DIRECTOR: Zhang Yimou

SCREENPLAY: Su Tong, Zhen Ni

STARRING: Gong Li, Ma Jingwu, He Saifei

LANGUAGE: Mandarin

RUN TIME: 2hrs 5mins

Gong Li stars as Songlian in Zhang Yimou’s 1991 film ‘Raise the Red Lantern’. Distributed by Orion Classics.

I decided to take a break from the horror genre this week to discuss a classic Chinese movie that’s a horrifying and devastating watch in its own way. I’m discussing Raise the Red Lantern (1991), one of the most famous films directed by Zhang Yimou. Although Zhang’s most successful movies (especially among English-speaking audiences) have tended to be wuxia martial arts films, such as Hero (2002) and House of Flying Daggers (2004), his collaborations with actress Gong Li are unflinching examinations of life under Chinese patriarchy and Communist Party rule, so much so that several of them were banned in China.

But out of all those collaborations, which include Red Sorghum (1988) and To Live (1994), ‘Raise the Red Lantern’ is probably the director/actor duo’s most famous. It’s a claustrophobic, female-centred film that explores how patriarchy crushes women, forcing them to play a survival game that they have no realistic hope of winning. It’s based on the 1990 novella Wives and Concubines by Su Tong. It follows Songlian (Gong Li), a 19-year-old university student who is pulled out of her studies after her father’s death and forced by circumstances to become the third concubine to a wealthy older man. Once she enters his household, she must compete against his wife and older concubines for his attention.

I’ve seen it categorised as a Romance Drama, but I think categorising it as a “romance” is a stretch. Songlian isn’t fighting for love as much as she is fighting for autonomy and survival in a system designed to strip her of both. As a concubine, she doesn’t have the same legal recognition or status as a wife, and can be divorced arbitrarily, making her position precarious. Within the household, she and the other concubines are given little to do outside of serving him and are placated with shallow privileges. As a result, they descend into petty rivalries and psychological warfare, which ultimately destroys them.

The story resonates beyond its Chinese context. While rewatching it, I was reminded of contemporary stories from women in polygamous marriages across Africa. For instance, I recently read reports of how Nomcebo Zuma, the 22-year-old daughter of South Africa’s former president Jacob Zuma, abandoned her marriage to King Mswati III after spending less than a year as his 12th wife. Official statements said she went “months” without seeing her husband, but rewatching ‘Raise the Red Lantern’ made me wonder if there was more to the story. The film also brought to mind Lola Shoneyin’s 2010 Nigerian novel The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives, another story that peels back the layers of rivalry, repression, and patriarchal double standards among women in polygamous households.

In this way, ‘Raise the Red Lantern’ is part of a global feminist conversation about how patriarchal systems pit women against one another while denying them genuine power or agency. And although it is not a horror film in the conventional sense, its suffocating atmosphere, relentless cruelty, and depiction of women trapped in roles that slowly devour them make it one of the most horrifying films I’ve ever seen. That’s why it feels like a natural fit for my ongoing project on female horror characters, which I’ve called the Madonna-Monster complex. This framework examines how women, repressed into idealised “Madonna” roles of purity and obedience, inevitably unleash their frustration and rage in monstrous, destructive ways.

In ‘Raise the Red Lantern’, there are no literal monsters, but the concubines become monstrous in subtler ways. Stripped of choice and dignity, they turn inward, lashing out at each other. The system deforms them until they no longer recognise themselves.

SUMMARY

The film opens with Songlian explaining to her unseen stepmother that she has decided to become a wealthy man’s concubine. She spent the previous six months studying at university, but her father’s death and the family’s subsequent financial hardship forced her to drop out. Her tearful face suggests that this choice is not entirely hers. She arrives at her husband’s compound as the Fourth Mistress, where she is given her own home that is brightly lit with red lanterns and pampered with a foot massage.

Songlian (right) receives a foot massage from the housekeeper as Yan’er (Kong Lin) watches on. Distributed by Orion Classics.

Songlian soon meets the First Wife (Jin Shuyuan) and the Second Wife, also known as Zhuoyun (Cao Cuifan). The Third Mistress, Meishan, remains cold and distant. She learns that the foot massages and lit red lanterns are only given to whichever wife her husband, Master Chen (Ma Jingwu), has chosen to spend the night with. Zhuoyun is friendly towards Songlian and warns her not to get too close to the Third Mistress, who was previously an opera singer.

Her maid Yan’er (Kong Lin) is cold towards Songlian. She discovers it's because Yan’er had an affair with Master Chen and hoped he’d promote her to Fourth Mistress. She catches the two fooling around and becomes angry at Master Chen, who simply reminds her that there are others desperate for a foot massage, and spends the next night with Meishan.

Meishan (He Saifei) invites her over for a game of mahjong with the handsome family doctor, Dr Gao (Zhigang Cui), and a friend. When she searches for a dropped tile, she spots Meishan playing footsy with the doctor and realises the two are having an affair.

Songlian spots a locked room at the top of the compound and is told that it is where wives and concubines from the previous generation were hanged for adultery. She overhears the sound of a flute playing and, after following it, meets Feipu (Chu Xiao), the adult son of the Master and First Mistress. Hearing him reminds her of her flute, which was passed down to her from her deceased father. But it’s missing. Furious, she goes to Yan’er’s room and accuses her of stealing the flute. Instead, she finds that Yan’er has lit red lanterns in her room and discovers a doll marked with her name that has pins stuck in it. She accuses Yan’er of trying to curse her, but recognises that, as she is illiterate, someone else must have written the name for her. She asks who wrote it, and Yan’er confirms that it was Zhuoyun.

Master Chen tells Songlian that he burned her flute as he suspected it was gifted to her by a boy she met in university. When she’s upset by this, he becomes angry and leaves her for Zhuoyun. The next day, Zhuoyun, pleased with herself, asks Songlian to give her a haircut as Master Chen said it would make her look younger. Songlian accidentally cuts her ear, but Zhuoyun tells the Master it was on purpose, and he agrees to spend a few more nights with her.

Songlian and Meishan grow closer. Meishan warns her that Zhuoyun has “a Buddha’s face and a scorpion’s heart”, telling her that when the two of them got pregnant at the same time, Zhuoyun slipped medicine in her food to cause a miscarriage. The medicine didn’t work, and Meishan gave birth to a son while Zhuoyun had a ‘useless’ daughter. She warns Songlian that she must give birth to a son soon, otherwise things will become much more difficult for her.

After the Master passes a few nights with Zhuoyun, Yan’er gives Songlian a backhanded comment about her status in the household. This prompts her to fake a pregnancy. The lanterns are lit continuously at her house, and she is pampered. But Yan’er spots blood on one of her undergarments and tells Zhuoyun, who convinces the Master to call the doctor. The doctor exposes Songlian’s sham pregnancy. Livid, Master Chen orders the lanterns at her house to be covered.

In response, she exposes Yan’er for having lit lanterns in her room. First Mistress commands Yan’er to kneel in the snow and only stand once she has apologised. But she refuses, kneeling in the snow the whole night until she collapses. Songlian later hears from a servant that Yan’er died in the hospital while calling her name.

A lonely and guilt-ridden Songlian becomes blackout drunk alone on her 20th birthday. Zhuoyun tries to sober her up, and she cries about her lack of attachments compared to the others, unwittingly exposing Meishan’s affair. She wakes up to the sounds of Meishan screaming and being dragged by the Master’s manservants. Zhuoyun thanks Songlian for telling her about the affair. Songlian follows the manservants as they carry Meishan into the locked room. She later goes into the room herself and screams, yelling that the master and the servants are murderers.

Later, the lanterns in Meishan’s house are lit, and her voice can be heard singing opera. The servants believe the home is haunted. In reality, Songlian lit the lanterns in both Meishan’s house and hers and is playing Meishan’s opera records loudly.

The next Summer, Master Chen takes a new mistress. When she asks about Songlian, she is told that she is the Fourth Mistress who went mad. Songlian is seen pacing her courtyard aimlessly, dressed like a schoolgirl, while the lanterns are lit around her.

ISOLATION AND LOSS OF AUTONOMY

The movie provides a harrowing portrait of how patriarchy suffocates women’s autonomy, reducing them to objects that exist to serve men. Songlian enters the household as a bright, independent woman. She walks herself to the house instead of waiting for the bridal sedan and initially treats Yan’er as more of an equal until she’s met with rudeness. Master Chen approves of her being educated, but despite his wealth, funding the rest of her studies is never an option. This is because he views her education solely as a feather in his cap. He benefits from the prestige without ever being threatened by it.

Meishan (He Saifei) performs an opera ballad alone in the courtyard. Distributed by Orion Classics.

Within the compound, Songlian is given nothing to do, has no books, and is never visited by anyone. She eventually becomes frustrated from boredom, remarking to Meishan that in the compound, they are no different from dogs, cats, or rats and have no hope of ever amounting to anything more.

The set and sound design reinforce this suffocating loneliness. The compound is a stark grey labyrinth, devoid of natural beauty or art. The women are often framed within the confines of rigid square and rectangular walls that mirror a prison. Whenever they find fleeting moments of joy outside of the Master’s gaze, they are reminded of their status. During a game of mahjong with Meishan and Dr. Gao, for instance, Songlian is unsettled by the sound of Zhuoyun receiving a foot massage, which serves as an audible reminder that even leisure comes at a cost.

A striking directorial choice is Zhang’s decision never to show Master Chen’s face clearly. His power is felt through absence: in the lighting of lanterns, the sound of foot massages, and the subtle rivalries he incites among the women. By contrast, the women’s own ‘power’ is fleeting and precarious, tied only to their youth, beauty, fertility, and desirability to him.

Unable to strike at the source of her oppression, Songlian directs her frustration downward, most often at Yan’er. Her decision to expose Yan’er for secretly lighting lanterns is a desperate attempt to reassert herself after her sham pregnancy destroys her standing in the household hierarchy. Yet, their rivalry underscores a deeper truth: they are more alike than different. Though positioned at different levels of the hierarchy, both remain under Master Chen’s control, their futures determined entirely by his whims. Their shared subjugation is revealed when they overhear Zhuoyun’s foot massage and, closing their eyes, both imagine themselves in her place. Although Songlian has the power to command, Yan’er to give her a foot massage, Yan’er’s retort, “Maybe you can get Aunt Cao to give you one,” points back to the reality that while she has power over the servants, she does not wield the true power in the household.

This reality leaves Songlian with no viable path forward. Meishan and Zhuoyun function as mirrors of her possible futures. To emulate Zhuoyun is to capitulate to the Madonna role: the dutiful concubine who survives only by descending into cruelty, rivalry, and desperate acts for the Master’s approval. But this path will eventually lead her to the same fate as the First Mistress, who has resigned herself to total abandonment as she can no longer compete with the younger, fertile women. Emulating Meishan is to embrace the Monster: a woman who dares to seek emotional fulfillment beyond the Master’s control, but is punished with death for her defiance.

Songlian sees the impossible bind: survival demands submission, but rebellion risks annihilation. After Meishan’s execution, Songlian unravels, her madness completing the Madonna-Monster trajectory. She plays Meishan’s records so that her death haunts the compound, and she lights the red lanterns herself in a symbolic attempt at reclaiming power. Yet this act of resistance proves futile. In the final scene, Songlian wanders through the compound, dressed like a schoolgirl, her mind shattered. The ending underscores the tragedy: any attempt at reclamation within an unyielding patriarchal system can only collapse back into madness, submission, or death.

DIRECTOR: Jennifer Kent

SCREENPLAY: Jennifer Kent

STARRING: Essie Davis, Noah Wiseman, Daniel Henshall

LANGUAGE: English

RUN TIME: 1hr 34mins

Noah Wiseman stars as Sam (left) and Essie Davis as Amelia (right) in the 2014 Australian supernatural horror film ‘The Babadook’. Distributed by Umbrella Entertainment.

INTRODUCTION

I’ve been thinking more about haunted houses since my previous post on His House (2020) and thought I might as well close out Pride Month with a movie that inadvertently birthed a queer icon after Netflix put it in the LGBT category by mistake. I’m talking about the critically acclaimed Australian horror hit The Babadook (2014), which won four prizes at the 2014 Gerardmer Fantasy Film Festival. The movie was based on writer-director Jennifer Kent’s 2005 short Monster.

‘The Babadook’ follows Amelia (Essie Davis), a single mother going through the motions, barely keeping it together while caring for her son, Samuel (Noah Wiseman). After she reads Samuel a bedtime story from a mysterious book about a terrifying monster named Mister Babadook, Samuel becomes convinced that the monster is real. Soon, it begins creeping into Amelia’s home and life, threatening to take over.

I’ve previously mentioned that haunted houses are effective, symbolic representations of women’s rage, grief, and neurosis, given the associations between women and the home. ‘The Babadook’ is perhaps one of the best examples of this. Amelia is a widow whose husband died almost seven years prior in a car accident while driving Amelia to the hospital to deliver Samuel. She has spent years repressing the memory of her husband, while Samuel is determined to confront it.

This is the root of the tension between the two characters. In a 2014 interview with The Dissolve, Kent explained that she was interested in exploring the dangers of not facing one’s “shadow-side”, and how this can lead to destructive behaviours. When comparing Amelia and Samuel’s behaviours, she said:

“Well, he’s acting out all of this stuff, while Amelia is being a “very good girl” in the beginning. She’s had these terrible things happen and people are trying to help her out, but she’s like, “I’m fine, I’m fine. I’ll do something for you.” And that’s a typically altruistic feminine trait, and I think it has massive negative repercussions. You get the suppression, and then underneath the nice girl is this monster that’s waiting to explode.”

I have to admit, I smiled when I read the above comment because it sums up what my ongoing project, mapping a feminist analytical lens onto female horror characters, which I’ve called the Madonna-Monster complex, is all about. This refers to women characters who are repressed into idealised gendered roles and representations of womanhood, or “Madonna” figures, unleashing their pent-up anger and frustration in the form of a monster.

The Babadook serves as a powerful metaphor for Amelia and Samuel’s grief, and its poignant ending offers a nuanced, grounded exploration of how grief can be dealt with.

SUMMARY

‘The Babadook’ opens with Amelia, a single mother who is strained and not entirely present but dutiful towards her six-year-old son, Samuel. She checks in his cupboard and under his bed for monsters, reads him bedtime stories, smiles at her job in a nursing home, and insists that she’s doing just fine, thank you very much. But the cracks are showing. Sam has behavioural problems and is suspended from school after he brings one of his anti-monster weapons to class.

It’s the lead-up to Sam’s seventh birthday, and Amelia expects him to have a joint party with his cousin Ruby (Chloe Hurn), rather than celebrate it on the actual day. This is because his birthday is also the anniversary of his father Oskar’s death (Ben Winspear). While Amelia insists she’s past it, everyone, including her sister Claire (Hayley McElhinney), can see she isn’t.

One night, Sam asks her to read her a bedtime story from a book called Mister Babadook. She doesn’t recognise it, but reads it anyway. The black-and-white pop-up book starts innocuously but takes a sinister turn as it describes a monster that visits a little boy in his bed at night. “Whether it’s in a word or in a look…you can’t get rid of the Babadook,” it promises, terrifying Sam in the process.

He is convinced that the Babadook is real. He frightens his cousin Ruby with stories of the Babadook, becomes clingier, sets up booby traps to capture it, and plays among his father’s things in the basement which he’s forbidden from entering.

Amelia finds glass shards in her food, which Sam attributes to the Babadook. Out of frustration, she tries to destroy the book. But Sam’s behaviour grows increasingly erratic. He attacks his cousin and has a vision of the Babadook in the car, which triggers a seizure.

The reassembled copy of Mister Babadook Amelia finds which depicts the monster attacking her. Distributed by Umbrella Entertainment.

Amelia later finds Mister Babadook assembled at her front door. She flips through it and sees the images have become more frightening, implying the Babadook will possess her and drive her to kill their dog, Sam, and eventually herself. “I’ll wager with you, let’s make a bet, the more you deny me, the stronger I’ll get,” the book says.

She runs to the police and her sister for help, but neither is helpful. She receives strange phone calls and sees the Babadook’s coat and pointed gloves at the police station. At night, she hears terrifying scraping sounds and sees the Babadook crawl into her room and attack her.

After this, she hallucinates the Babadook and becomes aggressive towards Sam. She becomes impatient, yells at Sam to eat shit when he tells her that he’s hungry and cuts the phone line to prevent him from calling anyone. He is terrified of his mother and insists that the Babadook is making her behave in this way.

One night, while Sam is sleepwalking, he walks down to the basement, and Amelia follows. There, she sees Oskar, who tells her they can be together if she brings him the boy. She realises he’s the Babadook, but a second too late. The Babadook possesses her. In this state, she kills the dog and attempts to kill Sam. He uses one of his booby traps to disarm her and tie her down telling her, “you let it in. You have to let it out!”

She vomits black bile, seemingly getting rid of the Babadook. But Sam reminds her, “you can’t get rid of the Babadook”, and is dragged upstairs by an unseen force. She saves him, but is confronted with a vision reenacting her husband’s death. Once she confronts the vision, she stands up to the Babadook, calling it a trespasser, and commanding it to leave. It flees into the basement.

Amelia and Sam recover. She throws him a birthday party on his actual birthday and is more attentive and caring towards him. He collects worms in the garden, and she takes them to the basement where she feeds them to the Babadook.

GRIEF AND REPRESSION

The monster at the heart of the Babadook has been commonly interpreted as a symbolic representation of grief and how unaddressed trauma can manifest in destructive ways. How Amelia and Sam respond to it is analogous to how they’ve each responded to Oskar’s death. She has been unable to accept it, and this lack of acceptance underscores every interaction she has with others and with her son. She snaps at any suggestion that Sam is similar to her husband. Her sister avoids her because the weight of Amelia’s depression feels unbearable on her and her child.

I had the sense that Amelia responded to her grief this way not just because of her personality, but because she lacks the emotional support to deal with it. Her sister claims to be there for her but recoils from her pain and urges her to move on in a manner that seems more impatient than empathetic. In an interaction between Ruby and Sam, Ruby says, “Mum told Dad she didn’t want to go to your house because it’s too depressing.” Amelia can tell, and the lack of a safe space makes her clam up and repress her feelings to protect herself. But the more she represses, the stronger her depression grows.

Amelia reading Mister Babadook to Sam before bedtime. Distributed by Umbrella Entertainment.

There are societal consequences as well. When Sam acts out in school, the blame is placed on Amelia’s shoulders. She is visited by child protective services, who seem likely to take Sam after an awkward interaction in which Sam admits he doesn’t want to take “drugs” (meaning prescribed sedatives) anymore, and she hallucinates cockroaches coming out of the wall. This represents the enormous societal pressure Amelia is under to be an ideal mother, or Madonna figure, and the high stakes at play if she is unable to meet it. Outside of a colleague who offers to cover her shifts so she can tend to Sam, she is not given the necessary support. As a result, she is unable to process her grief, and her inability to do so eventually triggers a monster transformation.

And so the Babadook grows. She denies its existence until his presence in her house grows so large it becomes inescapable. Sam, on the other hand, is keen to confront the Babadook head-on. He is frightened of it but devises his traps and weapons, talks about the Babadook, and vows to protect his mother.

This mirrors how eager Sam is to engage with his father’s memory. Whenever he attempts to speak about his father, Amelia changes the subject. When she scolds him for playing with his father’s things, he yells, “He’s my father! You don’t own him!” While Amelia is a dutiful mother, her detachment from her son and her refusal to allow him to talk about his father suggest that, in some way, she might hold him responsible for her husband’s death.

This is affirmed later in the film when he yells at Sam, “You don’t know how many times I wished it was you, not him that died. Sometimes I just want to smash your head against a brick wall until your fucking brains pop out!”

This is, of course, an appalling thing to say to a child. However, she says this while possessed by the Babadook. This isn’t to excuse her actions but rather to say that if the Babadook is a metaphor for grief, then this moment encapsulates how pain will always demand to be felt. If it is not confronted healthily, it can spill out, manifesting in destructive ways that harm both the grieving person and themselves.

This is what makes the ending so compelling. Sam’s comment, “you can’t get rid of the Babadook,” represents how grief never fully resolves. It ebbs and flows in waves. While the high tides become less frequent over time, there will still be moments when they return months or years later. The only way to deal is by addressing them head-on. The Babadook will always be a part of their lives, but by confronting him, they can contain him.

I found it touching that Sam immediately recognised when the Babadook had taken over Amelia and was able to support her throughout her possession. There is a point that can be made about how he was parentified at this point, as he had to take on the responsibility of trying to call a trusted adult for help and ultimately guide Amelia through exorcising the Babadook.

Her monster transformation is difficult and ugly to watch. She swears at her son, kills the dog, and assumes mannerisms of the Babadook. However, it is clear that it’s been a long time coming. Through her son she is ultimately given the safe space she needs to release almost seven years of repressed grief with someone who loves her enough to hold her hand through it. I’m not sure how I feel about such a young child being given such an enormous responsibility. But the other interpretation of this is that Oskar’s death is a grief shared between Amelia and Sam, and the only way they are able to confront it is by doing it together.

DIRECTOR: Julia Ducournau

SCREENPLAY: Julia Ducournau

STARRING: Garance Marillier, Ella Rumpf, Rabah Nait Oufella

LANGUAGE: French

RUN TIME: 1hr 39 mins

Garance Marillier as Justine in Raw (2016). Distributed by Focus World

INTRODUCTION

Happy Pride Month everyone! To celebrate, I thought it would be appropriate to discuss a movie that in 2017 was described as “the most outwardly queer” horror film of the year by media outlet The Fader. That movie is Raw (2016), the major debut of French writer-director Julia Ducournau. It was a critical and box office success, racking up an impressive four nominations at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival and the top prize at the 2017 Gerardmer Fantasy Film Festival.

It isn’t a particularly pleasant watch because of its unflinching portrayal of cannibalism. It follows first year veterinary school student Justine, a lifelong vegetarian, who is coerced into eating a raw rabbit liver as part of a hazing ritual. Following this, she begins to develop rashes and uncontrollable cravings for raw meat and eventually develops a taste for human flesh.

The film is arguably queer in two ways: firstly, one of the characters with the most screen time Adrien (Rabah Nait Oufella) is an outwardly gay character whose sexuality is explored by the film, and second because sexual repression, sexual awakening and deviance are the major themes driving the movie.

In a 2017 interview with Film4, Ducourneau explained that she was interested in exploring the idea that bodies can evolve to have their own autonomy independent from the person. She said,

“If your body has its own autonomy, like you get very sick or have a rash or something like that, and it doesn’t respond to you anymore…what does it make you? Are you your body or is your body you, and where is the identity in this?”

Because of this, I decided to explore it as part of my ongoing project of mapping a feminist analytical lens onto female horror characters, which I’ve called the Madonna-Monster complex. This refers to women characters who are repressed into idealised gendered roles and representations of womanhood, or “Madonna” figures, who go on to unleash their pent-up anger and frustration in the form of a monster.

So, of course, I was attracted to this film because of how it explores repression. I was also interested in watching a New French Extremity film directed by a woman. New French Extremity is a bit of a difficult genre to define, but it’s a loose description first applied to French movies from the late 90s to the 00s, characterised by graphic depictions of gore and violence, both physical and sexual. I only managed to watch about two of these films, Irréversible (2002), and Martyrs (2008), before being turned off the whole genre by the gratuitous and misogynistic depictions of violence against women. Irréversible is probably the worst offender, with its nine minute long rape scene shot in a single unflinching take. Yes, the rape scene is nine minutes long. Nine minutes. NINE.

Thankfully, no such scene exists in Raw. Its depiction of body horror is graphic, but the violence it does show feels far more motivated, and its depiction of women feels more complex.

SUMMARY

The cold opening begins with a quiet rural road where a car swerves to avoid hitting someone lying on the road before hitting a tree. The person then stands and calmly walks towards the crash scene. It then cuts to Justine (Garance Marillier) a first-year veterinary student from a close-knit family of strict vegetarians. Her parents drop her off at the veterinary school they graduated from, and her older sister Alexia, called Alex (Ella Rumpf) is currently attending as a second-year student.

Justine is surprised to see that her roommate Adrien is a man. She specifically requested a woman, but he reassures her that he’s gay. They are woken up one night by loud yelling and balaclava-clad older students as part of an initiation ritual. One of the rituals involves eating a raw rabbit liver, which Justine initially refuses. But Alex pressures her to do it, telling her, “you’ll be happy you did it.” She is anything but. Justine soon develops rashes and nausea, which a school nurse tells her is the result of food poisoning. But that’s not all she develops. She begins to crave meat, attempting to (unsuccessfully) steal a burger patty from the university cafeteria and eventually resorting to eating raw chicken cutlets she steals from a fridge.

Justine steals and eventually consumes raw chicken cutlets. Distributed by Focus World

One night while Alex is giving her a bikini wax, an accident with a pair of scissors leads to Alexia cutting her finger off. Alexia faints, Justine panics and calls emergency services, and while waiting for an ambulance to arrive, she picks up Alex’s severed finger and eats it. Only after she’s eaten it does she realise her sister has woken up and seen the whole thing.

But Alex doesn’t tell their parents the truth. Instead, she blames the dog for her missing finger and takes Justine to a deserted road where they lie in wait. Alex throws herself in front of a car, causing an accident that kills the driver and passenger. In horror, Justine watches as she walks over to the car and begins eating the driver. When Justine tries to stop her Alex yells, “I did this for you, idiot! You need to learn.” Justine realises her sister has the same cannibalistic urges she does and has been satisfying them by deliberately causing car accidents to kill and eat the people inside.

Justine’s cravings for human meat develop alongside her sexual awakening. She is a virgin when she arrives at university, which she loses after a night of drunken sex with Adrien. During this, she attempts to bite Adrien but accidentally bites herself and orgasms. During another seven minutes in heaven type initiation ritual, she kisses a male student and bites part of his lip off, which she later eats. She begins to make more aggressive, inappropriate sexual advances towards others, blurring the line between arousal and hunger.

Things come to a climax when Adrien pulls her aside one morning and shows her a video he was sent in which she is blackout drunk in a morgue, surrounded by disgusted onlookers, as her sister goads her into biting a dead man’s hand. Irate, she confronts Alexia, and the two have a public brawl which ends in them biting chunks out of each other’s faces and arms. The two make up. But she wakes up one morning next to Adrien and finds herself covered in blood. Adrien is dead. She realises Alexia was the one who killed and ate him. She is livid at first, but cleans her sister up.

The film ends with Alexia in prison for Adrien’s murder. Justine has been sent back home to her parents. In a terse table scene, her father (Laurent Lucas) tells her, “It’s our fault. We didn’t find a solution.” As he tells her that her mother was initially reluctant to date him, he brushes the scar on his top lip as he says that he finally understood why when they had their first kiss. He unbuttons his shirt, revealing scars and healed-over chunks of flesh missing. In the final line of the film, he says, “I’m sure you will find a solution, honey”, revealing that she and her sister inherited their cannibalistic urges from their mother.

SEXUAL REPRESSION AND QUEER AWAKENING

Justine bites her arm and orgasms while having sex for the first time with Adrien (Rabah Nait Oufella). Distributed by Focus World

Repression sits at the heart of this movie. Justine’s parents enforced vegetarianism in the hopes that it would keep the monstrous, cannibal urges hidden. But shrouding them in shame and secrecy only makes them worse. Justine and Alex lack the tools to navigate their urges in a healthy way and act on them in ways that are destructive to themselves and to others. In the Film4 interview, Ducournau addressed this aspect, saying,

“I do believe that when you acknowledge the dark part of yourself, this is when you can actually start growing as a moral entity and you can start making moral choices because you know your freedom comes at the price of the responsibility you have towards others.”

Cannibalism is obviously an imperfect metaphor for queerness, given its inherent danger to others. But there are strong parallels one can draw between the shame and secrecy Justine feels towards her urges that are outside of her control and the shame and secrecy queer people can often feel in recognising and acting on their own queerness.

This is something the movie deliberately brings attention to through Adrien. After Adrien and Justine sleep together, he immediately regrets it. He becomes frustrated that he spent years closeted and then bullied, only to question his sexuality all over again. His gayness is an integral part of the identity he has constructed, and he feels confused and ashamed by what he views as a personal betrayal.

Justine’s transformation from a virginal vegetarian into a cannibalistic monster is linked to her sexual awakening. As she devours a shirtless Adrien with her eyes, her nose begins to bleed, directly linking the sexual desire she feels to her condition. As her cannibalistic urges become harder to control, her sexual behaviour becomes more alarming and inappropriate, including kissing people without consent. As a monster, she is “freer” to act on her repressed urges, but that freedom comes at a destructive cost to others.

CONSUMPTION AND THE SEXUAL POLITICS OF MEAT

I’ve previously mentioned Carol J Abraham’s seminal book The Sexual Politics of Meat, in which she links the oppression of women to the oppression of animals. She argues that both women and animals are oppressed through a process of being objectified, fragmented, and eventually consumed.

I wondered if Ducourneau was making a similar point by including a debate among the veterinary students about whether a raped monkey and a raped woman suffer the same. The imagery of a hazing ritual in which the first years crawl on all fours resembles animals being herded in a slaughterhouse. As she prepares for a night out she listens to Plus putes que toutes les putes (meaning sluttier than all the sluts) by ORTIES ft ANTHA, kissing her mirror while singing the lyrics which translate to, “I like to bang the dead, cold and hard, less talk” reinforcing that sex is a form of consumption, and that sexual objectification involves violent dehumanisation and abuse.

The consequences of this are made apparent by Adrien’s death. Justine consumes Adrien sexually, and Alex consumes his flesh. Parts of Justine and Alex’s father were also consumed by their mother during sex. The consumption is both literal and symbolic, echoing Adams’ argument that the fragmentation of the body, whether human or animal, is a foundational mechanism of patriarchal control.

Justine’s father (Laurent Lucas) shows Justine the scars on his chest caused by her mother consuming him. Distributed by Focus World

CONCLUSION

Raw is a film that sinks its teeth deep into the intersections of identity, repression, and desire. Through its visceral imagery and complex characters, Julia Ducournau crafts a coming-of-age story that is as grotesque as it is emotionally honest. By framing cannibalism as a metaphor for queerness, hunger, and sexual awakening, the film challenges viewers to reckon with the parts of ourselves that polite society teaches us to suppress. Justine’s journey from reluctant vegetarian to voracious predator is not just about indulging taboo urges. It’s also about confronting the shame that repression breeds and the harm it can cause when left unacknowledged.

Ducournau's lens is distinctly feminist, centring female agency, bodily autonomy, and the monstrous as a response to control. This makes Raw a rare example of horror that explores queerness, sexuality, and womanhood with intelligence and intentionality. It’s messy, uncomfortable, and deeply human, much like the experience of growing into oneself.

In a genre often defined by its marginalisation of women and queer people, Raw flips the script and asks: What if the monster is simply a girl trying to survive?

DIRECTOR: Lorcan Finnegan

WRITER: Garret Shanley

STARRING: Eva Green, Mark Strong, Chai Fonacier

LANGUAGE: English, Cebuano

RUN TIME: 1hr 36mins

Eva Green (left) and Chai Fonacier (right) star in Nocebo (2022) directed by Lorcan Finnegan. Distributed by Shudder

INTRODUCTION

Nocebo (2022) is a film unlike any other revenge horror I’ve seen. Instead of tackling domestic affairs, it focuses on late-stage capitalism and neocolonialism. I was initially a little reluctant to watch it because I’d found director Lorcan Finnegan’s earlier work, Vivarium (2019), stylistically interesting but thematically shallow. With Nocebo, however, Finnegan drew inspiration from his Irish background to explore themes around colonialism.

According to Merriam-Webster, a nocebo is “a harmless substance or treatment that when taken by or administered to a patient is associated with harmful side effects or worsening of symptoms due to negative expectations or the psychological condition of the patient.” In a 2022 interview with Film International, Finnegan explained that he was interested in exploring how placebos and nocebos are often associated with shamanism, which was widely practised in Ireland before British colonialism. He saw similarities between shamanism and the impact of colonialism in Ireland and the Philippines. He explained:

“[Nocebo] was kind of drawing a connection between colonialism neo-colonialism, which is like these corporations, brands now being the masters of people in the developing world and exploiting them from afar and through ignoring human rights and workers’ rights and safety regulations and all this kind of thing.”

As a woman from the Global South, I was very interested in analysing this movie through an intersectional feminist lens. This is why I’ve decided to revisit it as part of my ongoing project of mapping a feminist analytical lens onto female horror characters, which I’ve called the Madonna-Monster complex. This refers to women characters who are repressed into idealised gendered roles and representations of womanhood, or “Madonna” figures, unleashing their pent-up anger and frustration in the form of a monster.

The “monster” at the heart of this movie is an exploited Filipina woman who uses witchcraft traditions to exact revenge. The result is a textured, unsettling story examining neocolonialism and who pays the true price for garments.

SUMMARY

Nocebo takes us into the world of Christine (Eva Green), a British woman who seemingly has it all. She’s a successful children’s fashion designer who drives luxury vehicles and lives in a large manor house with her handsome marketing strategist husband, Felix (Mark Strong), and daughter Roberta, called Bobs (Billie Gadson). Her world changes when she receives a call informing her of a tragedy she is somehow connected to. The details are scarce, but the few we receive are dire - multiple bodies have been pulled out of a building. As she tries to wrap her head around this, a burnt dog appears and shakes ticks onto her.

For a moment, we wonder if she imagined it. Flash-forward eight months, and she’s visibly ill. The tick bite on her neck points possibly to Lyme disease, although the mysterious circumstances force us to question whether it’s something else. She sleeps with a CPAP mask, takes an assortment of pills, has shaking fits, and suffers from memory loss. Her memory loss is so severe that she seemingly forgets she hired a housekeeper. So when Diana (Chai Fonacier) shows up at her door, Christine has no idea who she is and has not prepared for her. She assumes, given her illness, that she probably did hire her at some point, and lets her in. Felix isn’t too keen on allowing Diana to stay, but agrees to give the arrangement a week.

At first, it seems to go well. Diana cooks traditional Filipino meals for them, which Felix condescendingly calls “surprisingly good”. She’s able to stop Christine’s shaking fits using a folk remedy. When Christine asks how Diana gained her healing skills, she explained that an ongo (the Cebuano word for witchdoctor) had visited her home as a child and died in her presence. This act transferred her spirit to Diana and with it, her understanding of the natural world and ability to harness it for healing or destruction. Christine is skeptical of the story but allows Diana to try other folk remedies. When these also work, she asks Diana for help with her illness. Diana tells Christine that there is something hidden inside her that is making her sick. “I will draw it out of you and show it to you,” Diana tells her. “You must allow me in, Christine. I will prepare you to face it. You will know it when you see it.”

As Christine and Bobs grow more dependent on Diana, Felix grows more suspicious of her intentions. He doesn’t believe Christine’s illness is real, telling Diana, “it’s all in her head. It’s buried guilt.” We aren’t told for what. Felix is disposed of after what looks like an accident on the stairs sends him to the hospital, and Christine fully lets Diana in as her illness becomes worse.

Diana preparing a traditional folk remedy for Christine. Distributed by Shudder.

Interspersed in the narrative are flashbacks of Diana’s life in Cebu. We see her meet her husband Jomar (Anthony Falcon), give birth to their daughter Anina (Sariah Reyes-Themistocleous), and get violently displaced from their home after the land is sold to a mining company. They move to an inner city slum, and Diana takes a job in a garment factory. She is unable to afford childcare, so she has to take her daughter to work with her.

The two narratives merge when, during a drawn-out “healing” session, Diana informs Christine, “it is time for you to see [and] understand.” A flashback shows Diana sewing clothes for Christine’s label, Tykie. Christine visits the factory, asks the foreman if the “girls” could up their quotas from 25 t-shirts an hour to 30, and orders it to be locked to prevent theft.

The factory is hot, and Diana asked the foreman to leave so she could buy coconut water for her daughter. Tragedy strikes after an accidental fire starts in the factory, and the locked door prevents anyone from escaping, including Diana’s daughter. Diana has therefore come not to help Christine, but to seek revenge.

And she gets it. In a spectacular role reversal, Christine is stuck to the sewing wheel, unable to get up and denied water, while Diana barks orders at her. Through a reality-bending dream sequence, Christine is placed in the factory, forced to live through the desperate final moments of those who died in the fire, and she too is burned to death.

In her final act of vengeance, Diana leaps to her death in front of Bobs, transferring the ongo spirit into her. In the final shots of the film, we see Bobs collecting moss and plants in an apparent newfound fascination with the natural world while Diana’s spirit watches from a distance.

NEOCOLONIALISM AND THE ABSENT REFERRANT

I’ve previously mentioned that monster transformations allow for a role-reversal in power dynamics, and while this is usually along gender lines, what makes Nocebo particularly striking is that the power inversion is directly related to race, class, and colonialism. The film draws from real ethical concerns plaguing fast-fashion industry giants like Shein and Zara. The true costs of cheap clothing are borne by poor garment factory workers working across Global South countries like India, Bangladesh, and the Philippines under poor health and safety conditions for exploitative pay. The factory fire at the heart of the movie draws from real-world tragedies like the 2015 Kentex factory fire, which claimed 72 garment workers’ lives in Manila, and the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, which claimed the lives of 146 garment workers. It is a form of neocolonialism in which mostly Western fashion companies exploit the labour of workers in the Global South while reaping the profits.

Throughout the movie, we see this reality casually normalised by those in decision-making roles. When Diana asks Christine whether she makes her clothes herself, Christine euphemistically refers to the factory workers as her “little helpers” and becomes cagey when asked for more details. This sequence reminded me of Carol J Adams’ 1990 seminal work, The Sexual Politics of Meat, in which she refers to the concept of the absent referent, saying:

In other words, the way we talk about and present meat distances the animals as living beings from the meat we consume as products. This distance allows us to consume meat products without thinking of the ethics behind how they arrived on our plates. I think that a similar process happens with the garment industry, where the clothing we buy in a store is separated from the conditions of those who produce it. As a result, we have a consumer population that is ignorant of the true labour costs behind clothes. It is why a consumer can look at a ridiculously cheap jacket from Temu or Shein and think only of the jacket without questioning how much the person who sewed it was paid.

Christine is a more extreme example of this. She is supposedly wracked with guilt over her role in the factory fire, yet she never mentions it. When Diana asks her if she and Felix have heard of Cebu City before, they look at her with blank faces. Christine has met Diana and Anina before, but she has completely forgotten them. When she feels better she is happy to work on a new line inspired by South East Asian culture without once noticing the irony. This is deliberate. She can separate her success as a fashion designer from the exploitation that makes that success possible. The garment workers are the absent referent when she thinks and talks about her work.

The climax scene represents Diana making this absent referent visible. Through her monster transformation, Diana utilises one of the few means available to her to level the playing field. As a Filipina factory worker, she is powerless compared to a rich British businesswoman. But as an ongo, she can use her supernatural power to overcome her lack of political and economic power to force Christine to remember, and to truly comprehend the horror she was directly responsible for.

MOTHERHOOD AND REPRODUCTIVE JUSTICE

The movie made me think of reproductive justice, a concept championed by U.S. Black feminists in the 1990s. Reproductive justice advocates argue that the conditions under which women make reproductive choices are just as important as the choices themselves. In other words, they interrogate the socioeconomic and environmental factors that inform who is able to mother.

Christine speaking to her daughter Bobs (Billie Gadsdon). Distributed by Shudder

Nocebo takes pains to emphasise that both women share a common experience of motherhood. Scenes of them giving birth are shown side by side, their daughters are similar in age, and Diana looks longingly at a photo of Anina after seeing a photo of Bobs hanging on the walls.

But only one woman’s daughter is still alive. Anina was taken from Diana, not because Diana was incompetent. The movie shows that Diana was an attentive, caring mother, perhaps more so than Christine. She was effectively a “madonna” figure who fulfilled societal expectations around motherhood. However, her ability to fulfil this role was taken from her by the intersections of poverty and neocolonialism, which placed Anina in the factory when the fire occurred. If she had just been paid a living wage so she could afford childcare or worked under adequate safety conditions where an unlocked fire exit was available, her daughter would still be alive.

When Diana exacts revenge she tells Christine, “you’re a greedy parasite. You’re a tick, Christine. Feeding, sucking everything from us”. It’s a stark reminder of how the opulent lifestyles of the Global North are made possible by the blood, sweat, and tears of underpaid workers in the Global South.

DIRECTOR: Banjong Pisanthanakun and Parkpoom Wongpoom

WRITER: Parkpoom Wongpoom, Banjong Pisanthanakun, and Sophon Sakdaphisit

STARRING: Ananda Everingham, Natthaweeranuch Thongmee, Achita Sikamana

LANGUAGE: Thai

RUN TIME: 1 hr 37mins

Shutter (2004) is one of my all-time favourite horror movies that I don’t believe gets discussed nearly enough among female rage Good for Her movie enthusiasts. I blame this in part on English audiences’ hostility towards foreign language films, and partly on the appallingly shallow and racist reviews the movie was subjected to by English film critics on release. If I’d banged my head on the table every time I came across an English review that referred to the Thai movie as a Japanese horror, I’d probably look like Toni Collette at the end of Hereditary (2018).

The movie was critically and commercially successful in Thailand, leading to an English-language American remake (which wasn’t nearly as good). English critics were quick to dismiss the movie as a derivative, paint-by-the-numbers ghost story featuring yet another vengeful spirit in the form of the long-haired, pale woman in white, similar to the entities that haunt the videotape at the heart of Ringu (1998) and the house in Ju-On (2000). One particularly grating review complained that the movie made no effort to bring in the “cultural nuances” of Thailand. “The story could just as easily have been set in Peoria [Illinois, USA] instead of Bangkok,” moaned Bill Cunningham of Quarter to Three, because god forbid creatives from the Global South don’t self-exoticise for the benefit of western audiences.

Natthaweeranuch Thongmee (left) and Achita Sikamana (right) star in this classic Thai horror exploring female rage, sexual violence, and karma. Distributed by GMM Tai Hub

It’s also just not true. The story is steeped in Thai culture, which has a rich tradition of ghost stories. While the movie’s depiction of its ghost was undoubtedly influenced by J-horror like Ju-On, the ghost in the story is most similar to Phi Tai Hong entities in Thai culture. These are vengeful, restless spirits of people who met sudden, tragic ends and whose families did not perform the proper funeral rites. These entities are known for claiming victims under circumstances similar to their deaths. They therefore represent anger, unresolved grief, and unaddressed trauma, as traumatised people will often turn to repetition in the absence of real closure.

Haunted photographs admittedly do feel similar to haunted videotapes. However, in a 2024 interview with Fangoria, the directorial duo Banjong Pisanthanakun and Parkpoom Wongpoom explained that, unlike earlier technology-based Asian horrors like Ringu and Pulse (2001), they were less concerned with presenting technology itself as scary.

“I was more concerned with answering whether technology can prove the existence of souls, of spirits,” Wongpoom reportedly said. “From there, I thought about how karma and consequences could come into play, exploring why photos can ‘trap' the dead.”

The powerful ending of Shutter and the subtle ways it explores toxic masculinity and rape culture make it a a fascinating movie to examine through a feminist lens. This is why I’ve decided to revisit it as part of my ongoing project of mapping a feminist analytical lens onto female horror characters, which I’ve called the Madonna-Monster complex. This refers to women characters who are repressed into idealised gendered roles and representations of womanhood, or “Madonna” figures, unleashing their pent-up anger and frustration in the form of a monster.

Unlike previous movies I’ve discussed, this movie has a male protagonist. It follows photographer Tun (Ananda Everingham) and his girlfriend, fourth-year photography student Jane (Natthaweeranuch Thongmee). One night, while returning from a friend’s wedding, the couple is in a hit-and-run with a young woman. Soon afterwards, ghostly light distortions and images infiltrate Tun’s photos. His neck hurts, and his weight almost doubles with no clear explanation. He takes graduation photos for one of Jane’s friends, and while the class is posing for a shot, we see a ghostly young woman staring back at him through his camera lens. The graduation photos almost all develop with strange light distortions.

Things take a terrifying turn when Jane returns home, sees the light in Tun’s photography room is on, and sees a shadow pacing on the other side of the door. The doorknob rattles before the door swings open to reveal an empty room. She approaches the flowing sink and sees a dark head of hair begin to emerge from the basin, followed by fingers and a piercing scream.

Tun (Ananda Everingham, left) and Jane investigate the accident as the number of ghostly encounters they have grows. Distributed by GMM Tai Hub.

This encounter prompts the two into action. They investigate the accident but find no reports of any girl who was hit. They track down a magazine that specialises in publishing ghost photos but find that most of the photos the magazine has are faked. Not all of them are, though. The magazine editor (Apichart Chusakul) shows them a few authentic ghost photos he has and tells them, “In my opinion, these pictures represent more than macabre urban legends. They are signs…why would the dead return to the living without a message to convey?” He theorises that ghosts haunt images of people they are either related to or who maligned them in life. He also suggests that they take Polaroids to confirm whether the ghost images they are seeing are authentic, as Polaroids are “impossible” to fake.

Armed with this knowledge and decent sleuthing skills, Jane realises that the young woman they hit was a former classmate of Tun’s named Natre, and other photos reveal the two seemed close. He confirms that the two dated but secretly, as she was a social outcast and Tun didn’t want his friends to know he was with her. She loved him deeply and bought him his first camera. But no matter how much she begged him, he refused to claim her publicly or stick up for her while he watched his friends bully her.

Their situation grows more desperate after Tun witnesses a close friend of his jump off a balcony and discovers that his two other close university friends have killed themselves similarly. Tun fears he might be next. He and Jane track Natre’s mother and discover Natre’s corpse lying in her bed. Natre killed herself months ago by jumping off a hospital roof. Her mother has refused to cremate her out of extreme grief and denial, but after Jane and Tun show her the ghost photos, she agrees to observe the proper funeral rites so Natre’s spirit can rest.

But it doesn’t work. Natre continues to haunt Tun, chasing him around a hotel in a terrifying sequence. Her spirit continues to show up in photos taken inside Tun’s apartment, and Jane realises the spirit seems very interested in something behind the bookshelf. She investigates and finds jaw-dropping photos of Tun’s friends assaulting Natre. He witnessed them gang raping her and when she cried out for his help, he chose to listen to his friends instead, who begged him to take photos of the assault to blackmail her into silence.

At this point, we realise that the Natre’s spirit has been stuck in a cycle of traumatic repetition. The ghostly rattling doorknob Jane witnessed earlier was Natre recreating her attempt to flee her attackers, only to realise they had locked the door. The piercing scream that punctuates the movie was from Natre crying out to Tun after the mental anguish from their relationship led to her self-harming. Natre’s presence manifests over and over in the images Tun takes using the very same camera that she bought him and that he later used to take photos of her assault.

Jane, disgusted by his actions, leaves him. In a fit of madness, he yells at Natre to reveal herself before flinging his Polaroid camera across the floor. The camera snaps one final photo while facing him. He looks at it and discovers, to his horror, that Natre’s ghost is sitting on his shoulders. The severe shock causes him to stumble backwards and fall out of his apartment. But the fall doesn’t kill him. In the powerful final shot of the film, we see Jane visit Tun in the hospital. He is hunched over and leaning forward in a catatonic state. As she closes the door, the reflection in the hospital glass shows Natre seated on his shoulders, weighing him down as his burden to carry.

The final Polaroid reveals that Natre’s spirit is sitting on Tun’s shoulders in a powerful symbolic representation of her passing on the burden of shame to the person who rightfully should carry it. Distributed by GMM Tai Hub

The end of the movie made me think more about the burden of shame. Natre had suffered from this burden repeatedly, first through Tun’s rejection of her and later when he and her attackers weaponised shame against her by using the threat of leaking her photos to silence her. In the end, it had destroyed her and her mother, who suffered social isolation for refusing to accept her daughter’s death. I don’t know enough about Natre as a character to know whether she ever truly fit the Madonna ideal in life, although her devotion and attentiveness towards him indicate she likely tried. Her monster transformation subverts the power imbalance she was once victimised by, allowing her to exact revenge and place the burden she has carried where it truly belongs.

It’s a bittersweet ending. While she has exacted her revenge, she is still stuck on Tun’s shoulders. She is unable to move on, and now neither is he.

The movie is also a fantastic commentary on toxic masculinity. We see it from the beginning as Tun’s newly married friend discusses how he visited sex workers just a few days before marrying his bride. His friends refer to Natre as “that bitch”. He never holds his friends accountable for the way they abuse Natre. While he does not participate in the actual rape, he is fully complicit in it. He makes excuses for his behaviour, “I was young and stupid”, and yells out at Natre’s spirit, “I thought you loved me so much”, revealing that he has still failed to take accountability for his actions.

It’s a powerful reminder that rape culture isn’t just perpetrated by actual rapists, it is also perpetrated by so-called good men who quietly sit by and watch.

Director: Karyn Kusama

Writer: Diablo Cody

Starring: Megan Fox, Amanda Seyfried, Adam Brody

Language: English

RUN TIME: 1hr 45mins

Jennifer’s Body is a rare cult classic that was critically and commercially panned when it was released because audiences misunderstood it. To be fair to them, that was partly the fault of the marketing team. The movie stars Megan Fox at the peak of her Transformers sex symbol heyday. Accordingly, the marketers decided the best strategy would be to market it to horny teenage boys by promising them sexy, close-up shots of Fox and titilating girl-on-girl action.

But the movie doesn’t work as a sexy male fantasy vehicle. The leads, Fox and Amanda Seyfried, keep their clothes on, the same-sex kiss isn’t framed in a titillating way, and the male characters don’t stick around long enough or leave enough of an impression to identify with. It didn’t help that the media had turned on Megan Fox for her comments comparing Transformers director Michael Bay to Hitler, and this reportage cast a dark shadow over the movie.

This is something writer Diablo Cody (fresh off her award-winning film Juno) and director Karyn Kusama (whose debutÆonFlux had been universally panned) have since discussed. In a 2018 interview with Buzzfeed News, Cody said, “Because of the way the film was marketed, people wanted to see the movie as a cheap, trashy, exploitative vehicle for the hot girl from Transformers. That’s how people insisted on seeing the film, even though I think when you watch it, it’s pretty obvious that there’s something else going on.”

Official poster for Jennifer’s Body (2009) directed by Karyn Kusama, written by Diablo Cody, and distributed by 20th Century Studios.

Thankfully for Cody, recent audiences have realised that beyond its comedic tone, it explores some heady feminist themes. As a result, the movie has gained cult status as a feminist horror classic. Post the #MeToo movement, it has a particular resonance as a depiction of sexual violence.

I decided to revisit it as part of my ongoing project, mapping an analytical lens onto female horror characters, I’ve called the Madonna-Monster complex. This refers to women characters who are repressed into idealised gendered roles and representations of womanhood, or “Madonna” figures, unleashing their pent-up anger and frustration in the form of a monster. And in this movie, both female leads, Jennifer (Megan Fox) and Needy (Amanda Seyfried) undergo monster transformations.

The movie introduces us to high school best friends Jennifer and Needy. They live in small-town Devil’s Kettle, named after the real-life mysterious ‘waterfall to nowhere’ in the US. Jennifer is a typical popular cheerleader, whereas Needy is the typical nerdy, bespectacled girl who is far more comfortable watching from the stands. They’ve been friends for life, as Needy says, “sandbox love never dies”.

But from the beginning, the sexual tension between the two characters is palpable. When Needy waves at Jennifer from the stands, another character (played by Valerie Tian) quips, “you’re totally lesbigay”. And we see where she’s coming from. In later scenes, they often lace fingers and stare deeply into one another’s eyes. However, there are also subtle hints of jealousy and competition. Boys ignore Needy while approaching Jennifer. When getting ready for a night out, Needy says that she cannot upstage Jennifer by showing her cleavage as breasts are “Jennifer’s thing”. Needy’s boyfriend Chip (Johnny Simmons) comments, ‘you always do what Jennifer tells you to do,’ indicating a codependent dynamic.

Jennifer convinces her to go to a gig playing at a local bar by a little-known band named Low Shoulder. The gig ends in catastrophe after the bar catches fire and kills over a dozen people. But not before Jennifer catches the eye of lead singer Nikolai (Adam Brody), who becomes more interested in her after he’s told she’s a virgin. We later find out she’s “not even a backdoor virgin” anymore thanks to an older man, Roman (Chris Pratt), whom we see her flirt with. Nonetheless, Jennifer gets into the band’s blacked-out van despite Needy’s objections.

Needy (Amanda Seyfried) and Jennifer (Megan Fox) attend the Low Shoulder gig together, which ends in disaster. 20th Century Studios.

We find out much later what happened. The story unfolds as a flashback in which the camera switches between tight shots of Jennifer’s face and POV angles that force us to identify with her perspective. We see the fear in her face as it dawns on her that she is in a van with strange men and has no idea where they’re taking her. She tells them she is a virgin again in the hopes that it will make her sound less sexually appealing to them. But that’s exactly why they want her. They drag her out, tie her down, and stab her in a ritual sacrifice to Satan in the hopes he will give them the commercial success they crave. Despite the comedic tilt of the seen, Jennifer’s terror and the repeated penetration of the knife give it the feel of a rape scene.

But the ritual requires a virgin, likely because of associations between virgin women and purity. When a non-virgin is sacrificed instead, a part of the demon is absorbed into them, and they must feed on humans to survive. As a result, Jennifer is reborn as a vampiric succubus who uses her sexual wiles to prey on the boys at her school.

I’d earlier mentioned that a monster transformation allows for a role reversal between predator and prey, and this becomes a major theme within this movie. At the beginning, we see Jennifer being approached and preyed on by older men like Roman and the band members of Low Shoulder. I found it interesting that the closer she was, or appeared to be, to the Madonna ideal was when she was the most vulnerable to male violence. As she takes on the role of a beautiful young ‘virgin’, male sexual desire and ambition are mapped onto her body, resulting in them abusing her for personal gain. Once she is transformed, she can take full control of her sexuality and use it as the source of her power.

When we see her approach a jock Jonas (Josh Emerson) who is devastated over the death of his friend, her use of emotional manipulation to seduce and ultimately kill him shows the audience that she has become the predator. The scene ends with his corpse being discovered by a teacher (J.K. Simmons) who finds his stomach ripped open, and his innards being eaten by a deer. The irony of a prey animal eating a human reinforces the role reversal that has taken place.

Jennifer’s behaviour parallels rape trauma syndrome. Immediately after the ritual sacrifice, we see Jennifer standing in Needy’s dark kitchen covered in blood. Needy asks what happens, but the only response is a sickening smile, followed by Jennifer throwing up a strange, prickly black bile. Jennifer leaves, and the next time we see her at school, she is perfectly fine, looking radiant and unaffected by the incident at the bar. She is so emotionally detached from it that Needy questions whether the kitchen incident happened. This reminded me of the initial shock of being raped, which can trigger physical symptoms like nausea, followed by avoidance of the topic, both of which are common trauma responses experienced by survivors. Her seductiveness, particularly towards boys she was previously uninterested in, mirrored hypersexuality which is another common rape trauma response.

Jennifer after the ritual sacrifice turns her into a demon. 20th Century Studios

Soon, Needy becomes consumed by Jennifer’s strange behaviour. The first time she has sex with her boyfriend, her mind is on Jennifer. She notices that Jennifer looks sickly and withdrawn before a murder and returns radiant soon after another one takes place. She spends time in the library researching the occult to figure out her friend’s strange behaviour.

Jennifer seems obsessed with Needy, too. She turns her attention to the boys Needy has relationships with, starting with Needy’s goth friend Colin (Kyle Gallner) and then Chip. While pursuing both of these boys, she asks them to tell her she’s better than Needy, betraying that she, too, feels insecure around her friend. Her relationship with Chip is complicated. Initially, she complains that Chip is always stealing Needy away from her. Her desire to feed on Chip and have him tell her she is better than Needy could be read in two ways. Either she is attempting to remove him from the picture, or she wants Needy for herself and wants to be her.

Jennifer uses her monster state to regain control over several parts of her life. She tells her victims, “I need you frightened. I need you hopeless,” just before killing them. There’s a chance she may not be able to feed on them if they aren’t, but importantly, this is how she would have felt in the moments before her assault. I also found it interesting that, rather than pursuing Low Shoulder, she focuses on more vulnerable targets like the Indian exchange student. This is possibly because the ritual still works out for Low Shoulder, and they soar to success, lifting them out of her reach.

This is partly why the kiss scene between her and Needy feels more uncomfortable. There is no pornographic soft lighting or music. Instead, the kiss feels like a manipulative attempt on Jennifer’s part to use her seductive powers to prey on Needy as she had previously preyed on men. But there is a passion and urgency behind the kiss, implying a real yearning for each other.

The kiss made me question the role of the monster in Needy and Jennifer’s relationship. Did Jennifer’s monster transformation lead to her preying on her friend in a similar way she had preyed on her classmates? Or did it provide her with a means to release years of complex, sexual desire she had felt towards her childhood friend? I don’t think the film gives a clear answer either way.

However, I found it interesting that in a final twist, the film reveals that after a climactic final battle between Needy and Jennifer, leading to Jennifer’s demise, we find out that Needy has absorbed some of Jennifer’s demon powers after being bitten. In the credit scene, we see her hunt down and kill Low Shoulder. In this sense, Needy and Jennifer’s monster transformations allow them to flip gendered power dynamics to gain autonomy. Jennifer’s rage is directed at men in general, but Needy’s is laser-focused on exacting revenge on the men in Low Shoulder. In both cases, the monster transformation gives the girls the power they need to act out on desires they’ve been forced to repress.

Director: Coralie Fargeat
Starring: Demi Moore, Margaret Qualley, Dennis Quaid
Language: English
Runtime: 2 hours 21 mins

INTRODUCTION

“The idea was, to me, to portray this world and to portray my main character was to work with symbolism, which is the whole language of the way I work,” said French writer-director Coralie Fargeat in an interview with Vanity Fair about her latest work, The Substance. “I always look for the strongest symbolism, which is gonna show my idea and…tell the story.”

And true to form, this highly stylised, satirical body horror about ageism and misogyny in the entertainment industry is rich with symbolism. A spilled ketchup smear on a Hollywood star of fame foreshadows the final shot. Two egg yolks in a frying pan, whose whites have been separated down the middle, foreshadow the characters’ eventual separation.

Movie poster for The Substance (2024) directed by Coralie Fargeat and distributed by Mubi

I’ll be honest, The Substance is a disgusting and uncomfortable movie to watch. However, there’s a rawness to it that makes it feel real despite how stylised the filming is. This is because the movie is based on Fargeat’s real anxieties about aging. The director rose to the scene after her debut film Revenge (2017) was critically acclaimed. In a behind-the-scenes interview with Mubi, she admitted that the closer she got to 50, the more she began to worry that she would no longer be interesting, valuable, or seen.

“How did I get to think that? There are no representations of women anymore over 50. It’s like something is silently telling your brain, okay, after that limit, you don’t exist anymore,” she said.

It was only fitting, then, that her film stars 62-year-old Demi Moore. Moore looks fantastic, certainly in much better shape than any of the balding, ordinary, older men who populate the screen. In a way, that’s the point. Under constricting patriarchal beauty standards that dictate that women lose value after menopause, staying in fantastic shape still isn’t enough.

I thought this would be a perfect movie to try out my Madonna-Monster lens because this character does, quite literally, transform into a monster. And it’s a transformation that is both disturbing and cathartic to watch.

SUMMARY

In The Substance, we are introduced to its lead, Elisabeth Sparkle, by seeing her Walk of Fame star being assembled from a birds-eye-view. We see her briefly from above, lit from all sides by the adoring paparazzi who take her photo. The camera remains on the star, but through subtle changes in wardrobe and hair, we get the sense of the passage of time. Initially, people stop to take photos of her star, but gradually fewer people recognise her name.

We next see Elisabeth (Demi Moore) as an aging star on the set of her Jane Fonda-inspired cardio show. When ongoing maintenance forces her to use the men’s toilets, we see her boss, network executive Harvey (Dennis Quaid) walk into the room, call Elisabeth an old hag over the phone, and say he wants a hot, younger woman to replace her immediately. These words play in her mind as he fires her over lunch in a grotesque shrimp-eating scene where he tells her, “after 50, it just goes”.

Elisabeth is devastated until she receives a mysterious offer from a male nurse. He tells her she is a “perfect candidate” and slips her contact details for a strange new treatment called ‘The Substance’. A buzzy video ad tells her the experimental treatment will lead to a younger, better, hotter her. But there’s a catch: she will spend seven days as her younger, hotter self, after which she must switch back to her old self for another seven days. For the first time, we hear the warning refrain that will be heard repeatedly, “You are one. You are the matrix. Everything comes from you and everything is you.” Most importantly, she must, above all, respect the balance.

Elisabeth takes the Substance home and injects it into herself in a minimalistic, bright white bathroom. Here, we get our first true body horror scene. Through sickeningly tight, close-up shots of her back and her eyes, we see her pupils split in two and her back seemingly bubble before splitting open. Bright flashing lights greet us before we cut into a blurry shot of a body with a split-open back on the floor. The POV-style camera slowly pans to reveal a young, smooth pair of hands. They wipe a mirror, and a young, hot woman looks back in the reflection. This is Sue (Margaret Qualley), the “younger, hotter” version of Elisabeth.

Sue stitches Elisabeth’s back together and brushes away her hair with an almost maternal concern. Sue steps outside and scores a lead role in Elisabeth’s old show, setting the stage for Sue to begin eating away at Elisabeth’s life.

What I found particularly striking is the use of physical space and camera angles to symbolise power. Elisabeth is often filmed at either eye level or high angle, emphasising her vulnerability. She looks unusually tiny while walking through the bright orange studio hallways, something Fargeat did deliberately to show her lack of power. Moore’s performance also plays into this. She is often hunched over, hiding behind her long hair, looking downwards, and speaking sparsely and meekly as though in apology for existing. Watching the world of the movie, we can hardly blame her. People ignore her. Men treat her like shit.

Demi Moore as Elisabeth Sparkle examining herself in the mirror and finding fault. Source: Coralie Fargeat/MUBI

Sue, however, is filmed very differently. We often see her filmed from low angles, implying she wields power, while she walks confidently with her head held high and her hair pulled away from her face. But these cuts are interspersed with lingering close-up shots of her buttocks, breasts, and legs, indicating that her youth and sexuality are the source of her power. It’s an objectifying lens which reaffirms that in this world, women are only seen and valued if they are, to quote Harvey, “young and hot”. But this kind of power is fleeting. And it doesn’t translate into actual power. In this world, all the decisions are made by older men. Women are rarely seen, and when they are, it’s in brief flashes where they are either working in service roles or their breasts are the focal point.

The male gaze is represented by Harvey, who takes up space, clacking down hallways with his metallic boots and physically dominating every shot he’s in. Quaid looks about the same age as Moore, but in his world, that is irrelevant because he is a man. He barks on the phone about women losing fertility after age 25, forgets his assistant’s name, and checks out a young waitress’s ass as he fires Elisabeth. But he’s not alone. A young man who sleeps with Sue yells and swears when he bumps into Elisabeth. At the casting call to fill Elisabeth’s old role, a woman auditions before Sue and a male casting director quips, “Too bad her boobs aren't in the middle of her face instead of that nose!” Harvey is odious, yes, but he is not uniquely evil. He is a product of an society that judges women by how fuckable they are.

I was also struck by the links the movie draws between women and meat. We see it in the lunch scene, where the camera zooms in on Harvey eating shrimp and discarding the shells while he chews up and discards Elisabeth. The food imagery complements the many, many shots of women’s breasts, buttocks, and legs as a reminder that in this world, women exist to be consumed by men.

WARNING: Spoilers from this point

Naturally, as Sue’s star rises to heights Elisabeth only dreamed of, the monster is not far behind.

It starts slowly. Sue wants to have sex with a hot man, but her nose starts to bleed. She has to change back to Elisabeth. She makes the fatal mistake of taking just a little more fluid from Elisabeth, after all, what could a few more hours hurt? But when Elisabeth awakens, she finds those few extra hours have been taken from her remaining vitality and left her finger gnarled like an inverse Picture of Dorian Grey. In her frantic call to the Substance helpline, she refers to Sue as a separate person for the first time, saying, “She’s taken from me!”. And thus, the cracks of their eventual separation begin to form.

And Sue keeps taking. It read like a metaphor for addiction. When she has a run-in with an older man that she soon recognises as the male nurse that recruited her, he says, “It gets harder each time to remember you still exist. That this part of yourself is still worth something.” This mirrors a come down and the depression that follows. Each time Elisabeth comes back, she is visibly worse off, and her world is darker and colder compared to Sue’s.

Things reach a tipping point when, after three months of living full-time as Sue, she is forced by circumstances to switch back to Elisabeth the day before a career-defining event hosting the network’s New Year’s Eve party. The Elisabeth we see is a gnarled, grotesque caricature of an elderly person. She decides to be done with Sue and orders a termination fluid to end the experience. But at the last minute, she glances out her window at a billboard of Sue ahead of the New Year’s Eve party, and can’t go through with it. “You’re the only lovable part of me,” she says to Sue as she tries to shake her awake.

When Sue wakes up, she is an entirely separate person. A fight between the two results in Sue killing Elisabeth in a bloody, brutal fashion. She goes to the New Year’s Eve event, and just as she’s about to achieve her dream, something goes wrong. Her teeth begin to fall out. An ear detaches. I noticed that instead of wearing her signature bubble gum pink, she’s wearing a bright blue dress, the same colour as the leotard Elisabeth wore when she found out she was about to be fired, in a subtle call back to that scene.

Margaret Qualley as Sue wakes up as an entirely separate person from Elisabeth. Source: Coraline Fargeat/MUBI

She races home to inject herself with the remaining Substance. She hopes for a better her to emerge, and she undergoes a similar backsplitting transformation, but the distortions in sound and image indicate that something is wrong. What emerges from Sue’s back is a monster assembled from women’s body parts named Monstro Elisasue.

Surprisingly, this monster seems far less concerned with her appearance. She puts on her blue dress, sticks an earring where an ear should be, and covers her face with Elisabeth’s picture. She returns to the studio where she is welcomed by adoring fans who address Elisabeth rather than Sue, saying, “We love you! We could never replace you!” But the next shot reveals this was a fantasy. She is standing alone in an empty hallway.

She takes to the stage surrounded by topless women to a horrified audience, which heckles and screams in horror at her. Her pleas to them that she is the same person go ignored in a final message that, as a woman, her personhood does not matter as much as her appearance. This sets the scene for the most controversial moment: Monstro Elisasue is struck in the face and regenerates, spurting blood all over the room and the audience. Fargeat’s use of practical effects are particularly visceral in this scene in which 36,000 gallons of fake blood are sprayed across the audience in a giant fuck you to an industry that profits off commodifying women’s bodies. It’s a violent rejection of societal beauty standards in response to years of abuse.

It’s a shocking scene to watch. But it also feels like a giant exhale. Elisasue throws up a breast in a direct callback to the casting director’s earlier sexist quip as if to say, you want boobs where my nose should be? Here you go! Afterwards, a decomposing Elisasue makes her way to Elisabeth’s star on the Walk of Fame, where she lies on top, and smiles as she reminisces about her fame. It is the only time in the movie that she seems truly happy.

MADONNA-MONSTER LENS

The madonna-monster lens, in which a madonna is an idealised and unattainable form of womanhood and the monster is the violent rejection in response to years of abuse, maps out perfectly onto this movie. Sue is an ideal, but a fleeting one. Elisabeth both resents her and depends on her for a sense of self-worth. Monstro Elisasue is therefore a direct response to and criticism of the society that made Elisabeth view herself this way. Through transforming into the monster, Elisabeth can reject these patriarchal standards and find a degree of self-worth outside of them.

I remember the evening I turned into a monster.

I had just had the most traumatic experience of my life, a rather violent assault at the hands of a man, thrown in my face by a man who was a little too concerned with my leaning on a close friend of his for support. I still don’t know why he decided it was his business or why he felt that his friend’s decision to make himself available for support was irrelevant. Still, he yelled at me outside a South London pub, informing me that he didn’t like me or “all the baggage” I’d brought into his friend’s life.

I remember the initial feelings of shock, anger, and distress. I remember how unaffected he was by the emotional breakdown I was having, and how every time I tried to explain myself (through tears), he simply responded that he didn’t care. I remember returning to my place and realising three things. The first was that no one would ever hold him accountable for how he had treated me because this man, like many others, had become accustomed to treating the women around him poorly and getting away with it precisely because, as a man, he could. And I realised that if anyone was likely to be judged for what had happened, it would be me for the undignified manner I had handled the whole thing.

The second was that handling the situation within the bounds of acceptable social etiquette, which dictated that I hide my pain and deal with the whole thing quietly, if at all, would win me no favour. If anything, it was likely to embolden him further by positioning me as an abusable woman who could be treated as a punching bag. Who would absorb the blows with a smile on my face like a good girl. I even wondered, at what point does handling things the “right way” become functionally the same as giving permission?

The third was that nothing I could ever do or say would change his opinion of me. In other words, I had nothing to lose. And so the monster was born. I walked back into the pub and caused a scene, yelling at him in front of his friends. I can’t remember what I yelled. It may have been something along the lines of calling him a rape apologist. However, it clearly struck something in him. I remember the look of terror he gave me afterwards. We have never spoken again. It has been nearly two years since it happened, and he still becomes visibly uncomfortable and leaves the room whenever I walk in. And to be honest? It felt, and still feels, like one of the most empowering things I’ve ever done for myself.

Movie poster for Carrie (1976) directed by Brian DePalma and based on a 1974 Stephen King novel of the same name.

I bring up this incident because ever since it happened, it has made me reflect on gender, repression, and catharsis. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that my obsession with horror films grew since my assault. Through horror films, I have found a kind of catharsis that I rarely do in day-to-day life, especially in London, where every interaction feels underpinned by a million social rules and breaking just one can result in catastrophe. It’s an environment that often feels stifling, and the urge to deliberately transgress is always strong.

Horror movies are cathartic because they give us a safe way to transgress. They allow us to explore societal anxieties and dark impulses that exist in ourselves and others. They have long been used as a medium to explore gendered repression, in particular female rage, neuroses, and sexuality. Canadian film critic Kier-La Janisse provides detailed analyses of how female neuroses are depicted across horror films in her 2012 part-film-criticism-part-autobiography House of Psychotic Women. In the opening essay to the book, she argues, “We have more patience, or perhaps even empathy, for fictional characters than we do their real-life counterparts. Faced with neurosis in film or literature, we want to investigate rather than avoid” (page 17).

There is a strange satisfaction one feels while watching female rage unfurl on screen in the form of Pearl (2022) yelling “please I’m a STAR” at the end of her failed audition, or Dani watching her emotionally unavailable boyfriend burn to death inside a hollowed bear in Midsommar (2019), or Carrie (1976) using her telekinesis powers to go on a bloody revenge rampage. So satisfying that online film buffs have called this subgenre of female rage films “Good for Her” movies, and similar films in this vein, like Gone Girl (2014) and The Witch (2015), have been popular among women precisely because of the catharsis they create.

But what is this catharsis? And why do we feel it? Perhaps it’s because we are watching women do on screen what we wish we could do in our own lives. That, as women, so much of womanhood is defined by restriction. We cannot walk around at night for fear of rapists, cannot voice our opinions too loudly or often in meetings for fear of being seen as overbearing, and cannot express our thoughts and feelings as bluntly as we’d like, for fear of being seen as crazy. Watching women fully embrace their craziness and using it to exact revenge against those who have wronged them speaks to the part of us that wishes we could do the same, and deeply resents that the bounds of womanhood and social etiquette mean we cannot.

Florence Pugh as Dany in Midsommar (2019), directed by Ari Aster, in the final shot.

This is what I am attempting to explore in this ongoing project. The name Madonna-Monster is a subversion of the Madonna/Whore Complex coined by the father of psychology Dr Sigmund Freud to try explain male sexual anxieties towards women. In this complex, women are viewed as either madonnas who are chaste and morally pure, making them ideal for marriage and childrearing, or as whores who are immoral yes but lustful and therefore desirable. As a result these men struggle to have fulfilling sex with their wives, who they view as too pure, and turn to “whores” to satisfy their sexual urges. But there’s a catch - this often leads to a dangerous cycle of sexual repression and shame.

In this context, the Madonna/Whore complex is an objectifying lens men use to view women. What I want to propose is that the Madonna-Monster complex centers women as the subject. It is a lens that argues that inside each woman is a monster, and that monster is embodied in a female form, repressed by physical, economic, and social factors from being let out.

While exceptions of course exist, the average cis woman is physically smaller and weaker than the average cis man, and this difference in strength and size can be and often is exploited by men to subdue women. As a result, the threat of male violence is constantly hanging above women’s heads, informing our day-to-day decisions and interactions with men. It is a threat that all men benefit from, even if they don’t directly act on it. At the most basic level, it allows men to “sell” safety and protection from the violence of other men back to women in exchange for sex, domestic labour, and reproductive labour. At worst, it allows all men, particularly those disempowered by sociopolitical circumstances, to feel empowered when they walk onto their streets and into their homes to find a target who cannot easily fight back to let their frustrations out on.

The Monster offers a chance to level the playing field. Oftentimes, through supernatural means, the monster can overcome these physical differences, becoming far stronger than the man, and inverting existing power dynamics. Perhaps this is why female monsters are common in horror films and folklore. In Japanese folklore, the onryō is a bitter, vengeful spirit in the form of a woman with long black hair in a white kimono who inflicts terrible curses on all those she encounters regardless of who they are (you can see her daughters again and again in horror films like Ringu (1998) and Ju-On: The Grudge (2004)). In West African and Caribbean folklore, Mami Wata is a water spirit who takes the form of a beautiful woman to drag men to their deaths below the surface. And of course, in Western literature, the witch has long symbolised the evil and mysterious powers of women who are too independent, who know too much, and who live on the margins of society. It’s little wonder that the women persecuted during witch trials were often midwives and widows.

Rie Inō as Sadako Yamamura, the onryō-inspired ghost who haunts a videotape in Ringu (1998) directed by Hideo Nakata.

This monster is often trapped within the “Madonna” who symbolises an idealised womanhood that women are socialised to try and embody. This ideal woman is morally pure, feminine, chaste, maternal, and above all, adheres strictly to societal definitions of womanhood. These two natures are in constant tension with one another.

This is not a new idea. American psychoanalyst Dr Clarissa Pinkola Estés explores this dual nature in her bestselling 1992 book Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype. In it she proposes that all women have a “wild woman” nature which is a “robust, chock-full, strong life force, life-giving, territorially aware, inventive, loyal, roving,” (page 10) and that this wild woman must have “freedom to move, to speak, to be angry, to create” (page 34) otherwise she is at risk of withering. Her biggest threat comes from her early training, which teaches her that the ideal woman is polite, meek, and above all, ‘nice’. She adds, “this early training to ‘be nice’ causes women to override their intuitions. In that sense, they are actually purposefully taught to submit to the predator” (page 47).

But this “wild woman” can be released. And in horror, she is often released in the form of a monster. One whose nature is generally depicted as destructive towards others and towards themselves, like Carrie (1976), who brings the home she has suffered years of abuse in crashing down over both her mother and herself. One becomes extremely isolated from and dangerous to their loved ones, like Ginger in Ginger Snaps (2000), whose final werewolf form causes her to turn on her sister. And one who suffers an irreconcilable break from reality, like May (2002), whose severe social isolation and neurosis results in her creating a Frankenstein’s monster-style ‘friend’ made up of body parts from people whose approval she craved but didn’t receive.

Unlike the Madonna/Whore complex which positions women as either or, the Madonna-Monster complex recognises that women are both at the same time. The madonna is a repressive state adopted for survival and safety, while the monster is a cathartic state that snaps into play when the madonna has been bent so much she finally breaks. This transformation into the monster is a trope that recurs again and again throughout horror cinema. I suspect that analysing it in this way can offer fascinating insights into gender as it’s constructed and into the self. As a Black woman, I also want to apply an intersectional framework. This is particularly because Black horror directors like Jordan Peele, Ryan Coogler, and Nia DaCosta have used monsters to explore both gendered and racial dimensions, to varying success.

This is an ongoing journey and I imagine I will think very differently about this in a few years time. And I’d like to thank you upfront for coming with me.