In preparation for a lecture on film psych 101 and the up-and-coming release of trash horror Jennifer's Body (2009) I reprised a forgotten love of Ginger Snaps (2000) and visitations to the beautiful and monstrous allegories of the female transition and the importance of first blood.
The physicality of the horror in such movies is metaphor. A monstrous interpretation of the physical changes incurred during puberty manifested as psychoanalytical archetypes, a context that such films find hard to escape in criticism. What I am interested in is the oh-so-female specificity that sees teenagers bleed and feed beyond the hormonal. This entry will look at the reason these girls transition to monsters and not women.
Barbara Creed writes of the 'monstrous feminine', a psychoanalytical reading of monstrous female depictions routed deeply in the abject. The emphasis is heavily on gender and Creed unpacks the ways in which the patriarchal gaze of the cinematic apparatus doubles with Freudian fears to produce beastly women.
Teen Wolf (1985) follows the adolescent emergence of the wolf in the male. This is non-violent. The change is hereditary, a familial right and rite of passage that the male passes through relatively unscathed. There is no blood and no body count. Yet from beginning to end the context and classification of the female beast in her becoming is quite different, it is born in the non-consensual spilling of blood and it ends that way too.
The premise of Jennifer's Body sees a teenage girl come cannibal after a sacrifice gone awry. The satanic ritual calling for virgin blood fails because of Jennifer's experience and a daemon takes possession of her dead but rockin' bod. Similarly in Teeth (2007), the character Dawn suffers assault on her way to alterity. Proudly abstinent, Dawn's body reacts to the men in her life that try to coerce her into sex - her vagina bearing teeth. The bloodshed in death upon the alter and the loss sustained in hymen rupture serve the same function - they instigate radical physical change.
From here each girl possesses a unique but monstrous power over the men in their worlds. Jennifer seduces and slaughters her way through the school, hungry for the flesh of boys who betrayed her. Dawn also grows an appetite, albeit from the nether regions. Having been used and manipulated for sex she harnesses her inner monster seeking out predatory men to dismember. Both characters vengeance is based on consumption. They consume, take into themselves the blood of the gender that drew it first. Sex is the semenal act in both cases, literally enacting the castration that their fair sex symbolizes as a sanguine solution to their original lack.
The allegory at work in Ginger Snaps operates differently to that in either Jennifer's Body or Teeth , rather than biblical it's biological. In this tale of two sisters Ginger reaches sexual maturity signaled by the commencement of menarche. Out playing a prank Ginger gets the 'curse', blood drips down her leg. Following the discovery of first blood she is bitten by a werewolf and the transformation begins, substituting womanhood for monstrosity. Ginger pays the price for the bloody breach, the exposure of red taboo and the penalty is monstrous. Ginger undergoes full metamorphosis over the months lunar/menstrual cycle. She becomes the embodiment of feminine taboo. She becomes sexually active passing the Lychan infection to her male partner, inflicting him the undesirable essence of the monstrous feminine. She begins to physically regenerate, and with her wounds healing she becomes the impenetrable woman. Furthermore she grows a tail and claws that make her explicitly penetrator.
Briget the younger of the sisters is trying to rescue her Ginger from taboo. Culminating in the chase scene that has Briget bowing before the transformed Ginger lapping from a puddle of the leading mans blood. She is coerced to consumption by her sisters guilt and the man who came between them is a binding banquet shared.
Vengeance is in the blood and these girls take back the blood that is spilled, into themselves. In blood these tales begin and so they must end. The woman that bleeds transfuses herself out of the accepted gender role into something other. Thats why these girls bleed and feed.
xoxo Final Girl
NOTE: The above is what comes from an academic with a hangover up all night with the complete works of De Sade, a copy of Bataille's Solar Anus and some Sutter Cane on her bedside table. COMBO.
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