Dario Argento and the Paradoxical Feminism of Horror Films
Horror film is the greek mythology of our time — unavoidably moralizing. Especially when it comes to cartoonish fare like Nightmare on Elm Street or the Saw series, you root for the villain, dispensing gruesome O. Henry-ending comeuppance — slash the face of the vain beauty queen, paralyze the bully star athlete. Without unlikable victims, the film can’t go on. The viewer’s conscience is brustled. He feels remorse as spectator of evil, even if it is all staged.
Sometimes the most dramatic moments in a horror film are violence towards animals, as they represent the ultimate innocent victims. What did the puppy do to you? I haven’t yet see The Strangers, but Liv Tyler seems perfectly cast. She’s strong and beautiful, in a humble way. Impossible to dislike. You wouldn’t want her in danger, any more than you could stand a chainsaw weilding monster attacking a panda.
Nearly every film has an Athena, an Artemis, a Cassandra, or some figure combining the myths of all three. Either her boyfriend dies early, or he is maimed, paralyzed, zombified, etc. She must defend him, but first herself, relying on wits and strength she never realized she had. Here is a good essay reviewing several of my favorite films, and explaining how horror films subvert traditional gender roles by making a feminine character the hero.
Notably, there are also a number of films with the girl as the killer, the prototype being I Spit on Your Grave (set for a remake,) in which a woman savagely beaten and raped, kills her attackers off one by one. Hard Candy, with Ellen Page playing a young woman who literally castrates would-be pedophiles, is another one. I didn’t particularly like it, but its faults lie not with the premise, so much as the too-cute script.
At least since HP Lovecraft, horror has been indentified as the genre of repressed sexual fantasy. And I’ve heard more than several people compare slashing to penetration, but for now let’s stick to the theory of the final girl, as named by Carol Clover in “Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film.” Her book was groundbreaking in that it pointed out the audience — male or female — does not identify with the serial killer, but the lone woman on the run.
Nobody does the “final girl” quite like Dario Argento, then again most of his main characters are women to begin with. His latest film, the third in the trilogy starting with Suspiria and Inferno — Mother of Tears — opened this weekend. But with surprisingly little fanfare considering he got a big shout out in Juno, and nearly every art school girl I know is obsessed with him. If you’re a fan it’s a must-see, and even if your not, it’s a good place to start. It’s missing the hallucinatory neon music box architecture and prog rock orgy that is Goblin, the band who scored his best known films. But absent of these campy stylistic details, one finally able to appreciate Dario Argento’s gift for suspense.
Sarah, an art historian, played by Argento’s extremely attractive daughter Asia, receives a recently unearthed tomb. Opening it and examining its contents becomes a literal play on Pandora’s Box. All the witches in the world — played by hot goth chicks of all ages and ethnicities — come to Rome to celebrate the new darkness. They are lead by the Mother of Tears (her sisters the Mothers of Pain and the Mother of Sighs, were killed in the previous films. This trio is loosely based on Thomas de Quincey’s Suspiria de Profundis.)
Sarah discovers she’s a “white witch,” and therefore must confront the Mother of Tears herself for a magic-off. So there is no sense of WTF are you doing walking down those steps? She has to come face to face with the danger.
Argento’s films have always seemed very feminine, perhaps because the mother of Asia, Daria Nicolodi, often cowrote his scripts. There’s a very small list of women writing and directing horror, so her contribution is notable.
Incidentally, I saw two and a half films over this unpleasantly temperatured weekend. First Prince Caspian, (which is delightful) and afterward, I walked into the last hour of Sex and the City, playing down the hall. The script is dumb and Sarah Jessica Parker is annoying (but actually kinda pretty in it, in a Joan Crawford kind of way.) But everyone is there to see the clothes, and it delivers for that. Just as horror film scripts tend to be threadbare, just circumstances that might deliver a zombie sneaking out from under the bed every twenty minutes, SATC was written to show off shoes, and there’s really nothing wrong with it if that’s your thing
Related links:
- Final Girl
- Pretty Scary
- What Is a Feminist Horror Film Anyway? by Hannah Ax Wound
- Ax Wound, a feminist horror film zine
- Ginger Snaps, great feminist horror film written by a women
- Slumber Party Massacre, written and directed by women
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