In his groundbreaking book on queerness and horror, Harry Benshoff looked to the star of Cat People (1942) as not only a particularly sympathetic monster but a rare example of lesbian subtext in the early horror film: “Irena’s monstrous ability to turn into a panther and kill men […] serves as an oft-cited metaphor for lesbian sexuality in the films of this era.”[1] The early girl-monster is associated with sexuality that deviates from the strict heterosexual norm, whether by vampirically seducing and draining young women as in Dracula’s Daughter (1936), or by a more complicated mix of frigidity and passion. Irena could be read as queer in her avoidance of heterosexual intimacy, or read as too attracted to men, such that she is prone to improper and violent explosions of passion. The modern girl-monster, who almost exclusively preys on men, has left behind the Countess’s predatory lesbianism for the more ambiguous waters of Irena’s fraught passions. How queer is it? That depends on the movie.
Check out the trailer for Trouble Every Day:
Claire Denis’s erotic cannibal flick Trouble Every Day (2001) operates through a distinctly heterosexual logic. The film centers around two straight couples, the cannibals are heterosexual in their appetites, and the cannibalistic urge even seems to spread exclusively along the lines of straight attraction. It is not that heterosexuality is framed as inherently violent or undesirable. Rather, everything is straight here – the characters’ loving relationships, illicit lusts, and violent appetites alike. So, when the cannibalistic Coré moves seamlessly from sexual lust to devouring her partners, her monstrosity is framed as out of control (straight) desire.
In Trouble Every Day, the cannibalistic Coré is cared for by her husband Léo
The vampire films A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014) and Let the Right One In (2008) also give their girl-monsters male love interests; both films conclude with these strange couples running away together. While the early American horror films which codified the tropes of the vampire conclude, as a rule, with the preservation of a “normal” straight couple,[2] these films allow the girl-monster and her beau to occupy that narrative position.
But Let the Right One In complicates the perceived straightness of its central relationship. The vampire Eli, who appears to be a prepubescent girl, insists to love interest Oskar, “I’m not a girl,” and is implied to be a boy who was castrated in human life. While other girl-monsters may not be as ambiguously gendered as Eli, they often occupy a position of gender transgression. In Ginger Snaps (2000), the newly-turned teen werewolf Ginger seduces a male classmate who is taken aback by her sexual aggression, protesting: “Hey, who’s the guy here.” In Raw (2016), the cannibalistic Alexia teaches her sister to urinate standing up while initiating her into the lifestyle of cannibalism. Not to mention the oddly phallic tail sported by Ginger, as well as the sirens of The Lure (2015). The body of the girl-monster is interstitially gendered, and even her straightest relationships have a distinctly queer valence.
Oskar and Eli become fast friends in Let the Right One In
Attack of the Girl-Monster
As in Cat People, the girl-monster’s bloodlust is often depicted as a close cousin to sexual desire. As Ginger puts it: “I get this ache. I thought it was for sex, but it’s to tear everything to fucking pieces.” Girl-monster movies all-but-invariably feature a seduction scene in which the girl-monster lures her male victim with the promise of sex only to eat or maim him. But her choice of victims only sometimes correlates with sexual desire – when a girl-monster does have a sustained romantic relationship, her love interest is rarely the object of her appetites. Instead, the girl-monster is inclined to choose unsympathetic victims, acting as a sort of avenger or protector. In A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, the unnamed vampire becomes attached to a sex worker and eats the men who mistreat her. In Let the Right One In, Eli brutally dismembers her beloved Oskar’s bullies. And in Teeth (2007), a teenage abstinence advocate, Dawn, finds herself in possession of a vagina dentata and spends the movie biting off the penises and fingers of the many sleazy men who surround her.
Ginger’s sexuality is inseparable from her werewolf transformation
The threat of sexual violence is never far away in these films. Under the Skin’s (2013) steely alien meets a nasty end at the hands of an attempted rapist. More often however, as in Teeth, the girl-monster gets the better of her attacker. These recurring seduction scenes play out as miniature rape-revenge movies that, for the most part, leave out the rape. The girl-monster finds herself in a situation that is culturally recognized as precarious for young women – walking home alone at night, getting into a car with a strange man. But these films reverse our expectations; it’s the girl who enacts violence.
In Teeth, an abusive gynecologist is in for a big surprise
In Teeth, Dawn discovers her monstrous anatomy when she castrates her boyfriend while he’s raping her. Initially convinced that her body is ungodly and needs to be “conquered” by a man, she soon decides to embrace the advantages of her teeth. The girl-monster is always a castrating figure, sexually threatening and inclined to bite off fingers in a none-too-subtle metaphor. This is not included for the discomfort of male viewers, though that may certainly be a side effect, but for the enjoyment and even empowerment of viewers who identify with the girl-monster and cheer the suffering of terrible men. Her pursuit of male victims is thus less an expression of heterosexual desire and more an intentional subversion of the cinematic suffering so often endured by female characters.
A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night warns us: never put your fingers in a girl-monster’s mouth…
Sister of the Girl-Monster
The first of the modern girl-monster boom, Ginger Snaps, codified the most common of the girl-monster plots. In these films, the girl-monster is doubled with a sister or female best friend. The older and/or more confident of the pair undergoes a monstrous transformation complete with physical changes and a cannibalistic appetite. Concerned by her sister’s bloodlust, the “good” girl of the pair teams up with a male love interest to contain her murderous ways. Inevitably, the girl-monster kills the man but dies at the hand of her sister (or is otherwise eliminated from the story). But normalcy has not been restored; the surviving girl has contracted her sister’s monstrosity. Jennifer’s Body (2009) follows this model exactly, Raw shifts the timeline so the film focuses on the “good” sister’s transformation, and The Lure follows it – but with a twist.
Good girl Justine enjoys an unusual snack in Raw
When the girls are not sisters, as in Jennifer’s Body, or when the girls are not human and “sisters” may not mean the same thing, as in The Lure, the queer eroticism of this dynamic is apparent. In Jennifer’s Body, Jennifer preys on men who show interest in her best friend Needy, just as the early girl-monsters stalked their romantic rivals. The passionate kiss shared by the girls was seen by some viewers as pandering to a fetishizing male gaze, but the intense and charged relationship the girls share justifies the scene. The sirens of The Lure share a similar relationship. They kiss on stage, a spectacle for nightclub audiences, but also tenderly in private. Even in those films in which the relationship between the two girls is platonic, it is the most important relationship in the film, one that is disrupted by the male love interest and the lure of heteronormativity; consequently, this story structure is well-suited to queer eroticism.
The most romantic kiss in Jennifer’s Body
The Lure subverts the template of Ginger Snaps as both girls begin the film in a monstrous condition. Sirens Golden and Silver come ashore and join a nightclub band to pass the time. Golden is happy to eat men and be a tourist in the human world, but Silver pursues the love of her human bandmate, Mietek. Golden finds a home among the queer underworld of sea creatures, enjoying a one-night stand with a woman who gleefully caresses and licks Golden’s enormous mermaid tail. Her monstrous body is desirable, while Silver’s is abhorrent. Mietek can only see Silver as a fish, so to win his love, Silver has her tail surgically replaced with legs, losing her voice in the process. It is “good” girl Silver who physically alters her body and drives the plot just as the involuntary transformation of Ginger and Jennifer drive their respective stories. Unfortunately for Silver, Mietek is just as disgusted by her oozing scars as by her tail. She has traded one misogynistic notion of a vagina for the other, a fish tail for a bleeding wound. According to the fairy tale laws of the film, Silver must eat her fickle lover on his wedding night or turn to sea foam; when she refuses and accepts her fate, a grieving Golden devours Mietek in revenge.
Golden and Silver share an on-stage kiss in The Lure
Silver’s attempt to assimilate to the straight human world dooms her, just as the uncontained monstrousness of Jennifer and Ginger dooms them. The Lure locates monstrosity as its norm, and the unapologetically monstrous Golden survives. This redefinition of the normal fulfills the appeal of the girl-monster, placing our sympathies with her and indulging our desire to identify with the monstrous. With her unruly desires and deviant body, the girl-monster cannot help but be a queer figure even when the plot places her in straight pairings, but it is a film like The Lure, which does not insist on its queer girl-monster’s annihilation, that makes for the most joyous queer viewing.
Check out the trailer for The Lure:
Related: Sara McCartney’s “The Rise of the Girl-Monster Part 1: Birth and Body.”
NOTES
[1] Harry M Benshoff. Monsters in the Closet. Manchester University Press, 1997: 101
[2] “However, by the end of the film, the villain and/or monster is destroyed by a public mob or its patriarchal representatives, and the “normal” couple are reinstated after safely passing through their queer experience” (Benshoff 37).
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