American Monsters

by Sezin Koehler

  III. Vampires and Horror: A Background

  I have always been a huge fan of horror as a genre, whether through books or film. Stephen King has been a favorite of mine since I was eleven or twelve and Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire series renewed my interest in vampires. During the first few months of my stint as a raver, the Wesley Snipes film Blade was released. At first I was very disturbed by the representation of ravers as vampires in Blade, as it seemed to make them monstrous and blood-thirsty. While identifying myself as a raver I found Blade’s portrayal of raver vampires to be a distortion of the “truth” of raves. On re-viewing the film much later, I realized that the only distortion is in the eyes of the viewer, and whatever cultural assumptions one may have will effect what one sees. I realized that by seeing the raver vampires as monstrous I was falling into the dominant gaze of society that would condemn the actions of ravers. Thus began my library research on vampires, as I had decided to follow up on the provocative linkage of the raver and the vampire.

  As I did research on vampires, I discovered a gendered construction of monstrosity that I then expanded into my topic as “Women, Horror and the Rave.” The treatment of (feminized) monsters within cultural texts of ethnography, film, and theory was very similar to the gendered inequalities I had noted in the rave, though the rave does preach a gospel of peace, love and respect. The intense hatred of women that seeped through theories of the monstrous directly related to experiences of women within the rave, the most notable being the lack of female representation within the production of rave music as well as the use of ecstasy as a pseudo-rape-drug. Though it is men who produce the most horror artifacts, be this through film or novels, another challenge arose: How to be a woman and write horror?

  I had decided that the theoretical framework that most suited my topic was the horror genre, as it comes with many hidden and misogynistic subtexts that allow for different readings of women in society. I then began considering the possibilities of monsters and the type of fictionalized ethnography I had been in the process of conceiving. Being a visual person, I turned to horror films and theory, which gave me an interesting canon from which to work and propose feminist revisions of what monsters can mean and are capable of, especially in a male dominated genre. This also brought up questions of what it means to be a woman in worlds that have only to do with male perspectives and control of cultural capital. How could I make raves and horror more appropriate to women?

  IV. We Have Met the Enemy and She is Woman: Female Grotesqueries

  The parallel foci of raves and horror is a focus on the body. In raves, the body is used as a site of transformation through synthetic chemicals. Ravers collectively dance, sweat, hug, share water as well as consuming drugs and physical culture in the form of clothes, jewelry, etc. Horror as a genre has capitalized on the destruction and mutilation of female bodies, usually by male killers and seem to be a product of a misogynistic American culture that not only accepts but actively promotes the degradation and exploitation of its women citizens. This hateful treatment of women has been linked to fears of the female body: the vagina, menstruation, and pregnancy. These are all seen in horror as different versions of the monstrous (the monstrous that must be eliminated). Because of these functions that mark women’s Otherness from men, the female body is seen as something incomplete and inferior, and thus open for abuse.

  Barbara Creed, in her book The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis, discusses one particular Freudian revision which involves the vagina dentata, a popular re-reading of the supposed female castration anxiety posited by Freud. Creed re-tells this theory using the idea of fear to invert Freud’s masculinist structure and instead details how a male fear of the vagina brings up castration anxiety not in women, but in men. Creed’s work analyzes different horror films and applies different monstrous theories of the female body to their representations in the horror genre. Though most of her work is in-depth analysis for critiquing purposes, Creed does agree that the rape revenge film is a sub-genre of horror, and is one of the more positive portrayals of women, subsequent to the horrors of rape trauma. This is the main genre of horror that I drew upon in creating my series of stories.

  Creed also applies these theories of the ‘monstrous-feminine’ to Bakhtin’s theories of the carnivalesque in her chapter “Horror and the Carnivalesque: The Body-monstrous,” from Fields of Vision: Essays in Film Studies, Visual Anthropology, and Photography. Creed writes:

  “It is not that the body has been forgotten over the preceding centuries ― rather, it has functioned as the debased ‘other’ within a series of binary oppositions that have been central to Western thought: mind/body; spirit/flesh; culture/nature; immortality/mortality. Significantly, in philosophical and religious discourses, the body is linked to the feminine ― woman is emotional and more ‘of the body,’ whereas man is usually positioned on the side of logic and rationality.” (p. 127).

  Creed goes on to discuss Bakhtin and the politics of inversion that exist within the theoretical carnivalesque and the horror genre. One of the popular notions of the carnivalesque is known as “woman on top,” a reversal of the male-dominated status quo. Though my honors project has many such Bakhtinian inversions, I would like to call attention to the title of the first chapter, The Succubi Sideshow. A succubus is the foil to an incubus, a male vampire who exists “on top” of the victim. Even though a succubus is also a vampire, because she is gendered female the word “succubus” involves being “on the bottom.” As Creed says, “Following on from the proposition that aspects of carnival were displaced into middle class discourses, it is possible to argue that the horror cinema constitutes an arena into which aspects of carnival practices have been displaced.” (p. 131).Since the rave is a primarily middle and upper class youth project, theories of the carnivalesque and horror begin to overlap within rave occurrences, as seen in the earlier stories.

  Julia Kristeva, in her Powers of Horror: An Essay of Abjection, discusses the idea of the abject: the space where the boundaries between the inside and the outside of the body are transgressed. Wounds, bleeding, infection, excrement and other bodily secretions are seen as abject and polluting. This fear of the abject, again, is related to the monstrous female body which emits all kinds of substances the male body is never in contact with. The fear of the abject further supports Creed’s arguments of the vagina dentata and a pervasive fear of women in male-dominated societies. Kristeva writes “...a true ‘ab-ject’ where man, frightened, crosses over the horrors of maternal bowels and, in an immersion that enables him to avoid coming face to face with an other, spares himself the risk of castration.”

  This sentiment is echoed in Rosi Braidotti’s “Mothers, Monsters and Machines” as she discusses the idea of motherhood as monstrous to men who never have to go through the process:

  “The woman’s body can change shape in pregnancy and childbearing; it is therefore capable of defeating the notion of fixed bodily form, of visible, recognizable, clear, and distinct shapes as that which marks the contour of the body...The fact that the female body can change shape so drastically is troublesome in the eyes of the logocentric economy within which to see is the primary act of knowledge and the gaze the basis of epistemic awareness. “ (p. 64).

  Many times this idea of monstrous births presents itself within the role of haunted houses in the horror genre. For example, in Stephen King’s The Shining or the film The Amityville Horror, both haunted houses bleed, scream, produce monstrous beings, and attempt to hurt those present within what becomes a monstrous womb. This idea of the mother as monster is extremely prevalent in Stephen King’s fiction, especially in such novels as It, Carrie, and Misery.

  The act of bleeding is very different for women and for men. In a paper presented to Professor Thomas Burkdall’s freshman class on “What Horror Means” one of the (male) students commented that when things bleed there is an immediate association with pain. I brought up the point to him that women have a very
different experience of blood than do men. When men bleed it is most likely because they have been injured. When women bleed, sometimes they have been injured. But once a month, every woman bleeds while menstruating. Karen Houpert in her study of menstruation, The Curse, discusses the culture of silence surrounding menstruation and the male mediations that have Othered women’s bodily experiences. Menstruation feeds into the fear of the vagina dentata, as there is a popular saying: Never trust anything that bleeds for four days without dying. For men the expulsion of blood could mean death. For women, the loss of blood is the cycle of life. We see here that blood has different cultural meanings for men than for women.

  Andrea Dworkin’s insightful Intercourse follows in this same vein of perceived cultural differences between men and women with regards to sexual intercourse. As a culmination of these few theories of the body, I would like to present Dworkin’s view that because of the unequal power relations between men and women, all sex that takes place in the society would be considered a rape of the woman. Her book follows up on Catherine McKinnon’s “Rape: On Coercion and Consent”, which proposes a very bleak (though accurate) portrayal of sex in America. This book struck a particular chord with me as I reflected on the abusive relationship I was in during my time as a raver. My experiences along with experiences of many other women, from raves and outside of them, are what make up most of American Monsters. As Dworkin writes “Sadism and death, under male supremacy, converge at the vagina: to open the woman up, go inside her, penis or knife. The poor little penis kills before it dies.”( p. 190). “Fucking,” as Dworkin puts it, erases the humanity of women, making them sexualized objects, readily available for exploitation. Men, the rapists, are considered individuals. Women, the violated and debased, remain voiceless and exist to be fucked.

  Dominance and submission are also made evident through theories of the gaze. Dworkin explains that subsequent to the demeaning “fuck,” the woman’s body is fetishized by the male gaze which further allows him to possess and rape her body. Laura Mulvey discusses this to some length in her article “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” while discussing the role of women as recipients of the gaze, never the gazer, in narrative films. I will discuss the idea of the gaze and anthropology a little bit later on in this paper.

  Stephen King’s early representations of women are incredibly misogynistic. Though there are feminist scholars, myself included, that see much of value in Stephen King’s writings, most feminists agree that the homosocial uses of his women along with their monstrous presentations leave much to be desired in terms of women’s representations in American pop culture. These themes say something about how women are perceived as a threat and detail how to eliminate the threat from society. In support of Stephen King’s more recent fictions, I would like to say that his feminist sensibilities are definitely improving as his characters are no longer as monstrously two-dimensional, and there is more of a sense that men are the monsters to women, not the other way around. It took King long enough to become more progressive with his female characters, but the shift is present and has made his writing much stronger for his millions of mostly female readers.

  It was on being inspired by Stephen King’s Rose Madder and Bag of Bones that I began thinking about who the monsters would be in my paper, and what it would mean as a woman writing about these silently controversial issues. So, how do women begin to write horror? If the genre is inherently woman-hating, how does a woman go about writing her own horror?

  V. Horror and Film Theory

  Though these theories were evident in Stephen King’s written fiction, I then turned to film to see if these feminist theories were at all representative of the horror film. The general trends in horror films consist of the Bakhtinian carnivalization that Barbara Creed discusses in her “Horror and the Carnivalesque: The Body-monstrous.” Though there is a carnivalesque inversion within the status quo of horror films, there is always a return to the previous state of male dominance whereby the feminized monster is eliminated by the hand of a hero figure, usually male. In this section I will relate some of the above theories of women and horror to specific examples from the horror film canon in order to explicate the parallels between female representations in horror and female treatment in real life situations.

  The genre of the “slasher” film is one of the more popular trends in horror. Slasher films consist of a “monster,” feminized in treatment though usually male, whose weapon of choice is a sharp and long kitchen blade. Gender in the slasher film is notable because there is usually a masculinized young woman who battles against the feminized male slasher figure. In the Halloween series by John Carpenter, Jamie Lee Curtis’ character is sister to Michael Meyers, the slasher. His pathology develops as he sees his older sister (not Jamie Lee) about to have sex with her boyfriend. Disturbed by this sight, young Michael stabs his sister to death and subsequently is taken away to a mental hospital. The deaths of sexually active women are prevalent in the slasher sub-genre and relates to Creed’s theories of the vagina dentata and fears of female sexuality. Michael Meyers, like Freddy Krueger and the other slashers of this genre, is killed and returns numerous times to stalk his younger sister who knows too much. In the final episode of Halloween, Halloween: H20, Jamie Lee Curtis returns twenty years later, again to eliminate her brother, the slasher. In films such as these, the gory details that receive the gaze are always the mutilated bodies of young women; if men are killed their bodies are not displayed in the same manner as the murdered women.

  I would like to jump, now, to the recent Scream trilogy which should be classified as a slasher film, but definitely reflects changing views of femininity within mass media culture. The main character of Scream, played by Neve Campbell, loses her virginity in the first Scream film and actually survives all the way through the third and final film. One of the “rules” of horror posited by the self-reflexive Scream trilogy is that once someone loses their virginity, they will be the next prey for the monster. Jamie Lee Curtis remained “virginal” throughout the Halloween films, with the exception of the last one where it is known she has children.

  The tendency to murder women who express an interest in sex within horror films demonstrates an archaic and sexist view of women and their desires. Because male desires are coded as normal and because the female body is made monstrous by these male desires, the object of these tensions must be eliminated in some way. The final Scream film did not do well in the box office, though it is the best of the Scream films. I will discuss this a bit more later when I talk more about Twin Peaks, but I would like to mention how films that expose the exploitation and rape of young women are not accepted by mass culture. Scream 3 explains one woman’s promiscuity which then led to her death as the result of a horrible and brutal rape she suffered as a teenager. As I have discovered, talk of rape is incredibly taboo, especially in terms of how masculinities are constructed in violent opposition to femininities. The fact that Scream 3 admits one of the characters was raped is a very progressive move, but one that made the film suffer at the box offices. The fact, also, that the heroine of the film remains sexually active and alive is also a cause for some celebration.

  Another incredible series of films is the Alien quartet, which relates to Rosi Braidotti’s theories of monstrous motherhood. The architecture of the ships in each of the films detail vaginal tunnels, uterine hallways, the presence of eggs, and even the very act by which the aliens reproduce themselves. The oral rapes that take place in the Alien films unsettle gender relationships and further make monstrous the female body. When the alien lays an egg in a human, it inserts a tentacle into the throat of the victim, and when the alien is ready to hatch, it emerges from the abdominal area. The vagina is displaced not only into the stomach, but also the mouth, whereby unwanted penetration allows for the aliens to monstrously birth themselves through the humans. Sigourney Weaver’s character, Ripley, became an icon of the feminist movement. She is a strong and capable woman, and again manage
s to survive for hundreds of years during the course of the series. Though, there are critiques of Weaver’s character, the most notable being Barbara Creed’s in discussing Ellen Ripley as a “phallic mother,” as she totes huge machine guns but still protects and nurtures those around her who need protection and care.

  The genre from which I drew the most inspiration is the rape-revenge genre of horror. Though it’s sub-genre speaks for itself, these films consist of horrible rapes, usually performed with groups of men and one woman, from which the woman emerges pissed off and thirsty for vengeance. The rape-revenge film is the most valued sub-genre of horror in terms of women’s issues as the brutalized character hunts down her attackers and kills them. Though the women end up masculinized by following the vein of violence the men brought to them, the rape-revenge could be seen as the female version of machismo: feminismo, whereby women stop taking shit and get even with those who have abused them. These themes are extremely prevalent in the stories of American Monsters.

  Though the television series Twin Peaks and its prequel film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me are not traditionally considered horror, I would like to pose the series as an addition to the horror canon. The series deals with the abuse of Laura Palmer by the hand of her father, who before the series even begins, has “slashed” her. The different women portrayed in Twin Peaks are affected by varying degrees of abuse and exploitation by the men around them. Clifford Geertz in his “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight” discusses the idea of “deep play” as “...play in which the stakes are so high that it is, from his utilitarian standpoint, irrational for men to engage in it at all.” (p. 432). It appears to me, not just in Geertz’s cockfight, but in general, women who live within a male-dominated society are already performing much deeper cultural play than their male counterparts. Using the fantastic of Twin Peaks as a metaphor, many of the women within Twin Peaks are in relationships with horribly violent and abusive men, though the women remain in these very relationships. As I discussed with Andrea Dworkin’s Intercourse, if sex(ual) roles are determined by the male “fucking” the woman into submission, then Twin Peaks can be used to detail specific events that will lead to a woman’s demise in her own culture.