Baby Bitches From Hell: Monstrous-Little Women in Film


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Section 2

Background

Films about children invariably tell us more about the adult world, in which the films were conceived, than about the children themselves. In particular, such films explore adult dreams, desires and fears projected onto children who become the bearers of adult values and attitudes. When such values are corrupted in terms of gender socialisation, the female child figures prominently. Images of children created in the cinema particularly during the first half-century of its existence--focused generally on the theme of childhood as a state of lost innocence. Given that the child, by its very nature, projects vulnerability it provides a powerful symbol for adult creative practices. Early horror films such as Frankenstein emphasise the fragility of unprotected innocence by having the creature inadvertently murder a young girl.

In Children in the Movies, Neil Sinyard, argues that horror films of the 70s and 80s have "in their attitudes to children" oscillated between "twin extremes of protectiveness and paedophobia." Some horror films:

could be interpreted as projecting an adult fear or even hatred of children as the destroyers of bourgeois marriage, as in The Omen (1976), or as perennial reminders of adult guilt, corruption and insufficiency, as in A Nightmare on Elm Street (1985, 58).

Nightmare on Elm Street embodies both attitudes. Children are tortured, tormented and killed--in bizarre and bloody ways--by the "ghost" of Freddy Kruger, the child-molesting monster, who was burnt to death by an angry mob of parents. (In a later episode we discover that Freddy himself was a victim of parental sexual abuse). Although the.Elm Street (Kennedy was assassinated on one of America's ubiquitous Elm Streets)
films contain marked evidence of a sadistic attitude to children, they are wildly popular with teenagers who seem to identify with Freddy and delight in his attacks on the children of Elm Street. Freddy draws them into his surreal nightmare world where they--like figures in a video game--are forced to pit their wits against the monster. In all but one of the eight episodes, Freddy is outwitted by a teenage girl. Because of their extraordinary ability to enter and manipulate the nightmare world, she is able to meet Freddy as an equal. In one sense, Freddy is her doppelganger, or dark self. This is not suprising for--as I will discuss later--girls are more often represented as possessing supernatural powers, and linked to the pre-symbolic world of the maternal imaginary where she rules over the non-rational powers of the imagination.

On a different note, the 30s cult of the child-star epitomised in the figure of Shirley Temple, enabled the culture to project onto the child its dream of recapturing its own lost innocence. The Temple films (and recent films like Curly Top, The Assassin, Three Men and A Little Lady, Firestarter) also provided a context in which the child is seen as both an object of adult sexual desire and as an agent of its own desire. The issue of child eroticism in the visual arts has only recently been opened up for critical discussion. (Modleski, Stoney, Wood).

By the 70s, however, with the appearance of many films which portrayed the child as a monster, the agenda changed dramatically. Robin Wood dates the popularisation of the child as monster from Rosemary's Baby (1968) He sees the child as function as a repressed "other", a symbol of all that adult world represses in itself from one generation to the next. Metaphoric use of the figure of the evil child - whether mystical, monstrous or malevolent - also plays or adult fears about the propensity of human nature for evil. William Golding explored this theme in his book, Lord of The Flies in which a group of British schoolboys, from the best public schools, are stranded on a desert island where they gradually abandon all forms of civilised behaviour, engaging in acts of violence and murder. This change, however, did not occur without precedent; it origins reach back into the 50s and early 60s when children first began to appear in horror films as monsters. The image of the child in films like The Bad Seed (1956) and The Innocents (1961) took on new meanings which suggested that the adult world no longer dreamt of a return to Paradise and lost Victorian innocence, but instead sought to understand its own dark impulses, via the potent image of the child.

Monstrous-Little Women

Horror films frequently depict the monstrous female child as different from the male. What is specifically horrific about the monstrous little woman is that the potential of her body and mind to be corrupted is seemingly without limits or borders. These situations occur in films about spiritual possession devilish possession and maternal possession. The mad moppet is able to "pass" easily from one state of the spiritual divide to the other. The young girl of Poltergeist is swept into the "other side" via the family television set which sucks her into its uterine whirlpool; in The Brood, blood ties initiate her transformation into a clone of the monstrous maternal figure; and in The Exorcist a distant archaeological discovery of a pagan devil-statue leads to her immediate bodily possession and displays of hysteria. She is still a child, an innocent but because she is female, and not yet fully developed, her evil potential like her potential for innocence--is limitless.

Julia Kristeva's notion of the abject is particularly helpful in analysing the monstrous-little woman. Elsewhere, I have drawn on Kristeva's work to explain the nature of female monstrosity and its relation to the female sexual and reproductive system (Creed, 1983). Insofar as the monstrous little woman represents abjection, she does so in a particularly threatening manner. The abject is that which threatens to cross the boundary which civilisation erects in order to define itself as civilised--the line between human and animal, male and female, living and dead, clean and unclean, natural and supernatural, innocence and evil, adult and child. Because the abject threatens such borders and highlights the fragility of the symbolic order, it is also immensely appealing. It seduces by offering a return to the pre-symbolic, the archaic domain of untrammelled pleasured and uninhibited play.

The monstrous female child is a powerful agent of abjection. More rigidly socialised, than the boy, in terms of external proprieties, and proper "civilised" behaviour, she is also expected to epitomise worldly innocence and sexual purity. When she crosses the boundaries between innocence and corruption, proper and improper behaviours, the ensuing violation seems more profound. Considered less able to protect herself, the girl is more susceptible to corruption. When she falls, the hope of redemption is lost.
And because she is regarded as weaker than the boy, there is a greater expectation that she will fall. This situation, of course, is not a consequence of anything "essential" in the nature of femininity and masculinity. If the monstrous child of horror, tends to be more often female, it is because the culture constructs her image as more susceptible to corruption. Young and innocent she attracts dark forces seeking a host--as in Curse of the Cat People, The Innocents, The Exorcist, Poltergeist. and Dolly Dearest. Witch Story plays on the girl's malleability in its advertising. "One of Satan's most demonic daughters is about to exact her hideous revenge . . . Using the lost soul of an innocent little girl, she has finally found an earthly channel for her hellish powers."

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