Why are horror movies so obsessed with castration?

Castration is a big theme in basically every movie we watched over this term. I Spit on Your Grave is particularly fond of this trope as well. So I wanted to ask, why is it such a big deal in horror films?

Aside from the obvious fear most people have of genital mutilation, men, in particular, have a hefty fear of this. Which is odd considering 30% of men in the USA had their penis snipped right after being born. According to Freudian Theory, the penis and other phallic symbols are also the sources of masculinity and power. Which explains why so many weapons in horror films are considered phallic. But it is when men lose that power that the horror starts. What they are left with is a lack of power which leads them to become scared, they ultimately become Not Men.
<- This poster is from the 2010 remake but the way it is set up is meant to imply the threat of castration to the audience, the handles are the man's knees and the blades hover in what lies between. The cutesy line "It's Date Night" also adds to the sexual implications, the words themselves are whats being cute. This line has no meaning in the movie itself either, there are no dates, no cutesy moments, just pain and gore.

In most slasher films the man must fight to keep his phallus and the "final girl" ultimately earns one by killing the monster at the end (or at least she appears to before a million sequels are made). But here it is more eventful, Jennifer earns a phallus when she kills her attackers.  There is never a moment where the audience has to wonder when she will be able to actually fight back. She uses a rope, a gun, a knife, an ax, and the propeller of a motorboat to attack and kill her victims. Not all of these are inherently phallic, in fact, only two of them really are. The moment she cuts Johnnys penis off with a knife is the moment she fully earns her phallus.
The power is in the phallus and the fear is in losing it and becoming powerless like the women who have to fight to earn their phallus.

Manly Women and Feminine Men

After reading Creed's work I have found that a large part of the Monstrous Feminine comes from the disruption of traditional roles for women when girls become too masculine and threaten the role of manhood, especially in the house and around the family.
Heredity is a movie all about what happens when the mother figure in a family is destroyed. But it also does a lot to invert the positions of man and woman. The typical roles women and men play in horror movies are as follows: the woman is either the last one alive or she becomes the prize the man gets for his survival. Her motivations often are either about the man or the same as the man. Often times she is the reason for the spooky to be happening.
 In The Creature From The Black Lagoon Kay isn't shown to care about anything but whether or not she and the men around her survive. She has nothing to motivate herself, she also works as the point of conflict with all of the men (creature included) fighting to keep her on their side. David then wins her after the creature is defeated.
In Heredity, though Annies goals clash directly with both Peter and Steve's. Steve wants to take care of his son and help him to work through his emotions, something traditionally feminine. Annie wants to keep her family from finding out she has been going to group therapy and later she wants to take on the threat that is attacking her family. Therapy in this movie serves as a symbol of coping and healing something Annie is starchly against (in a hyper-masculine world like the one we are in this also gives Annie a more masculine presence).  She also never wanted to be a mother, at least not the first time she was pregnant and then had the child she actually wanted taken away by the one she didn't. Losing Charlie did the opposite of castration to Annie, it gave her her masculinity. So Annie is phallic and Steve is not. In the traditional horror film this places Steve as a prize for Annie to win should she take down the threat to her home. Peter has no real motivations outside of trying to follow Annie at first but being too scared to go through with her plans.
He starts off as a regular teenager who has a crush on a girl and wants to smoke pot, but after he kills Charlie he loses all sense of personality, his only real job left is to cry and freak out when the spooky start to happen. Again this is usually a woman's job.

Peter ends up being the last one left alive, the Final Girl Boy if you will.
He ends up dying at the end but coming back possessed by his sister.
Thus the threat of the woman is fulfilled.
 The family is destroyed and all that is left is a Feminine Man.

Why Body Horror is the Most Effective Form of Horror

"Body horror or biological horror is a subgenre of horror that intentionally showcases graphic or psychologically disturbing violations of the human body. These violations may manifest through aberrant sex, mutations, mutilation, zombification, gratuitous violence, disease, or unnatural movements of the body." - Mutations and Metamorphoses, Ronald Allen Lopez Cruz.

After watching Ganja and Hess I realized I wanted to write about my favorite genre of horror, not because this film fits into this genre like many others I will talk about but because it features so many elements of this genre. Most horror films capture some element of body horror. Ganja and Hess pervert the human form by making it something not human, The Exorcist has a little girl twisting into unnatural shapes, The Shining has a decaying corpse walking, Texas Chainsaw Massacre Leatherface cuts up the human body and wears someone else on his face, I Spit On Your Grave decimates the idea of owning your body and mutilates the human form. None of these are strictly body horror but they all contain elements of it. Why? What makes Body Horror so effective?

To explain why I want to also put forth the claim that horror lies in our ability to see ourselves in the situation the characters are in. Not because it is believable but what would be the most terrifying. What situation, no matter how outlandish, would be the most terrifying? I want to claim that your greatest fear for yourself lies in body horror in some form.  

There are two parts to this in relation to body horror that I want to look at, as I go on try to image your fear in those contexts: losing control and perverting the human form.

 Many people will say they are scared of being killed by another person, or a ghost, or being sexually assaulted, or maybe a creepy figure walking towards you is enough. All of these situations are rooted in a loss of control. When you find yourself unable to do anything to stop what is happening. Human beings are creatures that like to be able to control their world, look at how the world is today. City-planning, fences around yards, borders between cities and countries, family structures, racial stereotypes, and gender norms are in every aspect of society. All of these things are meant to package our world in neat little boxes. So when these things are destroyed people get uneasy. Take The Skin I Live In Vincete is forced to have his entire body changed into that of a woman named Vera. He was held captive for the entirety of the procedure and was unable to convince the people around him who he was. He had no ability to take control of his life even at the end of the film. His entire world breaks the mold of who he should be in society and it was not by choice. Similarly in the film, Eraserhead Henry's whole life is one where he is forced to accept decisions made for him, he marries X he raises the baby and his visions lead him to try and kill the baby in the end. 

The point of horror in both films is not about what either character ends up doing but how they do it, without a choice. Each character ends up in a state beyond human. There is a relation to this lack of control in the extreme and the lack of control in the real world. The changing body is something no one can control, it starts most obviously in puberty when adolescences are forced to go through changes that fundamentally alter how they are seen. Girls become women, meant to be objects who lose their innocence. Boys become men and lose their allowance towards emotions and kindness. As adults, your body starts to fail. The older you get the more likely it is that some parts of your body will stop and you have no ability to fix it. Our bodies are a source of anxiety that nearly everyone has and seeing other people lose their control over themselves only reaffirms our fears.



The second part of Body Horror is the actual perversion of the body. This is tied into Freud's theory on the Uncanny once again taken to its most extreme. When a character on screen has their body perverted it is always in a way that still leaves the viewer able to recognize their new form as human. The most iconic example would be The Human Centipede the people in this configuration are still clearly human, the science in the universe backs that up, but they aren't fully human anymore. Take The Fly Seth is still human in form but the film is about him becoming less and less human. Body horror plays on the existential questions of what makes us human, and where the line should be drawn. Are Lindsay, Jenny, and Katsuro still people if they are no longer able to function as people? Is Seth still human even when he is no longer only a human at the genetic level? What does all of this mean for us? What makes people so different from other animals? 

These fears dominate the realm of body horror and the minds of every person who wants to have some understanding of how our world works. When the order of the world is called into question what stops us as people from not fitting in?

Body horror is scary because everyone has a body they cannot control and everyone has a fear about what it will become. And that is why I think it is the most effective form of horror.

Soft vs Hard Masculinity

The Creature From The Black Lagoon is one of the most iconic horror films of the Golden era. References to it can be seen even in children's cartoons to this day. There's an entire book series dedicated to parodying the title aimed for children. All about different, often aquatic, monsters that make their way into a kid's school.
And that's where the references stop. There's a monster, it came from a lagoon, it's funny, laugh.

But I think that with the progression of time the actual subtext of this film has been ignored.
That this film was made to praise "soft masculinity".
The set up for this discussion is simple, there are two men Mark and David.  Both like the same girl, Kay, and this film is the trial they go through in order to "win" her.
 Mark is an action hero blonde man who sees the creature as something to kill before it kills them, and is jealous of David and Kay's relationship. David doesn't want to kill the creature, at least until it kidnaps Kay, and thinks with his brain. If the movie were to follow your standard action hero movie David would die and Kay would end the film kissing Mark (despite only having lost the man she loves mere moments before).
But that doesn't happen, in the last underwater scene of the film, Mark is killed by the monster. His body floats to the surface and Kay is dragged off for David to rescue.


(Side note: Marks blond hair and white shorts also provide an interesting color contrast with David's black hair and shorts. Both spent most of the film wearing the same color shorts but after Edwin is attacked and injured Mark had changed, this gives the audience a sense of the two-toned nature of the argument the film is presenting. Either you are a hard or a soft masculine type, there is no in-between. Though it could also have been done just so that when the underwater fight went down the audience could still know who was who.)
David uses a knife to attack the creature, which at first made me think this was his, and by extension the films, way of embracing hard masculinity. But he is unsuccessful in actually killing it, it is only with Lucas and Carl shooting the creature does he actually "die" (he doesn't until a few sequels later).
I believe it was one of our first readings (one of Williams or Clovers) that made the claim that guns aren't a phallic weapon because they don't allow the user to get close, they don't allow for the same revelry in gore that horror films are so fond of. By using a gun rather than an overly phallic harpoon or the standard knife as the weapon that kills the creature the film has rejected the traditional notion of manhood.

The Unkown vs The Known

One of the more unique aspects of Kubrick's The Shining is how everything is laid out from the start. The audience is told that the job Jack is trying to get cause a man to go insane, the audience knows that Jack is an alcoholic who hurt his son, and the audience knows everything they need to know about the shining all within the first hour of the film.
Yet with all of this out in the open, with the plot obvious, and with every reason to not care much about Jack or his family The Shining still manages to be insanely creepy.
I think conversely this fear is from what the audience doesn't know.

The Unkown has always been the source of most fears. What made the noise, who screamed, why did that vase move? Without an answer all of these can become scenarios that haunt our imaginations.

In the film the audience is only told what they need to know to understand the basic plot but not the details. In a way, the early expositing of information helps add to the creepy feeling the camera work and soundtrack slave away to create. But why was there a man dressed as a dog about to give someone else a BJ? Why was there a corpse in room 237? Why were the twins appearing only to Danny and no one else? Why is any of this happening?

The original Steven King novel has some kind of explanation for all of these things.

But had there been an explanation given in the film I don't think it would have been as scary as it is.
Horror novels rely on the unknown just as much as their film counterparts. But most authors aren't just trying to scare the reader, they also want to tell a complete story. That's what most readers are after when they read a long novel. Cheap jump scares and screaming won't work in this medium so authors have to coax the fear out of their readers.
With films jump scares and screams are abound, for most people a gory image and a screaming woman is enough to give the audience a sense of fear.

 One of the creepiest scenes for me was when Danny was playing with his trucks and a ball rolls in from out of nowhere. We don't see who rolled it or even where it came from. All we the audience know is that a ball just appeared. Most authors in a novel would tie it back to some of the spirits, perhaps the Grady sisters were trying to entice Danny towards them, in order to give the ball a reason for being there. In this movie, though there is no other purpose for the ball than to be scary.

That's what makes this film such a classic, the balance between what is known and unknown is toppled. The audience knows even less than they think by the end of the movie. The entire story is not laid out neatly for them. There's still a large debate around why Jack ended up in the picture at the end of the movie. Or why Jack froze so suddenly. Or what the Shining power Danny has actually is.
This lack of answers are primed to trigger the audiences to flight or fight responses.
The audience is forced to ask themselves the same questions they would while in the same situation, why is this happening, and how do I stop it?
Both questions the movie refuses to elaborate on.

Why does this movie make us feel so sick?

I am someone who has a pretty strong stomach, I enjoy watching films and Tv shows with bloody action, one of my favorite forms of horror is body horror. But this week's film Human Roast Pork Buns: The Untold Story managed to do something no other movie has been able to do. It made me feel sick. I spent a solid hour after watching it trying to calm my stomach so I could eat something. There is only one other piece of media I can think of that has done this and that's a TV show called Tokyo Ghoul an animated show with very little onscreen gore, and it was only for a brief time that I felt discomfort at the subject of the show.
The only real connection I can even find between both media is that one of the main concepts behind them involves eating people, which maybe that's what triggers my nausea cannibalism. Except Texas Chainsaw Massacre didn't even manage to make me feel anything and a man wears human skin as a mask.
While I was contemplating this I remembered something, one of the most popular tv-shows of the mid-2010s (aside from freaking Game of Thrones) is a show that revels in body horror. Supernatural got its start as a semi-horror tv show and it was full of body horror. A tv show that showed on primetime networks whose most vocal complaints were about the satanic elements in the show.
So why did The Untold Story manage to get such a visceral reaction out of me?
I think a part of it does have to do with the fact that much of the violence was towards women. While I don't identify as a woman myself I do still have a feminine body and a part of watching violence is mentally supplanting yourself with the victims. The infamous chopstick scene caused a very visceral reaction to both me and my mother (whom I made the mistake of watching this film with). When you find yourself able to identify with what is happening on screen at such a level it is no surprise films can cause such a reaction. Prince said that violence is connected to the visceral and I really only happen when you are able to identify, on some level, with the victims. All of the victims in The Untold Story were more human to me than Sally was in Texas Chainsaw Massacre. They had a more human reaction to what was around them and the sexual violence that Pearl faced somehow managed to draw more of a reaction from me than a demon dog ripping a man to shreds in Supernatural even though at that point at I had known Dean Winchester for longer than I knew Pearl the cashier.
Along with that, the realism is much more noticeable. I probably won't be eaten in Tokyo by a man who can control his blood to form weapons, but I could be chopped up by a restaurant owner.
While The Untold Story is an over the top gorefest it is one with people and plausibility. It is about one of the most hushed conversations in our society. And it almost seems to celebrate what it can make us feel.

The Babadook, and sleep, and the home (oh my)

There's been a trend in horror movies, I honestly can't say it's a recent trend but I've only just now decided to actually look at it. In horror movies that have to do with any sort of possession more often than not the person who has been taken possession of is asleep or otherwise unconscious.
The same holds true for this week's film The Babadook.

In fact, one of the biggest issues in the film, aside from the tall pale-faced weirdo who wants to murder everyone in Amelia's life, comes with issues regarding sleep. Her son Samuel is constantly waking up, convinced there is some sort of monster in his room. He often ends up sleeping in his mother's bed and this keeps Amelia awake for most of the nights. It gets to the point she begs a doctor for some sort of sedative to calm him down enough to sleep. It is after he begins to sleep better that the Babadook is able to take possession of Amelia. Sleep and dreams have always been a big part of film so this meshing of these two ideas is again nothing new. This is why Sigmund Freud, often thought of as a joke today, is still so important to film theory. He saw the unconsciousness as the ultimate gateway to a person's true self. So this incursion of possession is one that goes to the very deepest part of a person. People in these films are attacked at the source of who they are and are often lost because of it. Which is where the real horror of possession lays.

The most likely victims? Women. This all plays directly into Barbara Creed's theory about abjection and the Monstrous-Feminine. Woman as the source of fear? check. Women being given over the top powers that threaten castration to any and all men? check. Boundaries of the self-being infringed upon? check. In the case of The Babadook, I can add an extra checkmark for Amelia being a mother and for her main target being her son.

To delve deeper into The Babadook specifically each part of his creepiness comes from a relation to sleep. He first made himself known in a children's book that Amelia was using to get her son into bed. He comes out almost solely at night. He begins to take over Amelia's mind with dreams and the only way she can think to stave him off is by forgoing sleep entirely.
He almost becomes a rebranded version of Freddy Kreuger, what with his top hat and long-fingered gloves that scratch at things like a knife. A twisted face that smiles at its victims.

The second part I've been thinking about with all three films up to this point is how the apex of the horror in each film takes place in a home. The Sawyers kill in their home and Sally has to fight through most of the house to get away, Nosferatu threatens Europe simply by buying a house and Mina Harker gives up her life in her home (also in her bedroom as well which almost plays into my earlier point), after being possessed Amelia doesn't really leave her house as she threatens and attacks Samuel. The Babadook is even trapped in the very depth of Amelia's house. The depth of the womb as some theories put it (and I cannot remember who said this).

Following both paths of thinking the woman as a person becomes a source of fear but her womb becomes a source of safety. This puts women in horror films in their own liminal space. And I can't decide if this is another way to make women more terrifying or less human. Maybe both.