This is a woman who cant be dealt with as either the object or the subject of the gaze, Indeed, up until very recently and under the pressure of changing demographics and actuarial tables, in films (whether horror films or not) and in culture, she has been so threatening and disgusting a sight that the gaze slides quickly over her and disavows her visibility. Here I want to talk about the middle-aged woman who is both scared and scary-the woman who is neither lover nor mother, the woman who becomes excessive by virtue of her being regarded as excess. Here, however, I want to talk about another sort of "scary woman" in the horror film-one whose scariness, while related to her sexuality, has less to do with power than with powerlessness, and whose scariness to men has less to do with sexual desire and castration anxiety than with abjection and death. Nonetheless, perhaps because its more interesting and certainly more empowering, feminist scholarly emphasis has been on the "scary" rather than "scared" women of the horror film and on describing the relation between the psychic dread they cinematographically engender and their sexual and reproductive potency. Indeed, it is nearly impossible to think about the threat of "scary women" in horror films without recognizing that threat as emerging from a woman who, first, was scared. The elaboration of this male dread of women is played out in horror films at both manifest and latent levels, and all of us, whether practiced in psychoanalytic readings of popular culture or not, are certainly familiar with the genres dual articulation of women as both "scared" and "scary." Generally speaking, these two "female conditions" are intimately and systemically related-not only to each other but also to the regulation of heterosexual desire and biological reproduction in patriarchal Western culture. On the other hand, male fear is generated by female desire-the desire of the Other, which provokes the specter of male "lack" in the face of sexual difference and manifests itself in castration anxiety (an anxiety justified recently by Lorena Bobbitts castration of her husband and revealed in his testimony that she was angry not because he repeatedly abused and raped her, but because he hadnt been able to satisfy her sexually). To put it simply and reductively, on the one hand, male fear is generated by male desire-and the power women have over its satisfaction.
The horror film has been seen by many contemporary, psychoanalytically oriented, feminist scholars as a misogynist scenario elaborated within a patriarchal and heterosexual social formation and based on the male fear of female sexuality. Now, a grown woman and film scholar, I am surrounded by the intellectual discourse on horror, a discourse that is thoughtful but never quite gets to a description of my experiences-either then when I was very young and gloried in a sense of my own difference and its power, or now when I am middle-aged and often surprised by moments of fear and horror-both at the movies and in my life. In contrast, I never found those early horror films all that horrible or really scary, although I did find them incredibly poetic, and I almost always identified with the monsters, whatever their gender (assuming they had one). Insofar as my mother confirms my recollection, the wolf men, the Frankenstein monster and his bride, Dracula and his daughters, never invaded my dreams, but my more susceptible sister almost always had nightmares on Saturday nights. Nonetheless, they still seemed close enough to fire our imaginations and make the walk home in the darkening twilight titillating and perilous.
Both my sister and I loved horror films especially-at that time, before Psycho, often set in the Carpathians, or at least not in Brooklyn, and remote from our quotidian life.
I loved science fiction films, tolerated westerns, was indifferent to musicals and melodramas and-like all the kids around me-squirmed whenever a couple kissed on screen. On Saturdays in Brooklyn, when I was a child, my younger sister and I used to go to the movies where wed sit all day watching the cartoons, coming attractions, and double feature loop themselves several times over until it was almost dark outside and we knew our mother was just starting to get anxious. Jump to Section 2 | Section 3 | Section 4 | Bibliography On the Dread of Aging in a Low-Budget Horror Film (section 1) THE LEECH WOMANs REVENGE by Vivian Sobchack
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