ABSTRACT
This chapter argues for the importance of a female coming-of-age film for the new millennium. These films are at times hilarious, producing a very different face of the monstrous-feminine. In key texts, she deliberately undermines borders as she flaunts her abject body and bad behaviour, which female horror fans find so exhilarating. She is not a passive figure to whom monstrous things happen but an active terrifying rebel who draws on her nonhumanness to assist her in her revenge against a misogynistic and violent patriarchal order. Films such as Ginger Snaps (2000), Teeth (2007), and Jennifer’s Body (2009) are remarkable for the way in which each embraces abjection through the power of the nonhuman, in an act of radical abjection, expressed through the protagonist’s uncanny human–animal body. The female protagonists of these films draw on metamorphosis and alterations to their bodies to challenge – even parody – the patriarchal symbolic order. The virginal heroine of Teeth, for instance, only slowly discovers she possesses a fabled vagina dentata when men try to force themselves on her sexually. She then proceeds to weaponize her secret by using it on rapists and sexual predators such as her gynaecologist. Kristeva argues, ‘In abjection, revolt is completely within being’ and ‘is eminently productive of culture’. In these films it is the nonhuman who is in revolt. The recent ‘turn to nonhuman theory’ offers an important way of understanding the significance of these developments in feminist horror.
