Over the years, I’ve watched young women suffer a battle’s worth of gruesome deaths; the prettier, the sassier, the closer to 18—the better. Recently, I watched a naked woman get yanked to her watery grave by monstrous tentacles, while her severed arms hovered in chains above the sacrificial pit (Dagon). I’ll always remember the one who cried tears of blood before throwing up her innards (City of the Living Dead). Watching ladies squirm on the ends of long knives, hearing their suspiciously orgasmic screams, I’ve often asked myself: who watches this shit?
In my case, it’s an outspoken and nitpicky feminist. I have a knack for detecting sexism in unlikely places, and male friends are sick of hearing about it. Yet I get off on watching one of the most barefaced and egregious manifestations of woman-hating in the Western world: the horror flick.
One rather sucky explanation is that I’m too sensitive to violence against women; it offends me so deeply that subconsciously, I hope to exorcise the shock through watching scenes of extreme violence repeatedly. But seeing splatter films is not the key to self-healing; it’s just a lot of fun. I have to be honest with myself, as any horror fan must: sadism, masochism, and self-loathing underlie my viewing habits, to varying degrees. More importantly, I get a kick out of it.
Sometimes sexism is entirely excusable for the sake of a great flick. Few directors devote as much time to the aesthetic of expiration as Dario Argento does, and Suspiria’s famous window scene is as elaborate as brutality gets. It’s also somewhat pornographic: a very masculine arm (wasn’t the “killer” supposed to be a witch?) thrusts a girl’s face into a window, and then stabs her repeatedly as she lies, panting, on her back. We even get a penetration shot of the knife entering her heart. Stage Fright’s scantily-clad Italian ladies are a mere fringe benefit in a stylish, cheesy classic. Though I feel for the sorority sisters at the receiving end, the obscene phone calls in Black Christmas offer more golden moments in slasher history. Often enough, there’s more misogyny than movie, and Maniac is a standard example of this kind of picture: join Frank Zito as he slaughters New York broads in explicitly sexual ways and pins their scalps to mannequins. It’s utterly excessive, but completely awesome.
Within any genre, there’s good and there’s good. Last year’s Inside is brutal to a panic attack-inducing degree, largely to the fact that the primary victim is a pregnant woman (it should be noted that the villain—and what a villain—is a woman; the filmmakers, of course, are men). It’s absolutely painful to watch, but the immaculate use of tension and violence contribute much to its quality; the gore is abundant, but it’s far from gratuitous. In Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, just about every woman that appears on screen is murdered (or already dead): prostitutes, mothers and their families, even the female lead that the audience dares to hope might live. But the film’s matter-of-fact tone and Michael Rooker’s staid depiction of Henry Lee Lucas are what make it more than just a genre film. It’s worth noting that both of these movies were based on real events; the more you worry, the more you crave cinematic release.
Unfortunately, classics like these have stoked the ambitions of far lesser filmmakers. Gaspar Noé’s Irreversible has the pretensions of an art film, but the structure of a cheap exploitation flick: a ramshackle plot built around a few shocking scenes and gimmicks. It takes a lot of nerve to establish your film—your career—on the basis of a cold-blooded and unnecessarily prolonged rape scene. The makers of Inside had nerve, but they made a great film. This is key: much like off-colour jokes, outrageously sexist movies are only acceptable if they’re good.
A steady diet of blood and guts leaves one in need of comic relief. Luckily, the horror genre is wonderfully self-reflexive, and not a few directors have made virgin (more often slut) sacrifice fun. Slither makes a farce of phallic slaughter: the town tramp is impregnated by tentacles extending from the ever-virile Rooker’s torso; she then becomes rabid for raw meat, expands to the size of a barn, and bursts with alien slugs. The Wicker Man remake is an unintentionally hilarious parody of male paranoia about feminism. Nicolas Cage, facing an island full of man-hating drones in silly clothes, delivers some of the best lines since “Rowdy” Roddy Piper in They Live: “Killing me won’t bring back your goddamn honey!” Some horror directors have even saluted their feminist detractors: Stuart Gordon, clearly concerned about sexual reciprocity, has a dismembered head pleasure Re-Animator’s female lead.
I’d be a dirty liar if I didn’t admit that some horror movies, however stupid, serve their basest purpose: titillation. In most slashers, the killers—much like the real-life murderers they’re based on—are far from sexually potent. On the contrary, they’re driven to kill by their inadequacies—virginity, gender confusion, and, of course, mother issues. One notable exception is David Hess, the Robert Redford of grindhouse: he kills because he’s so ridiculously, delightfully masculine. Hess started out as a songwriter in the late ’50s, but carved a niche for himself as an onscreen psychopath in the ’70s, playing characters with names like “Krug Stillo,” “Bosco,” and “Ferret.” And carve he did, as anyone who’s watched Wes Craven’s Last House on the Left knows quite well. With pot as their bait, Hess and his gang capture, sexually humiliate, rape, and disembowel two teenage girls; it sounds horrible, and it is. The parental retribution doesn’t quite atone for the bloodbath, but Hess, as much as it worries me to admit, is a pleasure to watch. For the more compassionate, Ruggero Deodato’s House at the Edge of the Park is much less brutal (some of the sex is even consentual), and features Hess in various stages of undress. Aside from a particularly tense scene involving a razorblade, the Jewish Adonis is in fine, cheesy form—if you ignore his love handles.
It’s easy to draw the line between politics and pastimes; we’re well aware that many of our cultural indulgences are sexist, racist, or just stupid. There could be a host of psychological reasons for why a feminist enjoys watching her own kind get picked off like piglets; there are certainly enough real-life examples to make me question my own habit. I think the answer can be summarized quite succinctly: horror movies are harmless, often goofy fun. And like anyone else, we’re up for a good time.
