How exactly does a horror movie where a sexually voracious woman kills men subvert misogynist horror film tropes?

I agree with the rest of the post (although I’m not a fan of Cody; I thought Juno was death on celluloid), but isn’t “hot evil babe kills dudes” old news?

I wish these magazines would do a blackout on every celebrity they cover, followed by a blackout on every other subject they cover, followed by a blackout on paper, ink, and electrons.

Veeeery interesting.  So men are suddenly tired of Fox, eh?  That was fast - 2 weeks ago I couldn’t turn around without hearing how OMGSEXXXY she was.  Now that she’s made a movie that looks actually interesting (and even *fingers crossed* possibly GOOD), I’m suddenly interested in hearing more.  What an odd….um….COINCIDENCE that dudes have suddenly had enough.

Well, most horror movies are about male monsters killing nubile young women in ways that seem to punish them for being so sex-ay, which appeals to presumably hormonal, bitter young men.  Whether or not it succeeds, turning that shit around is clearly intended in this case to be a feminist statement.  As is putting a bunch of women at the helm of the kind of movie that’s traditionally marked as male territory.

I love Courtney Love in every one of her incarnations. 

I loathe horror movies and I’m going to run out and see this one.  This is gonna be awesome!  Thelma and Louise came out in ‘91 and men still haven’t stopped pouting about it.

Megan Fox has also spoken about badly about Southern Bible-beaters, and she picked a fight with Michael Bay about how stupid his movie was. So the troublesome bitch now obviously needs to be shut up.

I suspect her casting in this movie was hipster ironic casting.  But hell, maybe she’ll become more interesting to me as she promotes it.  Maybe there’s some there there.

I assumed the “We’re not promoting Megan Fox today” story was a matter of reverse-psychology…

“Hey, everyone! For one day, we won’t promote Megan Fox! I said, WE WON’T PROMOTE MEGAN FOX! MEGAN FOX! MEGAN FOX!”

Anyone know who did that cover of “Cherry Bomb” in the trailer?

So going to see this movie.

I would express uncritical love for Hole’s first THREE albums.  On ‘Celebrity Skin’, although Billy Corgan’s influence is palpable, I still have a crush on tracks like ‘Dying’, ‘Northern Star’ and ‘Celebrity Skin’. 

And I admit that one of my major flames in the 90s was Melissa Auf Der Maur.

About the whole Megan Fox thing, the geek in me is interested in seeing Jonah Hex as well as the current topic of discussion, but Transformers 2??  Not a chance.

How exactly does a horror movie where a sexually voracious woman kills men subvert misogynist horror film tropes?

Name a recent horror film that you saw where the murderer was a hot woman killing men.  Species is the last one I can think of, and that was 10 years ago.

Name a recent horror film that you saw where the murderer was a hot woman killing men.

Teeth, which was interesting. A take on the vagina dentata myth from the perspective of the girl. Don’t know if this was ever discussed at Pandagon, but such a discussion would be fascinating. Attempts to be feminist, and was written by a man. Does it succeed? I know I was cheering for her at the end, but there are questions I have.

Mnemosyne, does it have to be recent? I haven’t watched a horror film made in the last 10 years at least, so I’d fail that automatically. But I don’t see a film merely succeeding at being less sexist than your modern Eli Roth torture porn as much of a success.

And I think Megan Fox saying that women who’ve had sex with men are permanently befouled by the experience and are too dirty for her to have sex with would disqualify her from any but the most grudging respect from feminists in the near future.

So ambitious one is willing to sell-out one’s fellow human beings in order to make some money?

That’s a feminist statement these days?

Ummm WHAT Djur? Isn’t Megan supposed to be bisexual? I know she’s been dating Brian Austin Green. (The only reason I know this is because I was looking for news about TSCC, which he was in. )

....Weird.

You’re reading waaaay too much into this.

Who did Diablo Cody sell out?

Megan Fox? Meh. She hasn’t been in any good movies that I can recall (I did see Transformers cause I’m that kind of geek though). I also don’t think she’s all that hot. A couple of my friends totally flip out whenever they see her, which I think is funny (weird) since they’re twice her age. I’m not much into the celebrity thing, but I never miss an episode of “The Soup!” so that I can at least laugh at them.

The quote by Amanda is reminiscent of a comment by Catwoman in ‘Batman : Year One’ written weirdly enough, by professional misogynist Frank Miller (Sin City, 300) :

“You know what I hate about men?”
“What”“
“Never met one.”

Naturally enough, in that story, Catwoman ‘starts’ her career as a prostitute, and only later becomes a cat burglar.

But I thought about it, and I can’t deny that the reason that I think Cody grates on so many people’s nerves is that we’ve internalized the idea that naked ambition in women is wrong.

While I think we may be trained to have a *worse* opinion of nakedly ambitious women, I think most of us find nakedly ambitious men a little off-putting as well.

Ambition that looks like it is unchecked is admired by some, loathed by others, and just looked at with deep suspicion in some cases, I suspect.

So yeah, I am not a huge Cody fan because she really looks like she is a “I will walk over anyone/do anything to get what I want” and I find people like that - male or female - unpleasant.

Mind you, I liked Juno and this looks fun, too.

Aussiesmurf, just keep right on crushing on Auf der Maur. I think she’s showing up at WorldCon in Montreal next weekend.

I found her interview in Bust fairly infuriating, and the fact that she calls herself a radical feminist and then five seconds later talks about being post-feminist about earned some serious scorn from me.

Looks like a fun movie; the trailer reminded me of “Veronica Mars”—mainly due to the presence of Amanda Seyfried and Kyle Gallner. They really did a lot of work to make Seyfried look dowdy, though.

Not sure I can buy Megan Fox as a highschooler, though. In the movie she’s probably a 1,000 year old vampire/succubus/death queen whatever.

“Teeth” was a fun movie, but I’m not sure I’d call it a horror movie. The girl has full control over her vagina dentata, so in my mind any of her lovers should be just fine if they’re worth a damn. It’s more horrific that everybody in her hometown is apparently a rapist than her being a mutant.

Mnemosyne, does it have to be recent?  I haven’t watched a horror film made in the last 10 years at least, so I’d fail that automatically.

It would help, since it’s hard to claim that something that almost never shows up in movies is a cliche.  Even movies that have women as the killers are usually revenge porn (like I Spit On Your Grave or the first Friday the 13th movie).

But I don’t see a film merely succeeding at being less sexist than your modern Eli Roth torture porn as much of a success.

What’s your criteria?  I chickened out on seeing it the theaters (I can’t take horror movies like I used to) but by all accounts Sam Raimi’s Drag Me to Hell isn’t feminist, but it’s at least non-sexist.  The American version of The Ring has some pretty sexist tropes (the Bad Mommy) but I think it has a lot more redeeming qualities than Hostel.

It’s more horrific that everybody in her hometown is apparently a rapist than her being a mutant.

Yeah, that’s one of the things I liked about it. The mutant is the hero and the guys are the true villains. But maybe it oversimplifies things too much, making “rape” something only evil caricatures do, and it ends up not making any men question themselves and their assumptions.

Wasn’t The Descent somewhat non-sexist? I didn’t see it, but that’s what I heard. There was Monster too, but I don’t know if that’s technically a horror movie at all (probably not). Also, it was apparently kind of bullshit.

I hope this movie does well, even if it sucks. Maybe we’ll start getting movies with more non-stereotypical female villians. Not every evil woman is from Fatal Attraction, guys. They could totally do the Saw series 10x better if they’d had Amanda as the serial killer from the start and used less ridiculous plot lines in the movies after the first.

Can’t I just hate her because I find her dialogue cloying and her regular-girl-by-day, stripper-by-night schtick caters to the modern outgrowth of the Madonna/Whore complex instead of an actively subverting it?

Name a recent horror film that you saw where the murderer was a hot woman killing men.  Species is the last one I can think of, and that was 10 years ago.

Ooo, challenge!  Well, they’re up to Species 4 right now, so there’s that.

It’s more for a fetish crowd, but the female Cenobites in the Hellraiser franchise.

There are some from the Japanese films.  “Audition” features a complete nutcase and her treatment of her boyfriend makes “Boxing Helena” look like a tract on female empowerment.

The Night of the Demons franchise features Angela, demoness and sexpot.

The recently-released “War Wolves” featured hot woman soldiers/victims who switched from victim to werewolf in short order.  And in that same vein the girls from the Gingersnaps franchise (albeit at jailbait age in the first film, since the whole werewolf thing was a sledgehammer to the forehead analogy to menstruation).

If you look at B-movies (now usually direct-to-video) hot lady killers are hardly a rarity.  it’s because they aren’t as common in the big-name franchises that people think they aren’t there.

Ambition that looks like it is unchecked is admired by some, loathed by others, and just looked at with deep suspicion in some cases, I suspect.

I think this is not only true, but also I suspect that the folks who admire unchecked ambition tend to be the kind of people who also dislike powerful women.  Leaving a woman with unchecked ambitions to have a much smaller pool of potential admirers to draw from than men in the same position.

From the link:

“Listen, we love Megan. She’s responsible for driving more eyeballs to our sites — just by getting photographed walking down the street in a white T-shirt — than any other celeb alive,” says Eric Rogell of TheBachelorGuy.com. But while he professes his love for the raven-haired beauty, he says he’s ready for more diverse eye candy.”

Let’s say, first, that among the dudes I’ve duded around with in my life, I think using the term “celeb” unironically would not be well recieved.

I hadn’t heard Hole in a long time. They really were pretty good. Especially “Jennifer’s Body” “Doll Parts” and “Malibu”.

It seems hard to believe that this trailer, which hasn’t shown up on TV (and why was it red-banded, exactly? There’s not a conspiracy theory need there, it’s a proven fact that the MPAA is made up of close-minded jerkoffs) has really circulated widely to trigger such dislike of Megan Fox, but if I was the guy searching thebachelorguy.com for pictures of her, I suppose I’d have seen it.

Um, also I can’t quite get over the pro-life-lite theme of “Juno”.

What’s funny is that I put off seeing Juno for a long time because everyone was up in arms about it being such a pro-life movie, and then I actually saw it and I still don’t know what people are talking about.  Juno is such a specific character that it’s hard to generalize her out to a role model for what other teenage girls should do.

I was surprised that almost no one talked about the subtext of the film:  Juno doesn’t trust other women because her mother abandoned her, and her emotional growth is learning to trust that her stepmother and Vanessa aren’t going to let her down the way her mother did.  The romance is cute, but it’s the least emotionally involving part of the story by design.

If we’re going to debate Diablo Cody, did anyone else see “The United States of Tara”?  I watched a few episodes and it was pretty interesting. 

Taking Diablo Cody’s schtick about being an ex-stripper seriously is about as rational as taking Spike Lee’s schtick about hating whitey seriously.  They may say inflammatory things in the press that get them great headlines, but their art says something quite different and more complex about the subject.

Terrific post! I have recently come to terms with loving Diablo Cody, and I think this might be the first movie I see in theaters since…Juno, actually.

I think Megan Fox is really interesting. She’s made a number of problematic comments, of course, but she’s subject to a lot of sexist attention. I believe she also identifies as a feminist - that doesn’t change the individual harm of her actions, but I think that it adds something to their context and her career path.

I have strong suspicions that it’s going to be a very dark horror/comedy with strong feminist sensibilities

Or, it’s a lot of excuses to show Megan Fox being dangerous and sexxxay, wrapped in a veneer of pseudo irony.  Would anyone be expecting feminist sensibilities if not for the Diablo Cody connection?  The femme fatale who mates and then kills… that’s been around a while, not always particularly positive.

I’m not remembering it well enough, but isn’t the line about killing boys not being the same as killing “people” almost a quotation from Valerie Solanas?

Actually, the comparison would be more apt if Spike Lee came to fame by making films that played homage to Stepin Fetchit and assured white audiences that black people do, indeed, love fried chicken and watermelon.

I guess I missed the part in Juno where she marries her boyfriend without finishing high school and settles down to be a happy teenage mom, proving that all she really needed the whole time was to have a man and a baby.  Was that after the credits, because I didn’t stay through all of those.

I never heard of Megan Fox before.  Now, thanks to this “blackout,” I am now aware of her—and I am interested in seeing her movie.

Actually, the comparison would be more apt if Spike Lee came to fame by making films that played homage to Stepin Fetchit and assured white audiences that black people do, indeed, love fried chicken and watermelon.

You really disliked Juno, didn’t you? It sounds like you’re falling into an aesthetic Stalinism trap, where “teen having a baby” == “stepin fetchit.”

Juno was not propaganda. It did not even manage to fall into the execrable “message movie” category. It was a mass-market movie.

““The Descent” is fantastic, and made even better by the all-female cast (originally it was meant to be 50/50 but they decided to just replace all the male characters with women).  Although there is one backstory that has a female jealousy element, it’s a load of strong women fighting for each other.  And it scares me, which is rare enough in thrillers/horror.”

It was also (spoiler) much scarier to me (spoiler) before the CHUDs showed up. I guess I’ve got some claustraphobia in me. I didn’t really think about the fact that it was all-female at the time, probably because it was just matter-of-about it.

They really didn’t manage much of an interesting story, in my mind, but it was a horror movie that actually scared me. Not many of those. Probably helped that my wife and I watched it in our dark basement.

“It’s nice that you enjoyed Juno so much. It’s such a realistic portrait of teen pregnancy, not like the silly romantic scenario you mention. And did you know that embryos have itty bitty fingernails?”

Ah. That explains to me why it bugs people. I hadn’t quite figured it out before, but the fact that Juno is moved by nutty propaganda is something. She’s also squicked by the clinic worker. Personally, she seems like a teenager to me. I think having the kid was (as said above) Juno being Juno a lot more than Juno thinking a fetus is a person.

“Juno doesn’t trust other women because her mother abandoned her, and her emotional growth is learning to trust that her stepmother and Vanessa aren’t going to let her down the way her mother did.  The romance is cute, but it’s the least emotionally involving part of the story by design.”

That seems right.

Hard Candy. Hot [underage] chick tortures pedophile. Awful movie, but a recent example of hot chick offing men.

Diablo Cody? Attention-whore/James Frey fabulist with a tin ear for dialogue. She only seems perceptive and edgy to those who don’t know better. And to prove it, she comes roaring back with a stunt-casting vehicle that “turns conventional slasher films on their heads ... to the EXTREEEEEEEEEME!!!!1!!” P’tui!

IMO. Juno was too precious by half—and that dialogue?! Fuck me with a shoe-horn.

I actually liked Hard Candy. And Teeth. They were satisfying.

This movie looks like it’s going to remind me of Ginger Snaps. And Ginger Snaps was awesome.

Honestly, if it has a female badass villain, and a slightly-more-sane female protagonist, then I’m totally down with evil ladies, even female-chauvinist evil ladies. It’s when we have female badass villains who are Put In Their Place by dude protagonists that my misogyny meter starts going off.

Honestly, if it has a female badass villain, and a slightly-more-sane female protagonist

That would be awesome. Especially if they fell in ridiculously cheesy, furtive lesbian love. I don’t care if it would be pandering to the male audience; I’d consider it meant for me.

I’d say that Ginger Snaps is going to be damn hard movie to surpass.  The *best* werewolf movie of the last decade.  And I’m definitely going to give Jennifer’s Body a chance—if they get the balance between the horror and comedy right, it’ll be pure Evil Dead gold.

See, the anger about her being a stripper seems so misplaced to me.  It’s unfair that’s what it takes for a woman to get where she is, but that’s not her fault, is it?  So what we’re doing by jumping on her for it is holding women to an impossible standard men will never get held to, which is demanding that they never do anything less than pure to advance their careers.  Stripping isn’t hurting other people, stepping on other people, or anything like that.

But someone like Cody, who is nakedly ambitious, gets a lot more shit than women who get naked to advance their careers but play the good bimbo, so we’re not confronted with their intelligence, opinions, or ambition.  Wonder why that is?

Would anyone be expecting feminist sensibilities if not for the Diablo Cody connection? 

That’s like saying, “Would anyone be looking for campy subtext, if the writer wasn’t Oscar Wilde?  Would you be expecting Southern Gothic themes, if the writer wasn’t William Faulkner? Would anyone be expecting silly spoofs if the writer wasn’t Douglas Adams?”

I, for one, am happy to see writers getting the creative credit and control they deserve.

Hard Candy doesn’t work, but it’s one of those movies that doesn’t work in a really interesting way. As for Juno, I was kind of warm and cold on it the first time I saw it (it was mainly the soundtrack that annoyed me) but it’s one of those movies that holds up well to repeated cable-TV viewings. I am kind of skeptical about Cody’s sensibility translating to a horror-comedy – Juno’s dramatic parts are a lot better than its comedic parts – but we’ll see, huh?

That’s something the girlfriends, brides and wives need to take up with their jackass boyfriends, grooms and husbands (why are you listing those two separately, anyway? makes no sense), not take out on the strippers.

That’s like saying, “Would anyone be looking for campy subtext, if the writer wasn’t Oscar Wilde?  Would you be expecting Southern Gothic themes, if the writer wasn’t William Faulkner? Would anyone be expecting silly spoofs if the writer wasn’t Douglas Adams?”

Sometimes knowing the author/auteur’s life helps a lot.  Sometimes it doesn’t.  If no one knew Diablo Cody had anything to do with this movie, and it was shot for shot, frame for frame the same, would people be looking for its feminist cred? 

I’m all about intention, but this kind of analysis makes me leery, especially because we just went through why “500 Days of Summer” had to be all kinds of bad—based on the trailer—without all this sorting through who were the people behind it, what their politics were, etc.  And if “Summer” had been made by a crew consisting only of sworn feminists, it could _still_ be a trainwreck of misogyny, in the way you’ve pointed out how the Nice Guy might think he’s so good to/for the women around him. 

It’s frustrating to see two unseen movies get such divergent treatment, this one getting all the benefit of the doubt for quoting squicky commonplaces to subvert them, and that other one getting _no_ benefit of the doubt that it might be doing the same thing.

I find it amazing that you overlooked the fact that “women killing via sexuality” is actually an old anti-feminist trope (Cleopatra destroying Marc Antony, La Belle Dame Sans Merci, Jezebel, etc.)

Hmm.  I saw an independent movie called <a href=“http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1220213/fullcredits”>Grace<./a> today at the film festival.

Really goddamned creepy.  And you think you know what’s going on a little way in the film, only to find out you don’t.

All the characters, save a few peripheral ones, are female.  I dunno if I’d call it “feminist” - although there’s certainly a “resisting domineering medical authority (coded male)” theme for parts of the plot. It’s a psychological horror, focusing on the female body. However it’s more about motherhood than feminist issues per se - a subtle conflict between the main character and her mother-in-law over the husband turns into a not nearly as subtle battle over the daughter…

If you’re a hemophobic, you probably want to avoid it. And the La Leche League is going to hate this one. But I’d rate it a worthwhile morbidly creepy horror - good for fans of Lynch or Cronenberg.