Carrie (1976): A Look at Misogyny in Horror Cinema
The idea that horror cinema acts to showcase male-dominated violence has served as a much-buzzed about topic for new wave feminist film theorists. Because of its repeated prevalence in films like Psycho (1960) and Friday the 13th (1980), the genre’s depiction of violence against women can be used to discuss popular culture’s role of normalizing and enforcing anti-female sentiments.
In the 1976 film adaptation of the Stephen King novel, Carrie, teenaged protagonist, Carrie White, is subject to cruel punishment after experiencing her first period and shortly thereafter, develops telekinetic powers. While some critics have been led to believe the film to be a feminist rendering of horror cinema with its central female cast, Carrie is problematic for numerous reasons when viewed this way. This essay will explore the ways Carrie and other films reinforce misogyny through the suppression of female sexuality and its portrayal of female monsters, as well as the masculinization of its lead women.
Carrie’s opening segment is not uncommon to traditional horror. With its sexually charged shower scene accompanied by soft music and diffused lighting, the initially blissful sequence is promptly overcome with terror at the commencement of Carrie’s first menstruation. When classmates berate the crying teen with tampons, yelling, “Plug it up! Plug it up!” feminist theory can interpret this not just as a case of high school bullying but as a metaphor of her oppressor’s attempt to “plug up” and suppress her femininity. This form of suppression where female sexual identity is shamed or punished is a common trope in horror cinema, especially in cases where women fall prey to violent men.
Movies such as Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) and Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) utilize this storytelling device to justify the murder of sexually active “bimbos” as punishment for engaging in sexual activity. While sexually active females are killed off gruesomely (and most often always first), men who participate in sex remain unscathed or are killed outside of the initial sexual context. Where men are killed due to error, women are punished simply for being female (Clover 34).
Differences in the sexes also appear when analyzing male vs. female monstrosity. In Her Body, Himself, Carol Clover notes the contrast between male and female killers. While men who commit murder often suffer from gender confusion or family crises, women are depicted as emotional slaves, acting out in revenge for prior abuse. Clover writes:
Female killers are few and their reasons for killing significantly [differs] from men’s… They show no gender confusion [nor] is their motive overtly psychosexual; their anger derives in most cases not from childhood experience but from specific moments in their adult lives in which they have been abandoned or cheated on by men.
This only reinforces the misogynistic view of women as uncontrollable, hormonal slaves.
Horror cinema’s misogynistic treatment of women is further associated with the fear of the abject, defined by Julia Kristeva in Powers of Horror as the reaction to a “threatened breakdown in meaning caused by the loss of distinction between subject and object or between self and other.” Barbara Creed builds on this definition in The Monstrous-Feminine as a feeling or entity that must be “propelled away from the body and [deposited] on the other side of an imaginary border which separates the self from that which threatens the self.” (Creed 9) Not only are women portrayed as bodies that expel a “polluting substance,” but this natural and unavoidable act of “pollution” is used to signify a pre-pubescent’s inescapable transformation into womanhood and monstrosity. Kate Maher writes, “Menstruation is one of the few aspects of femininity that has remained taboo within cinema… where menstruating women become horrific bleeding monsters.” (Maher 1) Coupled with Briefel’s characterization of the vengeful woman who only inflicts violence for past trauma (Briefel 59), the menstruating vagina, then, can be likened to a bleeding wound in which those who suffer can rightly inflict violence upon others.
This is evident not only in Carrie — whose first menstruation and resulting telekinetic powers leads to her eventual death — but also in newer films such as Raw (2015) where the protagonist’s descent into cannibalistic madness is coupled with roaring sexual urges that cannot be contained. In both cases, their changing bodies are punished: Carrie’s inability to control her anger causes her house to collapse, killing her, while Justine faces the moral dilemma of embracing her need for flesh or denying her bodily urges and remaining complicit within society. Carrie’s final act of revenge — as well as the death of both her and her mother — serves as the consequences of the failure of sexual repression to contain the monstrous-feminine (Lindsey 40).
With this in mind, we can determine that menstruation is the abject that must be dispelled, and the monstrous-feminine is the cusp of masculine vs. feminine, purity vs. impurity, and human vs. inhuman (Chusna & Mahmudah 13). If Creed’s description of the monstrous-feminine is related to women’s reproductive bodies, female monstrosity is as innate and unavoidable as menstruation; nothing in the world — save sterilization — can stop it.
Of course, films that focus on the female reproductive body aren’t the only types of horror film that punish femininity. While Creed argues that female monstrosity is related to the body and abjection, she writes:
The horror film’s obsession with blood, particularly the bleeding body of woman, where her body is transformed into the ‘gaping wound’, suggests that castration anxiety is a central concern of the horror film — particularly the slasher sub-genre. Woman’s body is slashed and mutilated, not only to signify her own castrated state, but also the possibility of castration for the male. (Creed 74)
In When the Woman Looks, Linda Williams argues, “What is feared in the monster… [is] not her own mutilation, but the power to mutilate and transform the vulnerable male.” (Williams 63) What Creed and Williams both insist, then, is that fear of women is not due to a difference in physicality; rather, it is her ability to castrate and return the gaze that is truly quite frightening. This is problematic because it reinforces the normalization of violence against women for the sake of male spectatorship.
Still, there are other ways that the genre reinforces misogynistic stereotypes of its female characters. Creed’s take on the monstrous-feminine more broadly challenges the traditional horror trope that conceptualizes women as damsels in distress. In movies where bisexuality of the gaze gives power to the female protagonist, for example, the sexually devoid Final Girl takes on male qualities and becomes androgynous. This suggests that when a woman is the driver of narrative, it is through the degradation of femininity and the embodiment of the hyper-masculine. Women in horror film are not depicted simply as strong women but instead are weaker, castrated versions of men.
That being said, it is evident that a common recipe exists when fleshing out female depictions in horror cinema: women are almost always murdered, (especially when sexually active), though when they are not, are either sexless or have simply begun menstruating. As NYM Gamer’s Bianca Batti writes, “The only way to explore female puberty, menstruation, and sexuality is through fear,” (Batti 1) a fact that is evident in Carrie with the shaming of her first menstruation, the suppression of her sexuality, and Carrie’s embodiment of the monstrous-feminine. In the eyes of the audience, the changing, hormonal bodies of female teens and growing women are but a force to be reckoned with.
