Not a Girl, Not Yet a Demon: the Presentation of Periods in Carrie (1976) and Verónica (2017)

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 in film over the years; most famously in Brian de Palma’s Carrie, but also in The Exorcist, and more recently in Ginger Snaps, Jennifer’s Body, The Witch and Paco Plaza’s Verónica. Menstruation’s combination of volatile emotions, pain, and blood, makes it a frightening and therefore rich topic for horror films to explore, but the tendency to associate it with demonic possession remains a mystery- yes, periods are scary, but are they really evil?

In the 1976 adaptation of Stephen King’s Carrie, the eponymous character’s first period signifies her physical and mental growth as she unlocks a new state of being, whether that is the cultural notion of adulthood or her own blooming telekinetic powers. Though Carrie has no demonic influences, she is perceived by her mother as being sinful and Satanic, as her powers are assumed to be the work of the devil; indeed there is a heavy atmosphere of religious oppression permeating the film, given by the crucifixes and other religious iconography in the White house. So although Carrie and her abilities are not actually demonic, we see them that way; de Palma encourages this reading, with his devilish red lighting, heavy use of fire (a very common image in the Bible), and his framing of Carrie as a detached, god-like presence as she enacts her revenge and destruction during the climax of the film. There is a clear inference that though Carrie herself is our protagonist and a sympathetic victim of both parental abuse and bullying, Carrie’s powers are something to be feared and aligned with the supernaturally evil. Carrie, the pre-pubescent and therefore innocent girl, is not to blame- her period is. Carrie’s destructive powers are triggered by a downfall of blood on the prom stage, just as they were awakened by a rush of blood in the shower earlier. As Shelley Stamp Lindsay writes, the prom scene “explicitly associates female sexuality with violence, contagion, and death.”¹ These are all things that Carrie had no association with before her period, the cultural perception of the arrival of sexual viability.

Carrie is framed by fire and bathed in red light as she wreaks havoc on prom night.
Courtesy of MGM.

As soon as Carrie starts to move into adulthood, she begins the descent into eventual self-destruction, and this motif of teenage girls being their own ruin reappears years later in the 2017 Spanish language film, Verónica. After a seánce gone wrong in an attempt to contact her dead father, teenage Verónica finds herself haunted by a malevolent presence that wants to hurt her family. Early on in the film, we see Verónica go to the school nurse and tell us that though she is fifteen years old, she has not yet had her first period. Though the nurse does not comment on this, the implication is clear: Verónica is, at this point, innocent, and therefore not corrupted by either demonic forces or menstruation. Later on, we see a dream sequence in which Verónica's mother whispers ominously to her "I need you to grow up", then clenches a fist over Verónica's abdomen and triggers a rush of blood from it- her first period. She is now corrupted and the film makes sure to tell us so. During the climax of the third act, when Verónica confronts the presence haunting her, she realises that she herself is carrying the demon, repeating "it's me" as she looks in the mirror, before slashing her own throat in attempt to end the possession.

Verónica confronts herself as the source of a demonic presence.
Courtesy of Televisión Española.

The lines drawn between Verónica and Carrie experiencing their first period and therefore "growing up", and becoming a demonic presence, either explicitly or implicitly, force us to jump to the conclusion that transitioning from a girl into a woman (or at least the socially defined ideas of this transition, based on cis female biology and long-outdated notions of sexual maturity in teenagers, et cetera) is something demonic. So instead of "why do so many horror movies associate periods with being evil?", the question becomes, why do we see adult women as something to be feared and demonised? Why do we see a natural, if slightly icky, biological process as demonic and corrupted?

One answer to this lies in the persistent male gaze of horror and everything this gaze enforces. Horror films like to frame women as dainty, harmless victims; anything that deviates from this image inevitably makes the woman in question evil. Teenage girls in particular are ripe terrain as they are already so vulnerable, constantly policed and violated by society. In many ways, it's fun to see these girls as villainous demons, but in more ways, it's reassuring. We want to see a young woman who is so full of self-loathing and resentment towards her body and what it signifies, that she welcomes herself as a vessel for a demon and violently self-destructs. We want to remind ourselves that teenage girls will wear themselves out, and that they aren't a danger to our societal order. We want to remind ourselves that teenage girls hate themselves more than they hate anyone else, so we can keep directing that hatred inwards, and keep forcing them to restrain themselves. We want to forget that teenage girls are powerful, and we want them to forget that too. We just hope they don’t explode at prom.


Works cited:
1. LINDSEY, SHELLEY STAMP. "HORROR, FEMININITY, AND CARRIE'S MONSTROUS PUBERTY." Journal of Film and Video43, no. 4 (1991): 33-44. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20687952.

Written by Millie Felton. Published 28th June 2019.