Rise of female monsters shows horror movies are not afraid of big, bad women
Somewhere in the third act of Guillermo del Toro’s Crimson Peak – around the time a manic, shrieking Jessica Chastain is running through the titular haunted estate wielding a meat cleaver – it hit me that I had probably never seen a horror movie that was so unabashedly feminine.
Crimson Peak review – evil springs from a psychosexually rich soil of horror
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People seem to go back and forth on the genre: sometimes it’s called horror, sometimes (as per Del Toro) “gothic romance”. There are ghosts, gallons of blood, and more than a few memorable facial mutilations.
And yet, most of the time, Crimson Peak could pass for the world’s most violent episode of Downton Abbey. All those ghosts are interspersed with gorgeous ball gowns, romantic waltzes, impassioned monologues about love, and discussions of the obstacles female writers faced in 19th-century literature. (Our heroine, Edith, is an aspiring author who has to type her stories: her handwriting is so feminine that it “gives her away”.)
Del Toro claims he channeled his “inner 14-year-old bookish girl” to make this movie, and it seems calibrated to be loved by bookish, female horror fans and dismissed by everyone else, just as nearly every woman I know had her mind blown by Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility, and no man I know has seen it.
It’s feminine in another way, too, which I suspect accounts for its divided reviews: Men in Crimson Peak are thoroughly objectified. They exist to be brooding, hunky, seductive and/or devoted, and not much else.
Christopher Lee in Curse of Frankenstein, 1957. Photograph: Courtesy Everett Collection/REX
The core of the movie is the battle between the virtuous bride Edith (Mia Wasikowska) and her spectacularly unhinged sister-in-law, Lucille (Chastain). Hence, Chastain shrieking in a gorgeous Victorian gown while wielding a meat cleaver. And hence Crimson Peak’s other great distinction: as part of a wave of new horror that focuses on the power of female monsters.
“Monster” has come to sound masculine. Most of the slashers of the 1970s and 1980s – Freddy Krueger, Jason Voorhees, Michael Myers, Leatherface – were male. (The villain of the first Friday the 13th was actually Jason’s mother, but people seem to forget.)
Ditto for the classics: Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster, the Wolfman, all guys. (Though Frankenstein was written by a woman.)
There have been great female monsters – the girl werewolf in the lycanthropy-as-menstruation classic Ginger Snaps, or the Alien Queen of Aliens – but horror could often seem like a genre in which women spent most of their time getting naked, getting killed, or running away.
This is unfair. Horror is catharsis. It’s a primal exorcism of our personal and cultural fears. And it often exorcises the most personal fear of all, by inviting viewers to identify with both the monsters and their victims, and to face down their own dark sides.
As Margaret Atwood has pointed out, if female characters aren’t allowed to have dark sides – if they can be victims or heroines, but never the Big Bad – then women are being defined as less than fully human.
So it’s significant that, for several years now, much great horror has been about the evil that lurks in the hearts of women. Consider this summer’s Ex Machina, in which a sexbot created to satisfy male desires instead runs riot and starts killing them, as if the computer-girlfriend in Spike Jonze’s Her had realized how pathetic Joaquin Phoenix was and decided men needed to be eliminated from the planet.
Or, for that matter, the organ-harvesting alien in Under the Skin, who was possibly the least convincing seductress ever (she can’t talk much, or eat human food without spitting it out) but who was played by Scarlett Johansson, and who seemed to prove that heterosexual men will climb into any creepy murder van you like, as long as a naked Scarlett Johansson lookalike is involved.
Under the Skin: a chilly female monster. Photograph: Allstar/Film4
If you want your horror closer to home – and if you don’t want to sleep tonight – check out 2014’s utterly terrifying The Babadook, in which the demonic force possessing a home is, more or less, a single mother’s depression and anger at her young son. There are jump scares, roaring monsters, and one devastating incidence of gore. But the real reason that The Babadook sinks into your bones is that we spend most of the movie honestly considering all the reasons why a mother might want to kill her child.
You can, undoubtedly, create a female monster that is a projection of male contempt for women: Fatal Attraction, in which the “evil” woman’s defining characteristic is liking a guy she hooked up with, or Psycho, which is one long Freudian treatise on overbearing mothers.
But the truly terrifying aspect of all these new monsters is that we empathize with them: the robot in Ex Machina only wants to be free, the alien in Under the Skin is unexpectedly helpless in our world, the possessed mother in The Babadook is in agony. These women represent rage, death, appalling and carnivorous appetites. But every woman in the audience has been angry. Maybe angry enough to want blood.
Which brings us back to Crimson Peak, and to Lucille. Part Mrs Danvers, part Bertha Rochester, it should come as no surprise that Lucille is Edith’s shadow counterpart in many ways. Nor is it surprising that most of the ghosts we see are women.
If you’re going to crib from the Brontes, you should remember their biggest lesson: the only battle that matters is between a woman and her own inner darkness. That darkness may not be something everyone wants to confront. But it’s a refreshing reminder that women are human – shrieking, axe-murdering rage and all.