Titane, Jennifer’s Body shows the power of young female horror villains

It happens to almost every modern movie monster that is worth its salt. Freddy Krueger or Jason Voorhees or Michael Myers will begin a figure of terrible evil that lurks in the shadows and often pursues a brave heroine. Then, by the third or fourth part, the audience has become familiar with the ghoul in question and perhaps, at some level, is beginning to take root for him and everything he promises: the improbable resurrections, the elaborate killings, the obvious clues, who the killer will be back in another sequel in a year or two.

It’s not that these monsters are getting any less scary, although that is what happens. More importantly, they become the faces of their series, which makes them de facto heroes. After all, it is relatively rare for horror film protagonists to return in film after film; Scream is the exception to confirming the rule where a central trio of popular characters survive in multiple films, in part because the masked killer identity is meant to be a surprise and is not the same old slasher. In most other horror series, it’s the monster that keeps it going.

Still, some horror films have developed a kind of counter-trope: the monster that takes the form of a young woman, often a teenager, seething with complicated emotions. While the most notable (and sequels) of contemporary movie monsters tend to be aloof slashers, unrecognizable and regularly masked, their humanity obscured or absent, the Monster Girl is driven by more obvious psychology. Not obviously in the sense of a tragic backstory, but in the sense of externalizing various combinations of anger, confusion, and turmoil that are the by-products of growing up. (Hence “girl” not “woman”; while not every monster girl is literally a teenager, most of them are either young or socially awkward enough to appear that way.)

Sometimes the Monster Girl encounters familiar monster forms, such as Ginger, the girl whose youthful changes include a transformation into a werewolf Ginger snaps; the vampires of Let the right one in or A girl goes home alone at night; or the title character in Canwho has more than a hint of misguided Dr. Frankenstein has. Sometimes they create their own hybrids, like Dawn, the pro-abstinence heroine of teeth suffers from a case of vagina dentata, or the boy-eating demon who divides Jennifer’s body. Sometimes there is nothing explicitly supernatural about them – characters in The neon demon and the last titanium likely to qualify. What these sometimes different films have in common is a feeling that the characters’ experiences as young women in the world form their own horror shows.

Photo: Neon

The monster girl trope can sometimes act like the reverse of slasher cinema Last girl: Instead of facing an external threat, the girl claims the destructive threat for herself and then either fights with those instincts or with another girl who has not succumbed to her inner demons (as Needy in Jennifer’s body, or Brigitte in Ginger snaps). But Monster Girl isn’t a direct offshoot of the slasher movie – or the bad kids horror movie it resembles. It has its own touchstones: The Brian De Palma thrillers of the late 1970s Carrie and The fury, for example, both show young women with telekinetic powers. Carrie creates the fight between the sympathetic Monster Girl and the unchanged “nice” girl, which one could describe as a brilliant safeguard against the outcast status of his title character. Although much of the film is from the point of view of the withdrawn, socially awkward Carrie White (Sissy Spacek), some scenes take over the POV of Sue Snell (Amy Irving), the “normal” girl who tries to help Carrie and fails . The fury has even more points of view, plus espionage-like conspiracies, which makes it a more diffuse experience that interferes less directly with the emotions of its young female lead (this time Irving gets to play the woman who is not to be trifled with). Nevertheless, it comes to a head with a similarly bloody intensity.

Carrie links its bloody climax to the rituals of girlhood, both physically (as Carrie is scared and confused by her late arrival) and socially (via the cruelty Carrie faces from her classmates, which triggers her powers at the beginning of the film, and also enables her final vengeance in the end). The monster girl trope is almost always linked in one way or another to these physical and / or mental changes: In Ginger snaps, Ginger’s werewolf bite is caused by a delayed period while teeth‘s Dawn arms her body (first accidentally, then with clear intent) along with her sexual awakening. This is probably not a coincidence Snapshots, teeth, Can, Let the right one in, and Jennifer’s body all came out in the 2000s after pop culture dominated young pop singers who received mass attention for their looks and sexuality, while also being persecuted by tabloids and despised by men who ascribed them the delicate superficiality of a sexual fantasy. (Many horror fans would have mocked the singers as pop tarts; in 2004 Seeds of Chucky, for example, an off-screen version of Britney Spears is murdered as a joke.) The neon demon, a little further from then, is about pretty young things that are literally consumed by the desire to stay young, fresh, and desirable.

Image: IFC Films

While these films aren’t exactly feminine revenge fantasies, many of them find a more organic route into the complicated ethic of “enjoying” a horror movie kill. Not all Monster Girls victims deserve their sticky ends, and the Good Girl counterpoint is sometimes there to protest. However, it is a satisfying kick to watch jerks, crawlers, bullies, and rapists being punished for their insults as they are teeth, or at the height of Let the right one in. Granted, it’s no less routine than the half-naked couple pursued by the masked man, and at times the repetition can be numbing. teeth, for example, as smart as it is, relies on a fairly limited bag of tricks. But the Monster Girl has a way of justifying and curbing the bloodthirstiness of modern horror film at the same time: It’s fun to see some of the victims receive compensation while the Monster Girl loses herself in violence (Jennifer’s body), Lonliness (Can), or both (Carrie) still bothers me. And because the look of a male hero versus a powerful woman can be so questionable, these films often create a space where multiple female characters control the narrative. Even if they ultimately compete against each other, it stings more than, for example, the superhero girl who fights against the designated henchman.

Maybe that’s why there are relatively few “boy” monsters in Monster Girl mode. Horror has always included its share of personable monsters depicted or coded as masculine (the universal monsters sometimes provoke as much pity as fear), but they tend to have more creature-like appearances on the outside. The fish man in The shape of the water gets involved in a romance (and more) with a human woman; By making it look more like the creature from the Black Lagoon than an Aquaman-style underwater piece, the film trades one infraction (a human appearance that masks monstrous abilities) for another (a monstrous appearance, masking a human-like sensitivity). R, the zombie played by Nicholas Hoult in Warm bodies, gets closer to a gendered version of the Monster Girl tropic, and its zombie nature needs to be toned down significantly – he’s been shown to evolve back into a more human form – for the film to hit its goals that are more romantic. com as horror, anyway.

Even if they delve into dark comedies or avoid traditional horror images, Monster Girl films tend to be more horror, although less reliant on a creepy atmosphere. Familiar environments like old dark huts, the rustle in the woods, or the creaky hallways of suburban houses can occur, but these stories don’t have to cut their characters off from society (and in many cases wouldn’t function in isolation from social dynamics). . The characters’ special hell is also tied to their bodies, which follow them even more skillfully than boogeymen.

titanium makes this part of his story: his antihero spends much of the film on the run from her own life, where as a semi-famous exotic dancer she (in a way) committed several horrific slasher-style murders between her performances. She bears a scar from a child accident caused by the unruly behavior that is common in both children and is described as monstrous by their parents. Her body is constantly changing throughout the film, sometimes by her own design and sometimes by a body horror plot device that is never fully explained; it is an object of pleasure, fear and transcendence all at the same time. titanium and his many cousins ​​understand that the Monster Girl trope can be both liberating and familiar, finding horror and beauty in a girl’s world without a lack of both.