BITCHfest: Ten Years of Cultural Criticism from the Pages of Bitch Magazine by Unknown Read Free Book Online Page B

De Palma’s 1976 horror classic Carrie (adapted from Stephen King’s novel) opens with a post—gym class shower-room scene in which high-school pariah Carrie White discovers blood creeping down her legs. She reacts as one might expect a girl oppressively sheltered by a religious-zealot mother to—that is, with utter panic. Her fear and confusion are met with cruelty: The nicer classmates simply wrinkle their noses at her cluelessness, but the bolder ones pelt her with tampons and maxipads, laughing and screaming, “Plug it up! Plug it up!”
    It’s a moment of excruciating vulnerability and humiliation, but it’s also the moment when Carrie discovers the telekinetic power that she will ultimately use to wreak bloody revenge (’scuse the phrase) on her tormentors. The unforgettable opening scene prefigures Carrie’s transformation from bullied menstruating girl to menacing, electric horror queen with startling symmetry, for Carrie is as much about puberty and menstruation as it is about revenge. The two narratives come to a head at the film’s notorious end, and in the ensuing pig’s blood—soaked violence, Carrie is not only unable
to “plug it up,” she does quite the opposite: She opens up completely, unleashing her vast, horrific female power on everyone in her path.
    Never mind Judy Blume’s Margaret; Carrie was my first introduction to the trials of female adolescence. Watching the film at age seven, I was vaguely aware of what it might mean to be a teenage girl, my impression formed by conversations I overheard between my preteen sister and our mother. But nothing prepared me for Carrie. My reaction to this set of images linking menstruation, humiliation, and supernatural power was a mixture of fear and fascination: I understood that Carrie’s rage had put her firmly in the grip of evil by the end of the movie, but I was nevertheless in awe of her power. And I began to suspect that both rage and power had everything to do with becoming a woman.
    Carrie is but one of a whole host of horror films of the ’70s and ’80s that feature narratives of a “possessed” girl—possessed by spirits or demons, or in possession of otherworldly powers. In Carrie, the convergence of possession and puberty takes place most powerfully during the onset of menstruation. Two other films of this period—1977’s Audrey Rose and 1978’s The Fury —reference this connection, with female characters whose possession symptoms become extreme with the physical launch of puberty, suggesting an intrinsic link between sexual maturation and susceptibility to the supernatural.
    Carrie and her cohorts entered puberty at a time when the horror genre was obsessed with the female curse. The twenty years between 1970 and 1990 produced a multitude of narratives about possessed women, in addition to those about teenage girls, among them The Visitor (1979), Deadly Blessing (1981), The Incubus (1981), The Entity (1981), and Witchboard (1985). Similarly, horror of this period is full of narratives about satanic/demonic pregnancy, the most famous being Rosemary’s Baby (1968) and The Omen (1976). In these films, possession takes place in women’s wombs, and the horror of the film becomes both their literal inhabitation by evil and their capacity to reproduce demonic progeny.
    In Men, Women, and Chain Saws, Carol Clover’s extensive analysis of gender in modern horror, she notes the predominance of these “female portals” in film and notes that “where Satan is, in the world of horror, female genitals are likely to be nearby.” According to Clover, to be a portal is to be
“open” or susceptible to becoming possessed by satanic or supernatural powers—a reflection of the long-held historical view of women as both cursed and unclean. From the first mythic “open” woman, Eve, Western culture has defined women as more susceptible than men to the temptations of evil, and the language of horror pushes this notion one step