When the Monster Looks

Breaking the gaze in horror.

1

Over cosmopolitans at the bar, I try to explain to my friend Laura Mulvey’s concept of the male gaze¹.  

“Woman is the bearer of the bleeding wound!”  

A symbol of lack. A site of spectacle. Femininity running down the length of her body like a Suspiria silhouette. The male gaze is suspect. The male gaze is ubiquitous. The male gaze is apparatus. The male gaze is the forest and the trees.

I’ve read Mulvey at least five times now all the way through — not including the countless times I’ve read over excerpts and annotations — and I still can’t explain it to you here, in layman’s terms, in Lunchables portions, in my dumb-bitch vernacular.

Instead of being smart, I could just describe to you the way it feels to watch Jennifer Check burn the end of her tongue. The pleasure of peeling back the dead skin of your lips. Womanhood is a blood sport. Blood clots and Band-aids and bruises. Every girl, woman, femme, female-identifying babe knows how to walk the knife’s edge of pleasure and violence.   

2

Jen wants fear. She licks the flame. Jen knows the value of a good body. She’s sweet and sexy, siren eyes, velour against bare skin, until her jaw unhinges to take you whole. Gaze all you want — it’ll be your last. 

3

The male gaze says the body is filthy. The body is bloody. The body needs discipline. The Horror Gaze proposes: What if it didn’t? 

The camera is tantamount to the male gaze — to feminize it we punish the gaze itself by aiming it at something monstrous, something grotesque. The horror gaze is meant to be felt, it’s emotional, it’s meant to shock you back into your own body and out of the passive pleasure of voyeurism. 

4

When Linda Williams wrote about the affinity between the woman and the monster in a horror film, she said it was all in the eyes. The spectacle of the woman is supplanted by the spectacle of the monster’s body. Its freakishness is only matched by the castrated woman. When the woman looks at the monster, she sees herself through the trick mirror of the male gaze. The horror film shows us the male gaze through the woman’s eyes. Look what they did to her. Look what they’ve done to us. Can you see? I do. 

5

Asami likes the good parts. In Audition (1999), she unknowingly tries out to be someone’s girlfriend, but in a twist, she’s made for the role. When her would-be suitor gets cold feet, she takes them. She’s an editor by nature. She could use a hand, or a foot, or a tongue, or whatever she wants. The sweet kitten sounds of her Gigli saw take what she wants, how she likes, how she learned from the men in her life. What’s a little flesh and bone and marrow between friends? It’s surgical and clean, with a feminine flair. What woman doesn’t know how to make the body a site of play? 

6

In The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), a family of cannibals turn their home into an abattoir, but the film’s greatest cultural inheritance is Leatherface, who begins by cutting the faces of his victims and using them as masks. The face: widely agreed to be a signifier of our humanity, our identity [Eyes Without a Face (1960)].

Like Asami, the male gaze starts at the feet. It slips up the body in parts, ending at the chest — to go higher would be beside the point. If the gaze does consider the face, it’s in abstraction, in cut-up pieces of eyes, then mouth, then nose. In Fresh (2022), a woman is kidnapped to be sundered for her meat, and in her cell are piano key slices of mirror, so that even she can’t see herself whole. 

But the horror gaze loves the face, the frame lingering a little too long, feasting on the fear found there, luxuriating in blood spatter, taking one last look at the woman’s looking. This is a form of abstraction, too, I suppose. A way of image-making, of fetishizing and objectifying, even in the subject’s subjectivity. Or, is it confrontational? Does the horror gaze not only seek to break pleasure, punish it even, with images of the abject but also images of understanding? When the woman looks, is she not always looking at us? 

7

In Sean Byrne’s The Loved Ones (2009), Lola forces boys to play pretend the perfect prom at knifepoint — a macabre feminine correlation to rape. Lola needs romance. Her daydreams are all glitter and gore. Disco balls and party dresses with paper crowns to hide the hole in his head. It’s the cliffs of Hanging Rock, Wolf Creek’s plains and Chainsaw dinners. A date is just a game where one person wins at the end. And, Lola’s looking to get lucky.

Lola makes feral boys like class projects, gluing pictures to poster board with scented markers and construction paper. Arts and crafts with screw guns, like screw you, get mine. Part-Dahmer, part-bubblegum pop, she’s sadistically juvenile. Juggling urges both sexual and violent, she teeters on the border between girlhood and woman, clinging to make-believe while asserting agency the only way we know: with blood and power (tools). It’s hard to grow up as a girl, when becoming a woman almost certainly means death. 

8

In Black Swan (2010), Nina is disciplined and chaste, achieving what is thought to be the feminine ideal. But it's only then that her male mentor criticizes her for this control, this perfection. Now her greatness is not good enough. Now, he must undo her control, defile her as a means of maturity. The movie assumes that women need men to grow up, an extension of the generally agreed-upon idea of penetrative sex as the only means of losing one's virginity. 

She will ultimately not succumb to the same tragic fates of her mother or Beth, who live at the cost of becoming fully formed women with wants and needs and agency. Women who, because of their age, fall outside the bounds of male desirability. These are ultimately fates worse than death in the film. Beth, portrayed as unhinged and unreasonable, pathetic and pitiable, even tries to disfigure her own face —  her identity. Who is she now that she's been abjected? Why keep the same face that's so disgusting to those around her? 

Nina has a moment of lucidity in the final scene. She sees her mother, or, more specifically, she sees her mother see her. Her mother's look is one of horror. A moment of recognition passes between them, like William's look between the heroine and the monster. Nina has fully transformed into man’s perfect woman — but this cannot last, seen by the growing gash in her abdomen. She is the bearer of the bleeding wound and she will die for it. 

Nina manages to marry the chastity of the girl with the sexuality of the woman. Then she dies in this permanently arrested adolescence. She dies both figuratively, her story cut by the end of the film, she will no longer exist in the field of vision of the viewer, but also diegetically as the characters of the film will no longer see her either. The perfect woman.  

9

Then there’s the slow gaze — the moody, creeping, penetrative gaze — of The Virgin Suicides (1999), Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), Watcher (2022). 

As Anna Backman Rogers says in her academic exploration of Sofia Coppola’s films, Sofia Coppola: The Politics of Visual Pleasure, “Coppola’s films are disquieting because we are left with a nebulous and queasy feeling that is not easy to dissipate or disregard: that at the heart of Western visual culture is a deeply rooted hatred and woeful lack of knowledge with regard to the female body and female experience.”

The gaze that wants to pin you between the pages of a book, keep you stuck in its melancholy daydreams. Maybe that’s why Hanging Rock is so radical — the girls don’t disrupt the male gaze, they simply escape and never look back.  

10

The other day I asked Chat GPT to explain Julia Kristeva’s theory of the abject to me in RuPaul’s voice. She said, It’s like when a dead body gags you, henny. 

It’s a breakdown of meaning boots. 

It’s an understanding you struggle to understand. The abject doesn’t repel us because it represents the other — but because it represents us. I am always one moment away from unraveling. Object, subject, abject. The horror gaze is familiar. The horror gaze is liberating. 

Think of a woman covered in blood. The woman as a breakdown in barriers, as viscous, as bleeding into the male. The woman as bleeding. Is there anything scarier to a man than being contaminated with femininity?     

11

Is the opposite of the male gaze horror? Is horror inherently feminine? A genre where you know something’s wrong. A genre with no respect for containment. The male gaze says the body needs discipline. What if it didn’t? 

If where there is woman, there’s lack, if the image of a woman represents a void — of meaning, personhood, subjectivity — then make it generative. Where there was nothing, put everything. The excesses of the Gothic, Hélène Cixous’ conceptualization of jouissance, the feminine too-muchness in opposition to masculine order.  

12

Is to be in love with horror just a way of trying to love myself? To love the delicate, imperfect shroud of my skin, the rot in my teeth, the tissue that’s dislodged from my body. Can I love the bloody, sluicing parts I can’t see as much as the manicured parts I can? Aren’t they the same?      

13

The world’s got teeth — until I saw horror, I forgot I do too. 

1. Mulvey, Laura, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”