Movies have always meant a lot to me, as I’m sure is the case with many of us. That glorious escape, those visuals that keep our brains churning for days after, and the characters who were so perfectly fleshed out by amazing actors. What’s not to love?
I’m a horror fan and have been for as long as I can remember. I’m of the generation where parents didn’t really monitor what we were watching as long as the sexual content wasn’t too graphic. Violence was okay, and a little bit of nudity was a given, particularly in horror. Who isn’t familiar with the phrase “boobs and blood” when talking about horror movies from the seventies and eighties? It was as ubiquitous as hairspray and music montages. And while I’ve got a healthy sense of humor about it now, in my forties, there were some periods of my life where that particular movie-making trope bothered me.
Before I really get into this, I want to get a couple of points clear. First of all, I’m a cisgendered, straight, white lady. Of all of the marginalized groups that movie-makers have ignored or made into jokes, my group is the least complicated and arguably safest. Since I can only speak of my own experiences, I won’t touch on the transgressions done to other marginalized groups because it’s not my place and there are much smarter, more experienced people who could lay it out much better than I ever could. Second, I want you to know that I am not opposed to nudity or sex on screen, male creators, or even beautiful people appearing on the silver screen. What I am opposed to, however, is this long-standing tradition of making movies catering to a singular set of tastes to the point of making it weird for the rest of us. Movies made exclusively for the straight, white, male experience.
I spent my formative years watching movies, not just horror, where women were largely treated as props to better the main story, that of the main male character. In these movies, the roles of the women, and how they’re viewed by the male characters, are very clear. We’re made to know who the male characters like, because we, the audience, are made to like them as well. We know who the male characters are sexually attracted to because they end up baring at least their breasts at some point in the movie, and we know who the male characters hate because they’re usually old, traditionally unattractive, and they yell a lot. As a young girl, I was just watching the movies and having a good time, not taking anything too seriously. Or so I thought.
It took me a while to realize how much of that I was absorbing, using to mold my worldviews as a woman, and how I felt I should act and feel in regards to my own standing on this planet and in this society. I didn’t have a wise older woman in my real life who could point out some of the things in those movies that were obvious nonsense, so my young and malleable brain took those small cues and applied them directly to my blooming personality. Little things that built up over time, like pushing down my own discomfort to be easygoing, saying aloud the dreaded phrase, “I’m not like other girls,” and doing what I thought I needed to do to be likeable to life’s main characters, the guys. That took years to undo.
Hilariously, some of these tropes get a little muddled when applied to the slasher movies of the eighties. Yeah, the women still needed to get undressed, but if they were too sexual, it never ended well for them. The “nags” sometimes got punished for daring to speak up, and sometimes their roles in the movie were so small that they didn’t even merit a death scene. Then there’s the trope of the Final Girl. Oh, that trope is an unholy mess that tangles my brain even now. They’re young, beautiful, kind, driven, and victorious. But before they can reach their apex as the ultimate victor of their story, they first have to be horribly assaulted and traumatized, something which we rarely got to see the aftereffects of. It’s like Final Girls go on a hero’s journey that is a little more emotionally damaging than your typical journey of epic myth. I’m not complaining about the depiction of strong women, don’t get me wrong. Give me a strong woman every day of the week, and twice on Sunday, please! Maybe I just wish there were more mainstream movies from that time that allowed female characters to show strength without having to chop off some murderous maybe-dead person’s head off. Just a thought.
Because so many of the movies from that era focused on the male gaze, I learned what I thought were all-important DOs and DON’Ts of what it meant to be an acceptable woman. These are just a few, very broad examples.
DO be fun and up for a good time. Skinny dipping is a requirement, as is taking every drink offered to you.
DON’T counter a man’s idea or try to correct him. Men know best.
DO know how to do traditionally “masculine” chores, such as changing a tire or cutting down a tree, but step aside if a man wants to show you how it’s done.
DON’T be anything other than a sexually playful, thin, low-maintenance beautiful woman in her mid-twenties who claims to be sixteen.
If you can get past my facetious nature, let me tell you that there was some real hurt that came from these assumptions of what I, as a woman, was supposed to be. I’m okay with calling it self-inflicted pain, but let me assure you that it was helped along with some of the ideas pushed time and time again by these movies. Movies that I loved then and still love today. Based on what I was viewing, I knew I was never good enough, never pretty enough, never easygoing enough. While that certainly hurt, it took me a long time to figure out that the real hurt should have been on the fact that these movies, which had enormous viewership, were completely dismissing my existence as a consumer. I wasn’t recognized as a coveted viewer, but rather as background noise, the screeching scared girl. Not one of the true viewers. Let me tell you, in hindsight, that stings quite a bit more than realizing that my personality wasn’t cool enough to get the attention of some fictional guy in a horror movie.
I love horror movies, and I still love the horror movies from my youth that occasionally used to hurt my feelings. They got their hooks in me and I just can’t seem to quit them. Luckily, there seemed to be a shift in the mid-to-late nineties where casual female nudity wasn’t a requirement in horror movies. Nudity happens in real life, so it should matter if it happens in the course of visual storytelling. I’m not anti-nudity, remember. Nowadays, there’s a criticism of laziness and lack of creativity that can be lobbed at moviemakers who include gratuitous female nudity. The words “tradition” and “fun” are frequently used as a defense, but I can tell you from experience that moviemakers who use female nudity to draw in viewers are very much lacking in creativity and their movies are tired, derivative, and sad. The use of boobs as a perk of watching feels more and more archaic.
That’s not to say that female nudity doesn’t appear in movies that are good and creative—it still happens. My beef is with moviemakers who know they’re making garbage and simply throw in a topless woman to appease the possible annoyance of their viewers, which is again, ignoring my existence as a viewer. Because, really, if it’s all about keeping the movies fun, where’s the male nudity? It’s a recent concept where every female nude scene is countered by a male nude scene thanks to period dramas and Game of Thrones. So why did these older movies shy away from male nudity? Over the years, I’ve come across anecdotes where male actors have said that they aren’t opposed to performing nude, but that producers, the money-holders, have stated that male nudity wasn’t needed. The logical take away from that being, “our male audience doesn’t want to see naked men.” I’m making some leaps here, I know, but it’s not a hard line to follow.
If we’re going to have this discussion, I’d be missing a big part of the picture if I centered this solely on my own feelings and experience. We also have to talk about how obligatory female nudity exploited actresses. To make this point, I want to talk to you about two movies from a horror franchise that has some name recognition: The Howling.
The first movie of the series, The Howling (1981) was directed by Joe Dante, a familiar name not only to us horror fans, but to movie-lovers of the eighties. Most would be familiar with his movies Gremlins (1984), Innerspace (1987), and The ‘Burbs (1989). In The Howling, there is a scene where the vamp of the film, a real seductress named Marsha played by Elizabeth Brooks, meets the main character’s husband at a bonfire to consummate their intense flirtation. The movie is lightly based on the book of the same name by Gary Brandner, and the source material is extremely sexual, as werewolf tales tend to be, what with the “animal urges” and all that. So having a sex scene where a bit of nudity happens is actually in line with the storytelling, and not out of nowhere. However, Elizabeth Brooks was assured that the camera angles used in the filming of this scene would obscure her naked body with the large bonfire and all the viewers would see was maybe a flash of breast. People who have seen this movie, however, know it shows a full-frontal nude scene of Elizabeth Brooks that the filmmakers did without her permission. She was understandably upset when, at a viewing full of people, she saw her fully naked form on screen. There is no universe, no parallel timeline, where that act is acceptable.
The Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf (1985) is a vastly different movie from the first. The budget is obviously smaller, the storytelling is chaotic, and the monster costumes are actually monkey costumes from a Planet of the Apes film. But this movie also did an actress dirty. Sybil Danning, an actress known for being sexy in B-movies, is this film’s main antagonist. Danning’s filmography is full of movies where she was nude or topless, but for this film, she made it known that she didn’t want to do any nudity. The producers were able to talk her into agreeing on a single topless scene, one that is little more than a flash of breast. However, this scene was looped during the end credits so that the one nude instance Danning agreed to was flashed on screen an additional seventeen times. Again, we had an understandably angry actress, angry at unacceptable treatment.
Frankly, I dread to think of similar instances that aren’t as well-known as these, but I know that this behavior, this dismissal of the wishes of the actresses, was rampant. As a female viewer, I’m not a fan, and I know lots of male viewers who aren’t cool with this behavior as well. So not only, in these examples, are female viewers being ignored, but male viewers are being horribly underestimated.
Over the years, I’ve gone from being an impressionable girl to a disappointed woman, and now to a woman worried about the psyches of young girls who love horror as much as I did at that age. While I’ve maintained my love for movies made for the male gaze, I’ve grown into that older woman I needed when I was a girl. The one who can enjoy the movie and re-watch it endlessly, but also point out where it gets a little wrong for certain groups. Some of these movies endure as amazing works of cinematic storytelling, they just have that small stain of capitulating to the tastes of a few while ignoring the very real feelings and sense of belonging of many.
I’m optimistic, though. I see things getting better. I wish it weren’t such a slow process, but there is very real movement. Even so, I remain a fan, one with a voice and an opinion and a bank account that is ready to support the creators and moviemakers I love. Because I matter as a viewer. We all do.
