Alexandra Heller-Nicholas’ 1000 WOMEN IN HORROR: 1895-2018 (Exclusive Excerpt)
From that foundational moment in 1818 when Mary Shelley’s classic gothic horror novel Frankenstein dared to make an outsider the centre of her story, horror has at its best always been about giving a voice to those who would otherwise struggle to be heard. Horror often tells stories about things we’d rather not hear about; it forces us to face our darkest fears, admit our basest desires, and acknowledge the reality of our inescapable mortality. From splatter films to psychological ghost stories, horror reminds us we are all ultimately little more than cognizant meat sacks, our place in the world of the living hanging by often the thinnest of membranes. Horror is, at its core, fundamentally democratic: we’re all just big old fleshy bags of bones who can bleed, suffer, and experience physical pain.
I grew up in the 1980s in suburban Australia, where (like so many places around the world) it was all but assumed horror was for young men; all those topless blondes, the blood-and-guts and chain saws were surely intended only for the most toilet-brained, dead-headed hormone-drunk adolescent boys, right? Only here’s the thing: if that’s the case, why did so many of my girlfriends and I get such an intense kick out of them, watching them as we so often did on the sly when our parents weren’t looking during the endless stream of sleep-overs that were my entire teenage nerd-girl social life? Maybe part of it was simply that we got a thrill out of watching films that we were culturally told weren’t appropriate for blossoming young ladies. But as I’ve discovered in the years since, there was much more going on than mere transgression.
For myself and so many of my women friends – those when I was a kid, and those today – horror spoke to us on what was often a primal level about living in a world where physical threat is a constantly present reality, where danger quite possibly is hiding just around the corner. In this context, pretending the world is all sunshine and rainbows just doesn’t cut it. Any woman who has walked home alone in the dark at night and even once looked behind her or quickened her step has first-hand experience of the fears and anxieties that horror often speaks to, whether they personally enjoy horror movies or not.
And of course, it’s not just women that I’m talking about here, it’s anyone who has ever felt different or had their identity defined through negations: of being Not-white, Not-male, Not-straight, Not-middle-class, or the hundreds of other points of difference human beings at their worst find to use as excuses to discriminate against each other. Collectively, these “Nots” are often horror’s most memorable Others. While it would be useless to deny that in so many horror films these Others are often configured as monstrous, to consider this and this alone as an ideological baseline denies horror’s perverse pleasures of allegiance – a far more useful concept than mere ‘identification’.
The reasons for this are to me crystal clear: no matter how bad they are, no matter what their body count, the Other in horror is in so many famous cases strong. Horror is a space where Otherness is not an instant shorthand for ‘victim’ like it is so often in the real world. Rather, it’s a fantasy space where outsiders might just be a force to be reckoned with. This alone provides a subversive thrill, especially for those of us who are so often rendered invisible in the dog-eat-dog world of Alpha Masculinity.
There are, of course, more than a handful of famous horror villains who don’t fall into this category, but even then, at their best there’s an aspect of playful insubordination against the dominant norms at stake. Think, for example, of Halloween’s Michael Myers, a walking parody of white masculinity with his flat blank mask and almost ludicrous, parodic physical strength. Or Leatherface from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, who curiously wears for much of that film a suit and tie, the supposed symbol of acceptable white-collar masculine success. That Leatherface wears his “pretty lady” mask in that film’s iconic dinner table scene is worthy of note, too: from Norman Bates in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho to Bela Lugosi in Tod Browning’s Dracula, there has often been an aspect of the effeminate – if not the outright feminine – to many of horror’s most famous monsters.
Some academics have argued that this automatically equates monstrosity and femininity in horror, proving the existence of a blanket sexism at work in the genre. For me, this is premature. While I can’t speak for the pleasures (or lack thereof) that other women might find in the genre, for myself at least the thrill of horror is that these feminized characters have – for once – any kind of power at all. They might be punished for it, they might be social outcasts because of it, but often – for even just one glimmering, shining, transgressive moment – we have power.
My love for horror stems on a fundamental basis from the fact that for once, a woman or feminized character walking home alone at night in the dark might not be the one scared half to death, but the one doing the scaring. It’s a revenge fantasy, perhaps, but with the presence of male violence against women today at the level of a global epidemic, I for one will take whatever pressure release I can get.
Excerpt courtesy of Alexandra Heller-Nicholas and BearManor Media
