High Fashion Horror: The Evil Stylings of Carrie and The Brood
Female horror villains so often exist at an intersection between repugnant and relatable, sinister and sympathetic, frightening and fabulous. Their otherness is a source of terror, yet can also become a cause for empathy, especially for viewers familiar with a lived experience of otherness. As a feminist horror fan, I feel this ambivalence acutely. I repeatedly become infatuated by female horror villains — to the point that I worry about unjustly exonerating a genre that continues to churn out so many negative images of women (whether I find power and pleasure in them or not). It can be difficult to reconcile your identification with the monster with the fact that she is constructed to provoke nightmares. I’m always looking for ways to acknowledge and accept this ambivalence.
This dilemma isn’t new; there are decades of scholarship attempting to account for the female horror villain. In the 1980s, Barbara Creed persuasively detailed the concept of the Monstrous-Feminine, borrowing psychoanalytical concepts derived from Julia Kristeva’s notion of the abject. The abject is an entity beyond meaning, beyond our understanding of the human. The abject doesn’t respect borders or rules. It threatens and disturbs our sense of order, and our sense of self. Creed asserted that horror films bring about a confrontation with the abject, and, more specifically, the female body within these films can act as a site of abjection. This lends the female horror villain her monstrousness. She provokes both fascination and fear; she is a destabilising force, an aberration. She is the Monstrous-Feminine. But if she exists to inspire repulsion, then why do I still feel irresistibly drawn to her? Well, a lot of it has to do with what she’s wearing.
Fashion and horror have had a symbiotic relationship for some time now. The horror genre has directly influenced the runway in recent years: Boris Karloff’s Frankenstein’s creature was turned into a print by Christopher Kane in his Spring/Summer 2013 range; Rosemary’s Baby (1968) and Hitchcock heroines inspired Calvin Klein’s Spring/Summer 2018 collection; and even the ghost twins from The Shining (1980) appeared in haute couture form during Undercover’s Spring/Summer 2018 show. Designers and horror filmmakers often draw upon a shared well of inspiration, the most striking example being the work of Alexander McQueen, whose designs regularly flirted with the sinister, the macabre, and the suspenseful. The fashion industry, in turn, has been a furtive site for filmmakers to explore in the horror mode - think of the murderous models of The Neon Demon (2016) (and the similar but lesser-seen Helter Skelter (2012)), or the dark secrets lurking within the fashion house of Mario Bava’s Blood and Black Lace (1964).
But how do clothes actually function on screen? Beyond just aesthetic potential, what meanings may they have folded within? The theorist Stella Bruzzi has reckoned with these questions. When considering the history of fashion in cinema, Bruzzi distinguishes between costume and couture: costume seeks to complement character and narrative, whilst couture prioritises the visual element of the clothes themselves. By making this distinction, Bruzzi demonstrates that cinematic clothes contain multitudes. If clothes on film can serve character aims or function independently as spectacle, I propose that, in horror, where iconography and visuality is so crucial, clothes can do both things simultaneously. Clothes worn by the Monstrous-Feminine villain can turn her into a disruptive abject spectacle and open up pathways for identification with her. Both meanings can be pleated together and sewn into the fabric as one.
Nola’s White Cloak
When I consider the Monstrous-Feminine, I favour one character: Nola (Samantha Eggar), the angry therapy patient at the centre of David Cronenberg’s The Brood (1979). Nola’s body is producing “psychoplasmic” offspring: mutant children who are murdering the objects of her rage. Much of Creed’s writing on the Monstrous-Feminine focused on the ways in which horror films constructed the maternal as abject. So, unsurprisingly, Creed cites Nola. Creed describes Nola as “another one of Cronenberg’s monstrous female freaks.” By Creed’s rationale, this rings true: in a climactic scene, Nola’s husband Frank bears witness to her as she births her offspring from an external womb protruding from her body. She tears the skin of the birth sac and licks her newborn clean. It is a scene of abjection: Nola’s body upsets biological rules, her internal organs made external, and her behaviour transgressing lines between species. She is human but not-human, female but not in a way we know, or accept.
On Creed’s psychoanalytic terms, Nola is an atrocity that we should fear. Her presence in a horror film is an expression of the dominant culture’s anxiety, directly related to its subordination of women. However, I’ve always felt that horror’s specific method of discourse undermines psychoanalysis altogether. The horror film is about heightening and manipulation, it plays on emotions and reactions experienced infrequently in the real world. This mode is well-suited for taking societal issues and holding them under a magnifying glass. Perhaps then, horror is doing something other than just externalising structures of patriarchy, perhaps it is scrutinising them. The very representation of alternative modes of being is disruptive, raising questions about the perceived “natural-ness” of our natural order.
To return to Nola, Cronenberg’s recasting of her body is one that defies normativity. Nola is a deconstructive challenge to essentialism, her body ill-fitting within strict dichotomies or binaries. The sheer power and deviancy of her body transgresses biological boundaries in a way that reveals these boundaries to be unstable. Suddenly the oppressive rules we all live under don’t seem so set in stone. Horror films can so effectively speculate on alternative potentialities, or imagine routes out. If the notion of the abject does indeed threaten order, perhaps horror films can also illustrate the appeal of this threat.
Before I apply feminist-icon status to Nola and start considering the Monstrous-Feminine a win for the revolution, I remind myself that (due primarily to the extreme inequality of the industry), it’s almost always men crafting these images of female villainy, no matter their disruptive potential. I ask myself: does my exalting of these women come at the cost of overlooking the repercussions of depicting the feminine as horrific? Does my decision to determine and fixate upon any subversive power that these women may have put me in a position of constant reclamation? Because if so, this just isn’t sustainable.
But there is something in the image of Nola birthing manifested rage from her anomalous body where all of my conflicting feels are made material. As Nola kneels before her husband, she appears to be wearing a somewhat dowdy nightgown. It’s a gown of virginal white, untainted by the gore it conceals beneath. As Nola lifts her arms to expose her exo-womb, she transforms, her gown revealing itself to be a cape. Her silhouette suddenly becomes bat-like, white wings that are both inviting and cavernous. The cape offers an uncanny sense of shelter, a maternal protection with a perverse streak. Here, all the contradictions of the Monstrous-Feminine are expressed sartorially: within one garment resides a perfectly articulated ambivalence between empathy and atrocity. Nola’s cape gives me a novel insight into my response to her character. By just looking at her clothes, I take a step towards resolving all the conflicting meanings presented to me by her villainous status. For reckoning with Monstrous-Feminine villains, I want to attest to the benefits of looking with a sartorial lens.
Carrie’s Bloody Dress
Carrie White’s (Sissy Spacek) prom dress is a rightful blueprint of Bruzzi’s pattern. In her original incarnation in Brian De Palma’s Carrie (1976), the titular character wears a light-pink satin gown to attend her high school prom, an event where she becomes the object of a cruel prank that involves the dumping of pig’s blood all over her and her dress. The prom dress was featured in most of the film’s marketing — the original poster was made up of two images: Carrie smiling in her unsullied dress, and then seething in the blood-soaked version. The public imagination around the film is dominated by the gown — Carrie’s prom dress’ bloody transformation became iconic.
The prom dress is already a charged object, loaded with the meanings thrust upon it by society. The mainstream (that is, the Western cis-hetero-patriarchal) idea of prom is as a transitional event from puberty to adulthood. It is a ritual where one observes the rules of the society that one is expected to conform to, including a very particular performance of gender. The prom dress is a crucial way for girls to perform an expected version of femininity designed to attract men, just as the dress is designed to look aesthetically coherent to its tuxedo counterpart. In the film, Carrie is established as out-of-step with the society around her by her everyday clothes: ill-fitting and childlike compared to her peers’, which are all cut to a more modern style. It is significant, then, that Carrie makes her prom dress herself. Her designing and construction of the dress indicates her willingness to enter into “acceptable” society. She literally crafts this fantasy herself.
The dress Carrie makes is form-fitting, but floor length to offset any possibility it be too revealing. It is made from silk of the lightest shade of pink, echoing a blush of her white skin. The fabric is sensory, its touch is luxurious and the colour reminiscent of blossom. The cut is simple, lacking any frills or decoration so as to avoid the demanding of any undue attention. The dress hints at all the markers of early womanhood in a way that is classical, deferential, and purposefully unassuming. In the eyes of the society it was made for, it is the perfect prom dress.
That is, until it is drenched in blood. So, what does it mean to spoil this object? Blood, perhaps being the horror genre’s most favoured bodily fluid, is significant to the concept of the abject. Blood confronts us with our condition of living, exteriorising what we are meant to keep inside our bodies to keep us alive. The specific way that Carrie’s dress is stained is even more confronting: she becomes clothed in blood. The barrier of her skin no longer protects the interior of her body from the exterior that we can see, and she is enveloped by this transgression. Carrie moves through the frame accordingly, her slow movement almost otherworldly against the burning backdrop of the school she has set ablaze. Carrie becomes one with the dress in its gory transformation. She is no longer a girl wearing a dress tailored to fit within society, but a crimson monster hell-bent on terrorising it.
And yet. Carrie’s blood-soaked dress also acts as a point of entry into her subjectivity. When Carrie’s perfect prom dress is ruined, the oppressive rules and expectations imbued within it are threatened. In fact, spoiling the dress actually surfaces these meanings, holding them up to light for easier scrutiny. The blood stains only concede to the much uglier stain of the confines of heterosexist patriarchy. The bloody dress no longer resembles the conformist costume it was crafted to be, and, as such, Carrie no longer has to perform what the dress demanded. Hence the transformation is less from girl-innocent to girl-monster, and more from girl-captive to girl-liberated. In this light, the Monstrous-Feminine figure of Carrie isn’t abject, for she is not beyond the human, nor beyond understanding. Rather, Carrie in her spoiled dress is a completely knowable presence. Carrie is understandable in the same way we recognise and understand the society around her. It’s easy then, for the female spectator to identify, for we are painfully acquainted with the oppressive demands of the pink silk prom dress, and, as such, can recognise, and even covet, the avenging power of its blood-soaked counterpart.
Looking at the Monstrous-Feminine figure through a sartorial lens reconciles my major dilemma about her. Her clothes allow me to recognise the multitudes of meaning she evokes, even when these meanings are contradictory. Of course, it’s this contradiction that keeps us as female viewers so fascinated with horror. We are constantly feared and yet we know fear intimately; we are always living these ambivalences. I feel them when I dress myself — clothes allow me to expose my body or make it invisible; I can fashion myself into a spectacle or disappear into conformity. Clothes lend me an awareness of the extent to which I can control my appearance and how I will be viewed, and of the meaning I can construct, and the meaning already assigned to me. On-screen, clothes are saturated with these same conflicts, allowing the female horror villain to quite literally wear her nuances.
Can the likes of Nola and Carrie be both liberating disturbers of oppressive norms and totems to inspire complete fear? Their clothes confirm this possibility and, given the female experience of constantly living on the precipice of being cast as either (or both), it’s no wonder that we’re drawn to that. Clothes carry meaning within them and give meaning to those who wear them — as feminist horror fans, we’re always engaged in a process of trying all of these meanings on, to see what fits.
Jessica McGoff is a critical writer and video essayist. She has been published in the likes of MUBI Notebook, CinemaScope and Another Gaze. Her video work has been commissioned and shown by Sight & Sound, the International Film Festival Rotterdam and as part of academic curricula.
We've been going independently for years now, and so far have self-financed every single project. In order to do more work, and continue supporting amazing filmmakers in the genre space, we've launched a Patreon.
If you are able to support us and the work we do on Patreon, we'd truly and deeply appreciate it.