So the more I've been thinking about horror movies, the more I feel like I have to examine the misogyny that's rampant in the genre. Now, I was bashed to within an inch of my life in college for being a straight white man, so I am certainly not one of these guys who goes around complaining about misogyny everywhere. (Those guys got a lot of play in college, though--I suppose feigning outrage about the oppression of women was a pretty good scam!)
But, I mean, really. In two weeks I've written about two movies with rape scenes. I've been geeking out on the horror stuff with the Rue Morgue Radio podcast, and they were talking about the release of Dario Argento's "The Stendhal Syndrome" on 2-disc DVD blah blah, and they were like, "Yeah, it's a great movie, but those rape scenes involving his daughter Asia are pretty hard to take." (emphasis mine.) They go on to say that they can't possibly imagine putting their own daughters through the horror of filming something like this. And then they recommend that we go buy this on DVD. WTF?
It seems like sexual violence, or the threat of sexual violence (against women--always against women. We couldn't menace men like that, now could we? I mean, it's in Deliverance, and everybody knows about it, but a woman is raped in like every third horror movie!) is a mainstay of a lot of horror movies. Some, like Humanoids from the Deep and Invasion of the Bee Girls, linger on the rapes in an unseemly way. Some, like Last House on the Left or I Spit On Your Grave, try to have it both ways, by reveling in the rape at the beginning and then making sure the rapists meet a violent end. Hell, even in Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, Leatherface thrusts the saw between our heroine's legs. The Evil Dead features a woman raped by plant life. (This is one reason why I prefer the second one, which is really just a remake of the first one without the rape.) And don't even get me started on Dead Ringers, which should probably be retitled Fear of Vagina.
So what the hell's going on here? Certainly female sexuality is probably second only to death in terms of fearful things many horror movies are dealing with, but why all the rapes? Something like Fright Night, for example, is all about the fear of female sexuality (yeah, buddy, your virginal girlfriend is actually a saucy vampire mistress!), but there's no nasty rape involved.
I mean, I especially enjoy horror movies because they deal with real fears--like death, death, death--by using unreal creatures--like zombies, ghosts, vampires, and Godzilla. It's fun to be scared by stuff that you know can't really happen. Which makes the prevalence of sexual violence especially heinous to me. I mean, I don't have the statistics at hand and don't care to look them up, but I'll venture that a lot more people will be raped than stalked by masked serial killers, chained to radiators with hacksaws next to them, etc. etc. etc. So for all of those people who've lived through it, these movies that are fundamentally escapist aren't escapist at all. They're somebody trivializing and exploiting a very real horror.
I guess the easy answer to why this is so prevalent in horror movies is just that horror movies tend to be made by geeky men who probably didn't get a lot of dates in high school, and all these fictional rapes are their little revenge against the girls who wouldn't date them when they were teenagers. I don't know if that facile explanation holds water or not, but if it does, I have this message for you, O Horror Creators: Get over it! High School is over! There are things way scarier than girls! Girls are actually nice! Enough with the sexual violence already! Bring on the good old regular violence!
