What's Wrong With Me? On Abjection and the Queerness of Inconvenient Women In Horror

I wrote and recorded a lecture... for students... Gen Z students. I was terrified.

Aug 31, 2024

“A massive and sudden uncanniness, which, familiar as it might have been in an opaque and forgotten life, now harries me as radically separate, loathsome. Not me, not that. But not nothing either.” Julia Kristeva

In analyzing film, especially with a queer lens, it may be useful to consider the paranoid read and the reparative read referenced by Eve Sedwick in her work. I like to ask myself “Is this reading of the film useful or hurtful?” Within this lecture I’m attempting to read with generosity towards the films, allowing them to provide insight into an experience, rather than suspicion and indictment of the filmmaker’s intentions. Your personal experience with a film's ideas, themes, and subtext are valid. I’m a big believer in the headcanon, for me analyzing film is often about stretching a narrative to make space for yourself inside its skin. The time-honored tradition of applying the queer gaze to films that may not include textually queer representation is so important.

While there are so many references and films I want to speak about (this lecture will attempt to condense what could be a whole course) for the sake of time and coherence, I’ll be focusing on three horror films that feature a feminine figure who is considered inconvenient, abject, and monstrous within the narrative. Rejected, manipulated, and subjugated for their otherness, these characters tell the viewer so much about how society demonizes people who don’t easily fit into the roles assigned to them.

I want to start this lecture by mentioning Julia Kristeva’s writing on abjection. Abjection is a slippery concept that is often confusing and ultimately useful for discussing horror and queerness in many mediums.

“…the abject refers to the human reaction to a threatened breakdown in meaning…The abject thus at once represents the threat that meaning is breaking down and constitutes our reaction to such a breakdown: a re-establishment of our "primal repression." The abject has to do with "what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules" (Felluga, Dino. "Modules on Kristeva: On the Abject." Introductory Guide to Critical Theory.)

Identity, system, order, and rules. All of these ideas have ties to the status quo or the heteronormative patriarchy. Queerness by its definition exists outside of what is considered “normal” as the concept of “normal” has almost always been used to repress. In horror, while this is subjective, some viewers, often queer viewers, find themselves identifying more with the monstrous entity, the other, the abject, the rejected thing. For this lecture, we’ll be looking at a few examples that work within this reading of horror cinema.

One note: this lecture being focused on horror films requires that I mention multiple instances of trauma, abuse, disability, and violence. The films I’m citing were made throughout several eras with different levels of sensitivity towards disability and marginalization.

The first film I want us to consider is George Franju’s 1960 psychological thriller Eyes Without a Face. In the film Dr. Genessier, racked with guilt after an accident disfigures his daughter Christiane’s face, begins to kidnap and murder young women seeking to harvest new face replacements. Christiane is forced by her father to wear a ghostly mask, symmetrical, blank, and neutrally feminine, while her father conducts his search. The mask in itself is a rejection. She is not allowed to fully process the accident and its effect on her life because of her father’s insistence that it must be “fixed” by any means necessary.

While she has experienced physical trauma due to the accident, the mental trauma inflicted by her father and his insistence that she be hidden and eventually “fixed” is where the true horror develops. Christiane exists in a perpetual limbo, something once familiar that has now become abhorrent to those who should support her healing. Christine’s otherness is unacceptable for her father to such a severe degree that he is willing to murder and maim other girls to return his daughter to a previous state, a “beautiful” and undisturbed status that he can abide.

Writing on the film, author Sachiko Ragosta states “Perhaps we are soothed by the symmetry, the false promise of cohesion. We desire neatness in a messy world. We make ourselves complicit in the murder of authenticity when we look to others’ bodies to be that coherence for us. To surround ourselves with a single notion of beauty is to avoid building resilience within our powerlessness.” Sachiko Ragosta On Beauty & Necrosis

Christine’s physical divergence from her father’s concept of “rightness” is shown as the catalyst for his descent into madness. Dr Genessier refuses to accept Christine as she is, providing her with no actual support. When Christine reaches a breaking point with her father’s machinations, she releases herself, one of her father’s would-be victims, and the animals her father would experiment on. The film closes with Christine peacefully walking into the wilderness holding a dove (after placidly watching a dog kill her father) rejecting the violence of the world that rejected her and accepting the freedom that exists beyond society's boundaries.

In the 1979 film The Brood, David Cronenberg mines his personal experience of going through a chaotic divorce for a film that delves into the horror of marriage and subtextually the horror of patriarchy. Nola Carveth, a woman who has suffered trauma at the hands of her negligent and abusive parents, undergoes an experimental form of therapy at Dr Hal Raglan’s private institute. Dr Raglan practices a fictional experimental and controversial form of treatment known as “psychoplasmics,” encouraging patients to physically manifest their trauma through their bodies. Nola is concurrently going through divorce proceedings with her husband Frank, and a custody battle over their child Candace.

While Frank is arguably the film’s protagonist, the film’s heart is Nola and her experience processing the violence and carelessness she has experienced in her life. As the film proceeds, Nola’s grief and trauma begin to manifest as parthenogenically developed monstrous children that grow from an external womb on her body. The “children of her rage,” as they are referred to in the film enact Nola’s baser frustrations and anger against those that have harmed her.

There’s a lot to unpack here. In The Brood, Nola represents multiple problematic female tropes, the murderous material figure, the virgin mother, and the hysterical unhinged feminine, and they all reflect a fearful response to the second-wave feminism movement of the 60s and 70s. Scratching beneath the surface one can read Nola as a woman who has been preyed upon by opportunistic men and rejected for being inconvenient. While some viewers perceive the film as misogynistic, others hold a different view.

Critic Carrie Ricky writes “For me, Cronenberg’s gynophobia is a nonissue. It’s blaming the victim. After all, aren’t we talking about movies where male scientists use women as guinea pigs and then are shocked, shocked when the test subjects become monstrous, voracious, etc.? Let me invoke the Jessica Rabbit defense: The women are not bad, they’re just drawn that way. It’s the male scientists who have inadvertently transformed them into men’s worst nightmares.”

While Nola’s sexuality is never exactly in question in the film, her ability to conceive (to agender children without belly buttons or genitalia) without the need for sperm certainly queers her in the narrative. This evokes one of the oldest and most sticky male fears: becoming irrelevant and unnecessary. The men in her life feel as though they must control Nola, otherwise, they become inert and impotent.

The film as a whole can be read as a scathing indictment of marriage and heterosexuality in general. Speaking of his ex-wife, Frank seems to lack any empathy for Nola, positioning himself as stable and infallible stating that he got involved with a woman who fell in love with him “for his sanity and hoped it would rub off.” All of the men in The Brood insist upon their power and righteousness and position Nola as an unhinged thing to be controlled and confined.

Near the end of the film, when Frank attempts to confront Nola, feigning patience, acceptance, and understanding, Nola in turn confronts Frank with the physical reality of her new existence. She is testing him and ultimately Frank fails, he rejects what Nola has accepted for herself. “I disgust you. I sicken you. You hate me,” Nola echoes the sentiments of many who have been othered and marginalized from those they once trusted.

In the 2002 remake of The Ring directed by Gore Verbrinski, investigative reporter Rachel Keller is tasked by her sister to look into the sudden death of her niece Katie. Rachel’s investigation leads her to discover the deaths are connected to a mysterious VHS tape that contains a puzzling series of images and footage. Anyone who watches the film immediately receives a phone call from a ghostly voice that claims they will die in 7 days. Rachel’s search for answers intensifies after she realizes that her young son Aiden is himself in danger after viewing the tape.

The ghost on the other end of the telephone line, the creator of the cursed tape, is revealed to be Samara Morgan, the adopted daughter of horse farmers Anna and Richard. As Rachel continues to dig into the mystery of Samara, she finds that Samara was a child living with chronic illness, rejected, institutionalized, and ultimately murdered by the parents who claimed to want her. The tape and its curse are a reflection of Samara’s rage.

Samara is a complicated figure in horror cinema. The film goes to great lengths to first have the audience empathize with her as a neglected child and then in the third act the narrative flips to claim that she is an inhuman evil. This bait and switch seems to tell the viewer it is a mistake to feel for the othered, the inconvenient, the monstrous. The film seems to warn that empathy is a trap.

Poet and essayist Zefyr Lisowski writes “A point The Ring makes inadvertently is how interconnected all monstrosities are. The young dead girl who’s the villain is different and sick, so she becomes a recipient of violence. She becomes a recipient of violence, so she becomes an enactor of violence… This is what horror movies do, send their coded moral messages to a whole generation. I took notes: the blonde woman was mean to her ex-husband because he was bad, and we felt sympathetic. The girl at the bottom of the well looked scary so it didn’t matter how badly she hurt…. Anyone who looks dissimilar from the norm ultimately becomes a threat.”

In the original 1991 novel that The Ring and its remake are based on, Samara is a markedly different character named Sadako, a young woman exhibiting psychic powers, who is assaulted and murdered by a man who was infatuated with her. The man claims that he felt compelled to murder Sadako alluding to her using him to commit suicide by proxy but within the same admission of guilt he reveals that he discovered during the assault that Sadako was intersex. This narrative element is absent in all film adaptations, replaced by an uncanny otherness that is less specific.

In the film, Samara and the violence inflicted upon her is reflective of the experiences of children, often queer and/or disabled, that are rejected by their parental figures for their inconvenience. Aiden, Rachel’s son, similarly exhibits an otherness that disarms those around him. On one hand, The Ring tells a story of a mother learning to accept her “strange” child, on the other, it tells the story of the limits of acceptance. In one key scene, doctors question a still living Samara about whether or not she wants to hurt people and she responds “But I do, and I’m sorry. It won't stop.” And considering how she suffered at the hands of those who should love her: why should her rage stop?

Poet Cameron Awkward-Rich writes in his piece Essay on the Appearance of Ghosts
What queer kid doesn’t know that she is the monster
in the movie? The one who delights in the death of
the golden boy. Who talks to horses. Who drives her
parents mad. Who is killed, sure, but returns as a
specter haunting every ordinary family. That’s when
the real story begins. Sympathetic little monster
moves into the body of your child. Demands: Love
Me.
Essay on the Appearance of Ghosts - Cameron Awkward-Rich

Each of these films, Eyes without a Face, The Brood, and The Ring use the inconvenient and divergent woman as a figure of fear and disgust but looking deeper we can find that these entities are the ones we may empathize with. Their otherness, ostracization, and refusal to disappear quietly from society and their communities echo the queer experience.

As I mentioned earlier in this lecture, by reading these films and their characters as more than simply horrific depictions of the monstrous, we can find and embrace the monster within all of us. Through this process, we can accept that the convenient, the symmetrical, and the orderly are often less congruent with the experience of being alive. The monster, the abnormal, the abject reminds us that we are all inconvenient in our specific ways, and that, perhaps, is what makes us real.

Films discussed

Eyes Without a Face (1960)

The Brood (1979)

The Ring (2002)

Referenced

On Beauty & Necrosis

Sachiko Ragosta

The Brood: Separation Trials

Carrie Ricky

The Girl, The Well, the Ring

Zefyr Lisowsky

Essay on the Appearance of Ghosts

Cameron Awkward-Rich

Local Rituals

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