“Carrie and the Boys” Breakdown
In her 1992 book titled Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, Carol J. Clover, an American professor of Medieval Studies and American Film at the University of California, Berkeley, analyzes how sex and gender function in horror films of the 70s and 80s, including slasher films, occult or possession films, and rape revenge films.
The general feminist analysis on horror is that it is, in the most basic terms, exploitative and misogynistic. There is certainly truth to this, as horror films routinely sexualize and eroticize violence against women for the sadistic, voyeuristic enjoyment of the overwhelmingly male audience. However, Clover argues that there is more to the story. She pushes back against these ideas put forward by other film critics and theorists, not necessarily discarding them, but rather, adding a fascinating degree of nuance that has changed the way I’ve looked at horror forever.
Lately, I’ve found myself rereading Men, Women, and Chainsaws, and would like to do a chapter-by-chapter breakdown of the text on this blog, starting with the introduction, titled “Carrie and the Boys.”
The 1976 horror film Carrie, based on Stephen King’s novel, was an instant classic, receiving two Academy Award nominations, and spawning a sequel and two remakes. The story is distinctly feminine, centering around a lonely, awkward teenage girl whose struggle to fit in with other girls is met with nothing but ridicule and cruelty. In the opening scene of the film, Carrie has her first menstrual cycle, and becomes panicked, as she believes she is dying. Her classmates, instead of helping her, taunt her, chanting “plug it up” while pelting her with tampons and pads. Carrie is subjected to further cruelty at the hands of her hyper-religious mother, who consistently shames her for ever displaying any semblance of sexuality, even referring to her daughter’s breasts as “dirty pillows.” Throughout all of this, Carrie discovers her telekinetic abilities, something her classmates eventually become brutally aware of.
In the end of the film, one of Carrie’s tormentors, feeling pity for the girl, instructs her boyfriend to ask Carrie to the prom. He does, and Carrie is elected prom queen. For a fleeting moment of joy, she feels accepted by her peers, but her joy is cut short when a bucket of pig's blood, set up by her cruel classmates, is dumped on her head. Carrie then, in an act that is cheered on by the (mostly male) audience, unleashes her telekinetic abilities on the prom attendees, killing every last one of them.
The question with Carrie is a curious one; who is the monster, who is the victim, and who is the hero? The answer for all three of these narrative roles is, of course, Carrie.
She is the victim of her monstrous schoolmates who pick on her and her monstrous mother who shames and terrifies her. But in the end, she comes into her own and turns the tables on all of the villains in her life, emerging as a sort of monstrous hero. Essentially, Carrie becomes the “female victim-hero,” a term that Clover uses throughout her book (“hero,” in the context of horror, always implies some level of monstrosity.)
When discussing the popularity of Carrie, Stephen King explains, “one reason for the success of the story in both print and film, I think, lies in this: Carrie’s revenge is something that any student who has ever had his gym shorts pulled down in Phys Ed or his glasses thumb-rubbed in study hall could approve of.”
This is an interesting comment from King, as the viewer he describes who sees themselves in Carrie is not a girl, but a boy. It is typically boys who pull each other’s shorts down in gym class, not girls, nor boys to girls. Despite the feminine themes that permeate the story, Carrie is meant to be relatable to a male audience. Clover states, “The boy so threatened and so humiliated, King seems to be saying, is a boy who recognizes 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.”
This brings us into Clover’s overall thesis; male horror film audiences are routinely made to identify with screen-females, a concept that film theorists and movie critics rarely entertain.
(While it is certainly true that women do, in fact, consume horror movies, it cannot be denied that young males are the core audience of the horror genre. Thus, for the purpose of her book, Clover has chosen to focus solely on the male viewers, analyzing the relationship between them and the female victim-heros.)
According to Christian Metx, a French film theorist, there are two modes of identification in film. The first, primary identification, is with the camera, which can shift from one character’s perspective to another, or exist in a state of omnipotence. Secondary identification, on the other hand, is regarding the character of empathetic choice. The identification from the audience onto the character is very much fluid, “as competing figures resonate with competing parts of the viewer’s psyche (masochistic victim and sadistic monster, for example).”
Laura Mulvey, a feminist film theorist, famously explained how the camera, and the primary identification with the camera, is not gender neutral, but male. This becomes most apparent when the camera’s object is a woman. She is portrayed as a sexualized object, either through a sadistic, voyeuristic gaze, in which the female is punished, or a fetishistic, scopophilic gaze, in which the female is reduced to her physical body to entice male viewers.
It is without a doubt that horror films heavily indulge in the male gaze, as women’s bodies and suffering is erotized and sexualized, their fear and pain turned into something pornagraphic. However, a proper analysis of gender in horror should not start and end with that, as there is far more nuance to the topic that many feminist film theorists fail to consider.
As a typical horror film progresses into the story, the perspective that the audience is made to take on shifts from a wide variety of characters, including the killer, to exclusively that of the female victim-hero. By the end of the film, the story belongs to her and her alon, and she is the sole character of empathetic choice for the audience. The male viewers cheer on the final girl as she stabs, slashes, and claws her way from certain death to victory. Her fear is our fear, and her triumph is our triumph. Despite what the default view may suggest, the horror genre is very victim-identified, which questions the idea of the male gaze being a universal truth throughout all cinema.
It’s no secret that horror films are extremely formulaic. Fans of the genre know exactly what to expect going in; who will die first, who will die last, who will survive, etc. This is most obvious by the sequels upon sequels that the horror films spawn. There is nothing new, only different variants of the same story. It’s an art of performance, not originality.
So why do fans eat it up every time? Why has the slasher film not grown tedious or predictable to those who love them? Clover explains, “What makes horror ‘crucial enough to pass along’ is, for critics since Freud, what has made ghost stories and fairy tales crucial enough to pass along: its engagement of repressed fears and desires and its reenactment of the residual conflict surrounding those feelings.”
The horror film is a revoltingly beautiful depiction of our worst fears and our most disgusting desires, an outlet for the thoughts we’ve shoved so deep inside ourselves. We relish in the torment of the on-screen victims as they are violently gutted like freshly caught fish, much like the killer himself relishes in doing so, and we scream when the innocent woman is suddenly attacked without warning from the shadows, much like she screams. Clover states, “Just as attacker and attacked are expressions of the same self in nightmares, so they are expressions of the same viewer in horror film. We are both Red Riding Hood and the Wolf; the force of the experience, in horror, comes from ‘knowing’ both sides of the story.” We, the viewer or both the monster and the victim-hero.
Characters in horror films serve strict and specific narrative roles, roles that are highly gendered. The role of monster and the role of hero are male, and the role of victim is female. A woman does not cry in terror because she is a woman, she is a woman because she cries in terror. The killer does not kill because he is a man, he is a man because he kills. In horror, sex proceeds gender. When a woman is the monster or the hero, she is masculine, and when the male is the victim, he is feminine.
According to Jurij Lotman, a Russian-Estonian literary scholar, only two types of characters exist in fiction. Firstly, the masculine hero who penetrates boundaries and closed spaces, and the immobile feminine who represents those damp, darkened spaces that the hero must overcome. This simplistic picture becomes far messier when we take into account the fact that horror films operate on two accounts of sexual difference that they routinely shift between.
According to sexologist Thomas Laqueeur, up until the 18th century, the predominant view was that males and females are one sex, and the female is an inverted and deformed male. Sigmund Frued integrates this view in his ideas of the human imagination and human psychosexual development, some examples being penis envy, the phallic woman, and clitorus masturbation as masculine and phallic. Horror is based on stories of vampires and werewolves and undead creatures, mythology that stems from this “one-sex” era, and still possesses, in many ways, a pre-modern understanding of sexual difference. Both the one-sex model and the contemporary model that positions males and females as sexual opposites inform sex and gender in horror films.
Men and women are opposites in horror, yet, the line between them is blurred and unclear. Often, this is made true literally, npt just in the narrative roles, but the physical bodies of the characters. Such in Sleepaway Camp, when the little girl in the final scene is revealed to actually be a boy, or in The Incubus, when the rapist’s semen is revealed to be part menstrual blood.
The female victim-hero of horror movies is a lot like the male victim-hero of action movies, as characters like John Wick and Rambo and Dirty Harry must “undergo all manner of indignity before they rise to annihilate their tormentors.” In horror, this male fantasy is depicted through female leads. This choice is for several reasons, including the greater role that victimization plays for the main character in horror, as well as the nature of the victimization. In horror, the pain that the characters endure, rooted in castration anxiety, is far more “messy and unwholesome,” and can really only be expressed on screen through a woman.
Clover writes, “Here we arrive at the politics of displacement: the use of the woman as a kind of feint, a front through which the boy can simultaneously experience forbidden desires and disavow them on the grounds that the visible actor is, after all, a girl.”
Essentially, horror film viewers are as masochistic as they are sadistic, yet the latter is either understated or ignored.
I hope this breakdown was useful to anyone who finds this subject intriguing. I plan to continue this series on Men, Women, and Chainsaws with more digestible explanations of each chapter. And please feel free to use this link to read the full book!
