Niche Film Writings

Courtesy of MGM. In horror films, the transition from girl to woman and girl to demon is one and the same: the arrival of a girl’s first menstruation. In a certain light this association makes sense; puberty is about changing from one entity to another and entering the new realm of adulthood, and this is a scary, turbulent time for everyone. Using this experience in horror imagery as an outlet for the universal confusion and anger it causes is understandable, especially considering horror’s large teenage audience. Emotions are volatile and extreme, the body mutates into something almost unrecognisable; puberty is a fruitful terrain for a variety of horror narratives, but why do most horror films that focus on puberty tell the same story, that of a teenage girl becoming a demon and a monster through her period? The narrative of a girl’s demonic transformation triggered by a first period, or more broadly, by teenage-hood as a whole has been executed with varying degrees of success