Sexuality and the horror film or Who's Poking Pinhead?

Cafe Society
1

Clive Barker’s Hellraiser is one of my favorite movies, not least for its exploration of sadomasochistic sexuality.

(For the uninitiated, the movie concerns a wooden puzzle box, reputed to be the key to untold sexual pleasure, that, when solved, summons demons called Cenobites, led by the aptly named Pinhead, who rip your flesh apart in ingenious ways and then carry your soul off to the eternal torments of Hell.)

So many people only see the movie as an exercise in gore, but they completely miss the film’s sexual subtext. The key is when Pinhead describes himself as “a demon to some, an angel to others.” The Cenobites’ torment is pain taken to such an extreme that agony and ecstasy are indistinguishable. Their leather outfits feature straps and infibulated wounds that they finger in an orgasmic shudder. The movie takes the viewer on an S/M ride where suffering is indeed sweet.

Horror movie archetypes are often metaphors for sexuality. For example, the werewolf is often used as a representation of the threat of the masculine, as in The Company of Wolves and also as the sexual awakening of the adolescent, as in the Canadian thriller Ginger Snaps and the charcter of Oz in BtVS.

So what do you think are interesting or disturbing sexual subtexts in horror films?

2

Horror archetypes, especially the “transformative” ones like the werewolf and the vampire are particularly apt for describing and portraying the weirdness of puberty. Was there ever a more graphic metaphor for teenage sexual awakening than Michael J. Fox’s character in Teen Wolf sprouting hair from his hands while locked in the bathroom? I don’t even have to go into depth about Angel’s transformation back into Angelus after his “moment of happiness” with Buffy. There’s also the timeless connection between Carrie’s public menstrual humiliation in the girls’ locker room, her emerging telekinesis, and being doused with pig blood at the prom.

3

Horror archetypes, especially the “transformative” ones like the werewolf and the vampire are particularly apt for describing and portraying the weirdness of puberty. Was there ever a more graphic metaphor for teenage sexual awakening than Michael J. Fox’s character in Teen Wolf sprouting hair from his hands while locked in the bathroom? I don’t even have to go into depth about Angel’s transformation back into Angelus after his “moment of happiness” with Buffy. There’s also the timeless connection between Carrie’s public menstrual humiliation in the girls’ locker room, her emerging telekinesis, and being doused with pig blood at the prom.

4

Best. Title. Ever.

Barker is very good at examining sexuality in the context of erasing lines: between pleasure and pain (Hellraiser), between male/female and gay/straight (Imajica), even between god and man (The Great and Secret Show). His books, plays and movies all show a strong understanding of and connection to not just sexuality, but sensuality, that takes his work to the next level. He will be remembered as one of the best 20th century writers, IMO. (NB: My favorite Clive Barker line ever is “He was sick down its throat as it bit off the top of his head,” from Rawhead Rex. That’s some seriously visceral writing, and the context in which it appears is real genuine horror.)

Another horror creator that’s capable of plumbing the same depths to a different end is one of my favorite filmmakers, David Cronenberg. But rather than the wonder and experimentation that Barker is capable of, Cronenberg evinces a sense of nausea concerning the human body, its capability for sex and reproduction, and its relationship to mechanical things. That throughline makes it into every single one of his movies.

His use of the slugs as metaphors for promiscuous sex and its consequences in Shivers, the penetrative, invasive abilities and their manifestation as a birth defect from a Thalidomide-like drug in Scanners, every frame of Crash, nearly every frame of Dead Ringers . . . his body of work is so consistent in this regard, it’s incredible. The idea probably reached its apotheosis with eXistenZ.

5

We could also include the stinger/syringe that grows from Marilyn Chambers’ body as she drains the life from men in a reversal of the male/female penetration in Rabid. Cronenberg’s equating of the female sexual impulse as a devouring of men betrays a strong misogynistic streak that also runs cocnsistently through his films, most graphically in Videodrome.

6

pldennison, you forgot The Naked Lunch, although it’s not exactly horror. The homoerotic subtext is impossible to miss.

A lot of the teen splatter flicks seem to be about sexual guilt. The number of kids who die during or just after sex in the Jason movies would fill a graveyard.

7

Subtext, hell—in some of the pre-Code horror films, the text smacks you right in the puss!

The Mask of Fu Manchu and The Black Cat both have lurid S&M scenes in them, and Freaks is all about a woman seducing a midget, with a subplot about Siamese twins getting married.

8

1.) According to The Celluloid Closet (both book and film) the movie Dracula’s Daughter is filled with barely-disguised lesbian images.

2.) Most adaptations of Sheridan le Fanu’s “Carmilla” have strong lesbian elements, as well. I think one adaptation is even called “Lesbian Vampires”.

3.) Cinefantastique called David Cronenberg “The Master of Venereal Horror”.

4.) Me, I don’t need anything else to make sex scarier.

5.) I have to admit that I didn’t particularly care for Hellraiser, Clive Barker’s story about the Rubik Cube from Hell. What disappointed me the most is that he never did the obvious match-making – The Lady who Killed Guys by Hitting them over the Head with a Hammer and “Pinhead”, The Guy with Nails Stuck in his Head. Those two could’ve had a very good time together. (I know she met him, but there was never any consensual nail-banging).

9

Then of course there’s the Evil Gay Molesting High School Coach[sup]TM[/sup] from Nightmare on Elm Street 2 (definitely post-code) getting whipped to death in the showers by the good-looking guy possessed by Freddy.

Sort of a male version of that homoerotic/homophobic thing you have going in Basic Instinct.

10

Oh yeah. I remember my sophomore year of English, learning about the phallic symbols and sexual subtext of Dracula.

Brondicon- Good point with Carrie. Also, SK does that again in Christine (book and movie, but more book because I prefer it), there’s the whole adolescent transformation thing, with evil car as metaphor.

The Exorcist (film and book both) contains quite a lot of sexual elements. The whole crucifix-bation scene and “lick me jesus.” I read somewhere about it perhaps representing the latent sexuality of females, the possessed character being on the verge of adolescence and all that, and the fear of the male characters sort of representing the fear society has of this feminie sexuality. Taking it a little too far, perhaps, but you know.

And who could forget the virtual rape scene of Rosemary’s Baby- by Satan, no less.

Great thread, gobear.

11

I don’t know that I’d call Cronenberg “misogynist,” per se; more like “gynophobic.” He’s awed by and terrified of the power of female sexuality and womens’ ability to reproduce. But he’s equally afraid of the hostility that often attaches to male sexuality: James Wood’s arm merging with the pistol in Videodrome is a good example. Yves Cloquet and the Mugwumps in Naked Lunch are another. (That scene with Cloquet and Kiki in the cage is one of the freakiest things I have ever seen.)

12

In one of my favorite horror movies, Dario Argento’s Tenebrae, the killer has a flashback to being sexually humaliated by a girl in red shoes. Interesting note: the girl in red shoes is played by a transexual, the particular act of sexual humiliation was forcing the man to suck on the heel of her shoe while several other young men held him down. My interpretation of that sequence is that he is remembering a homosexual rape, and is remembering the attacker as a woman becausehe can’t deal with the truth.

In Return of the Living Dead 2, one girl locks herself in a room with her zombified boyfriend so he can “eat her”.

In The Company of Wolves, werewolves are used as a metaphor for sexual awakening, but the most disturbing image to me was the “baby tree”. Rosalin is walking through the woods with a boy from the village when they find a tree with babies growing on it (ewww…).

13

Hmmmm…so we’ve got a movie where Tom Cruise roams the city at night, meets strange men, and then sucks warm fluids from their bodies. And you’re trying to tell me there’s something sexual about it?

I once read a book about the potrayal of women in horror movies while I was in high school. I really wish I could remember the name of the book. It included an awful lot of movies I didn’t see such as “I Spit on Your Grave.” Maybe a fellow Doper remembers a similar book.

It has been a while but if I remember correctly it was women who primarily made it through slasher horror films. Mostly the women who didn’t have sex and didn’t appear topless at some point.

Marc

14

Marc, was it “Men, Women and Chainsaws” by Carol Clover? Great book.

15

This is a fascinating thread, on many levels. I’ve never much cared for Clive Barker, really, but I respect his talent for exposing the hidden. His story ‘Cabal’ is actually very good with this. He seems to have externalized the often ‘hidden’ aspects of homosexuality, the way it existed just under straight radar for centuries. His metaphors involving cemeteries filled with outcasts spring to mind.

But on a broader note, sex and death are somehow inextricably entwined in the human psyche. Even in non-horror films and books, a life-theatening situation is often followed by a love scene, as though the threat of death inspires one’s sexuality, and death can only be pushed back by sex. Which works in a physical sense as well as a psychological one; the reproductive act is the polar opposite of dying, but like all extremes, they eventually meet.

Even in literary language the two are often juxtaposed and even blurred with one another; the word ecstasy is sometimes used to describe both orgasm and the moment of death. Keats’ poem Ode to A Nightingale, while ostensibly about death, is replete with sexual imagery, references to fertility, to psychological and physical surrender. Perhaps this is the key to the whole paradox: both death and sex consume. One is devoured by death, but also by orgasm; one’s personality is subsumed in death, but can also be subsumed in a sexual relationship with another being. But it is also about surrender, and maybe this is where Barker’s S&M stylings also play in? We surrender to death and orgasm; we lose ourselves in both, and in both we transcend our solitary conscious. Dying we join the great unknown; climaxing we join with another living being, another form of unknown.

Horror also likes to play with gore, and violence,and what could be both but death and sex? Both can be unusually fast and messy. Both deal with things inside, things hidden away. The exposure of intestines is disgusting and frightening, but in some ways comparable to the exposure of genitals. Hidden; essential for life, yet somehow always unknown or unspoken. Horror also likes to play with change and transformation- zombies, vampires, werewolves- these are scary because they represent ourselves changed. And puberty, sexual knowledge, and awakening are also ourselves changed. It’s significant that one is made a werewolf or vampire or zombie by another- just as one is awakened, or transformed by another with one’s first sexual experience.

It’s this sexual subtext that will always make horror so popular, I think. It combines the two most basic drives of all life, to survive and to reproduce. That’s what makes it so compelling for so many, the way it taps into our most basic emotions, and yet constructs elaborate and intellectually satisfying frameworks above the base instincts.

Hmmm…rambling again…but thank you for the inspring thoughts, everyone.

16

You look at a lot of stories from the distant past, especially Greek myths, and they involve a lot of fooling around and revenge for being jilted. I think the first horror stories were extensions of that, with the jilted lover coming back from beyond the grave to enact vengeance.

By the same token, monsters were originally gods who were half human half beast. Plus, their monstrous sexual prowess manifested in the form of large penises, penis-snakes, etc. Pan is good example. He was the fertility god, half goat/half man with a beast’s randiness.

The Earth Mother is usually a gigantic woman with a large pregnant belly and huge breasts. Soft and loveable but at the same time potentially dangerous with her crushing weight and potential to swallow men whole with her reproductive unit, signifying the burden of long-term commitment and providing of one’s family as a consequence of sex. Still to this day a scary thought.

17

Great thread, and great responses. Most of my immediate (and glib) thoughts have been taken by others already, especially ratty, so I don’t have a lot to say at the moment. I’ll just watch the discussion develop.

Oh, and kudos, gobear, for referencing the very smart Ginger Snaps. Essential viewing for this discussion, I think.