'Do You Want to Tell me Something?': Vomiting Women in Horror
Illustrated by Julia Sayapina
When thinking of vomiting scenes in horror cinema, it’s a decidedly (though not exclusively) female trope; from the infamous pea soup of The Exorcist (1973), through to the almost unwatchable (and multiple) oral discharges of Drag Me to Hell (2009), and more recently the bug-filled vomit of Netflix’s The Perfection (2018), a scene which carries the added distinction of reportedly making viewers sick, with individuals on Twitter claiming nausea and even migraines. In recent years, the trope has spewed beyond the abject enclosure of horror and out into the mainstream, indicating quite an appetite for onscreen emesis of the female variety. Fictional housewives Betty Draper of Mad Men (January Jones) and Madeline Mackenzie of Big Little Lies (Reese Witherspoon) have both ruined a beautiful outfit and, in Betty’s case, the interior of a shiny new car. Last year Anne Cohen asked in Refinery 29 ‘Why Are So Many Women Puking In Movies This Year?’, citing Hustlers (2019), Knives Out (2019) and the Charlie’s Angels reboot (2019).
These scenes are diverse, and sometimes what comes up isn’t even vomit, but instead, some hellish substance (Jennifer’s Body, 2009); hair and medical equipment (The Ring, 2002); insects (The Perfection, Drag Me to Hell, Starry Eyes, 2014); even an undigested eyeball (The Neon Demon, 2016). In only one of these examples, The Perfection, is the sickness caused by something that’s been ingested, but in that case the horror element (the bugs) is imagined. There’s clearly something more going on than unimaginative screenwriters in search of a physical signifier for anxiety. What are all these vomiting women trying to tell us?
In The Monstrous Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis, Barbara Creed identifies abjection, as defined by Kristeva as “the place where meaning collapses”. Vomit is one of the “images of abjection” that pervade horror films. Creed also points out the ambiguous nature of abject acts on screen; “Abjection ‘fascinates desire’ but must in the interests of self preservation be repelled,” she writes, paraphrasing Kristeva. Perhaps our desire for vomit scenes in horror and elsewhere mirrors the unarticulated desires and truths of the female characters, which spew forth in the form of vomit, separate from the structure of language, but no less meaningful. Or, to put it in Kristeva’s terms: no longer symbolic (patriarchal) but definitely semiotic (matriarchal).
In an article for Arty zine, Alice Pember deconstructed that infamous Big Little Lies scene, focusing on actress Reese Witherspoon’s star persona, “A post-feminist ideal of perfectly coiffed female empowerment,” interpreting vomiting as a reaction against pretense or ‘artifice’. Pember is referring to the visual artifice of appearing polished and civilised while life spins out of control below the surface. However, Creed also notes in her discussion of abjection that it “occurs where the individual is a hypocrite, a liar.” Right there in the title, and present in the whole series, lies, or at least suppressed truths, proliferate this episode. I counted eight secrets, not including the ones we don’t find out until the second season. The show is notable for its non-verbal communication between female characters, such as looks, gestures, and mouthed words. However, Witherspoon’s character Madeline, the first of the central characters introduced, is immediately established as outspoken, exiting her car to chastise a teenager who is texting while driving. “My mom’s an active talker,” her daughter Chloe tells a new friend. Madeline’s habit of saying things is dreaded by those who aren’t her closest friends, and characters such as her ex-husband Nathan and his new wife Bonnie anticipate and circumvent her terrifying eruptions only to be faced with a more extreme one. While not a work of horror, the introducing of the abject vision of a woman hurling into a mainstream TV show functions in a similar way to its use in horror films; a woman’s speech causes a problem and must be suppressed: the woman vomits everywhere. As if reacting to their attempts to silence her, she swaps her words for a more visceral signifier.
In the vomiting horror films I watched researching this article, I noticed a recurring preoccupation with speech; in particular, speech that is carefully prepared, regulated, or suppressed. Some even feature a speech exercise, often right at the beginning of the film. Under the Skin (2013) opens with the audio of actress Scarlett Johansson practicing the English accent of her character, who later in the film regurgitates a piece of cake trying to pass as human. The Perfection's Charlotte (Allison Williams) practices leaving a voicemail message again and again, and later forces another character, Lizzie (Logan Browning), to vomit as part of a process of making her accept a repressed truth. Drag Me to Hell (2009), one of this century’s most abject films in terms of gross bodily excretions, opens with Christine (Alison Lohman) performing vocal exercises in an attempt to hide her southern accent, an authentic trait she feels is holding her back. When facing up to the terrifying spectre of a vomiting girl in The Sixth Sense (1999), little Danny (Hayley Joel Osment) screws his courage to the sticking place to ask her, “Do you want to tell me something?” It turns out she does. The ghost girl, Kyra Collins (an early role for Mischa Barton), has been poisoned to death by her own mother. Though her repeated vomiting is the literal manifestation of the crime, it is only through her story, and Danny’s willingness to listen to it that she’s able to relay what happened, leading Danny to save her younger sister from the same fate.
Creed spends time examining speech in The Monstrous Feminine, especially when it comes to The Exorcist (1973), a film that contains the mother of all female vomit scenes. She notes that impossible acts often follow a “verbal violation”, such as Regan’s (Linda Blair) incestuous “Lick me,” which occurs just before her head turns all the way around – another pairing of the symbolic with the semiotic. Creed also explores the demonic voice that emanates from Regan, addressing many critics' assumption that the voice is coded as male, when in fact it was voiced by a female actor and revealed in the film to be Regan’s voice played backwards.
Although she reads Regan’s abject words and act as her own, not those of a demon, Creed seems to attribute much of Regan’s transformation to an over-identification with her mother, Chris (Ellen Burstyn), noting that Regan’s bad language and rage mirror hers, “Whatever tension exists in the family clearly emanates from the figure of the mother... Mother’s swearing becomes Regan’s obscenities; Mother’s sexual frustrations become Regan’s lewd suggestions; Mother’s anger becomes Regan’s power.” However, it’s possible to ascribe more agency to Regan and her outbursts. Even before the ‘possession’, Regan has encountered her own unsuccessful attempts at communication. After meeting the possessed Regan for the first time, Father Karras (Jason Miller) listens to an audio recording of Regan and her mother made for her absent father – the one who never speaks to her, even on her birthday. Regan’s unsure of what to say to a man who isn’t listening. “What do I say? I don’t know,” she beseeches, self-conscious. “I mean, I hope you can hear me. Can you hear me ok?” she asks. “He’s not gonna answer you,” Chris interjects.
Just before Regan vomits for the first time, she says to Father Karras, “Your mother is in here with us, would you like to leave a message? I’ll see that she gets it.” As he leans over her the famous green pea soup hits him full in the face, a mockery of Regan’s own unheard messages.
Like Regan, many vomiting characters commit ‘verbal violations’, but are despised or suppressed in pursuit of self-expression. In Jennifer’s Body, the titular Jennifer (Megan Fox) is openly crude, much to the disgust of her best friend Needy’s boyfriend, Chip (Amanda Seyfried and Jonny Simmons, respectively). “It smells like Thai food in here. Have you guys been fucking?” Jennifer asks as she enters Needy’s house for a night out Chip isn’t invited to. When the members of an indie band from the city interpret Jennifer’s forwardness as a virgin’s bravado, they sacrifice her in a satanic bid for commercial success, unwittingly creating a man-eating succubus who says even worse things with more confidence. Jennifer expels this injustice by puking a hellish substance onto Needy’s kitchen floor and goes on to murder the boys of their high school. The Babadook’s (2014) Amelia (Essie Davis) has her speech constantly policed, both by others and herself. Having lost her husband in a car accident the day she went into labour with their child, Amelia exists in a suspended state of exhaustion, still heavy with grief and unable to fully connect with her now six-year-old son, Samuel (Noah Wiseman). Proving that the patriarchal silencing influence of these films isn’t always male, one of the villains of The Babadook, besides Amelia’s prolonged, unprocessed grief, is her smug, yummy mummy sister Claire (Hayley McElhinney), who routinely silences Amelia, all the while telling her, “I just want you to be happy.”
“Don't tell Aunty Claire about what happened,” she tells Samuel, when he gets excluded from school. But Amelia also puts her own limits on what can be said, punishing anyone (Samuel included) who brings up her late husband. At Claire’s daughter’s birthday party, Amelia insults one of Claire’s friends, another yummy mummy who, as she tells Amelia, works with ‘disadvantaged women’, some of whom have also lost their husbands. In retaliation, Amelia mocks her self-proclaimed busy schedule, “That's a real tragedy. Not having time to go to the gym? How do you cope?” The outburst earns her a death stare from Claire and renders her almost alone for the remainder of her ordeal, which includes a vomiting scene. Amelia’s vomit is black, the colour of the Babadook, which temporarily possesses her, but also the colour of the grief that she has left unexpressed for six years.
One vomiting character who doesn’t appear to be holding back verbally at all is The Ring's Rachel (Naomi Watts). Although she is an investigative journalist, Rachel is a typical detective character: clever, resourceful, and obsessively good at her job, to the point of allowing her personal life, even motherhood, to take a back seat – she is a single mother to a precociously independent son, Aiden (David Dorfman). The skill of writing gives her a mastery over language, and this is the primary signifier she uses to express herself, frankly and honestly. Her voice is introduced before her body.We hear her striding up the corridor of a primary school, speaking to her editor on the phone, “Listen Harvey, you punctilious prick, you touch my column and I'm coming down there and poking your eye out with that little red pen you like so much.” She thinks nothing of curses and threats in the service of her words, which she will allow no-one to edit, even her professional superior. When her editor tells her she's fired, she simply disagrees, adding that she's on the trail of a story too valuable to risk losing. Later, at her niece's funeral, Rachel's sister Ruth begs her to investigate the teenage girl's mysterious death, also citing her verbal abilities. “It's what you do,” says Ruth (Lindsay Frost), “ask questions.”
However, there's one person to whom Rachel can't be frank, or ask questions. Noah (Martin Henderson) is introduced about thirty minutes into the film as a professional acquaintance of Rachel’s, who she enlists to share her suspicions about the involvement of a mysterious videotape in the deaths of her niece and three other teenagers. Although he agrees to look into the technological origin of the tape, Rachel can’t convince him to believe in its occult power. In their next scene together they have an argument, seemingly provoked, in part, by Rachel’s romantic jealousy of Noah’s new girlfriend, and partly due to her frustration at not being believed. She goes on to investigate alone.
At home after a long day of following up clues, Rachel begins to cough and gag, eventually vomiting a long strand of twisted hair with an EEG sensor attached to the end (more clues) in a sequence that is revealed to be a nightmare. At the climax of this scene, Rachel discovers, with horror, Aiden watching the video. At this moment, Noah calls on the phone to tell her he believes her theory. “He watched the tape,” she tells him. “Who watched the tape?” asks Noah. Blockage cleared, signifier switched and midway through the film already, Rachel finally speaks the unspoken: “Our son.” The expelling of the hair marks two communicative breakthroughs for Rachel. First, she is finally believed, and second, she permits herself to remind Noah (and inform the audience for the first time) of his role as a father. For Rachel, voicing the truth before this point would have been her ‘verbal violation’, a violation of their unspoken contract not to mention it, referred to in a veiled way in their earlier argument.
In horror, this theme of women’s thwarted discourse is its own trope. ‘Cassandra syndrome’–people not being believed or listened to when they are in possession of the truth – is a classically female archetype, although it has been embodied by men as well (see the character of Alex Browning in Final Destination, 2000). The trope is thought of as feminine due to its association with sexual violence and male revenge. A mythological Greek priestess, Cassandra was given the gift of prophecy by Apollo. When she refused his romantic advances, the god cursed her to never be believed. If the Cassandra myth ever gets a Hollywood remake, she might try puking all over the dinner table to get her message through.
Taschen’s The Book of Symbols describes vomit as connected to ‘the passions’, “Body and psyche convey meaning through nature’s dire expulsions; vomiting is a kind of gut wrenching “knowing” at the core.” When I’m anxious, hurt, or humiliated I sometimes imagine vomiting supernaturally. Rivers of black slime or pink corn syrup are expelled from my mouth, and the unbearable, inexpressible feelings are on the outside, separate from me, “I’m feeling much better now.” I suppose this is related to my approach to horror and abjection in general. Lovers of horror films like myself sometimes report seeing them as comfort viewing, with relatable experiences and emotions handled in a safe, separate space away from ourselves. Things that we’d rather not articulate are better off handled a short distance away.
Watching women vomit in these horror films is like watching someone confess a secret, while the act may be unattractive and come with uncontrollable ramifications, psychic tension is released. Allowing someone previously unheard to speak can feel inconvenient and disruptive for those in power, broadening and complicating the status quo with diverse experiences of the world. But it’s the only way for catharsis to occur, and for the narrative to move forward. If you don’t like what we’ve got to say, you certainly won’t like what we’ve had to eat. Better listen to us the first time.
Sarah Kathryn Cleaver is a London-based researcher and writer. She co-runs Zodiac Film Club, independently programming good-looking, rarely screened films featuring complex female characters; co-hosts the Projections Podcast, a dialogue on film and psychoanalysis with Mary Wild; and curates @_spiltmilk_, an archive of female tears. @sarahkcleaver on both Twitter and Instagram
Julia Sayapina is an llustrator and artist based in Moscow. She works worldwide on self-publishing art projects, illustrations, collaborations with other artists and teaches contemporary art. Julia is most inspired by cinema, music and literature and how they can interact with the visual arts. Her main interest is horror and its intersection with queer and feminist topics.
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.