by Sady Doyle
Then, of course, there are the movies. Two separate films have been based on Anneliese’s life. One of them, Requiem, is a serious and respectful drama about a sheltered girl succumbing to mental illness. It’s also an obscure, low-budget German-language picture that is not available on any major streaming service. The other movie is the one you would have heard of. The Exorcism of Emily Rose, which debuted at number 1 in box office sales in September 2005, is one of the most successful horror movies of the twenty-first century.
Emily Rose is pretty explicitly a Christian film; you know going in that it’s not going to offer any answers outside of “God did it.” And on that level, it’s sort of dorkily charming, with its G-rated demons and jump scares and Laura Linney as the hardened, agnostic lawyer who realizes that, gosh darn it, there just might be something to this Jesus stuff after all!
On another level, of course, Emily Rose is an atrocity. A woman with a disability died because her parents didn’t give her medicine, and this chain of events is being recreated for audiences as fun, spooky popcorn fare, complete with bug-eating gross-outs and a rape-by-invisible-forces scene stolen straight from Poltergeist. You might as well let a bunch of anti-vaxxers make a movie in which a diabolical doctor really does inject poison into children.
But above and beyond any moral questions about its creation, this is also just how it goes: fiction shaping belief shaping fiction. Anneliese might never have died were it not for the worldwide success of one horror movie. Scrolling through the legions of direct-to-video Emily Rose imitators—The Exorcism of Molly Hartley, The Secrets of Emily Blair, and so on—it seems only fitting that Anneliese herself has become a foundational element of the genre. Her life, her death, have shaped what sorts of monsters we are willing to see in the world.
Nearly a hundred years after Mercy Brown’s brother ate her heart, a community dug up yet another sick girl’s grave to see if she was really human. We would rather see girls stopped dead—stuck in a constant childhood that never decays—than let them grow into women who can pursue their desires.
* Not all women have periods, and not everyone with a period is a woman—and this is true especially in adolescence, where younger trans people may not have the parental support they need to take puberty blockers and/or begin medically transitioning. The mythology of menstruation centers on women and girls, thus my use of generically female nouns and pronouns—but I am aware that mythology provides a woefully incomplete picture.
2.
VIRGINITY
There’s always some stupid bullshit reason to kill your girlfriend.
—Scream (1996)
Thus, we arrive at horror’s central image of womanhood, the one feministically relevant bit of the genre most people know: the dead blonde. She spans the decades, from the ill-fated, promiscuous babysitters of Halloween to a couple of high school mean girls getting burned alive by malfunctioning tanning beds in Final Destination 3—hot, naked, and splattered all over the walls.
Slasher films are perhaps the most exhaustively analyzed horror subgenre in existence; the corpus of criticism and self-criticism spans from Carol Clover’s famous Men, Women, and Chainsaws to “the Rules” in Wes Craven’s Scream films. Not coincidentally, slashers are also some of the easiest horror films to analyze, a place where a notoriously sex-obsessed genre spells out its desires in the most unsubtle, embarrassingly Freudian terms imaginable.
Consider the plot of 1985’s The Mutilator: A young boy accidentally shoots his mother with his father’s, uh, gun. (No, really. It’s a rifle, and he shoots her with it; Daddy’s gun is quite big and imposing, much bigger than the boy is ready to handle, you see.) The boy’s father, a big-game hunter and/or student of Incan human sacrifice, because why not, never forgives him. Therefore, when the boy is in his late teens, Daddy hides in the family’s rural vacation home and brutally murders all of the friends Junior has invited to stay there, including—in the film’s most memorable scene—a girl whom he simultaneously rapes and impales by shoving a two-foot iron hook up her vagina and through her stomach. To thwart his father’s murder spree, the young man—with the help of his capable, virginal, and highly androgynous girlfriend—must murder Daddy right back, which he does by ramming a car into him in a way that somehow chops him in half at the waist. Thus, Daddy is separated forever from his, uh, gun. (For those keeping track, this time gun actually does mean “penis.”) However, even when bisected, castrated, and spilling intestines over half the screen, Daddy is such a pro with his (long, thick, hard, penetrating) axe that he manages to commit one last slashing before going on to the great death cabin in the sky.
One fun piece of trivia: when The Mutilator hit theaters, it was known by its original, somewhat less terrifying title, Fall Break. Though, of course, students of the classics may know it by its original original title, “the Oedipus complex” by Sigmund Freud.
Slashers are the place where sex becomes death becomes sex, where a knife is never just a knife, and a two-foot iron hook is only a two-foot iron hook until someone gets creative. In that infamous shot of Regan with the crucifix, the blood gushing from her crotch could be menstrual, but it could also be another, equally portentous blood flow: a broken hymen, signaling the end of her virginity. Slashers tell stories about the second kind of blood. They envision a world in which every girl is a sacrifice on her way to the altar; whole, sealed, and unbloodied—virgo intacta, we used to call it—until a man comes along to break her open.
Think back to the first great dead blonde, Janet Leigh as Marion Crane in Psycho, and how Norman Bates’s repressed desire for Marion mounts until she is pinned against the shower wall, naked, with his eight-inch weapon being thrust into her again, and again, and again. You never see the knife enter, people used to say about that Psycho scene, marveling that we could get such a clear impression of brutality with no visible stabbing. Now, in the era of frame-by-frame analysis, we know that we do see the knife penetrate Marion. It’s one split-second shot, with the knife slicing, point-first, into her lower belly. If it were an inch or two lower, it would be in her crotch.
This is the vision of sex put forth by slashers. Men penetrate, women are penetrated; men are predators, women are prey; men desire and pursue sex, women flee or become the victims of men’s desires. There is no room for mutual excitement or tenderness or even nonheterosexual sex. A girl’s skin is a membrane just waiting to be pierced, and her virginity, or lack of it, defines her. Losing your virginity is equivalent to losing your life in these movies, because penetration is seen as a means of conquering and humiliating the penetrated; to open your body to another person is to bleed, suffer, and die.
When looking for a way into these stories, it’s easy to let your focus be drawn to Clover’s famous “Final Girl”—the boyish figure who resists penetration both sexual and chainsaw related, who outwits and penetrates the killer in the end, and who (Clover argues) is really just a thinly veiled substitute for the male Oedipal subject, the Mutilator’s son dressed up as Jamie Lee Curtis to soften the blow. She’s appealing, in large part because she’s able to rise above all the sexual humiliation meted out to other, lesser characters. But if the Final Girl is an exception to the female rule, she can’t be our avatar. Most of us, by definition, are not exceptional. It’s when we shift our focus to the margins, and all the non-Final, ordinary, disposable girls who are stripped and splayed and stabbed and ripped apart, that the next part of our story becomes clear.
Who Likes Scary Movies?
To call these girls’ deaths misogynistic is expected, and correct. It is also not nearly the whole story.
Granted, when we watch a woman get blinded by chlorine gas while masturbating in a sauna (Death Spa), or have her face boiled off in the hot tub where she planned to seduce her boyfriend (Halloween II), or get her decapitated head thrown into a public toilet (The House on Sorority Row), or just lean into the bathroom mirror to check her makeup, unaware that
the mirror is going to explode outward and rip her body into shreds via high-velocity flying glass shards (Death Spa, again), the immediate, surface-level message is a fairly strong warning against female sexuality, and also, for some reason, against bathrooms.
There is an undeniable mean-spiritedness to some of these deaths. Slasher-movie kills often reflect the defining character flaws of the victims: the arrogant man will be done in by his arrogance, the horndog by his horn, etcetera. But when you look at something like that tanning bed scene in Final Destination 3—you can find it on YouTube, accompanied by comments like “Lmao who’s here to look back on the tits in the movie,” “naked I like [smile emoji],” the single word “tits” (which has one like), and, trenchantly, “THEYRE LITERALLY DYING WHY IS EVERYONE TALKING ABOUT THEIR BOOBS?”—it’s not entirely clear what the victims are being punished for, other than being pretty, young women with pretty, young, female bodies.1
Of course, slasher movies kill off male characters, too. This is the genre that shoved an arrow through Kevin Bacon’s throat and turned Johnny Depp into eighty gallons of corn syrup. But it’s not the gore that is objectionable here. It’s the leering, gratuitous topless shots; the contemptuous, dim-bimbo characterization of the girls; the camera’s focus on mutilated breasts and lacerated faces and melting, bubbling female skin. It feels like watching a little boy tear the head off his sister’s Barbie—like watching something valuable get destroyed just to prove a point.
Yet it’s a mistake to read these scenes solely in terms of male desire. Ever since Scream—the top-grossing slasher movie of all time, and the first to succeed largely on the strength of teen girls’ tickets—women have been the primary audience for these movies.
“I don’t think there was anyone who expected that women would gravitate toward a movie called The Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” reboot producer Brad Fuller told Entertainment Weekly in 2009. “[But] for us, the issue now is that it’s harder for us to get young men into the theater than women.”2
These women begin watching horror in their teens, stay fans well into adulthood, and are explicitly driven to the extremes of gore: “I actually thought that the women would be less into the Saw films,” says FEARNet president Diane Robina in that same article, “but they were much more into them.”3
This demographic reality is the exact opposite of the situation Clover was writing to address in the late 1980s and early ’90s, when slasher fandom was presumed to be the exclusive territory of young men. It stands to reason that our theories have to change in response. The question, then, becomes not what frustrations men are venting upon the dead blonde, but what anxieties she might embody for women.
Again, slasher movies set forth a vision of the universe in which women and female bodies are continually in peril; where remorseless predators are everywhere, and female sexual desire experimentation, or trust is punished with violation, mutilation, and death; where only a few exceptionally lucky, paranoid, and resourceful women can go for long without being attacked, and even those women are emotionally traumatized by the nonstop violence they’re forced to witness. Not coincidentally, there’s another popular piece of media with the same worldview: the nightly news.
A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night
Women, particularly young ones, live with the ever-present threat of violence. It’s easy to recite the statistics: one out of every six raped or the victim of an attempted rape, one in nine girls sexually assaulted by an adult before her eighteenth birthday.4 You can even point out that teenage girls—the same girls we see running around and getting knifed in these movies—are the single most common targets: the sexual violence hotline the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network, summarizing a study by the Department of Justice, says that “females ages 16–19 are 4 times more likely than the general population to be victims of rape, attempted rape, or sexual assault.”5 According to another report, “young women between the ages of 16 and 24 experience the highest rate of intimate partner violence—almost triple the national average.”6
You can say that, and it’s true. But many people know the statistics already, and the reality isn’t sinking in. Numbers alone don’t convey a threat like this; the sense of inevitability, the constant attrition as girls fall one by one into the shadows. For most women I know, life in rape culture manifests as a quiet, constant drain on our sense of security: night after night of making sure you aren’t outside after midnight, you’re not alone in a subway car, you’re not alone with your boss. It means constantly making plans to ensure that you’re never caught in the wrong neighborhood or the wrong house or the wrong outfit; that when you attend a party, you don’t take your eyes off your drink and you don’t take your eyes off your friends and you don’t ever, ever lower your guard, because if something happened, they’d say that you had it coming. It means knowing that, even with your guard up and all precautions taken, something horrible can still happen to you—and if it does, you will still be blamed.
Slasher movies are a release, in part because they give a name and a face to the problem. They transform our culture’s underlying sexual violence into spectacle and story, giving us monsters to fear and heroines to root for; they cathect all that low-level anxiety into a quick, bright, bloody burst of fear.
Consider all those teenage girls who went to see Scream over and over. Now, consider the central conflict of Scream. Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell, who was to ’90s teen horror what traumatized blondes were to Hitchcock) is a teenage girl. Her boyfriend, Billy—played by Johnny Depp clone and future Riverdale dad Skeet Ulrich—repeatedly tries to pressure her into sex.
Billy climbs into Sidney’s room at night with no warning. He makes her feel bad about herself when she’s not ready, even though the reason she’s not ready is that everyone she knows is being murdered. (“No, Billy. I’m the one who’s been so selfish and self-absorbed, with all of my post-traumatic stress!”—actual dialogue from Scream.) In the end, Billy turns violent, ultimately revealing himself to be one of the killers who’s been knifing his way through their mutual friend group. Underneath all the masks and meta-commentary, Scream is just the literalization of a statistic: the story of a young woman between sixteen and twenty-four who finds herself in an abusive relationship. Pertinently, it is also the story of a young woman who gets to shoot her abusive boyfriend in the head.
Of course young women enjoy slashers. Adolescent girls have spent their lives absorbing our cultural disgust for womanhood, only to find themselves thrust into the middle of it, suddenly the butt of every joke. Their underlying anxieties are hit with a toxic sludge of predatory attention, sexual objectification, and impossible standards, growing to fifty times their natural size. It is not easy to become a monster. It is not fun to slip—suddenly, and for the rest of your life—out of humanity and into womanhood. Girls are left reckoning with the fact that their social status, their human value, even their basic survival, are all suddenly contingent on men. Thus, at the exact moment they’re beginning to have sex and enter romantic relationships, girls watch stories in which a moment’s lapse in judgment, or a single instance of giving in to temptation, results in agony and annihilation—not because that’s what they want, but because it’s already happening, and they have precious few other ways to process it. The slasher film is not (just) an illicit way for teenage girls to satiate their rage, but a confrontation with the worst possible outcomes of their newly fledged sex lives; it’s ritual catharsis, which exposes and acknowledges the vulnerability of female bodies in a male-dominated world. It gives us an excuse to scream.
Full of Secrets
In these enlightened times, filmmakers tend to serve up postfeminist rewrites of the dead slut. In The Cabin in the Woods, “the Whore” is a randomly assigned role, forced upon a girl without her knowledge, and maintained by dosing her with drugs that heighten her sex drive and lower her IQ. (Said drugs are administered, of course, through her hair bleach; she’s not a real
idiot or a real blonde.) In It Follows, the blonde who sleeps with three different boys over the course of the movie also survives through to the end, simply because the killer is a sexually transmitted demon who can only be defeated by having sex with a new partner. Yet, for all that, the most powerful rewrite of the archetype is one of the earliest.
There have been blonde girls and naked girls and dead girls, but no girls have combined those qualities quite as memorably as Laura Palmer. Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me was critically slated when it came out, not only for being an unsatisfactory prequel to a canceled TV show or for its self-conscious artiness (which was expected from Lynch), but for being too lowbrow to satisfy an art house audience. Twin Peaks had flirted with the mainstream, but it still comfortably fit into the semi-reputable tradition of the nighttime soap opera. Fire Walk with Me, what with its sordid focus on high school sex and serial killing, resembled an entirely different genre: the slasher movie.
“Fire Walk With Me could be the most rarefied teen horror film ever made,” Entertainment Weekly noted in their review. “It’s like A Nightmare on Elm Street directed by Michelangelo Antonioni.”7
They’re not wrong. The movie was primarily a long, slow exploration of Laura’s last days. Laura’s brutal murder had allowed her to serve as the central plot device of Twin Peaks. Her personality was only revealed postmortem, like an endless scarf pulled out of a magician’s sleeve—the sweet, universally beloved homecoming queen who was also cheating on her boyfriend, and was also a coke addict, and was also a sex worker but also had ties to organized crime, etcetera. Fire Walk with Me tried to take all those contradictory shards of characterization and make Laura a real person, the heroine of her own story.
