibalistic women but only one of them is a villain and even alexia's antagonism is softened by her relationship with justine and by understanding that her bloodlust can't be helped in these movies you feel bad for carrie and for ginger and even for alexia because of what they became from young woman to creatures beyond recognition driven by hunger for flesh and revenge and in the end these characters have to be stopped put away or killed but in rare cases the monstrous feminine not only keeps her monstrous self intact but she lives in the film teeth directed by mitchell lichtenson our protagonist is dawn dawn's a little different from the aforementioned characters in that she doesn't get her abilities after her period or after a sexual awakening as far as we know she's always had it what exactly is it teeth in her vagina as far as coming of age horror goes teeth is less scary less ginger snaps and more i spit on your grave territory don doesn't realize what she has until someone she trusts assaults her and gets his penis rightfully bitten off teeth is different not only because of dawn's abilities there have been a few young women turned werewolf stories and young women with telekinesis stories but very few young women with piranha teeth vaginas is also different because at the end of the movie she isn't stopped or killed by someone afraid of her abilities like carrie she's both the hero and the monster but her monster pales in comparison to the real enemy of the film which is rape culture and makes her hero stand even taller while it's easy to view this trope in the light of all women are monsters after all why and how can a person go from innocent girl to bloodthirsty woman the framing of these characters makes all the difference even when they do bad things they aren't always the enemy you don't want to stop carrie when she wreaks havoc on the school you don't care they deserved it burn them up carrie and jennifer check of jennifer's body is definitely evil but like don her character is a survivor of assault the undercurrent theme of sexual abuse and their survivors of it is subtle in jennifer's body but that's still what you understand her character to be a survivor no different from dawn after jennifer spends majority of the film feasting on the bodies of young men throughout the town the movie ends with the main character needy killing jennifer in order to stop her rampage and although needy is in fear for her life when jennifer's dead she still mourns her and in the end she goes on to kill the people responsible for sacrificing jennifer in the first place where raw uses justine's thirst for blood in the same vein of a sexual awakening jennifer's body is similar to teeth and how both films use man-eating vaginas and cannibalism respectively to portray the horrors of sexual assault dawn's teeth don't hurt anyone that she actually wants to have sex with and maybe that is what this trope is trying to convey not that all women are monsters but that the world treats them like they are even when all they're doing is defending [Music] themselves [Music] horror has a funny way of showing its love for women sometimes you get movies that meditate the trials and tribulations and sometimes triumphs of womanhood and at the same time you also have to confront the fact that statistically women do take longer than men to die on screen that the horror trope of you gave it up now you're no longer a virgin [Music] now you gotta die those are the rules was likely born from the fear of women expressing sexuality and it's impossible to ignore that as odd as horror's depiction of cisgendered women can be at times it's nothing compared to how these movies depict trans women how characters coded as trans are always violent killers and deeply disturbed and beyond help that's why it's hard to argue that horror has always been kind to women because influence and representation aside it hasn't because the women most horror chooses to center on are always pretty much white cis and always fitting into one singular definition of femininity if and when black women are in a horror movie they're usually not the main character sometimes we might get lucky enough to be the antagonist other times they're like that weird magical negro character we know everything about this cursed object and like no white kids don't don't touch the cursed object don't and then they do it anyway and we die what do you think i watch alien versus predators so much for my [ __ ] health because i do i mean it's the only black final girl i have give me a break and an asian woman fronting an american or european horror film is practically unheard of if a trans woman is in a horror film at all she's usually the antagonist for a long time horror has been ahead of the curve when it came to telling stories within stories saying it without saying it cat people for instance is about a young woman who's convinced that she'll turn into a cat if she has sex she spends the bulk of the movie trying to avoid becoming too aroused so she won't turn into a cat person or you know a walking [ __ ] movies like these have existed for decades and on one hand that's impressive seeing as some genres are only just now starting to write actual women there are those who say the genre is dead that it has done all that it can do but it hasn't horror has come very far from its humble beginnings in the silent era but it still has very far to go you

Channel: Yhara zayd

Views: 272,678

Rating: 4.9761758 out of 5

Keywords: commentary, horror, halloween, raw, ginger snaps, teeth, jennifer's body, film

Id: TkUbP2KVVl8

Length: 20min 28sec (1228 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 16 2020