A fang sunk into the hardened bone of the male gaze: this is what monstrous femininity means in cinema. A wild, bloody rebellion, bordering on nausea, a raw and brutal emancipation, a fingernail in the greedy male eye that expects absolute perfection from the female body.
This representation of girlhood is a drastic departure from the often seductive role in which female antagonists are confined. Evil, yes, but with style and elegance! Even in malice, one must be pleasing; even in cruelty, one must be attractive. Female villains in movies too often have to be “femme fatales,” sirens luring heroes into their traps, relying on sexual allure, mystery, and moral corruption as spectacle; devilish but desirable. Whether protagonists, antagonists, or secondary characters, women in cinema remain above all women —and thus fall under the same standards of beauty and expectations.
In this respect, Jennifer’s Body, Carrie, and the more recent TV series Yellowjackets are like breaths of fresh air in the stifling movie theatre and the claustrophobic little TV box. These works reject the glamorisation of femininity and embrace ugliness, gore, and monstrosity as expressions of female rage, trauma, and hunger —hunger for justice, equality, and repressed desires. Exploring the inner world and collective experience of female childhood, they speak more to female audiences by depicting jealousy, grief, solidarity, and the explosion of pent-up violence on screen.
The use of body horror —a subgenre of horror that explores the possibility of transformation, mutation, or degeneration of the human body in a highly graphic and grotesque manner, to create a sense of fear and anxiety— is common as a metaphor for female adolescence; the process is used to imply periods, puberty, or sexual awakening. The menstruation scene in Carrie is thus the appearance of a supernatural power linked to shame and rage. Just as in Alien and Ridley Scott’s brilliant forced insemination of male bodies to make his masculine audience cringe, Jennifer’s literal consumption of men flips the dynamic of predation; horror emerges from female appetite. Finally, Yellowjackets’ cannibalism and survivalism build the grotesque as a mode of empowerment and honesty about female violence. These works embrace the horror as an authentic representation of female childhood: messy, bodily, and terrifying. It is a reminder to the audience that little girls wake up with bloodstained sheets, that they are taught to fear the forest and the Big Bad Wolf, and that they are forced to internalise their anger and sense of injustice.
But digging a little deeper, these kinds of works challenge much more than the male gaze. They can also be seen as the female counterparts of what series like Hannibal represent for the queer community, particularly for gay men. Through this prism of reflection and artistic expression, violence, horror, and gore are used as symbolic representations of repressed, unacknowledged desires that are perceived by society as ‘unacceptable’ or even ‘dirty’ and ‘degenerate.’ The ‘monsters’ emerging from the depths of the characters are the result of this jumbled mass of temptations, of insatiable hunger that has been contained for too long, both for a carnal and emotional connection; Mister Hyde of their Doctor Jekyll, they finally express the entirety of their being in full light, even if it means being perceived as sick, horrifying, and debauched.
As a result, series such as I Am Not Okay With This and First Kill have been cut short, without offering their audiences —which are not large enough to justify renewal— a proper ending. Nevertheless, the ‘vile girl’ becomes a queer icon, rejecting normative femininity and embracing her monstrous body and the desires that come with it.
To come full circle, let’s take one last look at the female collectives trope—cheerleaders, high school friends, sports teams— as hotbeds of devotion and brutality. Girlhood friendships are portrayed both as places of horror and intimacy, often indistinguishable from love or hunger. In Yellowjackets, the group’s descent into savagery illustrates how female adolescence itself can function as a cult, structured by obsession, loyalty, and shared trauma. The heterosexual male audience finds violent and bloody lesbian representations neither glamorous nor sexy. They cannot fantasize about the tension between female characters, nor about the sexual subtext depicted through scenes of violence —not to mention cannibalism. This demonstrates why we talk more about girlhood than boyhood, because women as a gender often find themselves exposed to the same obstacles, go through the same traumas —minor or major— as well as the same ordinary misogyny, and therefore share an extremely specific common experience related to violence, bonding around it.
In the end, the figure of the ‘monstrous girl’ embodies a radical empowerment: she is not consumed, rather, she consumes. She refuses to smooth over femininity and offers a raw truth about the mixture of desire, pain, and violence. By celebrating gore and the grotesque, these stories allow young women to exist as wild, hungry, and monstrous —monstrously free.
Photo by Marvelous Raphael on Unsplash
