Horror: The Contributions of Personification and Dehumanization

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

Horror movie monsters often have offensive capabilities modeled upon those with which nature has equipped terrestrial animals. Sil, Species's female alien-human hybrid created through a synthesis of alien and human deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), is a case in point. An extended description of her appearance and her abilities shows that, despite her human characteristics, she is, at heart, much more alien than human:

Her human form is, in truth, merely a disguise and her true alien form is an exotic, sensual, alien mockery of the human form. Her form is chitinous and reptilian, somewhat reminiscent of the creatures from the film Alien, but still humanoid in appearance. Her “hair” is a mass of prehensile tentacles which are slicked back behind her head. She possesses two sets of teeth with the internal set being razor sharp. Her breasts, rather than storing fat or mammary glands, instead store long, slimy tentacles which emerge from her “nipples.” She can use her breast-tentacles as weapons but they are also used in her amorous mating ritual (as shown in the second film). Sil has long sharp spines up her back that she can retract and extend at will. These seem to be utilized as a weapon in Species 2 by Eve. Last but not least, Sil's infamous tongue. Her long tongue is tipped with sharp spines and is her primary defense mechanism (or weapon). When threatened, she can simple impale her aggressor with her tongue. This "kiss of death" is shown in each of the franchise's films at least once. Sil’s alien form is also capable of holding its breath underwater for an extended period (“Sil's Appearance”).

A conglomeration of insect, reptile, mollusk, feline or bird, and human, Sil possesses anatomical weapons that resemble those of the shark (her “two sets of teeth”), the octopus (her “prehensile tentacles”), spiny lizards (the sharp spines on her back), and cats or birds (her barbed tongue). In biological terms, she is more than simply a hybrid, or cross-bred organism; she is, in fact, a chimera, “an organism or tissue that contains at least two different sets of DNA.”

The surrealist artist H. R. Giger, who helped to develop the designs for Sil, the original of which, for her tongue, was festooned with shark's teeth, said, “My original idea was for a death kiss in which Sil forces her lethal tongue down her lover's throat, and pulls it out tearing his insides out with it. It was not to smash through the skull as in the final film.” From the beginning, Giger envisioned Sil's tongue as an anatomical weapon: “My original idea was for a death kiss in which Sil forces her lethal tongue down her lover's throat, and pulls it out tearing his insides out with it. It was not to smash through the skull as in the final film, exactly as it was done in Alien and Alien3.”

Giger also designed the spines that project from Sil's back, “hair with flaming tips,” breast tentacles, and “claw[-]like nails.” Oh, yes—she would be fire-resistant as well. Although he wasn't satisfied by the way his designs were incorporated, sometimes in an altered fashion, in the film, without his creative ideas, the movie would have been as original and as, well, surreal.

Before his work on Species, Giger also designed the Alien alien that has come to be known, unofficially, as the xenomorph. The creature's five-stage “life cycle” (Ovomorph, Facehugger, Chestburster, adult, and Queen) is elaborate and reminiscent, to some extent, of that of “wasps of the Chalcidoidea and Ichneumonoidea families, which lay their eggs on live prey that are then consumed by the hatching larvae.”

A mobile ovary with finger-like appendages and a phallic proboscis, the Facehugger attaches itself to its host's face after emerging from an egg laid by the Queen. After incapacitating its host with “a cynose-based paralytic chemical,” the Facehugger uses its proboscis to implant the creature's egg (formed during the first stage of the alien's life cycle) in its victim's chest. It then detaches itself, “crawls away and dies.” (While it's still attached, its “acidic blood prevents” its removal.)

The attachment of the Facehugger to its victim's face and its subsequent death are somewhat reminiscent of the fate of the male anglerfish, except that it attaches itself to the larger female, withering away until it becomes nothing more than a pair of testicles.

This stage of the xenomorph's “life cycle,” some contend, is a parody of the human reproductive process, substituting rape by means of something akin to oral sex for penile-vaginal intercourse performed in a context of mutual love and respect. (Alien is not recommended by feminists.)

The implanted egg is not only parasitic, but also tumorous in its growth, and it's like a virus, commandeering the host's body to use the host's DNA and other “biological material” to develop its own body, which includes assuming some of the host's own “physical traits [e. g., bipedalism] via a process known as the DNA Reflex.” Once the egg develops into a Chestbuster, it bursts through the abdomen of its host and flees, rapidly increasing in size until, within mere hours, it reaches its adult dimensions.

In short, Giger's design for the xenomorph's “life cycle” envisions reproduction as a monstrous process involving sodomy, rape, parasitism, infection, disease, and death. In his view, sex is not lovemaking, but rape combined with sexual perversion, which leads to death as well as birth, and may substitute a male host's abdomen for the uterus: the fetal Chestbuster erupts from the chest; it does not emerge from the womb. Sex, as Giger envisions it, isn't merely messy; it is itself a confusing and contradictory mess devoid of love and respect, involving violence, invasion, parasitism, infection, and disease.

Daniel D. Snyder sees the xenomorph as representing “obvious distortions of the standard human physique.” Although I'm not sure what he has in mind by “the standard human physique,” his observations are, otherwise, intriguing. Giger's alien, Snyder says, “is a filthy, primal parasite whose very survival is contingent on it's [sic] continued rape and exploitation of other species.” As such, Snyder believes the xenomorph reflects the Darwinistic struggle to survive not only by adaptation, but also through the reproduction of the species, or as Snyder himself puts it, “the cold, mechanical struggle to survive.”

He sees in Giger's monstrous vision of sex, an experience that can cause “pain” and death, and a fusion, in the xenomorph's phallic form, or “phallus and . . monster” that suggests “that thing between your legs [if one happens to be male] is also an instrument of evil.” The monstrous creature of Alien is not ourselves, exactly, but “a penis come to life [and] running amok.” As such, it is also somehow “our own weapon [turned] against us” to show “the terror of what we do to each other and the creatures we torture and exploit every day as a matter of simple survival.”

While Snyder may go a bit over the top with his xenomorphy-as-exploiting-human “run amok,” his understanding of the xenomorph's phallicism is certainly on target, as I have likewise suggested, and the creature's complex, perverse “life cycle” obviously does parody, if not critique, sexual reproduction in general.

In such monsters as Sil and the xenomorph, both personification and dehumanization are at work simultaneously, as they often are when non-human organisms or objects are given human characteristics or abilities and human beings are regarded as less than human. A mermaid is a woman—in part—but she is also a fish—in part. That's why the mermaid is extraordinary and, it must be admitted, not only eldritch, but also horrible.

By increasing or decreasing the quality of a person, an animal, or a thing, we alter it. We transform it, so that it is no longer itself. Whether, in doing so, we make it more or less than it as before, we have meddled with its identity and its essential character. We have played God, creating Sil, or the xenomorph, or whatever in our own image and likeness. That which we have changed remains changed, as does it nature, its existence, and, if it is sentient or intelligent, its experience. Where “man-made monsters” are concerned, this is the true and lasting horror, the horror of Pygmalion and Prometheus and Frankenstein: the creator becomes more monstrous than his or her creation.

Like the bat, a pit viper (the bushmaster, copperhead, and rattlesnake, among others) is equipped with a heat-seeking organ located between its eyes. This organ helps the snake to “accurately aim its strike at its warm-blooded prey.” (The bat uses its heat-seeking organ to locate blood.) Not only the chameleon and other lizards, but also plenty of other animals, including insects, fish, birds, and mammals, use various forms of camouflage, as do soldiers, to conceal themselves from predators. Insects have green blood. So does Papau New Guinea's green-blooded skink. But blood doesn't exist only in red and green; some species of octopi have blue blood, and the ocellated icefish has clear blood. Although, as far as I know, no animals have luminescent blood, many of them, including lightning bugs, or fireflies, glowworms, Jellyfish, and anglerfish, to name a few, are bioluminescent.

The alien creature in the Predator movie (1987) senses body heat, can camouflage itself (using a cloaking device, rather than natural means), and has luminescent green blood. Its traits and abilities are extraordinary, but they're not unique. Appearing in, or exhibited by, a biped creature of humanoid shape, these traits and abilities do seem novel, however, making the extraterrestrial marauder seem to be truly out of this world. They make the monster seem more nonhuman, even as its bipedalism, use of tools, and thinking ability make it seem not altogether unlike its human prey. Again, the monster is both enhanced by personification and degraded by dehumanization. The combined personification and objectification of the creature makes it seem uncanny and, therefore, all the more horrible and frightening.

H. R. Giger: A New Approach to Horror Fiction?

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

H. R. Giger's biomechanical art combines the organic with the mechanical, human bodies with machines, biology with technology. Typically, his bodies are female. Dehumanized, they lack consciousness; sometimes, they appear to be catatonic or even dead. Were they analyzed according to Martin Buber's categorization of relationships, the female figures in Giger's art would be involved in—not participating in, but involved in—an “I-it,” as opposed to an “I-thou,” relationship. In Giger's art, women are not flesh-and-blood creatures, or not entirely; rather, they are biomechnical hybrids, more dead than alive, and they are more subsumed by the mechanical than the mechanical is subsumed in them.

Often, the female figures' involvement in these associations with mechanical systems is compelled, rather than voluntary; the females are restrained, held in place by mechanical arms, pipes, vises, form-fitting chairs, needles, or masks. They appear to be nothing more than human hosts to industrial parasites or to a system comprised of interacting mechanical parts. Often, their eyes are closed or completely white, lacking both irises and pupils. It is as if their humanity has been extracted along with whatever the needles, tubes, pipes, coils, clamps, suction hoses, hydraulic devices, cables, pumps, phallic appendages, beakers, and baths extract from their mouths and other, more intimate, bodily orifices. Giger's paintings are impersonal, detached, disinterested, and, in this sense, inhuman, depicting scenes that involve actions resembling rape, although it is questionable whether the machinery of technology can commit such an offense in any real sense of the word.

Of course, someone had to create these fantastic hybrid female-machines. The existence of biomechanical factories dedicated to exploiting human females implies that other human beings, perhaps men, since their sex is almost completely absent in Giger's work, designed and operate this system for their own benefit, albeit for mysterious purposes. If men are in charge of the system, if they have converted the females of the species largely into a power supply or an exploitable resource of some kind—chemical, perhaps, or sexual—they must be inhuman; they must be monstrous, indeed, to have deprived women of their lives, of their liberty, of their pursuit of happiness—and, indeed, of their very humanity itself. One would not be surprised to find someone like Josef Mengele in charge of the sadistic, clandestine, mechanized operations.

Each painting depicts a nightmare world unto itself, disconnected from any other. Each of the paintings suggests a narrative, but none connects to any other, and none explains the situations it depicts. It is as if each one is the start of a tale which begins in media res, but never progresses beyond its beginning. Therefore, each scene is without context and without meaning, an existential nightmare devoid of significance from which, like Jean-Pal Sartre's No Exit, there is no escape. Perhaps this is Giger's vision of modern life, a world in which men operate a vast system of machinery, preying upon helpless, dehumanized females like parasites feeding upon hosts, for purposes unspecified, but likely involving, at the very least, sex and exploitation.

Most of Giger's work is unique, in a class of its own, but a few pieces, those he designed for various film projects, do have a context, although not one created exclusively, or even primarily, by Giger himself. However, he often expressed his enjoyment of the movies' scripts. His comments on some of his work on specific motion picture projects may suggest insights concerning his overall intentions as an artist. 

Giger was commissioned to create some potential designs for the movie Dune, including Harkonnen, a castle symbolizing “intemperance, exploitation, aggression, and brutality”—all elements commonly featured in his work. The castle is equipped with a “drawbridge which can be lowered like an enormous penis to admit visitors,” Giger explained. (Many of Giger's paintings also include phalli, most of which are mechanical, rather than organic.) His castle “is a gigantic Moloch, which functions by converting living beings into energy. Every visitor is materially or spiritually exploited.”

In describing the castle, Giger could be describing almost any of his own paintings:

Whoever enters the castle stays there for the rest of his life, which in any case can only last a few seconds. The belly of Harkonnen is a gigantic, senseless Gothic, empty space in which corpulent beings swing through the abyss on their suspensors. The thin, plump external skin is supported from inside by a bone-like structure in the form of gigantic vertical plates. The egg in the desert, a symbol of fertility and reclusion—nothing but a fragile, empty sham.

Although his contributions were not used in the film, the fact that Giger had “a completely free hand” in designing Harkonnen suggests that, in developing the castle's designs, he may have used the same ideas and themes he'd expressed in his other work. If so, in Giger's comments about the work he did for various movies, we may have an insight into some of the views the artist sought to express through his own biomechanical paintings. 

Giger designed aliens for the Alien film series, Species's Sil and Ghost Train, the Batmobile for Batman Forever, art for the poster promoting Future-Kill, creatures for Tokyo: The Last Megalopolis, and murals and other work for Prometheus. He also served as a creative consultant for set designs for Killer Condom. We'll consider those works which pertain to our own interest, the new approach for horror fiction that may be represented in Giger's work.

Batmoble Art describes Giger's Batmobile as an “'X'[-]shaped design” that included “articulated front legs/mandibles, retractable fins, and Gatling gun emplacements on each of the four pods on the sides of the vehicle,” noting that Giger's “design also combined side and forward intake ports with organic spines and a central pod connecting the four legs.” 

The result looks more like a living organism than a vehicle and, apparently, it was considered too avant-garde for the Caped Crusader, despite Batman's own penchant for the grotesque. It does indicate, though, that, for Giger, with regard to objects that have a definite, definable purpose, function determines form, where design is concerned.

Angela Cartwright, who plays the navigator of the Nostromo in Alien, describes the set that Giger created as the spaceship's interior as “visceral” and “erotic”: “it's big vaginas and penises . . . the whole thing is like you're going inside of some sort of womb.” Such a description could be applied to many of the backgrounds and settings of Giger's own paintings, Penis Landscape in particular. 

According to David Edelstein,

Alien remains the key text in the “body horror” subgenre . . . and Giger’s designs covered all possible avenues of anxiety. Men traveled through vulva-like openings, got forcibly impregnated, and died giving birth to rampaging gooey vaginas dentate . . . . This was truly what David Cronenberg would call “the new flesh,” a dissolution of the boundaries between man and machine, machine and alien, and man and alien, with a psychosexual invasiveness. [One might add that the film also dissolves the divide between male and female, since male characters are impregnated and give birth.]

Another of Giger's works, the so-called space jockey, was included to depict the dead alien pilot of a spaceship that enabled its crew to drop his species' eggs onto a planet whose life the parasitic hatchlings could then use as their hosts.

In designing the alien “facehugger,” Giger ultimately decided “on a small creature with humanlike fingers and a long tail.” He may have had its means of locomotion and its sexuality in mind. The alien assumes this form during “the second stage” of its “life cycle,” using its eight legs to “crawl rapidly” and its tail to assist it in “making great leaps.” Its legs and tail also help the facehugger to “hug” its victim's face: it grips the host's head with its legs and wraps its tail around the victim's neck. Once it has done so, the creature “administers a cynose-based paralytic,” which causes the victim to lose consciousness and the ability to move. The creature is also equipped with a tubular proboscis, which it introduces into its human host's mouth and esophagus to implant its embryo—reproduction by oral (and nasal), rather than genital means. It seems that, for Giger and the others who designed the facehugger, the creature's function determined its form.

For Sil, the female alien in Species, Giger was interested in maintaining her beauty while portraying her as deadly. She would change colors as she transformed into an assassin, and she would use her barbed tongue to kill her victims:

The character is to go through four distinct stages of evolution [Giger explains:] “She's looking for good-looking, healthy men to breed her race on Earth. If her lover's not healthy, she sees a green aura around him. When she gets angry she first becomes dark red, then orange-red hot. Her clothes and hair burn off and on her back there are these sharp spikes coming out. Her body weapons are like red glowing steel. Then she cools to transparent carbonized glass and you see her inside bone construction: veins, body organs and discs.” It is at this stage when her killing cycle begins and she loses her transparency.

Giger also wanted Sil to have a tongue “composed of barbed hooks. Sil would kiss her lovers, forcing her tongue into the victim's mouth and down their throats, then yank the insides out.” Instead of using her proboscis to impregnate men, Sil would use her tongue to disembowel them. This idea, like the idea of having Sil change colors, was rejected.

While it seems that, during collaboration with others, Giger considers carefully the effects he wants to create, allowing the forms of his designs to follow the functions of the films' fantastic characters, it may be that he is guided more by intuition than by intention. Since nearly all of his paintings and drawings have similar qualities and express similar themes and emotions, Giger may operate from an unconscious template in which bondage, masochism, sadism, and the “intemperance, exploitation, aggression, and brutality” his Harkonnen castle embodies provide a palette for creating the forms that allow various characters to accomplish the tasks assigned them by a particular movie's script.

Indeed, in creating his own paintings, Giger appears to rely largely on intuition, with no preconceived notions about function or purpose, although current events and fads may, like his own dreams, play a role:

I just start from one side and go to the other. I paint whatever comes to my mind. There is no pre-planning. For instance, the ones that feature penis imagery and grotesque baby heads, I just felt like doing that. People have said that I look like these babies a little bit. At the time, 1973, there was a problem with oil and gas—the energy crisis. You can see burners in some of my paintings. The other images must also have some reason behind them. Condoms, of course are very “in” now.

He has also admitted to having been inspired by H. P. Lovecraft's Necronomicon, a fictional book of spells and magic, and Lovecraft's cosmicism, the view “that there is no recognizable divine presence, such as God, in the universe, and that humans are particularly insignificant in the larger scheme of intergalactic existence.” 

Giger, who died in 2014, left quite a legacy in his works of art, which include his remarkable, disturbing, and fascinating drawings, paintings, and sculptures, as well as in his style, which mixes the fantastic with such concepts as Lovecraft's cosmicism and the existential angst of Soren Kierkegaard, Jean-Paul Sartre, and other existential philosophers. However, his work also suggests a new approach to horror fiction that could breathe new life into a genre that has, of late, become predictable and stale.


Too often, horror is about acquiring new knowledge about a bizarre anomaly or singularity, often of an origin that is otherworldly (Alien), paranormal (Paranormal Activity), supernatural (The Exorcist), or abnormal (Psycho). For most of such movies, the strange is emphasized, but, once characters learn, through discovery, education, or revelation, the nature of the beast, the alien, ghost, demon, or madman (or woman) is neutralized or eliminated, and all's well again with the world. Since the 1950s, this approach has worked well in horror, as it has in science fiction, but, after well over half a century, this plot has become more than a little threadbare.

Giger's art offers a new approach, one in which there is no discovery to be made, in which education cannot provide answers, in which revelation is not forthcoming. Every story is a story in progress, so there is only what is happening now. There is no context, so everything is a mystery, which means there is no certainty, no security, and, quite possibly, no safety, and, certainly, no meaning. Characters may act by reason or faith or out of compassion, guilt, fear, or a desire for vengeance. They may act blindly. At times, they may triumph, but over what will remain unknown, and reason, faith, love, or other motivators may just as easily fail as succeed.

Giger's worlds are dark, mysterious, dangerous, disturbing, strangely erotic, meaningless, and compelling. They are worlds in which anything may happen and the only certainty is that there is no certainty. Such worlds may be mad. They may be pictures of hell. They are full of exploitation, violence, existential absurdity, hopelessness, helplessness, and terror—just like “real life” itself. Nihilistic worlds, they are devoid of heroes. They are worlds in which unseen, monstrous managers rule, unseen and unknown, faceless, nameless, and inhuman.

They are perfect settings, in other words, for horror fiction, whether written or performed.

Femme Fatales

Copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

The Attack of the Fifty-Foot Woman started it all. Or maybe it was Lilith or the lamia. Or the bride of Frankenstein.

Actually, it’s probably impossible to say just which female character became the world’s first female monster, but the ladies have proven that she can be the deadlier of the species when she’s of a mind to be. In fact, in Sexual Personae, Camille Paglia argues that civilization is a result of men’s attempt to resist the overwhelming influence and control of humanity’s chthonian nature, as represented by woman as Mother Nature (which is roughly the same, one might add, as that which Biblical writers are pleased to refer to as the “flesh,” which is eternally opposed to the spirit and often calls one to take a nasty fall. It should be understood that the “flesh” does not mean simply the sexual aspects of men and women but, rather, all that is implied by their immanent and temporal nature or their mortality.)

As we have argued in a previous post, horror fiction is all about significant loss and our attempts to survive it. There are many, many such types of such loss, some personal, some psychological, some social, and some theological. The greatest loss of all, perhaps, is that of life itself. Can death be survived? Most religions insist that it can, and some horror stories suggest the same. Of course, one’s position on such a matter, whether pro or con, is one of faith, for the world, if any, that lies beyond this earthly, mortal realm is an “undiscovered country from whose borne no one has returned.”

One type of loss of which horror fiction treats is the loss of order. Order can be the result of a formal political process in which laws are codified and enforced by a police or military force or, less often, of an informal social process in which unwritten laws are transmitted from one generation to the next and enforced by the stigma of the tribe. In other words, order among men and women is a product, so to speak, of law or of tradition. In many horror stories, such social control, such regulation of behavior, such organization of society, including the roles that men and women play within their larger groups, is either set aside or, more frequently, cast down, as Moses, in a fit of rage, cast down the stone tables upon which God had carved the Ten Commandments. Sometimes, horror fiction inverts order; it turns insides out and upsides down.

In the animal world, the males are the pretty ones. This state of affairs is inverted among humans, where men are not only stronger than women but are also smart enough to know it and to use their superior physical strength to their advantage, one effect of which is to make women compete among themselves for their attention. It may be argued that, ultimately, women gain control of the situation, in marriages at least, although most societies are now patriarchic and are likely to remain so, at least for the foreseeable future. Therefore, to assert themselves, women have had to adopt stratagems that allow men the pretense, at least, of being in charge and in control. Allowing men the ego salve of being the dominant “partners” in the marital relationship, women rule, largely because they are pretty (or, more crassly, but accurately, sexy), and they take great pains and spend small fortunes to stay that way.

Men, it may be suggested, symbolize strength, whereas women represent beauty. What if women’s figurative significance were inverted, though, some horror stories have asked, and they were understood, even if for but a moment, as suggesting strength rather, or more, than beauty? The answer, in a word, writers of such literature imply, is a monster.

Equipped with the strength to subject men to their will and to dominate them individually and collectively, woman would become not seductive Eve but demonic Lilith. She’d become Pandora, the lamia, the gorgon, a fury, a she-mantis, a reptilian thing covered in scales, a female Frankenstein’s monster, a fifty-foot woman on an estrogen-fueled rampage, a blood-sucking fiend, la belle sans merci. She would become a femme fatale.

Some movies and books depict women as monsters, females as femme fatales. Such movies and books suggest their creators’ reasons (or lack thereof) for fearing the women whom they depict as monsters. Most such creators are men. Whether their fears are representative of their whole sex is debatable, but their qualms and uncertainties, at least, reflect how some members of the male sex have viewed the opposite sex. (The classics of Western literature that feature female monsters, such as The Epic of Gilgamesh, the Bible, The Metamorphoses and other sources of Greek and Roman mythology, European fairy tales, Beowulf, Christabel, “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” and others, are worthy of even more consideration, but they are not the topics of this post; here, we are concerned more with movies.)

What, then, do movies that feature female creatures suggest about women (or the moviemakers’ ideas about women)? Let’s consider a few of the more notable films to have threatened audiences with the dangerous doings of femme fatales:

• The Attack of the Fifty-Foot Woman
• Species
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer
• Teeth
  

In Attack of the 50-Foot Woman (1958), Nancy Archer is mad as hell, and she’s not going to take it anymore after her two-timing husband, Harry, having inherited $50 million, abandons her for another woman, Honey Parker. After a close encounter with visiting extraterrestrials, she is radiated, which makes her huge, and she kills Honey before reclaiming her wayward hubby. As she carries him through the streets, as if he were nothing more than a live doll, the police shoot an electrical transformer as she passes it, and she and Harry are both electrocuted. This movie’s horror derives from the fear that a wronged woman may exact vengeance and suggests that infidelity is a much larger problem (literally) than it may appear to the man who perpetrates it, since it is more than a merely physical or sexual betrayal, which can have an emotionally and, indeed, existentially devastating and destructive effect on both marriage partners, the victim as well as the victimizer.

In the original movie’s remake (1993), the femme fatale has come a long way, baby, and her growth represents her emancipation from chauvinistic and patriarchal dominance, and the aliens who increase her size also imprison her husband until he can be convinced of the errors of his sexist ways.


Read from a male’s point of view, Species (1995) seems to depict women, in the guise of sexual predator (a role more often associated with men than with women). As such, women dehumanize men, seeing them (as men too often view women) as merely sex objects upon whom their own sexual needs may be satisfied. The product of an alien human hybridization experiment, Sil is both extraterrestrial and human. She’s also bent upon motherhood, and there are no candy or flowers in her courtship designs. There is just her beguiling appearance, with which she lures her prey, and her superior physical strength, which she uses to force herself upon them. Procreation is her purpose, and rape is her means to this end. Men are nothing to her but walking, talking sperm banks, and she can do without the walking and the talking very well, thank you. She rejects by killing those whom she finds unworthy of, or threatening, to her, and, after she finally mates successfully, she and her offspring are killed by the team of government scientists and military personnel who have been tracking her. The patriarchy, although threatened by their Galatea, resume the upper hand.


In her role as sexual predator, Sil is somewhat like Faith, a character in the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003). A sort of female Nietzschean superman, Faith has physical strength that far exceeds that of any man, and she uses it to satisfy her desires, sexual and otherwise, without regard to their effects, emotional or otherwise, on her victims. A love-him-and-leave-him sort of girl, she summarizes her philosophy succinctly, saying, “Get some, and get gone.” In “getting some,” she nearly kills Xander Harris, an ordinary teenage boy, after fornicating with him, but she is stopped by the timely arrival of Angel, a male vampire with a soul. That her views are horrible to the patriarchic society in which she lives is indicated by the more traditional, if rather liberated, lifestyle of her counterpart, the titular Buffy Summers, who is also possessed of superhuman strength but prefers to nail her lovers according to the much more traditional, socially acceptable rules that lesser women have been taught to use in the mating game. Buffy’s manner of dating and courtship highlight the aberrance of Faith’s sexual behavior and Faith’s nature as both a rogue vampire slayer and a femme fatale.


Teeth (2007) confronts viewers with an age-old fear among men--that of the castrating woman. In this film, the vagina of Dawn, the teenage cannibalistic protagonist, is equipped with teeth that respond to her anger or rage, biting off the genitals of a would-be rapist; those of a boy who had seemed to care about her but bedded her only so that he could brag about having done so to his adolescent friends, having bet with them that he could seduce Dawn; and those of her stepbrother, who’d hoped to have sex with her before their father ruined his hopes by marrying Dawn‘s mother. After these snacks, Dawn leaves town, finding self-confidence in her power to defend herself, and smiles at the elderly man who has stopped to give her a ride when, locking her inside his car, he insists that she have sex with him.

In the context of this film, the femme fatale is not a predator, but, rather, a young woman who is uniquely able to protect herself. She evens the playing field, so to speak, by being more than merely able to fend off unwanted advances or even intended sexual assaults. The organ which, in feminist thought, allows men to dominate women, becomes, in Teeth, the instrument, so to speak, of both liberation and vengeance. Talk about poetic justice! Women, who have been sexually assaulted by men, now have a means of defending themselves and of exacting a suitably ironic revenge upon would-be rapists or boyfriends who won’t take no for an answer. No doubt, some feminists believe that the makers of this movie corrected an error in nature’s or God’s work, equipping women with the very weapon they needed--a sort of dental chastity belt with (real) teeth--to be employed or not at the owner’s discretion.

The femme fatales we have considered in this post are not so much scary in themselves as they are scary to the men who watch them, for they represent what women would be like were they to act as men behave, as sexual predators who seek men only as a means to satisfy their own lusts. By turning the tables, as it were, on men, these movies’ femme fatales show men what it is like to be considered sex objects who are accounted as nothing more than things to be brutalized at will and discarded thereafter as having had their only value depleted.

To deny one his or her humanity is a horrible and monstrous thing, these films suggest, and the one who does so is a monster. Monsters may rampage for a time (every monster has its day), but, sooner or later, it will be exposed, understood, and, usually, terminated. Are these studies in feminine angst and rage reflections of men’s guilty consciences? Are they symbolic projections of rape fantasies? Are they nothing more than reinforcements--or, possibly, reassurances--of men’s superior status in nature and in society (as understood by the men who write and produce such films, of course)? All of the above? None of the above?

By turning the tables on men as sexual predators, movies like The Attack of the 50-Foot Woman show that sexual betrayal not only hurts the victim but also can have repercussions for the victimizer, since infidelity is destructive to both parties and to the marital relationship itself; Species and Buffy the Vampire Slayer show what it’s like, from the female’s perspective, to be the prey of such attackers; and Teeth, portraying women as able protectors of their own virtue, suggests that women are not irreducible to their body parts and that any man who attempts to dehumanize women by regarding them as mere sex objects may learn that he, as much as she, can be reduced to mere objectivity--in his case, by being deprived of the very type of organs that he insists are the only parts of women that are desirable by, and valuable to, men. After all, if he has no genitals of his own, hers are likely to become a lot less important to him. Femme fatales convey the message that women are not merely sex objects whose purpose it is to serve--or service--men and that they deserve dignity and respect. If they are ill treated, these movies suggest further, vengeance, of a poetically just sort, is sure to follow. After all, “hell hath no vengeance like a woman scorned,” and the disrespect of a person’s humanity is, perhaps, the very zenith (or nadir) of disdain.