Introduction to the Madonna-Monster Project

We're all a little bit mad here. This project aims to use horror films to gain insight into how and why

WARNING: This article contains spoilers for the movies mentioned

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.