Hell is a Teenage Girl

Written by Isabella Fernandes

Photography by Ema Sabau

Horror understands women better than any other genre—it is the one that most honestly portrays the brutalities of both girlhood and womanhood. The conventions of the genre allow for this metamorphosis to be treated with the honesty they deserve, while depicting how harrowing these experiences can truly be.

Carrie is one of the most notable examples of this. Both the film and the book capture the inherent ostracization of the female experience, particularly through Carrie’s supernatural powers and the recurring motif of blood. Carrie’s powers make her a stranger to herself as well as others. Although she cannot control them, she is punished for their existence by both her mother and her peers, reflecting the ways women are shamed for bodily transformations that they cannot control.

The use of pig’s blood in the narrative is largely significant in its association with filth. It’s significant that Carrie’s peers chose to pour pig’s blood over her head during the prom; there is a stark contradiction between the utopic American teen attending prom and the gross animal blood. Yet, this Western stigma is anything but natural. Everyone sheds blood, be it humans or animals. Menstrual blood is the only blood that is shed without requiring violence, yet is regarded with the most visceral disgust, which is why the choice of pig’s blood specifically in the prom scene matters. The blood in Carrie is a physical marker of that shame, which is not exclusively eternal. The transformation from girlhood to womanhood can make one feel like a stranger to themselves.

This change can feel so extreme that it produces a sense of inhumanity, a concept the horror film Ginger Snaps takes to heart when protagonist Ginger Fitzgerald literally transforms into a werewolf as a metaphor for puberty. Like Carrie, Ginger begins as a social outcast, but this transformation makes Ginger increasingly attractive to those around her. However, as the world often does with a confident woman, they seek to tear her down. Her werewolf-induced sexual prowess is received with contempt, even by her sister, who is aware of her supernatural transformation. Ginger Snaps speaks to the vilification of women, especially when it comes to the weaponization of biological and hormonal processes that casts their bodies as inherently threatening.

Jennifer’s Body explores the vilification of women even further. Much like Ginger, Jennifer suffers a transformation—one that is not a shorthand for puberty, but instead a manifestation of the trauma caused by sexual assault. Members of the fictional band Low Shoulder attempt to sacrifice Jennifer to Satan in exchange for success, but unbeknownst to the band, the ritual goes wrong because Jennifer is not a virgin as they believed she was. This causes her to become a succubus.

The scene of the ritual itself largely resembles a gang rape, with the men circling Jennifer and holding her down. The members hold a knife to her chest, a phallic symbol that strengthens the metaphor. As the only one to become demonically influenced in the ritual, Jennifer’s experience parallels how women are treated like monsters during all stages of sexual assault cases—the incident, the coming forward, and the aftermath. Jennifer’s best friend Needy chastises her for going on a killing spree after her possession, but of course the men’s abuse of Jennifer is never questioned.

These events are life-altering to an extent that cannot be overstated. In Jennifer’s case, her demonic possession leads to the brutal, remorseless murder of men; if she does not engage in these acts, her exterior visibly decays.

When attempting to kill Needy’s boyfriend Chip, Jennifer says, “I need you hopeless”—hopeless like she was made to feel by the band, because the true terror was not becoming a monster but instead not being treated like a person when her bodily autonomy was viscerally violated by the members of Low Shoulder.

While Jennifer’s Body is not the first film to add to the rape revenge tradition in horror, it made way for many contemporaries, including Promising Young Woman. The promising young woman, Cassie, mirrors Jennifer. She essentially functions as an avenging angel in the film’s narrative after her best friend Nina is raped, drops out of college, and eventually takes her life.

However, there are some important divergences in Promising Young Woman’s depiction of rape revenge. For one, it is not supernatural like Jennifer’s Body. Second, and perhaps most interestingly, is that Cassie is already a woman instead of in the process of becoming one, thus informing much of how she goes about her revenge.

Cassie is much more cynical in dealing with men—and women who side with the very men who subjugate them—in the aftermath of her best friend’s assault. She is written as a fully established character and woman, lived in and tired of what she has been through, rendering her revenge personal and emotionally charged despite being plotted with calculated precision. She knows how to get the men she is targeting to do what she wants. Unfortunately, being the most
prepared woman is still not enough. Before she can see the fruits of her labored revenge take fruit, Cassie is murdered, suffocated by a pillow. Her hand tries to pry the pillow off her face before going completely still. The shot lingers in silence for a couple of seconds.

Where other genres might have trivialized these events as a joke or as a subplot, the horror genre confronts them through the grotesque and supernatural. Despite portraying female leads as beastly creatures, these films tell women that they are not the monsters—their perpetrators are more monstrous than they’ll ever
be. Maybe more importantly, they tell women that they are not to blame for the horrors done unto them. YM