Of Gals And Ghouls

Emani Jerome Of Gals and Ghouls The woman on the screen, anxious and inquisitive, hears an indecipherable sound coming from the next room. A raspy voice. A moan. She debates with herself whether to investigate further only for an instant; she has already decided. We watch as she gets up from the bed cautiously, the camera gives us a full shot so we can see her feel for her slippers in the suffocating darkness. She puts them on and slowly, ever so slowly, she inches for the door leading into the dimly lit hallway. She is reserved yet bold – alarmed yet curious. As she enters the narrow corridor, so small and so cramped, again she hears the awful noise and stops momentarily. The music, which until now had been a low and ethereal chord drifting in the background, has now intensified into a dramatic crescendo that gave promise to the twisted and terrible. The camera is now behind the girl, we see what she sees. We become her, moving closer to the slightly open door at the end of the hallway. She places a shaky hand on the door and tilts her ear to the tiny opening. There is no sound now, all is quiet and still. Gulping down the last of her reservations she pushes the door while simultaneously flipping the light switch on her left. The overhead light reveals nothing. The room is empty. The woman, confused, lets out a sigh of relief and then turns to leave. And there, in the doorway, stands the monster, horribly disfigured with its grotesque face bend into a warped smile and its hands stretched menacingly towards her throat… My date jumps at this part, her and most of the other people in the audience. She grabs my hand and I can immediately feel her pulse is racing. I had stolen fleeting glances at her between sips of my soda, watching the all-too-familiar pattern of bodily reactions to the scary movie. She started to lightly perspire, tiny droplets prickling around her mouth. She began to get fidgety, moving around in her seat and constantly crossing and re-crossing her legs. As the tension built on screen, my date sat further in her seat as if trying to worm away from the inevitable scene where the monster is revealed. And of course, every time she jumps she immediately grabs my arm while instinctually covering her face with her other hand. It would be an understatement to call watching a scary movie a sexual experience. The contraction of muscles, dilation of pupils, shortness of breath, and increased heart rate are all indicators of animalistic physical attraction. It’s no wonder that it seems the primary function of the horror film is to be a date film, feelings of fright and fear as a precursor to potential feelings of lust and love. That particular date, Gina, and I have since parted ways. But interestingly enough, during one of the many arguments we had that led to that eventual departure, the issue of why we kept watching these horror movies came up over and over again. At one point she says I was forcing her, that I would refuse to watch any of the movies she wanted to watch. Then she would turn it around and say she only watched those movies because she knew I wanted her to watch those movies. I demanded that she’d elaborate. “It’s pretty simple,” she said, arms at her waists in a decidedly defiant stance, “you got horny from watching me get scared. And I got scared so you’ll get horny.” I was appalled. Not only was she implying that I found some perverse pleasure from watching her get scared, but it also implied that she was aware I may have felt this way and

consciously acted scared as some form of sexual dominance. The very idea was preposterous. Wasn’t it? Stephen King would probably think otherwise. The horror writer and film critic recently wrote an essay called “Why We Crave Horror Movies”. In it, the very first line in fact, King gives us what he believes is the primary reason; “I think we are all mentally ill”. He then goes on to say, “…those of us outside the asylums only hide it a little better – and maybe not much better, after all”. The notion that we humans who enjoy these films share some kind of communal brotherhood (or sisterhood) of interspecies insanity is an intriguing one. The thought that we are all living lies underneath the polite exterior of civilized society, and that the horror film can somehow tap into those strange impulses, isn’t such a farfetched idea. King writes, “It may be that horror movies provide psychic relief on this level because this invitation to lapse into simplicity, irrationality and even outright madness is extended so rarely”. Is it any coincidence, then, that another one of those “rare” times when we are invited to lapse into irrationality or madness is when we are in love? Or lust? Gina’s accusations continued. “Scary movies are sexist, the monsters are sexist, and the people who came up with them are sexist.” Broad sweeping generalizations aside, when I really started to think about some of these ghouls I couldn’t help but feel there was a budding pattern. The vampire, wideeyed and sleek, would plunge his teeth voraciously into a pale neck. The woman onscreen would arch her back, her eyes would close slightly in ecstasy, and all the while she is being drained of life she is reeling in the throes of death orgasms. It never seemed, to me, that Dracula liked biting men all that much, and if he ever did it was quick and often as a means of defense than any real pleasure. The woman was also always a buxom young girl. The scene is always the same, the woman lies sleeping in her bed, wearing a tightfitting nightgown, and the only silhouette of moonlight that creeps into the room falls squarely on her swelling chest. At that point, the vampire would step out from the shadows and would slink slowly over to the sleeping woman, his eyes taking her in hungrily, in an expression of anticipated desire any man could easily identify with. The sleeping woman often woke, sees the lust in the vampire’s eyes, and doesn’t run away. She breathes in sharply, but then just stares at him, hypnotized it seems, and gives herself up to his deathly embrace. In a word: submission. It’s as if there is something about the vampire itself that we, as primitive carnal cavemen, find appealing when they turn the good girl bad. In the scholarly article “A Vampire in the Mirror: The Sexuality of Dracula”, author John Allen Stevenson writes, “Here, then, is the real horror of Dracula, for he is the ultimate social adulterer, whose purpose is nothing if it is not to turn good Englishwomen…away from their own kind and custom”. I’d be loathe to admit that when see a vampire take a woman onscreen that I cross and re-cross my legs as much as my date would. I would be even more loathe to admit why. And more strange patterns arise. Frankenstein’s monster, in the first movie, terrorized and killed and maimed dozens of people in his rage over his creation and apparent lack of purpose. The townspeople chased the monster with torches and pitchforks and demanded its head for the damage it had done. And yet, in the second movie, Bride of Frankenstein, the monster and his master work out a deal. If Frankenstein would make the monster a woman, a wife, then he would go on his merry

way and never bother them again. The theme seems to stem from biblical allegory, the thought of a woman created from man, with the singular purpose of keeping man company. The Bride seems nothing more than a tool, a foil for the monster’s violent tendencies. Even human monsters, like the masked chainsaw archetypes in Jason and Texas Chainsaw Massacre, as well as twisted psychopaths like Mike Myers from the Halloween series, seem to take particular offense towards women. In the first Jason movie, Jason watches a young couple go skinny dipping in a lake and then commence love-making out on the water. Jason slips into the water and murders the young girl violently and with considerable vehemence. The young boy escaped cleanly. If indeed we attend these scary movies for fun, for the sheer terror of it, for the physical reactions it has on ourselves and our partners, why on earth is it these images that do this sort of thing? These characters and themes seem to be a bevy of Freudian theories all wrapped up in repressed desires and primitive urges. Throughout the argument with Gina, as she got madder and madder at me, I couldn’t help but wonder if she was right. Perhaps I did unconsciously force her into watching these movies because I find them sexually stimulating. Perhaps there is something perversely satisfying in watching these symbols of hidden desires carry out acts I would never admit I envied. Perhaps these monsters are inherently sexist after all. If I was still in the argument, however, I would definitely bring up zombies. For everyone knows there isn’t a single thing on this planet less sexual than an undead brain-eating zombie. Those guys are just gross.