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Masculinity and monstrosity 1
MASCULINITY AND MONSTROSITY: CHARACTERIZATION AND
IDENTIFICATION IN THE SLASHER FILM.
Masculinity and monstrosity:
Characterization and identification in the slasher film
Klaus Rieser
University of Graz, Austria
Masculinity and monstrosity 2
Abstract
This article analyzes characterization (of the monster and the Final Girl) and identification
(of the male audience) in the slasher film. The author engages in a critical dialogue with key
theories of gender in the horror film, particularly Carol Clover's work, arguing that these
films, despite their formal deviance from Hollywood (gender) formulas – such as positioning
a female figure at the center of the narrative – do not usually depart from that cinema's
patriarchal signification. Indeed, most slasher films are violently misogynist and homophobic
- punishing female sexuality, equating femininity with victimhood, and portraying the
killer/monster as a queer figure. It is also argued that the male audience does not
straightforwardly identify with the Final Girl. Instead, the slasher films rely on primary
identification and offer empathy rather than identification. Moreover, insofar as secondary
identification with the female protagonist does occur, its aggressive impulses are projected
onto the monster.
Keywords
horror film, slasher film, gender, masculinity, monster, feminist film theory, identification,
characterization, queer
Masculinity and monstrosity 3
Masculinity and monstrosity:
Characterization and identification in the slasher film
We are trapped inside a killer monster that charges at women (and some men along
the way). Later, we identify with a woman, who is attacked by this very same killer.
The killer is a man. Or is he? He may be just a child, or even an animal. The victim
not only fights back, but also survives, even killing the monster. The victim is a
woman. Or is she? There are some doubts as to her gender status...
Some say the monstrous in horror films is the repressed of the male spectator. Some
that it is an alter ego of the woman on the screen. Some that it is the maternal. Some
that it is the woman's body...
The relation of masculinity to horror film warrants treatment, because horror is, as a
recent anthology on the topic states, preoccupied "with issues of sexual difference and
gender" (Grant, 1996, p. 1). Thus, it has become a popular ground for discussions of
identification in film, particularly one on which the prevailing paradigm of 70s and 80s
feminist film criticism, Lacanian psychoanalysis, has been challenged. After a brief
presentation of some basic tenants of this paradigm I will turn to three seminal counter-
arguments from the field of horror and gender: the work of Linda Williams, Barbara Creed,
and Carol Clover. Engaging in a critical dialogue with these and other analyses, I then
develop my own hypotheses on characterization and male identification in the slasher film, to
account for the patriarchal recuperation which always already counters the resistance
presented by horror films' breaking of Hollywood conventions. I will concentrate throughout
on 1970s and 1980s slasher films (with some side-remarks on their 1990s mainstream
Masculinity and monstrosity 4
derivatives) because their narrative and audio-visual codes differ most sharply from
traditional Hollywood styles and they have therefore moved to the center of critical
attention.1 Furthermore, this study is mostly limited to identification patterns offered the male
segment of the audience.
Psychoanalytical feminist film theory
Although feminist film theory has always been multileveled and pursuing
heterogeneous political, theoretical and methodological strands, it is nonetheless safe to say
that during the late 70s and early 80s one approach had gained paradigmatic status. This
strand itself is more heterogeneous than its usual label "psychoanalytical feminist film
theory" suggests, having as its basis a confluence of semiotics, psychoanalysis, and Marxism,
and comprising a whole array of feminist theories of subjectivity, identity, the cinematic
apparatus, filmic signification and media ideology. Simplifying even more (perhaps unduly) I
here follow the practice of summing up its core theses by reference to one of its foundational
texts, Laura Mulvey's "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" (1975/1988a). In it, she
uncovered an ideological imbalance between male and female, which in the classic film text
are constructed visually as "gazing/to-be-looked-at-ness" and narratively as "active/passive."
The spectator implied (or indeed constructed) by this process is male, and his visual
pleasures are divided between a fetishistic or sadistic/voyeuristic gaze on the female and a
narcissistic identification with the male characters. Through techniques such as invisible
editing and subjective camera, an essentially sadistic position vis-à-vis the story's female
character (either “rescuing” or punishing the woman for her desire) is carved out for the male
spectator.
Masculinity and monstrosity 5
Since the heyday of this strand of feminist film theory a number of critiques have
been voiced. It has, for example, been claimed that this theory naturalizes heterosexuality (by
disregarding a potential lesbian desire for the heroine) and conflates male/female with
masculine/feminine, but above all that in its critique of the encompassing power of
patriarchal signification (inherent in the film apparatus as well as in the visual coding, the
narrative structures, and of course in characterization) it tends to reify the patriarchal system
as monolithic and unassailable. This re-totalizing and thus self-defeating tendency is
sometimes seen to be compounded by the a-historicity of the tenants of psychoanalytical
theory and the fundamentalism in demanding nothing short of a total destruction of narrative
cinema.
Little wonder then, that a number of variations, revisions and counter-models have
since been proposed, including a focus on women's genres (theorizing the spectatrix),
audience analysis (e.g. to investigate the transformative power of reception) and historical
analysis (to determine the influence of social changes on filmic narration). Two central
tendencies in these post-paradigmatic theories have particular relevance for this paper: on the
one hand a search for resistance (or at least divergence) outside the mainstream texts of
classical Hollywood, and on the other an alternative theorization of the male spectator
(mostly as masochistic rather than sadistic).2 Both of these tendencies came together in the
feminist analyses of horror, focusing as they do on gender characteristics and on the
identification of the male spectator. Three inspiring articles by Linda Williams (1996),
Barbara Creed (1996) and Carol Clover (1996) respectively, are usually seen as foundational
in this regard. 3
Masculinity and monstrosity 6
Three seminal approaches to gender and horror
Of the three theorists, Linda Williams remains closest to the Lacanian-Althusserian
nexus, drawing heavily on Laura Mulvey and Steven Heath (another early theorist of the
psychoanalytical paradigm) in her article “When the woman looks” (1996).4 However, in
difference to them, she interprets the female figure as powerful rather than merely a symbol
for castration and “lack”. Indeed, one of her central arguments is that woman and monster are
close/similar, at least for the traumatized, “normal” male, because they both exhibit a
frightening potency where he would perceive a lack. "It may very well be, then, that the
power and potency of the monster body in many classical horror films ... should not be
interpreted as an eruption of the normally repressed animal sexuality of the civilized male
(the monster as double for the male viewer and characters in the film), but as the feared
power and potency of a different kind of sexuality (the monster as double for the woman)"
(1996, p. 20). Horror films have also been subject to historical changes: While the classical
horror at least granted some power to both the monster and the woman through their
difference to the normal male, the post-Psycho, post-Peeping Tom films not only escalate the
doses of violence, but – claims Williams – conflate the woman with the monster, often
leaving the woman’s body as the only site of horror.
More than Williams, Barbara Creed presents a decisive departure from the
Mulvey/Heath model, leaving behind the Lacanian mold in her fascinating article "Horror
and the monstrous-feminine: An imaginary abjection" (1996).5 Using Kristeva’s notion of the
abject, Creed reads the maternal figure as one of the prime horrific elements in horror films
as well as in Freudian and Lacanian theories. The maternal figure (often, she points out, an
illegitimate conflation of the archaic, parthenogenetic mother with the dyadic mother of the
Masculinity and monstrosity 7
pre-Oedipal phase and/or the phallic mother) presents the danger of castration, but goes way
beyond that in her devouring threat of death and annihilation. Despite her focus on the
maternal, Creed also comments on the male spectator, who in the duration of the film is
drawn near to the annihilation associated with the archaic mother and gains a reconstruction
thereafter. In this process the maternal figure is repudiated as stifling, the feminine is
repressed and the social (patriarchal) order is restored. In short, horror films bring their
(male) audience in contact with the (fascinating as well as threatening) abject, only to then
eject it and redraw the boundaries. Creed also differs significantly from Mulvey on the
question of the gaze, when she points out that horror in difference to mainstream film does
not constantly suture the spectator into realist formalism and its ideology, instead challenging
the spectator to look away. Turning the scopophilic pleasure at these moments into a decisive
displeasure (the threat of disintegration), it reclaims what Mulvey had only conceded to
avant-garde cinema: a breaking of voyeurism and its positioning of the spectator as male.
However, in Creed's analysis, horror films remain conservative in that after investigating the
abject they ultimately reconstitute the male spectator's self. The combined power of plot,
narrative, and imagery, one might add, is thus far more threatening and realistic to the
spectatrix.
A radical refutation of the Mulvey/Heath model also comes from Carol Clover. In her
article "Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film," and in her book Men, Women and
Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, both of which have been exceedingly
influential in film theory, she argues that the slasher film – that post-Psycho form of horror
with multiple killings by a psychopathic monster – differs significantly from mainstream film
and its pertinent ideological projects. In her pioneering analysis, Clover points out a number
of formal departures that revolve around characterization (mostly the construction of a Final
Masculinity and monstrosity 8
Girl as survivor-hero figure) and related to that, audience identification (in particular, the
male spectators' identification with the Final Girl).
Clover emphasizes that characterization in the slasher film (and, as she points out in
her book, in other subgenres such as the occult film and the rape-revenge film) does not
parallel male/female with masculine/feminine, thereby breaking the patriarchal tendency of
mainstream cinema to naturalize gender as biologically determined. "The fact that we have in
the killer a feminine male and in the main character a masculine female – parent and
Everyteen, respectively – would seem, especially in the latter case, to suggest a loosening of
the categories, or at least of the equation sex = gender" (1996, p. 106). Indeed, the killer often
has a non-normative masculinity which the films see as deficient: he may be virginal or
sexually inert (Halloween as well as countless other films), a transvestite (Dressed to Kill), a
transsexual, or a schizophrenic with "a woman within" (Psycho). Conversely, the Final Girl
tends to exhibit a lack of traditional femininity and a surplus of masculine attributes: an
androgynous name, boyish interests, and above all "hero" qualities of active movement
(tracking down the killer), active gaze, and/or employment of phallic weaponry. This
gender/sex split, especially that of the Final Girl, is the cornerstone of Clover's theorization
of gender in the slasher film, leading her to claim a certain progressiveness for such films,
unaccounted for in the film theories she reacts to: "What filmmakers seem to know better
than film critics is that gender is less a wall than a permeable membrane" (1996, p. 91).
Later in the article, Clover anticipates opposition to her argument, which would
interpret the Final Girl to be well in service of the male viewer. Such an interpretation might
see the Final Girl as little more than a handy stand-in for the male spectator in an otherwise
thoroughly masculine discourse and focus on her feminine characteristics (feminine garb,
"tits and screams", victimhood as femininity). In the face of such potentially oppositional
interpretation, Clover refines her analysis, now seeing the Final Girl to be less a masculine
Masculinity and monstrosity 9
female than a fluid gender-bender, who exhibits masculine as well as feminine attributes: "a
physical female and a characterological androgyne: like her name, not masculine, but
either/or, both, ambiguous" (1996, p. 106).
Related to such fluid and ambiguous characterization in the slasher film is a similarly
unhinged audience identification, that is potentially even more disruptive of the gender order:
Clover claims that in difference to Mulvey's theorization (of mainstream film), identification
in the slasher is no longer clearly split along sexual lines (male with male and female with
female). Indeed, she argues, it is closer to the Freudian theory of dreams in that it seems to
allow identification to be simultaneously with the attacker and the attacked. Most important
for Clover's and our purposes is that the slasher invites a shifting identification: The audience
(predominantly male according to Clover) usually identifies at first with the killer, from
whose point of view we witness the multiple murders that are typical of the genre. Later,
however, when the monster turns against the female protagonist, the audience shifts – along
with a change in camera point of view – its identification to the Final Girl. This process
demands of the male viewer not only to revise his identification midway through the movie,
but also to shift it to a female figure, a fact unaccounted for in most of the feminist film
theory to that date. The slasher indeed often seems to impose this identification by either
presenting no alternative masculine identification figures or else by discarding them
dispassionately (especially if they attempt to rescue the Final Girl). Clover concludes that the
slasher film solves the femininity problem not by obliterating the female and replacing her
with representatives of the masculine order – as "higher" forms of the horror genre do –, but
by re-gendering the woman: "We are, as an audience, in the end 'masculinized' by and
through the very figure by and through whom we were earlier 'feminized'" (1996, p. 103).
The attraction for the male viewer in this situation may be – Clover surmises – some sort of
cinematic transvestism, allowing him to feel "like a woman for a while" (1996, p. 103).
Masculinity and monstrosity 10
These three seminal articles shape the discussion of horror film to date and have had
enormous influence beyond that genre, in debates of gender, identification and subject
formation in film, making it impossible to do justice to all the issues raised by them. Suffice
here to say that all three very convincingly argue that horror (particularly slasher) films’
characteristics warrant a re-evaluation of the basic premises of a psychoanalytically inspired
feminist film theory and criticism. However, as I intend to show in the following pages,
slasher film nonetheless remains deeply implicated in patriarchal ideology. I believe that
particularly Clover and those who have followed her argument (e.g. Knee, 1996)
overestimate the progressive effects of low horror’s formal divergence from the mainstream.
Rather, it seems to me, these films prove that cinematic sexism can simultaneously be very
simplistic ("torture the women" advised the much-revered Hitchcock) and considerably more
complex than traditional Hollywood boy-gets-girl formulae would allow. In the main part of
this paper, I will therefore attempt to demonstrate how the slashers' gender disruption is
folded back into the hegemonic mold, how it serves to reinforce the heterosexist matrix,
despite of, or even by way of its break with mainstream gender forms.
Final girls and monsters: Characterization in the slasher film
In the following pages I will delineate an interpretation of characterization in the
slasher mostly through a dialogical engagement with Clover’s theses on the Final Girl
phenomenon. While the following thus criticizes main tenants of her analysis, I nonetheless
believe that various, and even conflicting interpretations are possible. This is especially true
of the slasher, since its typical low genre messiness and unpredictable variations do allow for
a wider critical divergence than the more slick and systematic mainstream genres. Moreover,
Masculinity and monstrosity 11
as I have already stated, a longer study would have to take historical genre developments into
account, such as the increasing marketing of horror to women and teenage girls in particular.
This being said, I also want to stress, however, that my main aim is not to elicit the latent
breadth of readings but to analyze the most powerful ideological codes of horror, which
continue to show resilience beyond the corpus of this study, the 70s and 80s slasher film.
There has been, for instance, some disagreement on the functioning of "female
sexuality" in horror film, sometimes claimed to be an aspect of the genre’s progressive
nature, sometimes considered precisely a sign of its reactionary ideology. A pro-horror view
can point out that the representation of female sexuality is more pronounced there than in
mainstream genres, and that the patriarchal code of silence surrounding it is somewhat
broken (cf. also Williams, 1989). On the other hand – a critical perspective would say – this
same sexuality is traumatically punished in the horror film. In the slasher, for example,
sexually active girls - the Final Girl's sidekicks - are typically slaughtered like lambs in
drawn-out voyeuristic scenes. Stephen Neale has argued "it could well be maintained that it
is women's sexuality, ... which constitutes the real problem that the horror cinema exists to
explore, and which constitutes also and ultimately that which is really monstrous" (1980, p.
61). While I find the second position somewhat more convincing, it is necessary to leave the
binary opposition behind. Indeed, a closer look at the reasons for the punishment of sexually
active girls in slasher film both reveals an even greater variety of possible interpretations and
a very simple sexism at work.
For example, the combination of a display of female sexuality and its subsequent
punishment can be read in terms of a double standard of that audience segment which is
arguably most challenged by an active female sexuality, adolescent males.6 For them it is not
so much the girls’ sexuality per se, which is "wrong", but the fact that they have sex with
Masculinity and monstrosity 12
other boys. In filmic terms, these girls are useful as titillation, as teasers and are then, in a
classical projective manner, taken to task for it. Rather than – as is often suggested –
repressing sexuality tout-court, slasher films are very clear about punishing almost
exclusively the "promiscuity" and activity of these girls. Thereby they adhere to Foucault's
interpretation of the production of sex in our culture, when he states that "the politics of the
body does not require the elision of sex or its restriction solely to the reproductive function; it
relies instead on a multiple channeling into the controlled circuits of the economy – on what
has been called [by Marcuse] a hyper-repressive desublimation" (qt. in Benshoff, 1997, p. 9).
A psychoanalytic interpretation might read these same scenes differently, e.g. as transposed
primal scenes (since they often take place in a parental bedroom), or more generally as the
parental bond in which the father as the third term breaks the dyadic mother-child
relationship (cf. Creed, 1996; Creed, 1990). Finally, I would suggest, one can also read the
girls’ sexual interest as diverging from their textual role. By trying to attain sexual pleasure,
they depart from the horror film’s single-minded preoccupation with loss, separation,
castration, expulsion, and terror. That is, they are punished for "behaving out of genre",
enabling the film first to cross over into more sexualized realms only to return "safely to
violence" right away.
In the above, I dwelled on the sidekick women in the slasher film because in
difference to the protagonist these women serve almost exclusively for voyeuristic display as
victims, a fact that in my opinion largely neutralizes the “unconventional” characterization
and identification processes around the monster and the Final Girl, which I will turn to in the
following pages.
The Final Girl is indeed an ambivalent and theoretically challenging phenomenon that
disrupts mainstream characterization practices. By placing her in the very center of the
Masculinity and monstrosity 13
narrative, by having her overcome various obstacles, but above all by letting her rescue
herself in the end, the slasher films and its mainstream derivatives typically put a biological
female in the position of the traditionally male (victim-) hero, making her the subject of the
story rather than the price (or prey) the hero wins at the end.
Although this remarkable positioning denotes a momentous departure from traditional
gender signifying practices, I think one should not prematurely overestimate its potential to
challenge the hegemonic discourse, which is restrained and contradicted by other factors.
First of all, the heroine's "success" is severely limited: she rarely wins anything, most of the
time only barely surviving her ordeals (Halloween), sometimes even loosing her mind in the
process (Texas Chainsaw Massacre). In difference to a typical male initiation story she does
not gain valuable experience (unless we count the “knowledge” of constant potential
endangerment as such), she does not gain entrance into the symbolic (access to language),
and certainly, she does not get social approval in the form of “getting” a boy. Furthermore,
the self-sufficiency of the Final Girl is severely undermined by the fact that woman is
equated with victimhood both in the instance of the Final Girl and in that of the sidekick
women. Above all, despite her hero status the female protagonist still exists to support desire
within the film. As Mulvey had claimed, it is usually the screen male to whom the active role
and the power to drive the story is assigned, while the female functions primarily to support
desire. That, I contend, also holds true for the Final Girl. After all, we do not get to
experience her desire, but only the desire of the monster for her.
In difference to Clover, I would also claim that the Final Girl isn’t really all that
masculine. It is more precise to state that she is lacking in traditional femininity, mostly a-
sexual (with an androgynous name), interstitial (between a girl's world and a heterosexual
one), sometimes a tomboy. Even the modest abilities that the films consider to be “out of
character” for girls, such as jump-starting a car, are rarely employed. Similarly, her usage of
Masculinity and monstrosity 14
phallic weaponry such as knifes comes reluctantly, usually only after these weapons have
been thrust upon her by the monster (!), and is often better seen as a residue of female
castration threat than as a signifier of masculinity. Alternatively, the phallic struggle between
the monster and the girl may be seen to signify that she has to accept sexuality on
heterosexual and phallic terms and her position within these sexual power relations – as
feminine and subordinated. After all, she does not turn these weapons against normative
masculinity, but against a border-breaking monster that is threatening hegemonic gender
relations. In this interpretation, fighting the monster (in order to overcome difference) is
precisely what makes her ready for the dichotic and exclusive relations of heterosexuality
rather than signifying a disruption of the gender hierarchy. Most of all, the Final Girl lacks
the ultimate signifier of masculinity, by holding virtually no institutional or social power (the
ultimate meaning of the phallus in the Lacanian reading). In this connection, it is instructive
to take a second look at her centrality in the story, i.e. the curious absence of other leading
figures. While in earlier films of the genre the Final Girl might still have been helped or
rescued by a representative of patriarchal authority such as the psychiatrist in Halloween,
later films have chosen to do without such savior-figures. Clover – again focusing only on
the absence of male protagonists while disregarding the dearth of female figures – applauds
the Final Girl's assumption of the roles of survivor, helper, and rescuer. While I certainly
agree on the (indeed refreshing) progressiveness of the absence of male authority-type
rescuers, I think the absence of any figure able or willing to help her (e.g. no female helpers
either) reflects a very literal and tragic loneliness of the Final Girl vis-à-vis the monster,
whose power, moreover, is far more "realistic" than the fantastic aspects of the slasher leads
us to believe. According to Lucy Fischer, horror functions as an "expressionistic 'allegory of
the real'", whose diegetic universe – tough fantastic – invokes a real social order (1996, p
428).7 What the Final Girl's "masculinity" therefore amounts to, is that she occupies the
Masculinity and monstrosity 15
structural position of the victim-hero: actively gazing, actively moving, possibly even
tracking down the monster, fighting back, surviving, succeeding. So she is indeed a woman-
hero, a female figure in a male mold rather than a heroine pursuing a feminine subjective
trajectory.
Interestingly, despite her somewhat ambiguous gender status, the Final Girl is
sexually always denoted as female. Clover lists a number of possible explanations for this
sexual consistency across a spectrum of otherwise divergent films: a filmic predilection to
connect women and fear, women being granted a wider emotional spectrum, etc. Perhaps
most significantly, this biological evidence of femaleness serves to delimit the Final Girl's
gender fluidity, marking her as ultimately inescapably feminine. And "feminine" she is, in
many ways: flimsy dresses, skirts, and screams, "tits and ass" are often quite literally
stressed, alongside her tomboy character. She might thus be a literalization of what Kaja
Silverman has described as "the quintessential gesture of classical film: the displacement of
masculine experiences of loss and lack onto the female body, whose anatomical difference
marks it safely as Other" (Lindsey, 1996, p. 292). Simply being so much in her body
(stumbling, wounded, crying, feeling) marks her feminine in diametrical opposition to the
(male) killer – who is visually coded as disembodied – and the camera I/eye. Sometimes, it
seems, she just cannot accept what "at core" she already is: a good, reproductive woman,
even the eternal mother – a soccer mom perhaps –, a characterization which does not
contradict her being a tough killer if she has to defend herself (or indeed her little ones) like a
lioness. In most films, however, she has not yet assented to her true destination. She is in fact
a Final Girl (not a Final Woman), who still has to outgrow her intrauterine world: Very often
the Final Girl is pursued by the killer in an intrauterine environment, be it the vaults in Texas
Chainsaw Massacre or the parental residences in which the killer strikes in Halloween and
countless other slashers. The Final Girl's task in each case is to get out of this "motherly"
Masculinity and monstrosity 16
body as much as to get away from the monster. Again, however, she is only a stand-in, since
this strict repudiation of the mother's body has been revealed by psychoanalysis as a
peculiarly masculine trajectory. In short, the fluidity assigned to her is often not so much one
between masculine and feminine as between girlhood and full-fledged motherhood.
Halloween, for example, portrays the protagonist as girlish in that she is pre-sexual and
relates to the interests and mind-sets of the children she baby-sits. Correspondingly, the little
boy is the only other person to sense the foreboding of danger and see the monster. Yet from
the start she also exhibits "motherly instincts": Contrary to her female sidekicks who get rid
of the children entrusted to them, in order to have sex with their boyfriends, she takes over
her responsibility. Moreover, when assailed by the monster she fights back as much to
protect the children as to save herself.
What are we then to make of this masculine/feminine/neutrum girl/mother/hero? On
the one hand, the strong, resistant, self-rescuing woman first incarnated as the slasher heroine
(and later mainstreamed) repudiates the chronic Hollywood formulas of the fragile female.
On the other, this resistance is not only countered in the surrounding discourse of the genre,
but is also contained in the hegemonic struggle over meaning within the text. First and
foremost, the Final Girl poses no threat whatsoever (and least to the Law of the Father); on
the contrary, she is held in constant endangerment, ensuring that she remains particularly re-
active. As we have seen, one way of resolving even the slight unease that her being a
"masculine woman" might produce is by couching her abilities in terms of an animalistic
motherly instinct: whereas "bestiality" is assigned to the monster, hers is "beastliness" – a
mammalian drive encompassing "naturally" wild defensiveness as well as nurturing qualities.
More often, the Final Girl is a watered down version and patriarchal reconception of a liberal
feminist ideal, a modern woman who is masculine (read "strong") enough to participate in the
hierarchy of hegemony, maybe even tough enough to sock some (bad) guys, yet far from
Masculinity and monstrosity 17
rejecting that "real word". Referring to the Alien, Terminator and Predator cycles Christopher
Sharrett remarks: "The resistance these films propose is atomized and individualistic, usually
in the form of the fully masculinized female who internalizes the perspective and means of
the oppressor, while female sexuality itself is represented as grotesque and malevolent ..."
(1996, p. 269). Far from seeing such a masculine female as resistant, he indeed analyses her
to be a "masculinized rejuvenator of the patriarchal order" (1996, p. 270). While I think this
point of view strips her unnecessarily of any resistant or innovative aspects, I nonetheless can
detect little more revolutionary in the Final Girl than a "sexually liberated" girl, one who is
ready to embrace premarital sex, but not prematurely and thus manages to keep an aura of
chastity. In short, the Final Girl is modern but not too modern, tough but not too tough, sexy
but chaste. A post-sixties, post-women's liberation (but not feminist) version of girl- and
womanhood, she may be enjoyable for women and in queer readings, but she is clearly kept
in line with the adolescent male's level of acceptability.
In difference to the Final Girl, the killer/monster is more diversified and ambiguous:
hardly to be seen, masked, hooded, hardly human; in fact in related subgenres the monster is
often an animal (The Birds, Jaws) or even an undefined threatening force (Pulse, The Entity).
However, while Linda Williams may be right in her assertion that the monster is not simply a
double for the male spectator, signifying his repressed animal self, I do not agree with her
claim that the monster is a double for the woman (1996). Instead, in the slasher the
killer/monster is predominantly male, but nonetheless interstitial, exhibiting a "categorical
incompleteness" (Carroll, 1990, p. 38). Indeed, where the monstrous is not locum tenens of
the maternal (these cases have been superbly interpreted by Barbara Creed) it is almost
invariably a male force outside the bounds of hegemonic masculinity (cf. Connell, 1995).
And often these two elements converge, with the killer incorporating his mother (Psycho),
Masculinity and monstrosity 18
living and moving through intrauterine spaces (Halloween, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre)
or simply being "too close" to the maternal (Brain Dead). In any case, his monstrosity is
almost always defined in terms of gender- or sexual deviance from a hegemonic masculine
ideal. That is, he is a defective, ab-norm-al, perhaps non-masculine man, a male queer figure,
in short, but not a woman.8 True, "his" deviance from the conventional catalogue of
masculine etiquette is often coded (and more often read) as femininity, due to the binary
categorizing of the patriarchal gender system that always tries to pin down as "feminine"
whatever does not conform to its definition of the masculine. But we should not follow this
hegemonic move of "Othering" (to recode gender difference as gender inversion) analytically
as well. When we equate the monstrous feminine man with womanhood, as Linda Williams
tends to do, we collapse gender and sex, while I think it is both more accurate towards the
films and more apt politically to maintain this distinction (1996). The difference between the
non-masculine monster and the non-feminine Final Girl (one bad, the other good) also
illuminates how patriarchy now under certain circumstances allows female figures a degree
of masculinity, whereas femininity in men is either funny or horrific. I will present a more
detailed analysis of this difference somewhat further on in this text.
In order to disentangle this ambiguous and somewhat contradictory structure it is
helpful to refer to Eve Sedgwick's notion of the reality of gender as a two-dimensional field
rather than the ideologically inflected binary model we are used to (1995). Based on research
by Sandra Bem (1974), Sedgwick points out that the characteristics of femininity and
masculinity are actually widely spread among both sexes. Masculinity and femininity are
therefore not on linear scale like this:
Masculinity and monstrosity 19
Figure 1
Rather, femininity and masculinity are independent variables, so that a lack of
femininity does not in and of itself signify a high degree of masculinity and vice versa. This
can be graphically represented in the following way:9
Figure 2
One conclusion to be drawn from Bem's research is that some men and women have
many characteristics of masculinity and femininity while others (perhaps perceived to be
asexual androgynes) have little of either. Even more significantly, perhaps, this model
reveals a whole large uncharted area of gender diversity within the traditional values
associated with masculinity and femininity, which can elucidate the horrific of the slasher
and its monster/killer as well as the field of struggle between him, the Final Girl, and the
spectator. One can define this disavowed area (the central part of the graph) as representing
queerness, which, in Alexander Doty's (1993) definition is a "flexible space for the
expression of all aspects of non- (anti-, contra-) straight cultural production and reception".10
From this perspective, the threat posed by the queer monster is that it lurks in the
ideologically unaccounted for and repressed section (lacking masculinity, exhibiting too
much femininity, being neither/nor or both, perhaps even roaming freely that whole
territory), thereby challenging the neat symmetry of the binary gender system and the
naturalization of gender as sex. The Final Girl, too, occupies this interstitial realm to some
Masculinity and monstrosity 20
extent. However, as we have seen, she is usually forced to enter this realm of ambiguity (to
behave unfeminine) by the aggressive moves of the monster and is almost invariably
characterized as "deep down" feminine (biologically female, girlish), while the monster is
entirely beyond the codex of traditional masculinity. In this regard we should also bear in
mind again that the narrative function of this masculine woman is foremost to escape and
destroy the queer monster. While she is ambiguous or shifting between two positions (bad
enough), the de-masculinized male monster is – with regard to both sex and sexuality –
irrevocably outside the grasp of the binary gender system. Thus, while she violates
behavioral rules by covering sometimes both ends of the gender ideology (being a woman
but behaving "masculine") and sometimes none (being pre/a-sexual), the monster rather than
merely violating a rule destabilizes categorization per se. Similarly, in his analysis of the
confluence of horror film and network AIDS reporting, Andrew Parker concludes that in both
cases, "the plot revolves around an identical danger, the inability to tell ("until too late") who
is Not One of Us. And in both instances, this danger will be surmounted with the
identification, isolation, and extermination of the monster, as the founding binary order, at
great though "necessary" cost to human life, is restored once more to its original integrity"
(1993, p. 218). Despite these differences between the monster and the Final Girl, in the eyes
of paranoid hegemonic masculinity she nonetheless suffers from an uncanny closeness to the
killer – to be evidenced in their non-verbal communication and their irrational ability to "find
each other”. A closeness which for the "average (male) spectator" suggests that she deserves
the threats posed against her. But the films tend to turn this around, presenting this shared
inhabitance of the ambiguous gender space as their mutual problem. It almost seems as
though they were competing for clarification, for an exit into the symbolic from the
polymorphous and confused underground of non-hegemonic gender spaces.
Masculinity and monstrosity 21
The difference as well as the similarity between these two figures is a powerful
evidence of the achievements of the feminist movement as well as the retaining power of
patriarchal signification on the male adolescent audience. After all, corresponding to the
"masculine" behavior of the Final Girl, modern patriarchy is not a sex-apartheid system but
rather a hegemonic gender system that perpetually redefines masculine as universal and vice
versa but allows females to participate and compete (cf. Laclau & Mouffe, 1985). The filmic
figuration of the Final Girl thus accommodates the real-world success of women to break
down walls of resistance and to gain access to positions earlier strictly reserved for males. As
outside the cinema, however, this particular construction simultaneously attempts to restrict
women to a purely reactive and perpetually disadvantaged position by defining any active
behavior as "masculine". Less acceptable, according to slashers (and many other horror
films), is the gender bending of gays, transvestites, transsexuals, or possibly even just
androgynous sissies (all recoded as aggressive ab-norm-al killers): characters, who are made
monstrous precisely because of their closeness, rather than their distance from the (fears of
the) implied spectator. As Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick puts it: "Because the paths of male
entitlement ... required certain intense male bonds that were not readily distinguishable from
the most reprobated bonds, an endemic and ineradicable state of what I am calling male
homosexual panic became the normal condition of male heterosexual entitlement" (1990, pp.
184-85). Alternatively, we might interpret the success of the masculine female over the
feminine male as an instance where the "one-sex model" (women as lesser men) still shines
through the otherwise hegemonic "two-sex model" (women as the Other of men): A
masculine woman then is no contradiction, but an indeterminate monster is unacceptable.
This deeply patriarchal and homophobic construction of the monster even extends to a
perverted accommodation of feminism in that it offers this figure as a negative, despicable
adversary/obstacle for the "progressive" female protagonist, and thus makes him (rather than
Masculinity and monstrosity 22
the gender system or "straight" men) carry the stigma of reactionary resistance to feminist
advances! But feminism interests the slasher and its derivatives only up to a certain point:
Since horror mostly toys with border disruption that in the end is contained or refuted,
queerness still constitutes the major monstrosity in slasher and other horror films (cf.
Benshoff 1997). What has changed is that under exceptional circumstances, the somewhat
masculine woman is no longer declared as queer and therefore monstrous.
Identification, control and (con-) fusion
To understand the workings of gender in film, identification is an even more
important analytical ground than characterization, because it involves the construction of
femininity and masculinity rather than their mere presentation on the screen. Following this
major insight, film theory in the Seventies turned from a study of "images of women" (i.e.
characterization) to an analysis of the involvement and construction of social power relations
in the filmic text, most of all by tracing the psycho-sexual identification on the part of the
audience. This favoring of a semiotic/constructivist over a content/sociological approach has
remained very popular, despite the growing disenchantment with the Lacanian variant of that
paradigm. For Clover, too, the figure of the Final Girl is most interesting not in itself, but for
its implications on the identification of the audience, particularly of the (heterosexual) male
adolescent. Clover concentrates on (heterosexual) male viewers for two reasons: because she
assumes them to make up the largest part of the slasher audience (1996, p. 98, p. 104), but
perhaps even more importantly because for them, identifying with the Final Girl constitutes a
crossing of gender boundaries which – Clover claims - throws them into a feminine and
passive position thereby subverting the patriarchal sex-gender equation. Since I take issue
with this analysis, I follow Clover in concentrating on the male audience, without implying
Masculinity and monstrosity 23
that it is necessarily the largest segment. It is here, that I depart most decidedly from her
analysis, both in terms of the tracing of the possible identification patterns and in the political
impact of these forms of identification. That is, I posit that the male spectator does neither
straightforwardly nor entirely positively identify with the female victim-hero, and thus does
not necessarily embrace an anti-patriarchal and/or passive position.
To a certain extent horror (especially slasher) films are disruptive in that they throw
up inconsistencies and contradictions, which they themselves cannot resolve. Clover follows
one of them, when she claims the Final Girl to be active, but the spectator – by virtue of his
identification with her! – to become passive. Adam Knee takes this position to an extreme by
claiming that the male "identification with feminine figures in distress [requires of them a]
contemplation of one's own passivity, humiliation, and penetration" (1996, pp. 214-15). The
contrary is more true: Far from being disruptive, the ambivalence and contradictions
surrounding identification in these films serve a conservative purpose: the male spectators are
drawn towards a passive, penetrated position, but not really into it and are released at the end
(cf. Creed). Therefore, the burden of the confused state between active and passive always
remains with the active woman: the female hero, not the male spectator, is located in the
double bind of not being masculine enough in one way and not being feminine enough in
another. As Tania Modleski concludes: "[T]he mastery that these popular texts no longer
permit through effecting closure or eliciting narcissistic identification is often reasserted
through projecting the experience of submission and defenselessness onto the female body.
In this way the texts enable the male spectator to distance himself somewhat from the terror.
And, as usual, it is the female spectator which is truly deprived of 'solace and pleasure'"
(1986, p. 163).
Masculinity and monstrosity 24
One might even propose that male spectators do not identify in a straightforward way
with the female protagonist (in the sense of feeling to be her) but rather empathize with her.
Witness for example that the gaze of the camera is only sometimes with her (and even more
rarely through her eyes), while at other times "her" point of view is subverted by shots which
are looking down at her, who is huddled and shivering in a corner (a camera angle of central
importance, it seems, since it is also reproduced numerous times on posters and video
jackets).11 Thus the film lets a male spectator feel her terror, but it remains nonetheless a
female who serves as the site/sight of terror. In other words, the fluidity and ambiguity
surrounding the Final Girl's character extends to the narrative and audiovisual construction of
identification, wavering between feeling like her and merely feeling with her, who 'is being
beaten' instead of the spectator. This corresponds to her being THE body, THE "meat" of the
film, while the killer remains mostly unseen, disembodied, just like the camera and the
spectator. She thus is the identificatory target, yet distanced by a binarism that defines
feminine as body and masculine as mind (cf. McLarty, 1996, p. 247). I would like to stress
again, that I am here delineating the patriarchal recuperation of the gender system following
the disruption of traditional cinematic codes through a more shifting and fluid identification.
This is not to say, however, that individual male audience members might not be thrown into
gender confusion, or embrace passivity beyond the distancing devices the text offers. Also, of
course, the intermingling of contradictory factors in the Final Girl - femininity, asexuality,
activity, power, fear and being pursued - and the ultimate release from that position that I
have pointed out, might have very different thrills for a female audience. Similarly, if my
reading were less aiming at ideological recuperation but instead deconstructively reading
textual gaps and resistances it might be useful to focus on the power of the monster/killer,
who (or should we say which?) although othered and ultimately destroyed, nonetheless
drives the story and allows for a vicarious negative identification.
Masculinity and monstrosity 25
But let us return to the identification patterns offered to the male adolescent viewers
by the slasher film. Without stretching the texts too far, one could claim that the Final Girl is
served up less as a stand-in for the male viewer than as an imaginary potential partner ("my
girl"). And indeed the Final Girl does not so much embody what a male adolescent would
want to be himself, but how he would like his girl to be: Not passive but not too active, and
above all, turning down (indeed against) that other man who desires her, while at the same
time fighting her way out of a somewhat too restrictive (read: parental) definition of girlhood
(now we don't want her too chaste, do we?). The resultant structure of empathy is not too
innovative either, being much practiced outside the film world, and – one may note – entirely
in accordance with patriarchal power relations. Indeed it corresponds perfectly to the
established masculinist practice of “protecting” women in the male's sphere of influence
(wife, girlfriend, sister, daughter) from other men. Or, to prove my point negatively: Who but
the spectator could be the partner of the Final Girl? Whose romance but that of spectator and
the Final Girl could possibly be blocked by the monster - for this is a main function of the
monster according to Benshoff (1997, p. 4)? After all, there is a dearth of alternative male
lead figures to start with and in the end it is only her and "us" who are left. It is this
consciously arranged absence of male protagonists above all that holds out an invitation to
the spectator to fill the vacuum. Thus, instead of a male lead figure getting the girl on the
spectator's behalf, the spectator is directly involved.
Other male figures could only be rivals in such a set-up – and are either immediately
disposed of (male sidekicks) or refuted (the monster). In the latter case this happens, when he
turns from punishing "bad" girls to desiring the spectator's girl: only then is the earlier
audience identification with the killer/monster disavowed and he is "named" and unmasked.
In other words, he is killed off, or at least disappears, not because he changes in any way (he
usually doesn't) but because he now turns against the heterosexual matrix of the "new", more
Masculinity and monstrosity 26
sensitive males, who feel they have some "femininity inside" and can accept "their" women
to have certain masculine aspects. It is telling in this regard, that the monster is now at the
receiving end of phallic weapons, lying down, bending over; that he is un-masc-ed, and is,
most of all, often denounced as a border-crossing pervert that has to be abjected. It is even
more telling however, that the monster – being (nearly) a man after all – is not punished in
equal "passionate" measure to the Final Girl or any of her sidekicks. He, like his male
victims, the boys and men, is disposed off quite quickly, often "painlessly", and above all,
never ever has to endure or represent terror. This one is exclusively for the girls – and the
vicarious enjoyment of the audience.
To put my interpretation of the identification patterns in these films in more cinematic
terms: I posit that these films – at least after dissolving the view through the eyes of the killer
– favor primary identification (with the narrative and camera) over secondary identification
(with the characters). While in the mainstream film the latter serve as an anchoring point,
especially for the distribution of active/passive dichotomies on male/female, in the slasher
this secondary identification is indeed more fluid and broken (see Clover, 1996). However, it
is my contention that in the process primary identification not only remains in place, but may
indeed be strengthened: This "body genre" (Williams) in its attempt to get us frightened
and/or disgusted, simply goes a more direct route both in its challenge to and its subsequent
reassurance of the male viewer.
Or, to put it differently again, these films play with a "hot spot" of masculinity: the
issue of control. In the realist, mainstream mode, primary identification serves to create a
phantasmatic belief in the viewer that s/he controls the film’s advance, that it is "our" story –
or at least conceals the passive helplessness of the invisible and inaudible position of the
voyeur. In horror film, and in the slasher particularly, this tenet is often challenged: the male
viewer looses control, instead being subjected to moments of terror, surprise, fear, passivity,
Masculinity and monstrosity 27
possibly even being thrown into masochistic identification, through a story that for a certain
time does not behave the way he wants. Neither is he always spared to face his voyeuristic
and "helpless" position vis-à-vis the screen. But it is a relatively controlled loss of control, an
invitation to the spectator to play loss of control. After all, it abuses the woman as a stand-in
for this passive position, guides the spectator through an identificatory progression from
monster to woman, does not directly challenge his sex or sexuality, and offers him a story
that may be more to his liking than he admits. In fact, even this loss of control, the
supposedly unpleasant part of the horror trajectory is usually done as pleasurably for the
"average" male as possible. With enough distance (unlike women, for example) the thrill may
be quite fun. Some theorist have even claimed that it is precisely this masochistic positioning
into passivity and inertia that is the pleasure of cinema – in other genres, however more
circumscribed or marginalized because of its connotation of gayness and/or femininity. As
Richard Dyer (1993) and Kaja Silverman (1992), two leading scholars in this regard, point
out, such a masochistic positioning is not necessarily any more disruptive of patriarchy than
sadistic/voyeuristic patterns of identification. In the slasher case, for example, the spectator's
being drawn into proximity of a woman's position (whether identification or empathy) should
not automatically be perceived as a promising signal. As Lianne McLarty points out:
"Contemporary horror seems doubly dependent on images of the feminine for its postmodern
paranoia: it simultaneously associates the monstrous with the feminine and communicates
postmodern victimization through images of feminization" (1996, p. 234). However playful
and "soft" they may be on this, ultimately most horror films let the male viewer regain the
phantasmatic belief in control which they had denied him initially. Thus, the Final Girl
finally obeys the spectator's (silently screamed) commands: On "Run!" she runs, on "Grab
the knife!" she grabs it. That way, across a fluid, broken, incomplete secondary
identification, primary identification here addresses the viewer directly in a narrative and
Masculinity and monstrosity 28
audio-visual trajectory that challenges but ultimately reinforces the viewer's subjectivity in a
heteronormative and patriarchal system.
Moreover, insofar as secondary identification with the Final Girl does indeed occur in
the slasher, it is more in accordance with Freud's conception of this process in that it contains
a significant aggressive aspect. According to Freud, identification is not only a benign
"wanting to be (like)" that other person, but also a partly destructive force. I would argue that
the viewer's identification with the Final Girl particularly exhibits "aggressive identification
based on a will to dominate and to humiliate sexually the object secretly coveted" (Fuss,
1993, p. 199). Following Freud's arguments, such identification is related to an oral
cannibalistic form (originating in the identification with the mother who fed us), and it is thus
interesting to note that aggression in horror films often takes a decidedly cannibalistic form.
While it is often remarked that monsters and their weapons are typically phallic, they are
equally often related to devouring. Horror films typically feature animals that see humans as
food (Jaws), vampires (Dracula movies), zombies munching on human flesh (Romero's
Living Dead series), butchers that have turned to slaughtering humans (The Texas Chainsaw
Massacre), cannibals (Silence of the Lambs), weapons such as knifes or kitchen machines
(Pulse, Gremlins), horrific family dinners (Brain Dead), or, more generally, humans as
"meat" - the knife that gives the slasher genre its name being a case in point. Whether or not
it is so clearly oral/cannibalistic, the identification with the female hero always contains a
strong aggressive streak, conveniently transposed onto the monster. Thus we can identify
positively with the pure girl while the aggressive aspect is associated with the sexually
confused killer. This is one of the functions of the initial positioning of the spectator in the
monster: he can thus serve all the better as the receptacle of our aggressive impulses that are
later disavowed. Despite the fact that the camera's point of view may at the beginning of the
Masculinity and monstrosity 29
film be associated with the killer, identification with him is countered from the start by
distancing devices (heavy breathing or heartbeats, visual codes such as obstructed views,
narrative austerity with regard to his character, etc.). The resulting significant lack of
emotional identification with the monster, I would argue, serves to make him first an "empty"
vessel for our access to the story, and later as an "empty" slate for the above-mentioned
projection of aggressive impulses.
Which brings us to the fact that illegitimate (con-) fusion is one of the prime threats in
the slasher (and most of the films inspired by it). The enveloping maternal signifiers such as
images of the vagina dentata, haunted houses or underground chambers, the feminine men,
the masculine women, the spectator in a monster, the male spectator identifying with a
woman – they are prime examples of such improper fusions, who are defined as monstrous,
then punished and expelled. In other words, the slasher first fuses things, people and
characters that "don't belong together", and puts into motion what is supposed to remain
stable, thereby obliterating borderlines deemed important for maintaining the social fabric. In
the film's duration, these confusing proximities are progressively disentangled, whereby
female subjectivity/sexuality and non-hegemonic masculinity are rejected and the other
"problems" are resolved: The monster is unmasked and subsequently killed or discarded – i.e.
"Othered" and disavowed. The Final Girl, after having been frightened enough, and having
had to accept the patriarchal terms of sexuality is now ready for the heterosexual contract as a
woman whose femininity is not a powerful aspect in itself but a mirror to masculinity – or
else she goes catatonic (a perfidious symbol of frigidity) in which case she is left behind like
the monster. And the viewer, who had originally been drawn into the monster's position and
then led to fight these very impulses during the emphatic alignment with the Final Girl is
finally helped out, into a position of (imaginary) control and ultimately, at the film's end,
released to resume the normative (male) position. In other words, difference from hegemony
Masculinity and monstrosity 30
(queerness) is othered while heterosexuality and the sex/gender system it maintains is
reinstated.
Speaking with Foucault, we can say that the aim of these films is not at all to repress
sexual agency itself – as the literature often suggests – but rather to affirm (phallic) sexuality
and control deviations thereof. In terms of the Sedgwick system we can state that the Final
Girl and the monster fight over who gets to leave the impossible field of gender confusion, or
to perish there – leaving the spectator as the profiting third party. Thus a binary antagonism
is established even in the depiction of broken binaries, since leaving or perishing remain the
only options for the Final Girl and the monster alike. Most importantly, the audience, who
has temporarily and thrillingly been allowed into the field of ambiguity, is "reassured" that
this gender bending sphere is uninhabitable.
Disavowing difference seems to be the foremost function of these films: It is at first
maliciously associated with active women and the threateningly independent and powerful
(male) monster, but is subsequently anchored by the Final Girl, whose awakening sexuality,
being perceived as a threat, is consequently controlled and contained. What is left is
femininity defined as the Other of phallic masculinity. That is, what gets really killed in the
process of the film is difference. Any remaining ambiguity (such as the Final Girl's non-
feminine, a-sexual conduct) is resolved when she successfully fights the transgender monster
at which point femininity and masculinity are more safely distributed: the former tied to her –
and through the loss of control to the passive film experience – and the latter to the audience,
especially towards the end, when it regains imaginary control and leaves both the monster
and the woman behind. In a corresponding movement, also the monstrous (non-hegemonic
masculinity), is expulsed from the viewer onto the screen as the killer becomes visible,
entering the screen as an object, and thereafter is expulsed from there, too, killed or
Masculinity and monstrosity 31
vanishing. While these films' ambivalent structure and their dialectical toying with difference
and queerness (presenting - rejecting) may accommodate female or queer pleasures or thrills,
its tendency to punish non-hegemonic masculinity and to expulse femininity ultimately
serves to reinforce heterosexual and homophobic masculinity. Normative male identity can
thus be placed in imaginary danger (con-fusion and border-breakdown) and then rescued in a
process of separation and border reinstitution, without ever being scrutinized itself.
In summary, the slashers (and, I would argue, many of its derivatives) dismally fails
to take advantage of the field of possibilities opened up by their formal departures from the
Hollywood formulas. If we follow Lianne McLarty in her assertion that "[t]he issue..., is not
simply one of a tension among discourses but a struggle over them" (1996, p. 249), then the
struggle over horror - involving issues such as gender fluidity, queerness, female protagonists
and hegemonic masculinity - is resolved in most cases in a reactionary manner. On the
whole, the slasher in my analysis remains quite rigorously hegemonic, indeed often utterly
(hetero)sexist, as can be witnessed in the standard punishment of sexually active women, the
conflation of femininity with victimhood and fright, or the homophobic recoil from feminine
men and other forms of queerness. In fact, if these films do realize a progressive potential at
all, it is more likely to be a critique of the stifling bourgeois family (Psycho et al.), media
seduction (some Cronenberg films), racism (Night of the Living Dead), consumerism (Dawn
of the Dead) or unethical corporations (Alien series) but is highly unlikely to be a pro-
feminist project. On the contrary, violently misogynist and homophobic images and
narratives by and large characterize the slasher.
Ultimately, the slashers' "playful" intrusions into the gender field conveniently
conceal that normative masculinity itself is the source of the monstrous. If we consider how
readily the audience accepts narratives where femininity equals victimhood and masculinity
Masculinity and monstrosity 32
equals rape and murder, we have to conclude that this version of masculinity should have a
government warning label: "Quitting being a normal male now greatly reduces danger to
yourself and others." However, this is precisely what most horror films do NOT do. On the
contrary: They are actively engaged in projecting the violent impact of hegemonic
masculinity onto the (non-normative) monster in order to then insidiously exorcise it - for the
moment, until the next film.
Masculinity and monstrosity 33
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1Endnotes
Films in the mold of the 70s and 80s slasher continue to be made (often going straight to
video), but the most significant development has been a mainstreaming of its elements for example
in the Scream series, in I Know What You Did Last Summer, in Silence of the Lambs or in the
science fiction horror of the Alien series. Apart from the bigger-budget look, these films manifest a
couple of significant changes from the slasher, foremost (especially in the Alien series) an even
more actice and powerful heroine. However, I would argue that a significant number of the
arguments I propose below for the 70s and 80s slasher (e.g. limited success, an equation of
femininity with victimhood, lack of social or institutional power, an othering of non-normative
masculinity) also hold true for these later manifestations, particularly as far as the monster/killer
and identification processes are concerned. An conclusive testing of this hypothesis, would,
however, necessitate a separate study.
2 For an extended theorization of (male) masochistic identification see Studlar (1988) and -
with a very different perspective - Silverman (1992). Neither of them has, however, focused on the
horror film.
3 One should mention also two pioneers of psychoanalytical approaches to the genre:
Margaret Tarratt and particularly the prolific theorist Robin Wood.
4 Compare also her book on pornography, Hard Core. (1989).
5 Compare also (1996) and her book The monstrous feminine (1993).
6 It is a matter of dispute whether male viewers constitutes a majority of the horror audience.
Most would agree, however, that for the 70s and 80s slasher it is a sine-qua-non or core group and
that even in later cases it remains a main target group that producers would definitely not want to
alienate.
7 See also Clifford (1974), pp. 11, 25.
8 For a useful introduction to the term "queer" and its political and academic uses see Smyth
(1992) and the first chapter of Doty (1993).
9 "Real man" and "real woman" in this graph (corresponding to the poles of the line in figure
1) refer to ideologically proscribed positions, expecting women to score high on the femininity
scale and low on the masculinity scale and vice versa for men.
10 Actually, ideological norms can be seen to be far more challenged: To adequately capture
gender performativity we would have to go beyond such static models figuring in the dynamic
aspect of lived existence.
11 I coined "empathetic identification" to account for the empirical observation of a "broken"
subjective camera. The concept is also in accordance with two points I raise below, namely the well
known distinction between primary and secondary identification and the Freudian concept of
identification as containing positive as well as aggressive components.
