O'BRIEN Women in Horro

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Screen Education 93 I © ATOM

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TALKING SOCIETY SS

Surviving Nightmares

WOMEN IN HORROR

The character of the ‘Final Girl’, the killer’s last remaining target who survives persistent tropes. With reference to the subversive new iteration of Halloween, GABRIELLE O’BRIEN argues that it can serve as a powerful metaphor for women’s agency – particularly so in an age in which questions of gender representation are being addressed more urgently than ever before.

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and gets the upper hand over her pursuer, is one of the horror genre’s most

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I always believe in following the advice of the playwright [Victorien] Sardou. He said, ‘Torture the women!’ … The trouble today is that we don’t torture women enough.

– Alfred Hitchcock1

H

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itchcock’s oft-quoted statement expresses a sentiment that predates cinema; Edgar Allan Poe famously claimed that ‘the death […] of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world’.2 And let’s not forget Italian giallo-horror maestro Dario Argento’s admission: ‘I like women, especially beautiful ones. If they have a good face and figure, I would much prefer to watch them being murdered than an ugly girl or a man.’3 And here we have the troubling tension that pulses away at the heart of the horror flick. It is the blood-curdling scream of a woman staring down death that is the codified sound of the horror movie. Within horror’s aesthetic regime, an attractive young woman in peril will frequently command top billing. But to assume (like so many writers and critics do) that the horror film is inherently misogynistic is a gross oversimplification. And there are many pressing reasons why we are doing our students a disservice if we overlook horror in our classrooms.

There is a misconception among some educators that horror is a ‘lowbrow’ genre and not fit for our curriculums, or that it panders to an immature teenage sensibility and is therefore limited in its capacity to provide powerful learning opportunities. Yet we know that meaningful learning takes place when our students are emotionally aroused and excited by a topic. Horror is the cinema of sensation; it ticks this box better than any other genre. In fact, this genre of transgression, of crossed boundaries, of sex and of death perhaps speaks most emphatically to a teenage audience.

The buzz in our classrooms on the Monday after a new horror release shouldn’t be quietened, but explicitly harnessed.

While it’s unsurprising that 60 per cent of the US horror audience is aged between fifteen and thirty4 – a figure that could be expected to mirror that in Australia – it’s worth noting that females make up a significant proportion of this number. In fact, according to data collected by CivicScience, 60 per cent of horror spectators are women.5 And they have been turning up to cinemas in droves over the last few years; 2017 was horror’s biggest year at the box office to date.6 If cinema is the artform that speaks most directly to prevailing social discourses, horror is the genre that magnifies these cultural anxieties, using the body as its road map. It’s possible to track periods of sociopolitical apprehension via a timeline of horror films. Two of the most well-documented examples are Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Don Siegel, 1956), which captures the fear of communist contamination, and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Tobe Hooper, 1974), which channels the anxiety of a fractured post–Vietnam War American society. Regardless of directorial intention, these films are usually read with reference to the historical context of their production.

In 2019, female representation on screen has finally become part of the cultural conversation. And the way that women are being portrayed is gradually evolving into a much closer approximation of lived experience. Female characters are stepping out from the restrictive confines of patriarchal power dynamics; rather than merely supporting the advancement of a masculine narrative, women are increasingly driving the narrative themselves. There is

a movement away from reinforcing the patriarchal status quo and towards a more empowering depiction of contemporary women.

This shift is explicitly evident in the work of some recent horror films. Halloween (David Gordon Green, 2018) reboots the ‘Final Girl’ archetype for a modern, empowered and politically aware audience. The evolution of Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) from John Carpenter’s original slasher masterpiece Halloween (1978) through to her present incarnation is worthy of critical inquiry, and makes for an engaging and accessible case study for students of all ability levels. Although the original film is rated R 18+, it may be possible to gain parental permission to show handpicked scenes from it (this will vary between schools, teachers and classes); the 2018 film, in contrast, is rated MA 15+, and thus should be able to be shown in most senior secondary English and Media Arts classes.

While still woefully underrepresented, women are also working behind the camera in increasing numbers, writing and directing films that reappraise the range and function of female characters

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PREVIOUS SPREAD: Laurie (Jamie Lee Curtis) in Halloween (2018) THIS SPREAD, CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: Dressed to Kill; Laurie (Curtis) in Halloween (1978); Wolf Creek; Sleepaway Camp

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THIS SPREAD, L–R: Laurie in Halloween (2018); Psycho

The majority of critics and scholars have historically derided the slasher as essentially base, artless and exploitative of women. Yet its ongoing popularity has always raised interesting questions about spectatorship. in horror. Horror provides a familiar framework for students to critically engage with female representation and body politics.

The representation of women is particularly pressing in the context of the #MeToo movement and the broader cultural groundswell of distaste for male privilege. By scrutinising how women are positioned within a film’s diegesis, and how the cinematic apparatus ascribes power and agency, students can investigate a fascinatingly problematic dialectic.

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Criticism and spectatorship There is nothing about [the prospect of watching] a horror film that you can entice me with. Nothing.

– Jamie Lee Curtis7

The original Halloween is arguably the most accomplished example of the slasher film; with a micro-budget of just US$320,000,

Carpenter’s stylishly taut composition delivered big bucks at the box office and revived a tired subgenre. The slasher narrative template is a fairly streamlined one, and typically features a (usually male) killer who goes on a rampage murdering teenage boys and girls. The adults in the diegetic world are well meaning but ineffectual, and, as the body count ramps up, it falls to a resourceful teenage character (who is most often female) to face off with the killer and expel him from the narrative. The killer’s death is often an ambivalent one, suggesting that they possess an immortal strength (and leaving room for a sequel or ten). While many subgenres of horror films have been accused of misogyny, it is the slasher film that has come in for the most criticism for its supposedly objectifying male gaze and point-of-view ‘I’ camera tracking terrified female victims. Questions of gender dynamics, representation and agency are replayed over and over in the slasher; Green’s film offers an opportunity to move the discussion on.

‘The popularity of these films with teenagers,’ writes film critic Robin Wood, ‘is vastly more interesting, and even more depressing, than the films themselves ever are.’8 Wood here pretty much

Their very existence and popularity hinges upon rapid changes taking place in relations between the ‘sexes’ and by rapidly changing notions of gender – of what it means to be a man or a woman.

To dismiss them as bad excess […] is not to address their function as cultural problem-solving. Genres thrive, after all, on the persistence of the problems they address; but genres thrive also in their ability to recast the nature of these problems.9

Psycho – analyse this!

Psycho (Hitchcock, 1960) is seen by many as the blueprint for the slasher film. The gender confusion at the heart of the film set up a template for the dismantling of discrete boundaries, and this led to a generic obsession with desire, sexuality and control. In this way, the legacy of Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) is not only structurally apparent in the slasher, but also tellingly influential in the film theory that grew up around the genre. Significantly, Psycho subversively intersects with many of the conceptual cornerstones of psychoanalytic theory: ‘the uncanny’, ‘fetishisation’, ‘castration anxiety’ and, of course, the ‘Oedipus complex’. In this way, psychoanalytical theory became the primary critical terrain for the slasher picture; these films offered a socially acceptable space for repressed psychosexual impulses to be played out in a contained ninety-­minute interlude. From critically adored films like Dressed to Kill (Brian De Palma, 1980) to the transgressive low-budget fun of Sleepaway Camp (Robert Hiltzik, 1983), gender and sexuality are perversely marshalled in the service of a shock denouement. This fascination with slippages in heteronormative categories, and with ruptures to stable categories of ‘male’ and ‘female’, is symptomatic of the amorphous thrills that the slasher offers us. This symbiotic interplay of tropes and theory informed the work of other feminist film theorists like Carol J Clover (author of Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film) and Barbara Creed (author of The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis), both of whom leaned on a psychoanalytical framework for their research.

For Williams, ‘Horror is the genre that seems to endlessly repeat the trauma of castration as if to “explain,” by repetitious mastery, the originary problem of sexual difference.’10 This claim points up the often-limiting lens of psychoanalysis, particularly those theoretical frameworks that privilege Sigmund Freud’s concept of castration anxiety. The analysis is then inevitably constrained by its emphasis on imagery that ‘explains’ the male spectator’s assumed ‘horror’ at the threat posed by the female

Other due to her ‘phallic lack’.11 While this concept clearly warrants a place in the constellation of film theory, there is a risk in overemphasising its importance and neglecting both the female spectator and those represented on screen.

Clover attempts to redress this imbalance by reassessing the role of the male spectator via psychoanalytical theory.12 While her seminal work is somewhat dated and certainly not without its detractors, some of her key concepts are worth introducing students to. This also presents a great opportunity for learners to ‘try on’ some psychoanalytical theory and to think critically about the idea of film spectatorship.

The ‘Final Girl’ Although there are quite a few notable exceptions, including Wolf Creek (Greg McLean, 2005) and queer favourite A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge (Jack Sholder, 1985), it is usually a young woman who is the last character standing in horror films.

She must take on the monster/killer adversary and overcome him with a combination of strength and smarts. The ‘Final Girl’ designation was coined by Clover, and is a term familiar to most audiences who have even a passing appreciation of the genre.

Clover’s theory proposes that the spectator’s identification shifts from killer to victim before eventually residing with the Final Girl, veering back and forth from sadistic to masochistic poles of engagement over the course of the film: This fluidity of engaged perspective is in keeping with the universal claims of the psychoanalytic model: the threat function and the victim function coexist in the same unconscious, regardless of anatomical sex.13 This is surely the most compelling takeaway from Clover’s theory: the recasting of the assumed misogynistic male spectator as considerably more complex in his negotiation of male and female, active and passive, penetrator and penetrated, and killer and victim. The implications are liberating for spectators of any gender (whether they be gay, straight or anything in between). In fact, it is precisely this state of in-betweenness that characterises the slasher film – and horror in general – and that makes it so liberating and intoxicatingly subversive for viewers.

According to Clover, the representation of the Final Girl makes it easier for the male viewer to identify with the female character, as she is generally presented as androgynous: ‘like her name, not masculine but either/or, both, ambiguous’.14 Halloween’s Laurie Strode is probably the most enduring Final Girl; her first iteration in 1978 gave us an archetypal prototype (bookish, reliable and capable of

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encapsulates the critical consensus with regard to the slasher movie, particularly during its most blandly repetitive cycle of production during the 1970s and 1980s. It’s fair to say that slasher films are among the most formulaic of any film genre (with perhaps the romantic comedy coming in second place). Like Wood, the majority of critics and scholars have historically derided the slasher as essentially base, artless and exploitative of women. Yet its ongoing popularity has always raised interesting questions about spectatorship, and the symbolic and unconscious imperatives being serviced by a genre that replicates itself so doggedly.

Back in the 1990s, feminist film scholarship started to reevaluate the down-and-dirty slasher; rather than dismissing it as a distasteful cultural aberration, they asked what underpinned the enduring fascination. One proponent of this view was Linda Williams, who categorised horror, alongside pornography and melodrama, as a genre built on ‘bodily excess’. Importantly, she recognised the centrality of gender to each:

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intuiting the threat of psycho-killer Michael Myers – played by Nick Castle and Tony Moran in the original, and James Jude Courtney and Castle in the 2018 version – and reacting accordingly). Yet, in Clover’s account, Final Girls like Laurie are not feminist role models for female viewers. Instead, they present an acceptable figure of sublimation for the male spectator. In order for him to identify with her final acts of heroism, her gender must be somehow ambiguous.

Applying Clover’s psychoanalytical logic, Laurie’s and Michael’s genders are each symbolically uncertain. Rather than this being presented as an empowering notion, however, Clover constrains us with phallocentric dialectics. The Final Girl is ‘manned’ when she appropriates a phallic weapon (for Laurie, a coathanger), and ‘castrates’ the killer (Michael cops one in the eye), then she takes his phallic knife and ‘penetrates’ him. For Clover, both the Final Girl and the killer are ambiguously gendered: ‘she specifically unmans an oppressor whose masculinity was in question to begin with’.15 Despite her overly phallocentric rhetoric, Clover argues that this unconscious negotiation of gender identification nonetheless leads to a final climactic sequence in which each and every spectator is rooting for the Final Girl: By the end [of Halloween], point of view is [Laurie’s]: we are in the closet with her, watching with her eyes the knife blade pierce the door; in the room with her as the killer breaks through the window and grabs at her; in the car with her as the killer stabs through the convertible top, and so on. And with her, we become if not the killer of the killer then the agent of his expulsion from the narrative vision. If, during the film’s course, we shifted our sympathies back and forth, and dealt them out to other characters along the way, we belong in the end to the Final Girl: there is no alternative.16

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The new iteration of Halloween presents some explicit reversals of genre tropes, and builds on elements of Clover’s theory in a way that moves historical ideas on, helping the world of the film to chime with contemporary society. The star power of Curtis as the returning Final Girl speaks to a culture that is renegotiating ageist stereotypes of women. The 2018 version of Halloween recorded the biggest opening-weekend box-office return for a movie with a female lead over the age of fifty-five.17 One of the most exciting aspects of Green’s Halloween is its capacity to knowingly revel in ‘fandom’, referencing locations, scenarios and even sequences from Carpenter’s original. The film ignores the franchise’s mixed bag of sequels and goes directly to the source, so it’s unsurprising that Laurie commands top billing.

However, this will be the first Halloween for a significant number among the teenage audience, a fact that makes Curtis’ box-office clout even more significant. For genre fans, there is the added intertextual delight of Curtis’ family lineage; she is the daughter of Psycho’s Janet Leigh.

Curtis herself calls the role ‘the most rounded character that I will maybe ever get to play’.18 While Laurie still operates as a Final Girl archetype (androgynous, sensible, focused on ousting the monster/killer from the narrative), she is also anchored in the context of being a survivor of male-inflicted trauma. This brings a more sophisticated psychologisation to the character, in that the #MeToo movement poignantly inflects the drama, especially for the female spectator accustomed to seeing a more passive representation of the Final Girl before her showdown with the monster.

Here, Laurie is the agent of action; she alone understands the threat and exactly how to eradicate Michael. Significantly, it is a trio of women who achieve this aim: Laurie; her daughter, Karen (Judy Greer); and her granddaughter, Allyson (Andi Matichak).

ABOVE: Michael Myers (James Jude Courtney) in Halloween (2018)

The ‘Terrible Place’ Clover categorises recurring elements in the slasher film, theorising their diegetic and symbolic significance. The ‘Terrible Place’, Clover’s term for the location in which a film’s victims are most vulnerable, is associated with the monster/killer and his entrapment of the Final Girl. The location is often underground, in settings such as basements that unwitting victims wander [into] in film after film, and it is the conventional task of the genre to register in close detail the victims’ dawning understanding, as they survey the visible ­evidence, of the human crimes and perversions that have transpired there. That perception leads directly to the perception of their own immediate peril.19 The killer–victim dynamic is reversed in Green’s Halloween: the ‘Terrible Place’ belongs to the Final Girl. Laurie’s concealed basement is a carefully engineered trap for Michael. The Freudian idea of the ‘unheimlich’ or ‘uncanny’ place is playfully invoked; here an uncanny space is collapsed with female agency and control in a reworking of elements of Clover’s theory. Clover categorises the Terrible Place as ‘interuterine’, with ‘damp walls’ that symbolically inscribe it as female. Again that state of ‘in-betweenness’ is signalled as the gender of the monster/killer is ill-defined. Within a psychoanalytical reading, the logic here is that this uncertainty offers a further layer of horror and threat.

The 2018 Halloween overturns this logic in an amusing reclamation of a patriarchally defined space. Subverting the limiting domestic associations of the kitchen, Laurie flips a switch to reveal the hidden entrance to the ‘Terrible Place’. The demarcation of space and power couldn’t be more explicit: this is a woman’s sphere, and the threat is contained herein.

The reversal of antagonist and protagonist is also wonderfully conveyed via point-of-view camera. During the final showdown, the usual frantic ‘I’ camera reserved for the Final Girl belongs to Michael. He scans the garden, only to realise that Laurie has inexplicably ‘vanished’ after being left wounded and presumably incapable of movement. This knowingly repositions the trope of the unstoppable killer figure who refuses to die.

The basement trap in which Michael is eventually imprisoned recalls the wardrobe that Laurie is famously trapped in at the end

of Carpenter’s film. Again, the reversal of point-of-view shots foregrounds Laurie’s agency within the narrative: finally, it is the Final Girl who is the aggressor, and the ‘killer’, the victim.

The slasher has always been associated with the dark underside of ‘civilised’ society. The new version of Halloween shows us that well-executed genre films can contribute to a civilised discourse on gender politics.

Gabrielle O’Brien is a freelance film writer and teacher. She has an MA in film studies and is a regular contributor to Screen Education. An unrepentant cinephile, she likes it best in the dark! SE Endnotes Alfred Hitchcock, quoted in Alex von Tunzelmann, ‘Do Hitchcock and The Girl Reveal the Horrible Truth About Hitch?’, The Guardian, 11 January 2013, <https://www. theguardian.com/film/2013/jan/11/hitchcock-the-girl -truth-master-suspense>, accessed 18 December 2018.

2 Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Philosophy of Composition’, 1846, available at <http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/poe/ composition.html>, accessed 18 December 2018.

3 Dario Argento, quoted in Kim Newman, Nightmare Movies: Horror on Screen Since the 1960s, Bloomsbury, London, 2011 [1988], p. 142.

4 Brent Lang, ‘Horror Movies Make Tough Times Less Scary for Studios’, Variety, 26 October 2016, <https://variety.com/2016/ film/news/horror-movies-1201900551/>, accessed 18 December 2018.

5 Jenna Enright, ‘13 Insights About Horror Movie Fans’, CivicScience, 26 October 2017, <https://civicscience.com/ horror-movie-fan-facts/>, accessed 18 December 2018.

6 Mekado Murphy, ‘2017: The Biggest Year in Horror History’, The New York Times, 26 October 2017, <https://www.nytimes. com/2017/10/26/movies/top-horror-movies-box-office-it-get -out.html>, accessed 18 December 2018.

7 Jamie Lee Curtis, quoted in Garry Maddox, ‘Jamie Lee Curtis on Why the New Halloween Is Striking a #MeToo Chord’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 23 October 2018, <https://www.smh. com.au/entertainment/movies/jamie-lee-curtis-halloween -metoo-australia-20181023-p50bbu.html>, accessed 19 December 2018, emphasis in original.

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FURTHER VIEWING •

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It Follows (David Robert Mitchell, 2014) draws on tropes of the slasher film in order to re-evaluate ­questions of gender and the status of the female ‘victim/hero’ figure.

The ‘new wave’ of slasher-inflected horror films is rejuvenating a tired generic formula – see works like Get Out (Jordan Peele, 2017), Prevenge (Alice Lowe, 2016) and Happy Death Day (Christopher Landon, 2017). These films mobilise generic slasher tropes in the service of caustic sociopolitical commentary: Get Out scrutinises modern race relations in America, while the latter two humorously play with female representation.

The Babadook (Jennifer Kent, 2014) places female experience at the heart of its narrative, in which a grieving woman struggles to reconcile her ruptured psychological state with her role as a mother.

Robin Wood, ‘What Lies Beneath?’, Senses of Cinema, issue 15, July 2001, <http://sensesofcinema.com/2001/freuds-worst -nightmares-psychoanalysis-and-the-horror-film/horror_ beneath/>, accessed 19 December 2018.

9 Linda Williams, ‘Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess’, Film Quarterly, vol. 44, no. 4, Summer 1991, p. 12.

10 ibid., p. 10.

11 See Carol J Clover, ‘Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film’, Representations, no. 20, Fall 1987, pp. 213–4.

12 ibid, pp. 187–221.

13 ibid., p. 209.

14 ibid., p. 221.

15 ibid., p. 210.

16 ibid., p. 208.

17 Christine Estera, ‘Why Jamie Lee Curtis Cried Every Day on the Set of New Halloween Sequel’, 9Honey, 25 October 2018, <https://celebrity.nine.com.au/2018/10/25/17/04/jamie -lee-curtis-halloween-sequel-cried-every-day>, accessed 19 December 2018.

18 Jamie Lee Curtis, quoted in Christina Radish, ‘Jamie Lee Curtis on Halloween, Exploring Generational Trauma & Laurie Strode in 2018’, Collider, 20 October 2018, <http://collider. com/jamie-lee-curtis-interview-halloween-2018/>, accessed 19 December 2018.

19 Clover, op. cit., p. 197.

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