Sexual Aberrations of the Criminal Female III: Vile Bodies
Here’s the biggest difference I found between men and women’s horror movies
Dear Gerald,
Body horror is usually my least favorite subgenre. Too often, it doesn’t do more than gross me out. Credit where it’s due to the make-up and special effects departments, but in my judgement these movies often rely on the grotesque at the expense of story, character development, camerawork, suspense, and all the rest of it. As long as there are mounds of pulsing, oozing, mutating flesh, the movie’s done its work, and the squealing fanboys go home happy. I even have trouble with the body horror movies that I know should be interesting on an intellectual level. They turn my stomach, so I don’t watch them.
Even so, as I descended into the murky depths of feminine horror, I watched a bunch of them. Most body horror movies are about the fear of invasion. Something, often an alien life form, gets inside people and changes them past recognition. As a metaphor, the invasion can stand for many things: disease, social contagion, or the fear of male birth (I especially recommend the latter clip and then this delightful parody). In all of these cases, the malign influence comes from outside and works its way in.
Not so with women’s body horror. With one film excepted, all of these movies show the horror emerging naturally, from inside, and instead of standing for many different threats, the body horror in these movies all touched on some part of the female reproductive lifecycle: puberty, sexual maturity, pregnancy, birth, child-rearing. These films didn’t offer clear conclusions. The message was never “puberty/pregnancy/birth is horrible!” These movies show women’s bodies going through profound changes that are beyond their control, and that’s scary. Yet in the best of these films the women undergoing these transformations are ambivalent about them. The changes they go through may be beyond their control, but they also open up new powers and possibilities.
Despite such ambivalence, or perhaps precisely because of it, women’s body horror results in some very good movies. Not one of these movies deserved less than 3.5 out of 5 Marnies. (Again, my scoring scale is a little nod to a late Hitchcock film about a man who thinks he can unravel women’s mysteries.) They have elevated the body horror genre as whole, in my judgement, and I recommend any and all of them.
Next week I’ll only have a few reviews, for movies that didn’t quite fit anywhere else. Instead, I’ll try to sum up what I’ve learned about men’s and women’s horror movies, and maybe about men and women more generally (if I’m feeling daring), along the way.
III. Body horror: puberty and sexual awakenings
Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014), dir. Ana Lily Amirpour
A vampire walks the streets of an unnamed Iranian city, where she wears a burka instead of the traditional black cape. As the whole movie is shot in black and white, her costume flows across the screen like a pool of ink. It’s the most striking black costume since The Seventh Seal. The rest of the movie is as good as the cinematography. It’s slow and dreamy and never stoops to moralizing or self-interpretation. The vampire hunts on the edges of Iranian society: among drug dealers, prostitutes, the homeless, and cross-dressers. Maybe that’s because they’re the only people with any life in them. The streets of the city are otherwise nearly deserted, as if civil society had been sucked dry long ago, and the ditches and dry rivers are full of corpses. Whatever its political subtext, the movie is most affecting as a teen romance. The scene where two characters fall in love to a British pop song is the best invocation of young love—and the power of music to conjure it—that I can remember. This movie’s not even remotely scary. I didn’t care. It’s just a great movie.
4.5 out of 5 Marnies
Raw (2017), dir. Julia Ducournau
During a school initiation ritual, a French veterinary student eats raw meat, despite her strict vegan upbringing, and later finds herself desiring flesh in all kinds of new ways. Yes, it’s about a sexual awakening, but there’s almost no sex. Instead, it’s a movie about the incredible lengths people will go to repress or at least circumscribe their desires, with varying degrees of success. This movie, Ducournau’s first, announced her as an ambitious director with a great sense of humor, able to compose shots that are horrifying and hilarious at the same time. The final scene is shocking and surprising and yet makes perfect sense of everything that’s come before it. Bon appétite.
4.5 out of 5 Marnies
The Lure (2016), dir. Agnieszka Smoczyńska
A handsome young man plays his guitar on a beach. His love song attracts two mermaids, who swim up and sing, “Help us come ashore. / There’s no need to fear. / We won’t eat you my dear.” Right from the beginning, then, the question of the movie, and of so many heterosexual encounters, is who’s luring who, and to what end. The mermaids get jobs at a cabaret nightclub, so along with a sexual coming-of-age story, The Lure doubles as a story about country girls moving to the big city, with all of the fun and danger that entails. There are lots of song-and-dance numbers set to terrible Euro-pop. Yes, it’s silly; at the same time, though, the movie’s great at showing how the characters’ sexual desires are intertwined with other strong emotions, like homesickness, disgust, and loneliness. It’s genuinely weird and original, and I’m sorry to say I can’t imagine anything like it being made in the US. The very last shot took me a while to figure out. Once you get it, though, it’s devastating.
4 out of 5 Marnies
Blue My Mind (2017), dir. Lisa Brühlmann
A teenager, new to town, simultaneously gets her first period and realizes that her toes are sticking together. What will become of her? Where in the world does she belong? Her options are the loveless rigidity and lies of her bourgeois parents or the confused, drug-addled, predatory, nihilistic, casual sex culture of her peers. It’s not so much scary as sad. The message is that there is no safe harbor for a young woman’s sexuality. Better to swim out to sea.
4 out of 5 Marnies
Amer (2009), dir. Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani
I should admit that I wasn’t able to find this movie in English, so I had to fall back on my (limited) college Italian. Fortunately, dialogue is a secondary consideration in Amer. It’s a loving tribute to our beloved gialli, and as such it’s real interest is style, a succession of surreal images, colors, and camera angles. The plot, such as it is, unfolds over a few vignettes, each an important episode in the erotic (dream?) life of the main character. Classic gialli have a mystery or murder plot to spur them along. That isn’t the case here, so it’s slow going. I would recommend it for big fans of the genre, though not for the uninitiated. Much of it appears to be shot at that creepy mansion from Dario Argento’s Deep Red, which is, incidentally, where I’d recommend anyone interested in giallo begin.
3.5 out of 5 Marnies
IV. Body horror: pregnancy (and kids!)
Goodnight Mommy (2014), dir. Veronica Franz (and Severin Fiala)
Most horror movies about bad mothers present them as devourers. Unable to let their children grow up, they consume their little darlings instead. Franz switches the question around: what if the children won’t allow their mother to grow and change? The result is a clever, creepy thriller whose conclusion doesn’t quite live up to the promise of its first two acts. Still, as an exhumation of maternal fear (will having children be the end of me?), it’s hard to beat.
4 out of 5 Marnies
The Lodge (2019), Veronica Franz (and Severin Fiala)
Another Franz flick, another movie about a woman and the children who don’t trust her. This time it’s a young fiancé caring for her husband’s two children at a remote cabin in the snowy mountains. Maybe she’s losing it; maybe they’re hiding something from her. Either way, it’s a nice slow boil and genuinely scary. It’s amazing how much some simple clicks and squeaks and dissonant strings can add to an atmosphere of dread. I’m not sure sound is as important to any other genre. Just another reason to love horror movies: they bring all the elements of cinema into play, and what they’re ultimately playing with is you. Yes, it’s borrowing a lot from The Shining. Who cares? I had trouble sleeping after watching it. That’s a good sign.
4.5 out of 5 Marnies
Note: Which Franz movie you should watch depends on what you’re looking for. Goodnight Mommy is a more thought-provoking piece of feminist art; The Lodge is a more accomplished horror movie.
Also, make sure you watch the original Goodnight Mommy, not the recent remake.
Prevenge (2016), dir. Alice Lowe
Any movie whose first scene includes an extreme close-up of a pregnant tarantula is off to a promising start. “She’s just like you,” coos the pet store owner to a pregnant patron. Then she kills him—on orders from her unborn child. The fetus wants revenge for the death of its father, who apparently died in a climbing accident. As the mother investigates, however, she finds out that the truth may have been more complicated. To paraphrase a famous line of Hemingway criticism, which would apply to many of the movies that I watched for this project: the only good husband is a dead one, and even then there are questions. Honestly, the father didn’t add much to this movie. It would have been better without him, as the mother-baby dynamic was far more interesting on its own.
3.5 out of 5 Marnies
Titane (2021), dir. Julia Ducournau
A runway model with a metal plate in her head has a wild sexual encounter in a car; later on, something starts assembling inside her. Ducournau has clearly been watching her Cronenberg. Like that weirdo from Toronto, she splashes neon colors across the screen and focuses her camera on the increasingly porous boundary between the human body and its machines. The plot of Titane is all over the place, but the direction and cinematography were stylish enough to hold my attention anyway. At the end, it unexpectedly turns into a father-daughter story. So did her first film, Raw (see above). Although it’s not as cool as chrome and car shows, the family drama is the dynamic that Ducournau keeps coming back to. It’s one of the greatest subject matters for horror movies, too. Here’s hoping she puts the machines away for her next film and focuses on flesh and blood instead.
3.5 out of 5 Marnies
Good Manners (2018), dir. Juliana Rojas and Marco Dutra
A poor black nurse in Sao Paulo takes a job as a live-in nanny for a pregnant white woman. Without any family or friends, they develop an intense relationship. Then the nurse starts to worry when her employer sleepwalks and exhibits some unusual appetites. No Gerald, not for pickles. At first Good Manners seems to be making a rather academic point: the real monster in the apartment is racial capitalism. That theme is certainly in play, though it falls by the wayside after a shocking, mid-movie twist that sends the story in a completely different direction. Much like the Academy Award-winning Parasite, this is a movie about what people are willing to do for the people they care about, and what they’re willing to do to them, too. It’s got a steamy sex scene, a great sense of humor, and a less formulaic plot structure than the typical Hollywood horror flick. All of which I appreciated.
3.5 out of 5 Marnies
Honeymoon (2014), dir. Leigh Janiak
A cute couple honeymoons at her family cabin, where her behavior becomes progressively weirder and more sinister. It’s an effective little thriller and, isn’t trying to be much more. Janiak has a knack for suspenseful pacing and a good eye for creepy images, and the actors playing the young couple are great, first at portraying lovey-dovey newlyweds, and then at believably descending into confusion, anger, and fear. This is the only body horror movie of the bunch where the invader comes from outside. The invader seems to represent the fear that fertilization will make you a completely different person. I think this may be the only movie I saw that went out it way to make all the main characters likeable, which made its Lovecraftian conclusion all the harder to watch.
3.5 out of 5 Marnies
Scariest movie of the week: “The Lodge”
Most pointed feminist art: “Goodnight Mommy”
Most shocking moment: The final shot of “Raw”
Best movie for people who don’t like horror movies: “Girl Walks Home Alone at Night”
Best movie for people who may or may not like horror movies but definitely love Eurovision: “The Lure”