The female body as a terrifying thing is a theme often explored in Horror Film metaphors. Freud said that men feared the female body because they saw it as being the realisation of their own fear of castration, and Laura Mulvey – one of the first to apply Freud’s theory to Film Studies – talked about women as bearers of the bleeding wound. In Horror Films, however, the images that prevail are not of the woman as castrated, but castrating. Monstrosity takes on specifically female characteristics, and they are terrifying not because they are the image of mutilation, but because they have the power to mutilate, to strip away male power, and ultimately to kill.
In John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982) this aggressive incarnation of the monstrous female comes through very clearly in connection with the mythological and powerful image of the Vagina Dentata – the Toothed Vagina. Where films such as Ridley Scott’s Alien focus on monstrous motherhood and womb imagery, The Thing show us a female threat that takes over and ultimately wipes out male identity. Women’s sexuality makes them desirable to men, but it also threatens them, and this is a problem traditionally addressed in horror films. This is one of the reasons for conventions that dictate that sexually active young women must be brutally killed in slashers.
The Thing tells the story of twelve stationed in a remote arctic base as winter sets in. They take in a dog fleeing from a deranged Norwegian explorer who they end up killing. When they go to the Norwegian base to try and find out what caused this madness, they discover a spaceship buried on ice for thousands of years which sheltered an Alien life form which is now masquerading as the dog they took in. This monster has the power to penetrate, kill and make itself a clone of, any life form. As the film progresses the men continue to investigate the alien – performing autopsies on the bodies they find, discussing its nature and trying to find ways to counter it and to find out which ones amongst them are already clones. It is all to no avail though, as by the end of the film there are only two men left alive, and while Carpenter leaves us wondering whether or not the Alien has survived, it is clear that the two men will freeze to death after being forced to destroy their only shelter.
Every attempt – from the pathetic to the brilliant – the protagonists make at surviving and outsmarting the threat is beaten by the exquisitely constructed horror they are faced with. Measures that could have worked against normal threats fail again and again, and this outlines a general feeling of male powerlessness to deal with the monster regardless of what they do. This sense of helplessness is the metaphorical castration that the film addresses, mirrowing the mood of the 1970s and early 1980s, when men were acutely feeling the confusion and threat of changing roles caused by the Women’s Liberation movement as well as by the increasing use of technology in the workplace. Men were finding out more than ever before that they were replaceable, and this made many of them feel vulnerable and threatened. This is expressed brilliantly in the scene where MacReady (Kurt Russell) plays chess against a computer which significantly talks to him in a female voice. When he loses the game he pours a drink onto the machine, using physical aggression in the face of the double-pronged female and technological threat.
The thing communicates this feeling with repeated images of feminisation. The male characters are penetrated by the creature’s phallic tentacles. This “rape” results not only in death, but also in impregnation. This is something that also happens in Alien, when Kane is effectively orally raped by the alien creature and impregnated with a monster that will eventually burst out of his chest and kill him. Male bodies taking on these female characteristics become extremely grotesque, and the fear is increased by the sense that men are vulnerable to rape and impregnation, a horror traditionally reserved for women.
The creature in The Thing cannot be rendered powerless – metaphorically castrated – no matter what part of it is cut off, it is able to regenerate itself, which is made clear in the scene where the head of the creature detaches itself from the burning body, sprouts spider-like legs, and starts to walk away from the scene. The only way to destroy it is to burn it to a crisp, yet even so its generative power means that it is already lurking somewhere else.
This is a baffling creature that with a generative power that will always find a way to multiply, but its most frightening incarnation is when it embodies the ancient male phobia of the Vagina Dentata. This is the literal representation of the female body as the devil’s gateway, and the vagina as a mysterious and dangerous place which can be potentially monstrous. In the scene where one of the men is dying and the doctor is applying electric shocks to his chest to try to revive him, the man’s torso opens up into a gigantic mouth-like organ full of sharp teeth which amputates both of his hands, swallowing them whole. This impacting scene is shocking not only because of the gruesome and graphic amputation which evokes castration anxiety, but because this vagina-like organ appears in a male torso, which opens it up and feminises it. The creature in The Thing clones, castrates and consumes the explorers that are at its mercy whatever they do. They do not understand, and are therefore subjugated by the creature that baffles them by its difference. The recurring image of the Vagina Dentata represented in horrifying detail in this film has nothing to do with lack, and yet it is undeniably, monstrously female.
In spite of this extreme difference, however, the creature is able to imitate the men perfectly, becoming so much like them that they cannot tell it apart from their own companions. This personifies the male fear of women taking over traditional male spheres, showing us a creature that is horrifyingly different but whose purpose is not only to imitate man, but also to take over, castrate, and ultimately replace him without a trace. In the social context of the time in which the film was made, we can see how the increasing number of women working in areas that were previously exclusive to men would make men feel resentful and threatened. This resentment could be partially rooted in the belief that women were merely trying to imitate them what they did, and in so doing, were well capable of completely supplanting men in the workplace. In such a world where women seemed on a path towards self-sufficiency, men would become almost obsolete, and this is the true terror that is given shape in John Carpenter’s film.
