Women and the Revival of Horror
Last week at the Cannes Film Festival, Jury President and renowned filmmaker Spike Lee accidentally awarded the top prize as the first prize of the evening. Luckily, the premature announcement did not reduce the significance of French director Julia Ducournau’s Palme d’Or win. Titane, Ducournau’s sophomore film, is an electrifying horror story about a woman that has a sexual relationship with a car. Though not yet available to watch in the US (distributor Neon is set to release the film this Fall), Titane is one of the most anticipated body-horror films in recent memory due to it being one of the only horror films to ever take home the coveted Palme d’Or.
Ducournau is no stranger to the horror genre. Her debut film Raw tells the story of a vegetarian woman who becomes a cannibal with the help of her sister. It’s gory, it’s disgusting, and yet it’s a beautiful depiction of the trials and tribulations of growing into your womanhood. Raw (and I expect Titane as well) represents a shift away from the one-dimensional damsel-in-distress. The new wave of horror focuses the narrative around the trauma that inflicts horror rather than the horror that inflicts trauma, which is best represented through a female protagonist.
As a self-proclaimed scaredy-cat and teenage film snob, I was never one for horror in my younger years. Franchises like The Conjuring, Saw, and The Purge were fun, but they were never stories that I could connect to on a deeper level. They are “horror for the sake of horror,” as I always used to say. And there is nothing wrong with that! These films are entertaining and box-office triumphs. Movies are meant to be enjoyed, not just rated on Letterboxd.
That being said, my entire perspective on horror movies changed when I was driving in the backseat of my dad’s car on our way to Salem, Massachusetts, the sight of the infamous Salem Witch Trials. To get into the Salem mood, we decided to watch Robert Eggers’ 2015 supernatural horror film The Witch (also known as “The VVitch”). I had heard from some of my friends that they thought it was slow, but when I watched it I found it anything but boring. Eggers did not rely on jump-scares, haunted houses, and gore to craft his horror film. Instead, he built a traumatizing tension and ambiance that had my heart pounding so loudly, you could almost hear it during the quiet and creepy forest scenery shots. What’s more is that I could empathize with Anya Taylor-Joy’s character Thomasin, a teenage girl longing for freedom from her oppressive Puritan family. The suffocating oppression of Puritanism and isolation are profoundly executed through Thomasin’s character in a way that would not be as impactful should the protagonist be her brother or her father. It is Thomasin’s development as a woman that gives The Witch its depth.
As I began to watch more horror films that have come out the last few years, I noticed the shift in storylines from horror films that dominated the 90s and 2000s. Jordan Peele, one of the pioneers of contemporary horror, explores the horror genre through the lens of Black trauma in Get Out and Us. In the latter, Lupita Nyong’o plays Adelaide and her doppelganger, who reflects the trauma of xenophobia and classism. The Ari Aster films Hereditary and Midsommar both center around a woman’s trauma leading to further traumatic events. Toni Colette’s character in Hereditary suffers from generational mental illness and Florence Pugh’s in Midsommar grapples with the deaths of her whole family. Like Thomasin in The Witch, both characters undergo such trauma that they become susceptible to manipulation leading to cult initiations and Satanic rituals. The nature of horror is trauma, and whose trauma best defines the horror genre than that of women?
Of course, horror films centered around the experience of women are no new phenomenon. The concept of a “scream queen” is most identified with Jamie Lee Curtis and Sidney Prescott in the Halloween and the Scream franchises respectively. Iconic horror movies like Psycho and The Exorcist also feature scream queens, and even horror films dating back to the 1920s like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari have prominent female characters. Carrie (1976) is one of the most famous horror films of all time and centers solely around Sissy Spacek as a teenage girl with supernatural powers. Though it is a classic, Carrie is very similar to contemporary horror films due to Carrie’s trauma from bullies and her abusive mother, which is the supernatural force that propels the narrative forward.
Horror is one of the few genres where women have near-equal screen time to men, but the role of women in horror movies has often been one dimensional, oversexualized and exploitative. Sex and violence are a Hollywood match made in heaven. And that is not to say that the horror films of today do not have these elements too—all of these women characters are undergoing trauma that steers the horror genre. But the shift from female trauma as a prop to female trauma as the primary plot point is what differentiates contemporary horror from horror of the past. I'm not saying that these are empowering films for women, but there is a truth to them that makes the stories that much more powerful.
Though the shift of female stories in horror has completely revived the genre for viewers like me, it is not without its faults. Nearly all of the aforementioned films have male directors. These are male directors telling stories of female trauma (often at the hands of men). Female horror directors are practically non-existent, even though horror stories are dominated by our experiences. That is why Julia Ducournau is such a refreshing new member of the horror party her stories are teeth-grindingly disturbing, but they are truly her own. If you had told me a couple years ago that the movie I was most excited to see was a body-horror mechanophilia film directed by a woman whose previous film is about cannibalistic sisterhood, chances are I would laugh in your face. The revival of great horror films (and Cannes Film Festival-winning horror films!) just goes to show that true horror is not in creaking attics and paranormal possessions, but in the inherent trauma that lies deep within us all.
Cover Photo by IMDb. Edited by Katrina Kwok.
