Masculinity in Horror

On the screen I see myself stalking and killing, stalking and killing. I look down at my heavily booted foot, at my roughly gloved hand, and at the violence and desecration that I have caused. I see Alice, knowing that she will be my next intended victim, and I invite her to look at me. As I approach the mirror that is the screen through her eyes, I am in shock. I am not the strong, rugged man I imagined myself to be. I am Mrs Voorhees, a middle aged woman.

The above scenario, based on the plot of Friday the Thirteenth, depicts how the Horror film (especially that of the slasher variety) throws away contemporary views of gender, and creates a world where sex is life, but gender is theatre. In this respect, the statement that “Representations of men are always about power” is essentially incorrect. Power is a sign of masculinity, not men, and as such the statement should read that representations of masculinity are always about power, regardless of what sex portrays it.

O’Shaughnessy states that the dominant perception of masculinity is that it is achieved through physical and/or social power. This view is epitomised in “stars such as (Arnold) Schwarzenegger and Clint Eastwood, both of whom represent ideals of strength, toughness, coolness, attractiveness, heterosexuality, and Whiteness” (p. 200). However, due to the very nature of the horror movie, were either of these stars to step out of their actions and their westerns and onto a horror set, they would be rendered useless and probably killed within the first hour.

One theorist of masculinity comes close to describing the place of gender in the horror film, but ultimately falls down at the post. He states that, “In a sense, horror has deconstructed both genders: the rationality of the male has been peeled away, revealing a core of psychotic destructiveness; the archaic sexual threat posed by woman has been partially replaced by a sense of female power” (Horrocks, p. 88). Where Horrocks’ fault lies, is in his inability to scratch beneath the surface instead of just taking things at face value. Yes, the villain of the horror film is predominantly a psychotic male killer, and yes, the hero is usually a female. However, what they represent goes beyond their sex, and that is what I will attempt to prove in what is to follow.

It has long been believed that the first true perception of gender was an essentialist one. Jung’s theories of an anima and an animus proposed that “the biological sex of people (whether they are men or women) is said to define who they are: it determines their characteristics (masculine or feminine) and hence their social roles” (O’Shaughnessy, p. 152). However, prior to this train of thought, there existed a one-sex theory of the world. The one-sex theory construed the “sexes as inside versus outside versions of a single genital/reproductive system” (Clover, p. 13) and was evident in Ancient Greek and Roman societies where homosexuality was commonplace. This is partly due to the fact that the ‘one sex’ was, of course, male, with women being viewed upon as ‘inverted’, and therefore, less perfect men. In this theory, sex proceeds from gender. In the horror movie, this is seen as such: “A figure does not cry and cower because she is a woman; she is a woman because she cries and cowers. And a figure is not a psychokiller because he is a man; he is a man because he is a psychokiller” (Clover, p. 13). In this sense, sex is life, but gender is a social construction.

Certain directors of slashers and teeny-kill pictures (as they have come to be known due to the high amount of doped-up, over-sexed teenagers that are regular victims), must be aware of at least some aspects of gender theory and criticism, as Clover states that she received comments from at least three directors following the first publication of her essay (p. 232n). It is then fair to assume, that these directors recognise that gender is a state of the mind, not of the body. That it is “less a wall than a permeable membrane” (Clover, p. 46). This is observable, by watching the typical audience of one of these movies. Predominantly teenage males, they will identify against their age and sex as they cheer on the killer as he attacks a number of their own kind, and later, with renewed enthusiasm, cheer the girl who takes him down.

Clover refers to this role as the Final Girl who, following the success of Jamie Lee Curtis as Laurie, has been an integral part of the slasher formula since Halloween was released in 1978. While spending the first half of the movie watching from the killers point of view, it is the Final Girl’s view with which we will eventually be aligned with and accept as our own. If we are to accept that point of view is equal to identification, then when the Final Girl accepts the active, investigative gaze it is the final process of her masculinization.

The first stage is evident from the onset. “Her smartness, gravity, competence in mechanical and other practical matters, and sexual reluctance set her apart from the other girls and ally her, ironically, with the very boys she fears and rejects… Lest we miss the point, it is spelled out in her name: Stevie, Marti, Terry, Laurie, Stretch, Will, Joey, Max” (Clover, p 40). Her boyishness becomes ‘manliness’ as she adopts the I-gaze, traditionally belonging to the male. The Final Girl then actively seeks out the killer, realising that the only way to survive is to fight back, and eventually brings him down using the same phallic symbols (knife, machete, knitting needle, and so on) that he used on her and her friends. Even in non-horror films this trend has become evident. In the 1991 hit Thelma and Louise, the two women use several phallic symbols in their bid to escape their oppressors (in this case, patriarchal society). Firstly, there is the Thunderbird convertible which they use to escape, the gun that kills the rapist, and the symbolic castration of the truck-driver by exploding his tanker (itself a phallic symbol).

However, Clover states that “The Final Girl has not just manned herself; she specifically unmans an oppressor whose masculinity was in question to begin with” (p. 49). This refers to the tendency of the male killer in horror movies to be socially lacking in some way, whether they are a virgin, sexually inert, spiritually divided, a transvestite or transsexual, or even equipped with female sex organs. So while the Final Girl emerges from the feminine to become the dominant masculine, the killer has his questionable masculinity exposed. As he becomes the victim, he becomes a woman. In one particular film (I Spit On Your Grave), the lead female cuts off the penis and testicles of her attacker, so that his castration is both physical and emotional, and in another (Videodrome) a male victim develops a vagina like gash, into which his killer inserts a deadly video tape (see Figures 1 & 2).

The setting also plays a large part in the gender construction of the modern horror film. Dark and often damp, the setting of the killer’s most terrifying attacks are decidedly intrauterine in nature. In this respect, it is interesting to not that Freud states in “The ‘Uncanny’” that: “neurotic men declare that they feel there is something uncanny about the female genital organs. This unheimlich place, however, is an entrance to the former Heim [home] of all human beings, to the place where each of us lived once upon a time and in the beginning…. In this case too then, the unheimlich is what once was heimisch, familiar; the prefix un [un-] is the token of repression” (cited in Clover, p. 48).

It is in these dank recesses that the Final Girl must inevitable face and defeat her foe. And once the killer is no longer a threat, neither is the ‘uterine’ setting, darkness gives way to light, and the physical closeness of the area yields to the open expanses of the outside world. Put simply, “The moment at which the Final Girl is effectively phallicized is the moment that the plot halts and horror ceases. Day breaks, and the community returns to its normal order” (Clover, p. 50). The most obvious example of this is in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre II, when Stretch, murky and bloody, emerges form the underground, ‘intrauterine’ tunnel into the open air. This is the symbolic birth of her new found masculinity.

Even the possession film (The Exorcist, Witchboard), which would seem to be based on tales of women and exploited femininity are essentially based in the power of masculinity. In both the movies listed above, the possessed female becomes more and more masculine as the possession strengthens. Regan (The Exorcist) begins to swear compulsively and develops incredible strength, whereas Linda (Witchboard) even takes to wielding an axe and wearing the clothes of her male invader. Clover notes that, “From biblical times on, the invading devil or dybbuk has been construed as a male being, and the possessed woman as hence subject to masculinization from the inside out… (That) Malevolent spirits appear to be conceived as masculine despite the fact that women figure among the improperly buried…sexual difference as we know it exists only among living humans in the here and now” (p. 103 & 103n). This is consistent with one-sex thinking

Therefore despite the perception of differing sexes during their lifetime, all people assume a masculine role after death. Combined with images of women as the possessed, and the word vulva related to valve (the Latin description of a door or entry into the body), and pushing this towards a metaphor for the ultimate portal, the Pearly Gates, death can therefore be an equal to sex. Heaven would thus be the perfect opening, and Hell, with its ‘fire’ can be seen as a menstruating female. To perceive pitchforks as a phallic representation, the equation then lends itself to a menstruating female = a male hell. Thus, in the overall scheme of things, sex and death is the same thing, which is why there is no need in horror for the victim to be subjected to both by the killer. The killer’s threat is purely physical, and the “archaic sexual threat posed by woman” has no effect on a figure who views them both as the same thing. This is the reason why the Final Girl must adopt a more masculine approach.

On the topic of menstruation, as the female body is still a mystery to the average male, it serves in the occult or possession film as a sign of hidden power. Conversations of, or actual menstruation predominantly precede the onset of possession. Creed (as cited in Clover) argues that in Lacanian terms, because the female protagonists lack the Phallus, both physically and symbolically, their bodies seek expression in other ways. “Indeed, the flow [menstruation] contained by the constraints of the Father, their physical and bloody ‘rage’ is an apocalyptic feminine explosion of the frustrated desire to ‘speak’” (p. 78). In the slasher, Regan and Linda would have simply adopted the Phallus through a variety of deadly, phallic symbols and attacked their oppressors.

However, the slasher is not the only variety of horror film that promotes cross sex identification. Carrie, a horror tale of a telekinetic girl who strikes out against her bullying peers is, on the surface of things, concerned with prom queens, menstruation, tampons, make-up, clothes and other stereotypical ‘girly’ interests. However, its author – Stephen King – based the character on one of the strongest-ever mythological beings, that of Samson, who was bound, shorn and blinded before demolishing an entire temple with his bare hands. King states that Carrie’s success stems from the fact that her revenge is something that any student (King uses the term his, highlighting, the male-ness of this girly movie) who has been bullied can relate to. As Clover states, King seems to be saying that the boy who is threatened and humiliated, “is a boy who recognises himself in a girl who finds herself bleeding from her crotch in the gym shower, pelted with tampons, and sloshed with pig’s blood at the senior prom” (p. 5).

Assuming that the horror film follows a basic trend based on heroic myth and legend, a reasonable assumption following Stephen King’s analogy of Carrie as Samson, then it is interesting to note that Teresa de Lauretis argues that the two functions of myth, “the mobile heroic function and the immobile obstacle function-are gendered masculine and feminine and hence naturally represented by males and females respectively” (cited in Clover, p. 100). Once again this discourse does not sit well with the standard slasher plot, however, where females are the dominant hero character and males play the obstacle.

It is fair to say then, that it is representations of masculinity, not men, that always focus on power. By analysing the films of the horror genre, it becomes evident that sex is life, but gender is theatre. Masculinity is construction of society that bears with it all the power of the Phallus. Men are but the usual procurers of this power.