When released in 2007 Teeth seemed to be a very misunderstood film, most particularly by its distributors who marketed it as a sexed-up up body-horror/monster movie. This was summed up by the UK DVD which features on its reverse a coquettish picture of lead character Dawn (Jess Weixler) with various blood splatters around the text. It contrasts heavily with director Mitchell Lichtenstein’s preferred marketing image in which Dawn, dressed in a “Sex Changes Everything” T-shirt stares confused at the viewer. Released on DVD through the Dimension Extreme label (familiar to fans of Torture Porn), Teeth’s very nature as a horror-comedy, and specifically a satire on American sexual values, was obscured.
Front and back of the UK DVD release
This was exacerbated in other marketing. The theatrical poster, in which Dawn reclines in a bath, evokes films more in the realm of A Nightmare on Elm Street rather than one that, for the first 20 minutes at least, contains almost no horror but plays more as satire. On release a certain, perhaps understandable, hysteria arose about the film’s employment of literal vagina dentata enhanced by the trailer which claimed, “There is something wrong with Dawn O’Keefe” and quoted critic Kirk Honeycutt, of The Hollywood Reporter, that the film was “The most alarming cautionary tale for men… since ‘Fatal Attraction’” positioning Dawn as a monster. The trailer opens with a scene in which Dawn visits a gynaecologist hinting at a moment when Dawn’s other teeth bite down on his fingers. It edits out, however, the fact that the doctor is assaulting Dawn at the time.
The theatrical release poster versus the director’s preferred image
Here Dawn does some research on “vagina dentata”:
The superhero film
On re-watching, and once the original shock has subsided, Teeth emerges not so much as a horror film, but as a horror-comedy of empowerment in which Dawn learns to stop fearing her own sexuality, coming to understand the predatory nature of many men (all of whom can now be literally emasculated if they step too far out of line). Within that, the film discusses the nature of myth and the presence of the monstrous feminine, evoking mythical monsters such as gorgons, and dispelling the idea of the hero who must conquer the “cave,” the metaphorical womb which must be visited to break woman’s power. This “dark crucible,” as Dawn comes to know it, has, since the rise of Joseph Campbell inspired narrative guides such as Christopher Vogler’s Writer’s Journey, come to dominate Hollywood, and is regularly invoked by blockbuster film-makers such as George Lucas. It’s a structure beloved by the superhero film a genre of which, re-watching now, Teeth appears to be an oblique satire.
Teeth as superhero film
In direct, but gender-reversed, parallel to the typical superhero film, Teeth follows a young woman who gains a special ability from mysterious sources (the mise-en-scène heavily hints it’s the local nuclear power station whose cooling towers dominate the horizon). This takes her from being a mousy girl, picked on by others, to an increasingly assertive woman. Dawn shares the typical parenting issues of the genre, her mother dying midway through the film (perhaps from cancer caused by the same power plant), with the opening credits hinting at her mutated DNA, recalling various X-Men films.
Opening credits of Teeth hint at mutated DNA
Rather than using the metaphors for adolescence that the genre sometimes employs (including the inadvertent issuing forth of white, sticky, fluid in Sam Raimi’s Spiderman), Teeth can bring these to the surface while keeping Dawn’s change internal. When she stands in-front of a mirror, à la Tobey Maguire post spider-bite, nothing has changed apart from her own view of herself. She embraces the power she already possessed but which has been repressed out of her by home-life, education and the chastity cult she belongs to. Where muscles often stand for masculinity and power, Dawn’s body is radically unheroic or sexualised (especially when compared with the rising generation of female super-heroes). She doesn’t need a suit either, her sex is cover enough.
What Teeth lacks from the genre is a clear antagonist, her Green Goblin or Joker, but as the film develops it’s clear that masculinity takes their place. Each sexual experience Dawn has is either violent or coercive: her first boyfriend attempts to rape her in a cave after a swim (images of rebirth clearly evoked); the doctor removes his gloves and tries to insert his whole hand into her; another boy drugs her before sex (while styling himself as her conquering hero) and then interrupts a second, consensual, bout to brag on his phone about his conquests. Finally, Dawn finds herself confronting her step-brother Brad who has long desired and feared her (due to losing the tip of one of his fingers during childhood when he tried to investigate Dawn’s genitalia against her will) and whose indifference caused her mother’s death. By this point Dawn has embraced her power and uses it to punish him – her vagina dentata go from being accidentally employed to wilfully used against those who would hurt her. In the final scenes, Dawn leaves town accompanied by a slow piano theme, recalling the 1970s Incredible Hulk TV show. It could happily end here as she hitchhikes away, but the film fades to a rest-stop where her benefactor makes lurid faces at her, demanding a return favour. At first disgusted, Dawn looks away, almost towards us, and then smiles. Now that she is in complete control of her power, he has nothing to threaten her with.
Dawn’s smile
Like any superhero, Dawn has been transformed from humble origins through twists of fate. In Vogler’s conception of Campbell’s ideas, the moment of triumph is described as “seizing back the sword.” As phallic a metaphor as ever there was, it describes the moment when the hero takes his reward (often including the girl) having come close to death. In Teeth it takes on a very different conception and the film goes beyond the superhero film to challenge the wider place of women as monster in myth. Here man is the monster, whose mythic structures support a history of violation of women.
Sadly, there was no sequel, but I like to think Dawn is still out there, going from town to town as a very specific sort of vigilante.
Cary Edwards is a Film Studies lecturer in Lincolnshire, UK. His earned his PhD in Film from The University of Lincoln and blogs at www.cary-edwards.com. He has previously written on Witchfinder General for Horror Homeroom.
You can stream Teeth on Amazon:
Theatrical Poster Image from:
https://uk.movieposter.com/poster/MPW-30200/Teeth.html
Alternative Poster Image from:
