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Monster Pains: Masochism, Menstruation, and Identification in the Horror FilmAuthor(s): Aviva BriefelSource: Film Quarterly, Vol. 58, No. 3 (Spring 2005), pp. 16-27Published by: University of California PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/fq.2005.58.3.16 .

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Aviva Briefel

Monster PainsMasochism, Menstruation,and Identification in theHorror Film

It hurts to be a monster. The make-up and costumesalone could make you scream. Encased in padding,

plaster, and greasepaint, Boris Karloff endured impos-sible tortures to become Frankenstein’s creature. Ashe described, “I felt, most of the time, as if I werewearing a clammy shroud. No doubt it added to therealism!”1 Bela Lugosi traced his debilitating drug ad-diction to the physical pain he experienced whilemaking horror films such as Dracula.2 Lon Chaney,the man of a thousand monstrous faces, seemed totake a sort of pleasure in his suffering, anticipating itbefore the shooting of his films and prolonging it dur-ing their production. Referring to the wire apparatusinstalled in Chaney’s nostrils to give him the Phantomof the Opera’s cavernous nose, a process that wouldoften lead him to “bleed like hell,” the film’s cinema-tographer confirmed, “He suffered, you know.”3 JoanCrawford, Chaney’s costar in The Unknown, a 1927flick about a man who amputates his arms for a wo-man who has a phobia about being held, described hissurprising devotion to this role: “Mr. Chaney couldhave unstrapped his arms between scenes. He did not.He kept them strapped one day for five hours, endur-ing such numbness, such torture, that when we got tothis scene, he was able to convey not just realism butsuch emotional agony that it was shocking . . . andfascinating.”4

But despite its indulgence in various slashingsand slicings, the horror film may seem quite obliviousto pain. Moralistic critiques of the genre often accuseit of desensitizing its audiences to the realities of suf-fering and suggest that its fascinated explorations ofthe various things that can happen to a human bodyfavor spectacle over “real” feeling. In what follows, Iwill suggest that pain is central to how we relate to the

horror film—but not as a vehicle through which wecan sympathize with the monster’s victims. Instead, Iwill propose that it is the monster’s pain that deter-mines audience positioning in the horror film. Thegenre presents two contrasting modes of monstroussuffering: masochism and menstruation. These twooptions dictate spectatorial identification in genderedterms. Masochism is central to the construction ofmale monsters, who initiate their sadistic rampageswith acts of self-mutilation. These “masochistic mo-ments”5 close off the film to viewer identification anddraw our attention to the process of identification it-self. Neither complicit in nor victimized by the on-screen violence, we remain at a safe critical distancefrom the cinematic events. The female counterpart tothe act of self-mutilation is menstruation, a narrativeevent that positions the audience in an uncomfortablyclose relationship to the female monster. These differ-ences between the masochistic and menstrual plots ofhorror cinema expose an underlying conservatism in apotentially radical genre.

The Masochistic Monster

Before they set off to harm others, male monstersrevel in masochistic acts. In Rouben Mamoulian’s

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Pre-teen trauma in Audrey Rose

Film Quarterly, Vol. 58, Issue 3, pages 16-27. ISSN 0015-1386, electronic ISSN 1533-8630. © 2005 by The Regents of the University of California.All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the

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Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931) and in subsequent filmversions of the story, Jekyll’s drinking of the trans-formative potion is an act of both intense pain andpleasure, as the doctor writhes around his laboratorybefore turning into the toothy, smiling Hyde. SethBrundle’s slow degeneration into a monstrous insectin David Cronenberg’s The Fly (1986) is marked byhis fascination with the various putrefactions andamputations that his body undergoes along the way.Clive Barker’s 1980s Hellraiser series (originallytitled Sadomasochists from beyond the Grave)6 ispopulated by humans who turn into monsters byseeking the most intense experiences of pleasure andpain: once they solve the cursed puzzle box, theirflesh is ripped apart by pins and hooks and they real-ize that “Some things have to be endured, and that’swhat makes the pleasure so sweet.” In the originalNightmare on Elm Street (dir. Wes Craven, 1984) andits many sequels, Freddy Krueger prefaces his killingsof teenagers by gleefully engaging in acts of self-mutilation, saying, “Watch this!” and cutting off his“real” fingers with his razor claws or slicing his ownhead open. Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare (dir.Rachel Talalay, 1991), the sixth and definitely not thefinal installment of the series, features a scene of theadolescent Freddy cutting his torso with a razorbladeand laughing. His stepfather, played by Alice Cooper,appears with a belt and asks, “Are you ready for it,boy?” Freddy welcomes his beating with gusto, beg-ging, “Thank you, sir. Can I have another?”

Although it acknowledges the centrality of maso-chism to the genre, recent horror film criticism over-looks the monster’s self-mutilations. Critics tend tofocus instead on the spectator’s masochistic pleasurein watching films full of suffering and carnage, oftengeared toward characters who are meant to representthe audience in some way.7 In her famous study of theslasher genre, Men, Women, and Chain Saws, CarolClover defines masochism as the “dominant” aes-thetic in “horror cinema and . . . one of that genre’sdefining characteristics; . . . the experience horrormoviegoers seek . . . is rooted in a pain/pleasure sensi-bility.”8 Clover focuses much of her argument aboutthe masochistic elements of the horror film on the“Final Girl,” the androgynous female character whosuffers the monster’s tortures throughout the film, butwho ultimately defeats him and survives. The FinalGirl’s subjection to and eventual victory over the mon-ster provide a site of identification for the male spec-tator. Revising Laura Mulvey’s view that the malespectator’s gaze is sadistic, Clover argues that hisidentification with the Final Girl demonstrates a maso-

chistic impulse: “The willingness and even eagerness(so we judge from these films’ enormous popularity)of the male viewer to throw in his emotional lot, if onlytemporarily, with not only a woman but a woman infear and pain, at least in the first instance, would seemto suggest that he has a vicarious stake in that fear andpain.”9 In his essay “Masculinity and the Horror Film,”Peter Hutchings takes Clover’s argument further bysuggesting that the monster can become a site of maso-chistic identification. He contends that the male mon-ster frequently suffers in the horror film; the force ofevil becomes vulnerable in the course of the narrative,as evidenced by Dracula’s and King Kong’s persecu-tions or by Michael Meyers’ pathetic loss of his maskat the end of Halloween (dir. John Carpenter, 1978).According to Hutchings, the monster’s sufferingoffers a masochistic position with which the male spec-tator can identify. This spectatorial position is pleas-urable, in that it allows the spectator to experience a

17

Boris Karloff as Frankenstein’s monster




“willing subjection” that makes his return to authorityall the more powerful.10

The monster’s masochism does not allow forsympathetic identifications. It is a profoundly disturb-ing occurrence, the shock value of which emanatesboth from the unexpectedness of the monster hurtinghimself when his apparent role in the film is to harmothers, and from its challenge to conventional notionsof monstrosity. Is the monster a show-off, bragging tohis prospective victims (and, by extension, to his audi-ence) that he can withstand what they cannot? Is heusing his own body to preview what he will ultimatelydo to them, thereby disrupting the boundary betweenvictims and monsters? And, perhaps most impor-tantly, is he capable of feeling pain? In the flashbackto Freddy Krueger’s adolescence in Freddy’s Dead,the young monster tells his abusive stepfather, fromwhom he has just demanded more punishment, “Youwanna know the secret of pain? If you can stop feelingit, you can start using it.” Freddy’s statement about theorigins of monstrosity reverses Freud’s claim in hisThree Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905) thatmasochism is “nothing more than an extension ofsadism turned round upon the subject’s own self.”11

Instead, the monster’s statement follows Freud’s laterwork, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), in ac-knowledging the presence of a “primary masochism”that can precede sadistic behavior; once he has de-livered his declamation on pain, Freddy directs hisrazorblade toward his father.12 His transition from in-flicting violence on himself to turning the violenceoutwards suggests that monstrosity originates whenthe ability to resist pain turns into a desire to harmothers.

This trajectory dictates the spectator’s own proc-ess of identification in watching the masochistic mon-ster. Freddy’s suggestion that the monster does notfeel pain when he wounds himself inhibits audienceidentification in this cinematic moment. The monstercreates a self-referential space around himself thatcannot be penetrated by any of our sympathetic iden-tifications, which might emerge when he is attackedby angry villagers or Final Girls. As such, the maso-chistic moment epitomizes Elaine Scarry’s discussionof pain more generally as representing an “absolutesplit between one’s sense of one’s own reality and thereality of other persons.”13 The dramatic separationbetween the monster and his audience places us in aspectatorial limbo in which we are unable to situateourselves on screen. When the monster attacks hisvictim after his masochistic act, however, we canbegin to claim our proper place in the film—with the

monster’s victims. Just as the monster’s violence isfirst directed toward himself and then projected intohis surroundings, our identification must initially beself-reflexive (it cannot go anywhere during the maso-chistic moment) before it can extend into the cine-matic world.

Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre(1974) follows this sequence in tracing the misfor-tunes of a group of five teenagers on a road trip whofall prey to a chainsaw-wielding, cannibalistic family.All the teenagers are massacred except for Sally, theFinal Girl, who escapes at the end. In one of the film’searly scenes, the kids pick up an ominous lookinghitchhiker, who grabs the knife of the disabled teen,Franklin, and proceeds to slice his own hand whilelaughing maniacally. This act suspends our identi-fication with both the hitchhiker (the monster) and theteenagers. The hitchhiker’s apparent disregard of thepain that would ordinarily result from self-mutilationbars us from identifying with him; he is involved in apurely self-reflexive, and thereby exclusionary, ac-tion. Recalling Freddy’s statement, we are uncertainabout the nature or extent of his suffering. On theother hand, we cannot fully place ourselves in the teen-agers’ positions. Their horrified screams and ques-tions—“What are you doing to yourself?”—invite the

18

Bela Lugosi in Tod Browning’s 1931 Dracula




audience to notice the incomprehensible horror of thesituation, but not in the same way as the teenagers.Their stupefaction renders them somewhat stupid. Asconnoisseurs of the genre, we know that their questionshould not be, “What are you doing to yourself?” but,“What are you going to do to us?”

Once the scene shifts from masochism to sadism,however, we discover our proper place on screen.Having stabbed himself, the hitchhiker moves on tothe sadistic act of stabbing Franklin, and the eventsleading up to the attack drift away from the self-referentiality of the monster’s masochism. This transi-tion is initiated by the hitchhiker’s offer of his ownknife to one of the teenage boys, as if inviting him toemulate his masochistic gesture. The hitchhiker thendecides to take a picture of his teenage audience. Thisseemingly random act, which has its double in therandomness of the masochistic moment, restores thecharacters to their proper roles and allows us to beginour process of identification. Franklin’s reaction tobeing the subject of the shot—“You took my pic-ture!”—reminds us that it is we who are the real sub-jects of the horror film. The genre is notorious forconfronting its target audience—in this case, youngAmericans—with cinematic images of themselves invarious states of danger. The parallel between the kidsin the van and the spectators reaches its peak when thehitchhiker points out the economic relationship inwhich they are now involved: “It’s a nice picture; youcan pay me now, it’s two dollars.” The possibility of afinancial transaction linked to seeing pictures mirrorsthe spectators’ seeming masochism in paying moneyto be terrorized. The masochistic monster takes on therole of director in this scene, reminding spectators thatthey rely on him to have their picture taken, to findtheir proper space on screen. When he burns the pho-tograph shortly afterwards, he confirms what weexpect from the slasher film—a visual display of ourown decimation.14

The impenetrability of the masochistic moment,coupled with the enigma of the monster’s pain, cre-ates an uncertainty that extends throughout the narra-tive. The film never allows us to forget that our subjectposition originates in the monster’s self-reflexive vio-lence. Franklin provides a model of the impact thatthis initial encounter with the monster will have on theaudience. He is traumatized after his experience withthe hitchhiker, and, until he is cut to pieces himself,tries to piece together what he has just witnessed. Fas-cinated with the knife, he scrutinizes it for traces ofthe hitchhiker’s blood and wields it dangerously closeto his own hand, while pondering, “Yeah, it takes

something, though, just to do that to yourself like hedid.” The monster’s act also haunts the viewer and be-comes the basis of our horror spectatorship. We gravi-tate toward the hitchhiker, but the strangeness of hisact and the unknowability of his pain prevent us fromfully identifying with him. While we do end up align-ing ourselves with the teenagers, this identification islimited by what we witnessed early on in the film. Wemay feel endangered by the images of violence onscreen, but we are ultimately numb to the pain theyrepresent.

Our spectatorial distance is also assured evenwhen we encounter monsters who seem to ask us tofeel for them. The monster’s masochism suspends ouridentification even when he visibly suffers. Cronen-berg’s The Fly, a film that tests the line between horrorand melodrama,15 keeps us at a safe distance fromSeth Brundle’s grueling transformation into an insect.Like his masochistic predecessors, Seth’s entranceinto monstrosity results from a self-inflicted act: inthis case, walking into the incompletely tested tele-porter pod he is in the process of designing. Althoughhe does not choose the disaster that follows his reck-lessness—he fuses with a fly lurking in the machine—the film suggests that he is the willing victim of hisown experiment. Cronenberg repeatedly reminds us

19

Jeff Goldblum in David Cronenberg’s The Fly




of the masochistic nature of this act in the variousscenes of Seth (a.k.a. Brundlefly) precipitating hisphysical demise by removing parts of his body, whichhe stores in a bathroom cabinet he has named the“Brundle Museum of Natural History.” His extractionof his own teeth and nails recalls the troubling detach-ment with which the hitchhiker and Freddy performtheir self-mutilations. At the same time, however,there are moments in the film in which Seth is clearlyaffected by his degradation, and, in the words of hisgirlfriend, Ronnie, is “scared, and angry, and desper-ate.” When his ear falls off toward the beginning of histransformation, he pleads, “I’m scared. Help me.Please, please help me.” Although we are not com-pletely immune to his pathetic changes, we are forcedto maintain a safe distance from Brundlefly. Cronen-berg never lets us forget that we are watching a film.He depicts Seth’s journey through the teleporter as apassage from reality to representation; as the scientisttells his girlfriend, the machine provides an “interpre-tation” of whatever goes through it.16 The Seth whocomes out at the other end is a film version of the“real” Seth. His cinematic identity begins as an ag-grandized, narcissistic projection of himself (likemany larger-than-life film stars, he develops super-human strength, a fabulous sex drive, and an unre-lenting ego) and ends up as a B-movie monster (hisexplanation that he has been “spliced” with a flyevokes the film editing that makes such monsters pos-sible).17 Seth’s status as a representation is furtherconfirmed by the introduction of a real camera intothe narrative: the one through which he and Ronniemap his mutation into Brundlefly. The double media-tion of the teleporter and camera distances us from thescientist and his suffering. His pain is like the steakthat he sends through the machine early on in the film;it starts off as the real thing, and ends up “synthetic.”The teleporter and the camera both allow flesh to “getlost in the translation.” The reflexivity of Seth’s origi-nary masochism heralds an equally self-referentialmode of narrative that foregrounds cinematic tech-nology over transparent affect.

Cronenberg’s film develops another effectivestrategy for distancing us from its celluloid monster: itprovides a nightmarish vision of what the alternativemight be. The biggest threat posed by Seth is a suffo-cating intimacy. As Adam Knee writes, the film pre-sents a claustrophobic view of romantic relationshipsand suggests that “getting involved means havingoneself inextricably fused with another.”18 By the endof the narrative, when Seth’s masochism has mutatedinto sadism, he tries to coerce the now-pregnant Ron-

nie to fuse with him in the teleporter. This fusionwould be dangerous to the spectators as well, sinceRonnie is our point of identification in the narrative; itis through her that we know when to feel disgust, fear,or pity.19 Were she to be spliced with Brundlefly, ourmediated vision would be endangered, and we toomight end up as part of the fly/man/woman/baby messresulting from the teleportation. Cronenberg saves usfrom this debilitating overidentification by conflatingSeth with the cinematic apparatus at the end of thefilm: his attempts to meld with his girlfriend fail, andhe splices with the teleporter instead, thus losing allclaims to flesh.

The film presents us with a nightmare of ultimatefusion only to release us from its actualization. Ron-nie gives us a sense of what such a union would en-tail. Even after she has exterminated her insectilelover in an act that lies somewhere between a mercykilling and self-defense, she must deal with the con-sequences of her pregnancy. Seth had curtailed her at-tempts to have an abortion by crashing into theoperating room and abducting her. Although she hadpleaded earlier on that she wanted the fetus “out ofmy body now . . . I’ll do it myself if I have to,” thenarrative ends with her entrapment within the biolog-ical imperative of pregnancy. Were the film to traceher own monstrous transformation into the mother ofa baby fly—it gives us a vision of this earlier on, inshowing her nightmare of giving birth to a horrificlarva—we might not be able to separate ourselves aseasily from her as we did from Seth.20 As I will dis-cuss in the next section, the female monster demandsthe very claustrophobic closeness from which Cro-nenberg mercifully spares us.

Cramp:Why Female Monsters Make Us Cry

As The Fly begins to suggest, the horror spectator’snumbness depends on a gendered system of identi-fication; the masochistic monster is always male. Fe-male monsters do not inflict pain on themselvesbefore undertaking their sadistic rampages. On thecontrary, they tend to commit acts of violence out ofrevenge for earlier abuse by parents, partners, rapists,and other offenders. Brian de Palma’s Carrie (1976)presents a textbook example of this model, as CarrieWhite’s fiery destruction of her teachers and peers ispreceded by countless scenes of her victimization: sheis physically and emotionally abused by her mother;pelted with tampons by teenage girls in the locker

20



room; and humiliated by having pig’s blood dumpedon her by her classmates during her brief stint as promqueen. In Cronenberg’s The Brood (1979), Nora re-sponds to her childhood of abuse by spawning anarmy of dwarf-sized minions who murder the objectsof her anger (her mother, her father, her daughter’skindergarten teacher). Jason Voorhees’s mother fromFriday the Thirteenth (dir. Sean Cunningham, 1980)follows in the footsteps of the female monster byslaughtering the teenage camp counselors who killedher son through their negligence; they were too busymaking out to hear his drowning cries.

When the female monster engages in masochisticacts, she does so either by coercion from an outsideforce or as a way of terminating her monstrosity. Thehorror film is rife with examples of women who com-pulsively harm themselves once they have been pos-sessed. In The Exorcist (dir. William Friedkin, 1973),Regan is compelled by the demon within her to stabherself with a crucifix in the face and crotch. Friedkinexplains that when choosing her makeup for the film,he “thought that her disfiguration should come fromsomething she did to herself.”21 Her self-inflictedpain recalls the male monster’s masochism but lacksits intentionality. The passivity of such self-mutila-tions is expressed by the character Frankie in the1999 film Stigmata (dir. Rupert Wainwright). Pos-sessed by a combination of holy and unholy forces,she is made to bleed Christ’s wounds. When a doctorimplies that Frankie has inflicted these gashes on her-self, she retorts, “You keep saying ‘she,’ but I didn’tdo this!” Her resistance to becoming a monstrousbeing (her voice and appearance change in a mannerrecalling Regan) suggests the passivity inherent inthese unwanted wounds. Pinhead, from the secondHellraiser film (dir. Tony Randel, 1988), asserts theimportance of intentionality to male masochismwhen he denies torture to a young, mute girl who hassolved the puzzle box. Rather than subjecting her tothe “sweet suffering” he reserves for men who will-ingly enter his domain, he declares, “It is not handsthat call us, it is desire,” and leaves her alone. Whenwomen do assert a more active control over their self-inflicted pain, it is often out of a self-destructive impulse that eliminates rather than generates mon-strosity. Carrie uses her telekinetic powers to kill her-self and her mother; Ripley jumps into a fiery pit onceshe has been inseminated by the alien in Alien 3 (dir.David Fincher, 1992); and Sarah in The Hunger (dir.Tony Scott, 1983) stabs herself in the jugular to avoidbecoming a vampire like her lover Miriam.22 Thesefemale characters demonstrate a form of masochism

that is intended to eliminate—rather than unleash—their monstrosity.

While male monsters wound themselves beforeturning to violence, female monsters menstruate. Vio-lence in the horror film is often initiated by the femalemonster getting her period, an event that is eithersuggested or overtly displayed. Carrie and JohnFawcett’s teenage-girl werewolf film, Ginger Snaps(2000), both graphically show their female leads’menstruation as a precursor—or even a prerequisite—to their committing acts of violence. Other films, suchas The Exorcist and Audrey Rose (dir. Robert Wise,1977), imply that menstruation heralds monstrosity,as both of their victims become possessed (once theyreach puberty. Menstruation, or its absence, is alsocentral to films dealing with women’s monstrous re-productions, such as The Fly, with its ominous treat-ment of Ronnie’s pregnancy, and Roman Polanski’sRosemary’s Baby (1968). Rosemary and her husbandcarefully map out her menstrual cycle in planning herpregnancy. Beyond this, menstruation can exist as ametaphorical condition in the horror film, particularlyin the case of female vampires; as Barbara Creedwrites, the vampire is a “menstrual monster.”23 Count-ess Zaleska in Lambert Hillyer’s Dracula’s Daughter(1936) and Miriam in The Hunger are both inflictedwith a “curse” that compels them to drink the blood oftheir victims.24

In fact, the horror film positions menstruation asthe structural double of the masochistic moment of-fered by male monsters. At the beginning of Carrie,we witness the nerdy adolescent girl getting herperiod for the first time. De Palma presents this eventas a rewriting of the famous shower scene from Psycho(1960). For Carrie, a student at Bates High School, as

21

Piper Laurie gets what’s coming to her in Carrie.




for Hitchcock’s Marion Crane, a temporary lodger atthe Bates Motel, the shower is at first a refuge fromexternal anxieties, a comforting site of self-pleasuring.The shots in both scenes are fragmentary, fetishizingthe body’s pleasure and then its pain.25 Our languor-ous attention to Carrie’s physicality is disrupted bythe sudden appearance of a stream of blood from thevery spot between her legs that she had just beenstroking. With its intertexutal reference to Psycho, thescene suggests that her blood is the outpouring of awound instead of a sign of healthy puberty.26 ButDe Palma’s film implies that Carrie, unlike Marion,has inflicted this wound on herself through her illicittouching. The close-ups on Carrie’s hands and legs as she engages in and eventually bleeds from her“self-abuse” mirror the camera’s attention to thehitchhiker’s self-mutilations in The Texas ChainsawMassacre. The experience in the shower leads to Car-rie’s later sadistic acts, as she acquires her destructivetelekinetic powers right after getting her period: heranger makes a bathroom light explode. Eventuallycovered in pig’s blood rather than menstrual blood,she will use these powers to burn down her prom.

And yet, the similarities between Carrie’s menstru-ation and the masochistic moment end up reinforcingtheir essential differences. While both herald the ad-vent of monstrosity, menstruation appears as a pas-sive, uncontrollable act that reflects an equally passiveidentity. The film misleads us with its suggestion that

Carrie has caused her own period through her mastur-bation. As soon as we meet her mother, we realize thatthis is how she would read the scene, as she brutallypunishes her daughter in one of the most heartbreak-ing moments of the narrative. As viewers, we want todistance ourselves from the mother’s Christian, pro-hibitive attitude, and thus we remember that periodsare not caused by masturbation, that they will happenregardless of how steamy Carrie’s showers are. Carriehas as little control over what her body does in theshower as she will later have over her victims; sheseems always on the point of asking, “Did I do that?”The film taunts Carrie with the impossibility of hermasochism through its repeated attention to a statueof Saint Sebastian, which Mrs. White keeps in thecloset where she locks her daughter for punishment.Saint Sebastian, the unofficial patron saint ofmasochism, stares reproachfully at the young girl as amodel of what she can never be. Carrie reacts to hersuffering as one might, by crying and screaming,rather than by enjoying or controlling her pain.27 Be-cause Carrie is unable to stop feeling pain, she cannotuse it as effectively as her male counterparts, whoseviolence often displays an obsessive control.

Carrie’s inability to manage her pain and to con-trol her violence affects how we place ourselves in thefilm. At first, it seems that the shower scene parallelsthe structure of identification produced by the maso-chistic moment. When Carrie gets her period, we canneither identify with her cruel classmates, who yell,“Plug it up!” while pelting her with tampons, nor canwe identify with Carrie, whose shock at her ownblood reveals a disquieting and even reprehensibleinnocence. As her gym teacher and mentor, MissCollins, tells the high-school principal, “The thing is,I know how they felt. . . . The whole thing made mewant to take her and shake her, too. . . . It was just herperiod, for God’s sake.” By the end of the showerscene, however, we are firmly situated in the body ofthe suffering teenager. The female monster denies usthe space and numbness afforded by the male mon-ster’s masochism. Carol Clover begins Men, Women,and Chain Saws with a quote from Stephen King re-garding his character’s appeal: “And one reason forthe success of the story in both print and film, I think,lies in this: Carrie’s revenge is something that any stu-dent who has ever had his gym shorts pulled down inPhys Ed or his glasses thumb-rubbed in study hallcould approve of.”28 Much of the film’s appeal isbased on the suffocating intimacy that we are made toshare with Carrie. This intimacy is represented by hertelekinesis, an unwanted power that projects her into

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Susan Swift and Marsha Mason in Audrey Rose




the surrounding world. In contrast to the teleportationdevice of The Fly, which creates a separation betweenthe viewer and Seth Brundle, Carrie’s telekinetic pow-ers project outwards and eliminate the space betweenherself and those around her. It is a supernatural mani-festation of the aggressive demands of sympathy.

Even at the very end of Carrie, when the younggirl’s telekinetic powers have destroyed her highschool, her mother, and herself, she returns to us anddemands our attention. The very last scene of the filmportrays Sue’s (the only one of Carrie’s female peerswho tried to help her) post-prom nightmare. Shedreams that she is slowly drifting through a landscapebearing markers of Carrie’s absence: the barren earthwhere her house once stood and a “For Sale” sign thatresembles a graveyard cross, covered with the sinistergraffiti, “Carrie White burns in hell.” Sentimentalmusic pervades the scene. When Sue bends down toput flowers on what seems to be Carrie’s fresh grave, ahand shoots out and grabs her wrist. This scene marksthe violent return of Sue’s repressed sympathy for the

monstrous Carrie. Carrie’s hand is at once threateningand pathetic, as it reaches out to remind us of its suf-fering. The film rewrites the typical return of the mon-ster in the horror film, a genre that notoriously resistsclosure, as a moment of sentimental violence.

Similarly, Regan in The Exorcist tries to garnersympathy when she is deep within Satan’s control;who can forget the scene in which the pathetic words“Help Me” appear on the surface of her repulsivebody? This demand for sympathy does not workagainst her monstrosity, but forms its very core. Thepossessed young girl poses the threat of a stifling inti-macy that rivals the danger of complete fusion at theend of The Fly. When Father Karras prepares to exor-cise her, her demonic voice expresses delight at theprospect of an act that “would bring us together.” Ful-filling this promise, she temporarily assumes the iden-tity of Karras’s deceased mother, and addresses theson in a suffering voice; he responds by yelling,mostly to convince himself, “You’re not my mother!”By the end of the film, Karras does end up fusing with

23

Carrie wreaks havoc at the prom.




Regan’s Satanic host as he commands it to take himover instead. Karras is the victim of the female mon-ster’s overwhelming demand for sympathy; he suc-cumbs to a collapse in boundaries between self andother.29 This type of stifling fusion is also provoked byMiriam in The Hunger, whose crushing love subjectsher partners to a lifetime of vampirism, ending with apainful span of accelerated aging. Miriam gets herdue when she is murdered by her lovers’ violent affec-tion, as they escape from their coffins to stifle her intheir embrace.

Like Miriam’s bisexual appeal, the menstrual plotdraws both male and female viewers into a painfulidentification with the monster. It is precisely the factthat horror seems to originate from within thewoman’s body that allows for a generalized identifi-cation with the monster, one that draws in male andfemale spectators alike. Critics tend to insist on thefemale monster’s status as an ungraspable Other,whose abject body defies comprehension or identifi-cation. In her essay on Carrie, for example, ShelleyStamp Lindsey writes, “In charting Carrie’s path tomature womanhood, the film presents female sexual-ity as monstrous and constructs femininity as a sub-ject position impossible to occupy.”30 On the contrary,I would argue that the female monstrous body is com-pletely knowable, that it is one of the main sites ofpredictability in these films. The viewer is trained toexpect that once the female body bleeds, it will breeda very predictable form of horror. This predictabilitycompounds our identification with the female monster—her changes and pain become our own.

John Fawcett’s cult film Ginger Snaps magnifiesthis predictability in its self-conscious rewriting ofCarrie. It tells the story of Ginger and Brigitte Fitz-gerald, misfit teenage sisters living in small-townCanada. One night, Ginger is bitten by a werewolf, andshortly afterwards she gets her period. Along with thecurse come disturbing secondary characteristics, in-cluding excessive, fur-like body hair, the growth of atail, an insatiable sexual appetite and bloodlust. At first,both girls treat Ginger’s menstruation as an extremeyet understandable predicament. They know what issupposed to happen when girls get their periods;Ginger, for instance, treats her first cycle as a cliché,telling her sister, “If I start hanging around tampondispensers, moaning about PMS, shoot me, okay?”When Ginger’s symptoms worsen and it becomesclear, as her sister explains, that “something’s wrong—like more than you being just female,” those aroundher continue to treat her physical changes as part ofnormal female development. The girls’ mother greets

them with touchy-feely discussions about growing up(she announces at the dinner table, “Our little girl’s ayoung woman now”), while the school nurse insiststhat heavy blood flow (Ginger is gushing at this point)is perfectly normal. Pointing to a chart of the uterus,she tells the sisters, “I’m sure it’s a lot of blood; it’s aperiod,” and insists on the familiarity of Ginger’sstory: “Expect it every 28 days . . . for the next 30years.” When Brigitte tries to bring up her sister’s se-vere hirsuteness and abdominal pain, the nurse re-sponds that these symptoms “come with the territory.”These reassurances echo Regan’s mother’s attempts tocalm her daughter about her dramatic physicalchanges with the platitude, “It’s just like the doctorsaid—it’s nerves, and that’s all. Now just take yourpills and you’ll be fine, okay?”

The predictability of the female body is anti-thetical to the male monster’s self-mutilations, whichcan never be reconciled within the formulaic nature ofthe horror film. The randomness of the masochisticmoment shocks us into alienation and forces us to step back from what is to come; we experience thefear of the chase, but with the understanding that weare not really a part of it. Although the ensuing eventsare predictable—we know that a group of teens willbe killed, that a Final Girl will survive—this predicta-bility has little to do with the monsters themselves,whose mystery and terror depend on our distance fromthem. On the other hand, the menstrual plot displacesthis generic predictability onto the female monster’sbody, forcing us to realize that we know her crampsand cycles as much as if they were our own. The cal-endar on Ginger’s tampon box—or the one on whichRosemary plans her pregnancy—becomes the emble-matic object of these narratives of female monstrosity.

Ginger Snaps does explore a different monstros-ity, one based on female masochism. The filmprecedes its menstrual plot by referencing the self-mutilating monsters of The Texas Chainsaw Mas-sacre. The first time we see the sisters, Brigitte carriesa chainsaw while Ginger holds a knife to her wrist in ashot that mirrors the hitchhiker’s self-abuse. She caststhe knife aside and says, “Wrists are for girls. I’ll slitmy throat.” The sisters then discuss the suicide pactthey had made as young children, joining their scarredhands, the mark of their bond, in solidarity. This isfollowed by an intricate montage of the girls posing invarious acts of self-mutilation. Fascinated with theirown deaths, they take theatrical photographs of them-selves as suicide victims: bloodily impaled on fences,poisoned, drowned, hanged, all in extreme graphic de-tail.31 They show a film they have made of these

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scenes to their high-school class, and the reaction theyreceive is far more dramatic than the school nurse’sbanal reassurances. After a few unsuccessful stutter-ings, their male teacher says, “I am completely sick-ened by that,” a comment that echoes the shockedreactions provoked by the monster’s masochism. Thesisters’ faking of monstrous mutilations exposes themasochistic moment as an effective cinematic tropefor the production of horror, and, more importantly,one that is not confined to the male monster alone. Asthe film progresses, however, it soon turns to the morepredictable structure of the menstrual plot. The filmboth critiques and enacts our comfort with the famil-iarity of female monsters by presenting us with a storythat can be mapped over the course of 28 days.

My argument about the horror film’s rigid sepa-ration of male and female monsters counters otherreadings that examine the genre’s productive dehis-cence of gender from sex. Clover argues, for example,that horror, with its many androgynous creatures andvictims, “collapse[s] male and female to the point ofinextricability.”32 Other critics, such as Creed andHutchings, apply the argument of the genre’s genderinstability to the figure of the male monster, whoseexcessive sufferings, bleedings, and oozings end upfeminizing him.33 These claims depend in large parton the cultural gendering of masochism as a femalecondition, an association crystalized by Freud in es-says such as “A Child Is Being Beaten”(1919) and“The Economic Problem of Masochism” (1924).Clover suggests that these essays loosen gender cate-

gories by opening the female perversion to male sub-jects: Freud paves the way for “the idea that one’ssex/gender/sexuality has no existence outside the actsor performances that constitute it.”34 My analysispoints to a more conservative trend in horror cinema’streatment of gender. Monsters who hurt themselvesare male in these films, and the violent empowermentthat results from their self-inflicted pain has little to dowith conventional forms of female submission. Like-wise, the menstruating monster exposes her biologicalidentity with every drop of blood she sheds, both herown and her victims’. These essentializing construc-tions of monstrosity mitigate the films’ more revolu-tionary play with gender and identity categories. Theywork to reassure audiences that the terrors they arewitnessing on screen are containable, that they willnot uproot deep-seated beliefs about gender and vio-lence. Whatever else the horror film may stir withinus, its gendering of the pain felt by monsters and thesadistic acts they subsequently commit provides anunfortunately reassuring stability. It sets a safe para-meter around the spectators’ alleged masochism inchoosing to sit through a horror film and prevents this“willing subjection”35 from turning into an act of self-destruction, if not of lives, then of identities. By gen-dering the monster’s pain, the horror genre preventsthe audience from losing control of its own.

Aviva Briefel is Assistant Professor of English at BowdoinCollege. She is currently writing a book on the politics ofthe horror film genre.

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Puberty brings sex, violence, and excessive hair in Ginger Snaps; Right: Ginger plays dead.





I am grateful to Elisabeth Ford, David Hecht, and Sianne Ngaifor their invaluable suggestions during the various stages ofthis project. I would also like to thank the participants and au-dience of the Violence and Self-Fashioning panel at Narrative2002 at Michigan State University for their extremely helpfulcomments on an early draft of the essay.

Notes

1. As quoted in Scott Allen Nollen, Boris Karloff: A Gentle-man’s Life (Baltimore, MD: Midnight Marquee Press,1999), 42-43.

2. Gary Don Rhodes, Lugosi (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland,1997), 35.

3. As quoted in David J. Skal, The Monster Show: A Cul-tural History of Horror (New York: Faber and Faber,1993), 68.

4. Ibid., 73-74.5. This term derives from Paul Smith’s essay “Eastwood

Bound,” in Constructing Masculinity, eds. Maurice Berger,Brian Wallis, and Simon Watson (New York: Routledge,1995), 77-97. Smith refers to the “masochistic moment”found in Clint Eastwood films, in which the hero tem-porarily loses power and suffers. He argues that the actionfilm absorbs this lapse into the narrative itself, so that itloses its disruptive potential.

6. “Hellraiser,” Internet Movie Database, 4 July 2004<http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093177/trivia>.

7. Noël Carroll refers to this as the “paradox of horror,”which raises the question of why “anyone [would] subjectthemselves to it. Normally, we shun what causes distress;most of us don’t play in traffic to entertain ourselves. . . .”Noël Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror or Paradoxes ofthe Heart (New York: Routledge, 1990), 10.

8. Carol Clover, Men, Women, and Chain Saws (Princeton,N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992), 222.

9. Ibid., 61.10. Peter Hutchings, “Masculinity and the Horror Film,” in

You Tarzan: Masculinity, Movies, and Men, eds. Pat Kirk-ham and Janet Thurmin (New York: St. Martin’s Press,1993), 84-94.

11. Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality,trans. and ed. James Strachey (New York: Basic Books,1962), 24. Freud also refused the possibility of primarymasochism in his 1919 essay, “A Child Is Being Beaten.”

12. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. anded. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1961), 66. Freudlater acknowledged a primary form of masochism in “TheEconomic Problem of Masochism” (1924).

13. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmak-ing of the World (New York: Oxford University Press,1985), 4.

14. In The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the hitchhiker’s maso-chism can also be read as an act of liberation, since two ofthe teenagers’ families were responsible for laying offslaughterhouse workers—including the hitchhiker and hiskin—in order to introduce more advanced cattle-killingtechnology.

15. Linda Brookover and Alain Silver refer to the film as “alove story of operatic dimensions masquerading as a mon-ster flick,” in “What Rough Beast?: Insect Politics and

The Fly,” in Horror Film Reader, eds. Alain Silver andJames Ursini (New York: Limelight, 2000), 237.

16. Helen W. Robbins also remarks on the similaritiesbetween the teleporter and the film camera in “‘MoreHuman Than I Am Alone’: Womb Envy in David Cronen-berg’s The Fly and Dead Ringers,” in Screening the Male:Exploring Masculinities in Hollywood Cinema, eds.Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark (London: Routledge,1993), 145.

17. Laura Mulvey notably writes about the film star as anarcissistic projection of the male spectator in “VisualPleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Narrative, Apparatus,Ideology, ed. Philip Rosen (New York: Columbia Univer-sity Press, 1986), 201-02. Cronenberg’s film is based onKurt Neumann’s 1958 B-movie, The Fly.

18. Adam Knee, “The Metamorphosis of The Fly,” WideAngle vol. 14, no. 1 (1992): 24.

19. Several critics have commented on Ronnie’s role asmediator between Seth and the spectator. See, for exam-ple, Cynthia Freedland, “Feminist Frameworks for HorrorFilms,” in Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies, eds.David Bordwell and Noël Carroll (Madison, WI: Univer-sity of Wisconsin Press, 1996), 212; and Linda Badley,Film, Horror, and the Body Fantastic (Westport, CT:Greenwood Press, 1995), 128-31.

20. The sequel to The Fly, Chris Walas’s The Fly II (1989),kills Ronnie off in the opening sequence of the film whenshe gives birth to Seth’s baby. The narrative remains amale story, focusing on how the son comes to terms withhis monstrous legacy.

21. Fear of God: The Making of The Exorcist (prod. NickFreand Jones, 1998). The documentary includes refer-ences to the sadism of the film’s special effects, whichcontrast with Lon Chaney’s self-imposed suffering. LindaBlair, who played Regan, explains that to film a scene inwhich she thrashes back and forth on her bed, she wasstrapped to a pulley system that gave her excruciatingpain. She explains that her cries for help, captured in thefilm’s final version, are expressions of real suffering:“That’s the footage they used in the movie when I’m cry-ing my eyes out because they’re brutally damaging myback.” Likewise, Ellen Burstyn, who played Regan’smother, Chris, was seriously hurt in a scene in which thepossessed Regan projects an armoire toward her, andChris jerks back. Although Burstyn had complained aboutthe system used to pull her back, Friedkin allegedly disre-garded her complaints and encouraged the special-effectsdirector to “‘give it to her this time.’” She remarks that, “Itwas way beyond what anyone needs to do to make amovie.”

22. Sarah’s suicide fails, and she adopts Miriam’s position asan eternal lover.

23. Barbara Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Femi-nism, Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1993), 67.

24. Given the horror film’s focus on menstruation, it seemssignificant that the title of the 2002 zombie film 28 DaysLater (dir. Danny Boyle) should feature such a suggestivenumber. The time it takes for England to be contaminatedby a “rage” epidemic is equivalent to the number of daysit takes women to reach the peak of their cycles, stereo-typically described as a time of rage as well. Further

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pointing to its concern with the female body, the film inte-grates a plot line about its two heroines falling prey to agroup of soldiers who, in order to save the swiftly dyingBritish population, try to rape and impregnate them.

25. For a thorough formal comparison of the two scenes, seeShelley Stamp Lindsey, “Horror, Femininity, and Carrie’sMonstrous Puberty,” in The Dread of Difference: Genderand the Horror Film, ed. Barry Keith Grant (Austin, TX:University of Texas Press, 1996), 279-95. DouglasKeesey draws our attention to the “Bates” parallel in “Pa-triarchal Mediations of Carrie: The Book, the Movie, andthe Musical,” in Imagining the Worst: Stephen King andthe Representation of Women, eds. Kathleen MargaretLand and Theresa Thompson (Westport, CT: GreenwoodPress, 1998), 39.

26. Lindsey, 282.27. Mrs. White does occupy the role of Saint Sebastian at the

end of the film, when Carrie’s telekinetic powers pierceher with various knives and household cutting devices.The mother moans with pleasure as she is murdered, andthe film draws attention to her resemblance to the statue.The film only allows Mrs. White to enjoy her pain at theend of her life, not as a preface to her monstrosity.

28. Clover, 4.29. Clover describes Karras’s fate as an instance of “opening

up,” an act of invasion that parallels women’s susceptibil-ity to possession: “At the level of representation . . . themale story of occult horror is an echo version of the fe-

male story: it tells of being opened up by and to some-thing, letting something in” (101).

30. Lindsey, 281. Barbara Creed makes a similar argument inThe Monstrous-Feminine. She uses Kristeva’s theory of“abjection” to describe the liminal role of the femalemonster, who comes to stand for the transgression of nor-mative boundaries.

31. A few of the deaths pictured in the montage seem to resultfrom murder rather than suicide (e.g., being run over by alawnmower). Because the sisters are figured as an indivis-ible unit in this part of the film, however, these deaths fallinto the category of assisted suicides.

32. Clover, 217.33. Barbara Creed, “Dark Desires: Male Masochism in the

Horror Film,” in Screening the Male, 118-33; Hutchings,89-91.

34. Clover, 215-16.35. This is Hutchings’s term (92).

Abstract Aviva Briefel examines the ways in which thehorror film’s gendering of the monster’s pain affects audienceidentification. Male monsters in these films are associatedwith acts of masochism that allow for a comfortable spectato-rial distance. In contrast, female monsters precede their sadisticrampages with moments of menstruation, which claustro-phobically draw their audiences to them.

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