The Spectacle of Dying Women in Horror (and every other genre)
It has long been accepted that the horror genre has a problem with its treatment of women. As a horror fan, this is something I take as a given; I’m not surprised when a horror film is disgustingly misogynistic. There are few or no women with speaking lines; there are no women of colour at all; when there is a female character, she is only a device for the male character’s development; the woman dies brutally and almost immediately; the woman is either a virgin or a whore (and gets mutilated either way); the woman is to blame for the male killer’s actions. None of these things surprise me. Nobody really knows why horror movies in particular hate women, seemingly more than other genres, but we accept it. It’s disappointing, but what do we expect? To be seen as human beings? That seems highly unlikely.
One trope that stands out to me as especially revolting is that of the beautiful dead woman in horror. You know the type: splayed out lifelessly and yet alluringly, makeup that was apparently applied just moments before death and has not been disturbed by whatever horrific attack she has suffered. The shot usually focuses on the woman’s face or full body, showing us what a tragic loss we have suffered in the death of this bodacious babe. Women are stylised in death in a way that men rarely are; the emphasis is placed on beauty rather than humanity. We have romanticised dead women for hundreds of years, from Ophelia to Princess Diana; it is only natural that horror follows this trend. In death, women are sterilised, their flaws and conflicts ironed out- they become more beautiful than they could hope to be in life.
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| Ophelia by John Everett Millais |
Though common in horror films, this trope of beautiful dead woman also pops up in other popular media, and made a recent guest appearance in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. In Avengers: Endgame, Black Widow falls to her death off a cliff, and we see her corpse in a long, panning shot while the tragic violins play. Instead of being smashed apart on impact, Black Widow has barely a hair out of place; she is posed flatteringly, her legs slightly bent to show off the curve of her thigh and hips, her face porcelain smooth, the plunge of her skintight catsuit still revealing enough to keep us interested. There is a smudge of blood behind her tousled hair. She is a mannequin modelling death.
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| Black Widow in Avengers: Endgame |
The fact that we see the woman dying or dead in such great detail already brings attention to the difference in treatment between them and the male characters. In a typical slasher film, the deaths of men are short and fairly non-graphic; the camera cuts away before most of the damage is done. To contrast, the scenes that feature women being murdered are longer and more excruciating in their intimacy; who can forget the opening of Scream, and Drew Barrymore sobbing snot down the phone, begging for her life? The camera lingers on the woman’s tear-filled, perfectly lined eyes; her stuttering, sensual breaths. The death of the woman is a spectacle, not a tragedy.
In some instances, the process of dying is almost pornographic; indeed, horror does share certain aspects with porn films, as they’re both considered “body genres”. To quote film critic Jenna Stoeber, a body genre is one whose aim is “provoking a physical sensation over plot development or narrative closure”. This physical reaction can be gasping, screaming, crying, an increased heart rate, or the sensation of sadness, fear, or arousal; the most popular examples of body genres are, therefore, horror, porn and melodrama.
The most egregious example of the pornographic murder is in the cult classic Halloween, when Lynda is strangled with a telephone cord while on the phone to our protagonist Laurie. While struggling, Lynda’s shirt is open and her breasts exposed, and she produces moans that make for non-family friendly viewing, even when her air supply is cut off. Making women attractive in their dying moments is clearly more important than any semblance of scientific accuracy.
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| The death of Lynda in Halloween, 1978. |
Similarly, when Pam is impaled with a meat hook in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, her expressions and sounds would not feel out of place in an extreme porn film. Our line between sexual pleasure and violence against women seems to get thinner the more you look at it.
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| The death of Pam in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, 1975 |
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| Carmen Electra in Scary Movie, 2000 |
Women are made beautiful and appealing in death because they are easier to handle than they were in life. Dead women cannot get angry. Dead women cannot spit in your face or knee you in the balls. Dead women cannot snort, scream, vomit or punch. This is what makes them beautiful; they are blank templates, projector screens for the other characters and for the audience. Dead women cannot do anything solely for themselves, only for other people; they are the ultimate submissives.
In many ways, dead women are the ideal women, even more so because they usually die for men. Black Widow dies so that her male friends fight harder. Marion Crane dies so that we see how depraved Norman truly is. Tracy dies so that Detective Mills can unleash his true self. When a woman dies, she is no longer a person- she is a wife, a mother, a daughter; she is only defined by her relationship to men. Of course men fetishise the dead woman, because she is perfect for them.
And therefore death, and the fetishisation of it, is seen as art, because it is done by men; just like it is art when women are belittled and abused, just like it is art when women are tortured, assaulted, hacked, strangled, sliced and slaughtered. Rosemary’s Baby is art. The Shining is art. American Psycho is art. Violence against women is art and, by extension, violent men are artists. Woody Allen, John Lennon, Roman Polanski, Stanley Kubrick, Marilyn Manson; they’re misunderstood, and they made one mistake, and it’s he-said-she-said, and we can separate the art from the artist, and he didn’t really hit her, and she’s just jealous and trying to ruin his life, and the age of consent laws are different over there, and it’s his creative process, and you should see his side too, and and and.
Don’t forget, it is not art when women write their own stories. It is not art when women create films, books and television for other women; then it is trashy, self-involved, performative, trying too hard, boring, unfunny, neo-lib garbage.
The sexy dead woman strips women of their agency. When all the media we’re surrounded by says that our lives are not our own, how are we supposed to cope when our deaths are taken away from us too? Even when we stop being, we are still being used by someone else. We are used to titillate, to get someone off, or to make someone wail in anguish. How can we exist when every aspect of our existence belongs to someone else? How can we survive?
I don’t know the answer to that. I just know that I’m angry. I wrote most of this article before Sarah Everard’s disappearance and death, and now I feel bitter editing it, seeing in real time that women cannot live or die for themselves, that we cannot mourn the death of each other without men enacting violence on us, that we cannot have the right to a peaceful vigil. We can only die. In Canada, thousands of indigenous women are missing. In America, trans women have a life expectancy of thirty to thirty five. In the UK, Black women are four times more likely to die while pregnant than white women. Violence against women, both interpersonally and on an institutional level, and especially towards women of colour, is what oils the wheels of our society, but it is also what makes us a machine on the verge of collapse. I wish there was an easy solution to this. I wish I could say that if we all donated £5 to a certain charity then there would never be another murder, or another assault; a revenge porn leak, a roofie, an upskirting, a cat call, a hand on a bum. I can’t say that. I can just tell you to show them your teeth, and when they inevitably kill you, don’t let them make a pretty corpse.
Read about the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women crisis here: https://www.nativewomenswilderness.org/mmiw
Read about Sistah Space Domestic Abuse Services here: https://www.sistahspace.org
A twitter account compiling GoFundMe's for trans individuals: https://twitter.com/fundtransgender
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