Titane, Jennifer’s Body show the power of young female horror villains

It’s a common occurrence for almost all modern film monsters. Freddy Krueger, Jason Voorhees and Michael Myers start as a terrifying figure, sometimes pursuing a brave heroine. By the end of the third and fourth installments the audience will be familiar with their ghoul and start rooting for them.

It’s not that these monsters become less scary, though that does happen. They become the heroes of their films, and that’s not all. After all, it’s relatively rare for horror movie protagonists to recur in movie after movie; Scream is the exception that proves the rule, where a central trio of beloved characters survives across multiple films in part because the masked killer’s identity is intended as a surprise, rather than being the same old slasher. In most other horror series, it’s the monster that keeps the whole thing going.

Some horror films have a counter-trope: The monster that takes the shape of a teenage girl, sometimes roiling with complex emotions. The most well-known (and often sequelized) modern movie monsters are aloof, uneducated, and frequently masked. Their humanity is obscured, or even nonexistent. However, the Monster Girl’s motivations are more evident. The Monster Girl is not obvious because of her tragic past, but rather in that she externalizes different mixtures of anger, confusion and turmoil that come with growing up. (Hence “girl,” rather than “woman”; though not every Monster Girl is a literal teenager, most of them are either young, or socially awkward enough to come across that way.)

Sometimes, Monster Girl takes inspiration from familiar monster forms such as Ginger, the young girl who undergoes a transformation to become a werewolf during her adolescence. Ginger SnapsThe vampires of Allow the right one inOr At Night, A Girl Leaves Alone HomeOr the title character MaiShe is a bit misguided, Dr. Frankenstein. They sometimes create hybrids of their own, such as Dawn, the heroine pro-abstinence. TeethVaginadentata is a condition that affects the genital area. Jennifer’s Body. Sometimes there’s nothing explicitly supernatural about them — characters in The Neon DemonThe most recent TitaneMost likely. What these sometimes disparate movies share is a sense that the characters’ experiences as young women in the world form their own horror shows.

Foto by Neon

The Monster Girl trope can sometimes play like an inversion of slasher cinema’s Final Girl: rather than facing down an external threat, the girl claims the destructive threat for herself, then struggles either with those instincts, or with another girl who hasn’t succumbed to her inner demons (like Needy in Jennifer’s BodyBrigitte or? Ginger SnapsThis is a. But the Monster Girl isn’t a direct spawn of the slasher movie — or the bad seed child-horror movie, which it also resembles. It has its own touchstones: The late ‘70s Brian De Palma thrillers CarrieAnd FuryFor example, the telekinetic abilities of young women are featured in both. Carrie establishes the struggle between the sympathetic Monster Girl and the unchanged “nice” girl with what could be described as a brilliant hedge against its title character’s outcast status. Though much of the movie proceeds from the point of view of withdrawn, socially awkward Carrie White (Sissy Spacek), some scenes assume the POV of Sue Snell (Amy Irving), the “normal” girl who tries and fails to help Carrie. Fury has even more points of view, plus espionage-like plotting, which makes it a more diffuse experience, less immediately keyed into the emotions of its young female lead (this time, Irving gets to play the woman who’s not to be trifled with). However, the intensity is similar.

CarrieThe movie’s dramatic climax is linked to both the physical and the social rituals of girlhood. Carrie is scared and confused by her late-arriving period and the cruelty she suffers from her classmates. These events set off her abilities and enable her final revenge. This is the most common connection between the Monster Girl trope and these mental or physical changes. Ginger Snaps, Ginger’s werewolf bite is brought on by a delayed period, while Teeth’s Dawn weaponizes her body (first accidentally, then with clear purpose) in tandem with her sexual awakening. It’s probably no accident that Snaps Teeth Mai Allow the right one inPlease see the following: Jennifer’s BodyThese songs appeared in 2000s following pop-culture dominance of young female singers. (Plenty of horror fans would have been among those deriding the singers as pop tarts; in 2004’s The Seed of ChuckyFor example, Britney Spears’ offscreen avatar is intentionally killed to make a joke. The Neon DemonA little more distant from these days is the story of young people literally obsessed with wanting to be young, healthy, and attractive.

Image: IFC Films

While these movies aren’t exactly girl-power revenge fantasies, many of them find a more organic way into the complicated ethics of “enjoying” a horror-movie kill. Not all of the Monster Girls’ victims deserve their sticky ends, and the counterpoint good girl is sometimes there to protest. There is something satisfying about watching the rapists, jerks, and bullies punished for their crimes. TeethOr in the final moments ofAllow the right one inThis is the. Granted, it’s no less of a routine than the half-naked couple stalked by the masked man, and sometimes the repetition can be numbing. TeethFor example, the Monster Girl, as clever and savvy as she is, relies on very few tricks. But the Monster Girl has a way of simultaneously justifying and tempering the bloodlust of the modern horror movie: It’s fun to see some of the victims receive a comeuppance, while watching the Monster Girl lose herself in violence (Jennifer’s BodyLoneliness (MaiYou can choose to have both.CarrieHowever, it is disturbing to see. Because it can seem so sexy to pit a man against a woman, many female characters often control these films. Even when they’re ultimately pitted against each other, it tends to sting more than, say, the girl superhero fighting the designated henchwoman.

Maybe that’s why there are relatively few “boy” monsters in the Monster Girl mode. While horror has had its fair share of sympathizing monsters, (the Universal Monsters can sometimes incite as much fear as pity), they are often depicted as males. However, these creatures tend to be more creature-like. In the film, there is a fish-man. Water’s ShapeHe has a romantic relationship with a female human being. The movie makes it clear that he is more human than a Creature from Black Lagoon-style Undersea Hunk. Nicholas Hoult plays R the zombie. Warm Bodies, comes closer to a gender-flipped version of the Monster Girl trope, and his zombie nature has to be considerably softened — it’s revealed that he’s evolving back to a more human form — for the movie to hits its marks, which are more rom-com than horror, anyway.

Even when they delve into dark comedy or avoid traditional scares, Monster Girl movies are more decidedly horror, though they’re less dependent on creepy atmosphere. Familiar settings like old dark cabins, rustling in the woods, or creaky hallways of suburban homes might appear, but these stories don’t need to cut their characters off from society (and in many cases wouldn’t work in isolation from social dynamics). The characters’ particular hell also tends to be tied to their bodies, which are even more adept than boogeymen at following them everywhere.

Titane makes this part of its story: Its antiheroine spends much of the movie on the run from her own life, where she’s committed multiple horrific, slasher-style murders between gigs as a semi-famous exotic dancer (of a sort). Her scar is from a childhood injury, which was due to the unruly behavior common to children. Parents are more likely to call her monstrous. Throughout the movie, her body keeps changing, sometimes by her own design and sometimes by a body-horror plot device that is never fully explained; it’s an object of lust, fear, and transcendence, all at once. Titane and its many cousins understand that the Monster Girl trope can be liberating, as well as familiar, finding horror and beauty in a girl’s world with no shortage of either.