Female Adolescence in Modern Horror Films
Tammy Oler / SUMMER 2003
AH, MENARCHE. ANY GIRL WHO READ ANYTHING AS A PRETEEN can testify that young-adult novels, teen magazines, and other media specifically directed at teenage girls never fail to depict menstruation as an event that girls anxiously anticipate and celebrate. Yet the most memorable visual representation of a girl’s first period tells a very different story. Brian De Palma’s 1976 horror classic
Carrie
(adapted from Stephen King’s novel) opens with a post—gym class shower-room scene in which high-school pariah Carrie White discovers blood creeping down her legs. She reacts as one might expect a girl oppressively sheltered by a religious-zealot mother to—that is, with utter panic. Her fear and confusion are met with cruelty: The nicer classmates simply wrinkle their noses at her cluelessness, but the bolder ones pelt her with tampons and maxipads, laughing and screaming, “Plug it up! Plug it up!”
It’s a moment of excruciating vulnerability and humiliation, but it’s also the moment when Carrie discovers the telekinetic power that she will ultimately use to wreak bloody revenge (’scuse the phrase) on her tormentors. The unforgettable opening scene prefigures Carrie’s transformation from bullied menstruating girl to menacing, electric horror queen with startling symmetry, for
Carrie
is as much about puberty and menstruation as it is about revenge. The two narratives come to a head at the film’s notorious end, and in the ensuing pig’s blood—soaked violence, Carrie is not only unable
to “plug it up,” she does quite the opposite: She opens up completely, unleashing her vast, horrific female power on everyone in her path.
Never mind Judy Blume’s Margaret;
Carrie
was my first introduction to the trials of female adolescence. Watching the film at age seven, I was vaguely aware of what it might mean to be a teenage girl, my impression formed by conversations I overheard between my preteen sister and our mother. But nothing prepared me for
Carrie.
My reaction to this set of images linking menstruation, humiliation, and supernatural power was a mixture of fear and fascination: I understood that Carrie’s rage had put her firmly in the grip of evil by the end of the movie, but I was nevertheless in awe of her power. And I began to suspect that both rage and power had everything to do with becoming a woman.
Carrie
is but one of a whole host of horror films of the ’70s and ’80s that feature narratives of a “possessed” girl—possessed by spirits or demons, or in possession of otherworldly powers. In
Carrie,
the convergence of possession and puberty takes place most powerfully during the onset of menstruation. Two other films of this period—1977’s
Audrey Rose
and 1978’s
The Fury
—reference this connection, with female characters whose possession symptoms become extreme with the physical launch of puberty, suggesting an intrinsic link between sexual maturation and susceptibility to the supernatural.
Carrie and her cohorts entered puberty at a time when the horror genre was obsessed with the female curse. The twenty years between 1970 and 1990 produced a multitude of narratives about possessed women, in addition to those about teenage girls, among them
The Visitor
(1979),
Deadly Blessing
(1981),
The Incubus
(1981),
The Entity
(1981), and
Witchboard
(1985). Similarly, horror of this period is full of narratives about satanic/demonic pregnancy, the most famous being
Rosemary’s Baby
(1968) and
The Omen
(1976). In these films, possession takes place in women’s wombs, and the horror of the film becomes both their literal inhabitation by evil and their capacity to reproduce demonic progeny.
In
Men, Women, and Chain Saws,
Carol Clover’s extensive analysis of gender in modern horror, she notes the predominance of these “female portals” in film and notes that “where Satan is, in the world of horror, female genitals are likely to be nearby.” According to Clover, to be a portal is to be
“open” or susceptible to becoming possessed by satanic or supernatural powers—a reflection of the long-held historical view of women as both cursed and unclean. From the first mythic “open” woman, Eve, Western culture has defined women as more susceptible than men to the temptations of evil, and the language of horror pushes this notion one step further—in these films, women’s very bodies become the Pandora’s box that unleashes evil into the worldly domain.
For the adolescent girls of this horror-film genre, biology is destiny. Against their wills, their bodies become the site on, in, and through which the films’ supernatural battles take place. And while these girls are ostensibly the films’ subjects, the narrative action inevitably reduces them to being merely bodies themselves, with their actual experiences rarely investigated or explored. As much as we can identify with Carrie White’s painful teenage reality—the bad skin, the social ostracism, the irrationally controlling mother—by the time prom night turns ugly, her humanity is all but gone. She’s reduced to the ultimate self-destructive object of horror, and, like her victims, we’re asked to react only with fear and terror, not with sympathy or pity.
The girls of supernatural horror suffer from the fact that they are too female, which makes them radically different from the subjects of slasher films, the other wildly popular ’70s and ’80s horror subgenre in which teenage girls figure prominently. The girl survivor of the slasher film is smart, resourceful, and tomboyish—she invariably has a boy’s name and avoids the sexual activities that doom her female counterparts. She triumphs, ultimately, because she transcends her gender, a conversion that allows a predominantly male horror audience to identify with her victory over whatever ax-wielding psychopath menaces her. No such identification is prescribed in supernatural horror; instead of objectifying girls for an audience’s uneasy sexual pleasure, supernatural and occult movies objectify them exclusively to produce horror and disgust in their viewers.
No film bears this out quite like
The Exorcist,
widely regarded as one of the scariest movies ever. While menstruation is not explicit in the film, the story’s preoccupation with blood and bodily fluids, as well as the adolescent anxieties that Linda Blair’s Regan MacNeil faces (puberty, divorce, an absentee father, jealousy for her mother’s attention), suggests that possession
is invoked to mask other forces at work. Throughout the film, Regan’s small adolescent body is subjected to as much abuse by her would-be saviors as by her demon possessors. We watch with equal horror the excruciating battery of medical testing Regan endures and the disgusting manipulations of her demon possessors. Regan transforms from girl to female portal so thoroughly that her character’s only cry for help is literally written on her body (“help me” spelled out in the raised skin of her stomach). At the end of the film, when an enraged Father Karras, the titular exorcist, physically assaults Regan, the audience barely registers any shock. In no other film context would the act of a grown man punching a teenage girl be acceptable, or even understandable. Yet the action that immediately follows—Karras is himself possessed and subsequently hurled out the window to his death—makes it clear that this is really his story and not that of the young girl left crying in the corner of her room. Regan spends the few remaining moments of the film gaunt and silent, hardly even a witness to her own terrifying trials. No longer “open” (at least not until the sequel) thanks to Karras’s sacrifice, she becomes useless as the object of horror—and as the subject of the film.
Growing up on a steady diet of horror movies, I identified something in these images that attracted me in a way that images of girls in nonhorror films never could: As much as becoming a woman in these films is a curse, it is also a source of tremendous power. Made during the height of public discourse about women’s liberation and reproductive rights, these films signal a preoccupation with issues raised by feminism. They propose a distinctly feminine source of power that must hide behind a satanic or otherworldly guise, too terrible to recognize and too destructive to respect. In this light, Carrie White’s metamorphosis from frightened menstruating girl to force of nature is the ultimate ascendancy to womanhood. Struggling with adolescent insecurities and baffling, embarrassing transformations in their own bodies, these characters unleash the monstrous beginnings of girl power.
I don’t mean to suggest that these images are actually positive, but possession has the potential to be a compelling metaphor for female adolescence, with its attendant social anxieties and bodily mysteries. Coupled with slasher films and their grim female survivors, ’70s and ’80s horror
films told dark coming-of-age tales at a time when adolescent girls were virtually invisible elsewhere in celluloid. With a few notable exceptions, like
Fast Times at Ridgemont High
and the Molly Ringwald-ruled realm of John Hughes, films about adolescence during this period—exemplified by
Breaking Away
(1979) and
The Outsiders
(1983)—were dominated by boys.
I’m keenly aware of the limits of such images and our ability to reclaim them; no matter how powerful these girls become or how much they challenge ideas of acceptable behavior, they are never truly agents of their own power. They are able to act only in relation to the greater forces that victimize them. Thrills aside, these films come dangerously close to pressing the conclusion that being female is, in reality, the ultimate horror.
It’s this conclusion that’s at the center of the 2000 film
Ginger Snaps
, a departure from the clichés of girls in horror and a paradigm shift for the genre. Instead of exploiting puberty as a means to inspire abhorrence in its audience, the film explores it as a complex and isolating part of female adolescence.
Ginger Snaps
reframes puberty within horror’s werewolf narrative, shifting the experience of female adolescence away from transformation into portal to transformation into monster.
Curiously, women have historically been all but absent as the subject of werewolf films—a strange oversight, given that the connection between menstrual and lunar cycles seems like an exploitation no-brainer. In
Ginger Snaps,
lycanthropy becomes a means to explore the awkward experience of first menstruation; after title character Ginger suffers a werewolf attack shortly after her first period, the film plays on the double meanings of Ginger’s physical changes, from suddenly robust body hair to painful cramps. When her younger sister Brigitte begins to suspect that Ginger is undergoing more than just “the most normal thing in the world,” she observes, “Something’s wrong—like more than you being just female.” Her pointed equation between “female” and “wrong” speaks to the disdain the sisters feel throughout the film toward their female schoolmates and the loathsome condition of being a girl in general. (Ginger and Brigitte, who is fifteen, are—like Carrie White—both years late in starting their periods, a physical manifestation of their desire not to join the contemptible world of adulthood and sexuality.)
The more the film emphasizes the connection between femaleness and
horror, however, the more it radically divests the connection of its power. The loathing Ginger and Brigitte feel for their female peers has primarily to do with the world of sexual double standards they encounter among their peers. When discussing her disappointing first sexual experience, Ginger says flatly, “He got laid. I’m just a lay. He’s a hero and I’m just a lay—a freak mutant lay.” As if to respond to the clichés that express an essential, biological link between femaleness and horror,
Ginger Snaps
entreats us to examine how potentially damaging such links are for young girls. Ginger and Brigitte want out of the preoccupation with “boys, body, and fitting in” that their mother claims is the central experience of young womanhood.
And as if to continue the tradition of revenge in teen horror (and further Ginger
Snaps’
tie to
Carrie
)
,
the film uses Ginger’s violent transformation to point out adolescent sexual stereotyping. After she kills one of her many victims, Ginger tells Brigitte with a mixture of pride and despair, “No one ever thinks chicks do shit like this. A girl can only be a slut, a bitch, a tease, or the virgin next door.” But despite this self-conscious objection to accepted female behavior, the film refuses to celebrate the mayhem wrought by Ginger, no matter how empowering it may seem to some.
Finally, the film never loses sight of its emotional center—the relationship between the sisters. As Ginger begins to transform beyond recognition, the film makes Brigitte the primary point of identification—she’s been left behind, and her conscience concerning Ginger’s feral violence is at odds with her need to protect her. We witness Brigitte’s struggle to find a cure and save her older sister, yet simultaneously escape from beneath her increasingly menacing shadow.
TAKEN AS A WHOLE, THE PERVASIVE IMAGE OF THE ADOLESCENT girl as portal/monster in the language of horror reflects the power of female puberty to unsettle, disturb, and, at its extreme, horrify. As much as images like those in the likes of
Carrie
and
The Exorcist
offer the possibility of embracing a distinctly feminine source of power, they threaten to reduce girls to mere expressions of their biological essence. The tradition also presents the female body as a contested site: As the girls of these films transform into portal/monster, they move beyond the sexual and into the grotesque, revealing a significant cultural preoccupation with control over the expression of female sexuality by young women themselves.