FEAR and SEX, or EROTIC overtones in horror movies

Brain Dead (1992), dir. Peter Jackson

The jump between The Lord of the Rings and all of Peter Jackson’s work that preceded it is colossal, even when only the Frighteners are considered. As for the cult Brain Dead, I still remember the feeling of emptiness in my head when I realized for the first time that it was this Peter Jackson, the one of LOTR fame. Because, in fact, Brain Dead is a bizarre film. It would seem that this is just squeezing the guts out of everything possible on the screen, but here it is not, because Jackson’s vision of gore strongly refers to Freud and his analysis of the erotic relationship of son to mother and mother to son against the background of another, younger woman seen as a rival. The relationship of the main character, Lionel (Timothy Balme), with his parent, the despotic Vera (Elizabeth Moody), is peculiar, even when it is not yet lined with the stench of a corpse. After Vera is infected by a monkey rat, what has been hidden in her so far, i.e. grief and loneliness after losing her husband, come to the surface in the form of an uncontrollable desire to devour others. As Lionel accurately points out in the film, the state of people after being bitten by a strange creature from Skull Island resembles decay, only with the uncontrollable operation of drives, including the sexual one. In the face of imminent death, the corpses only want to burn and eat.

These two most important animal drives are essential to the survival of both the individual and the species. The irony of Jackson is to activate the incredible power of these instincts in people who are no longer alive. So the corpse priest thinks of nothing but rough sex with the nurse, until they end up fathering a corpse child – extremely nasty and determined to kill. Graveyard cutthroats only want to kill. Lionel’s exceptionally mean and bitter mother grows into a zombie queen, and her cousin, Uncle Les Kalkon (Ian Watkin), becomes her right-hand man. Lionel seems so vulnerable in all of this. Only seemingly. In the end, he shreds everyone with a mower, and he enjoys it, because he is the only living corpse’s son who also feels these sexual, impulsive forces. In the symbolic final sequence, Lionel’s mother assumes monstrous shapes, and her breasts and buttocks are the largest, ancient attributes of fertility. Lionel has to fight them, as if he was overcoming his own fear of the same traits in women who would be the mothers of his children. So the story of Freud’s sexual fears comes full circle. Breaking free from parental fears is sometimes literally painful and bloody. Answering the question in the title of the list, in pop culture’s depiction of the dead, Peter Jackson is most excited about the other dead and the brains of the still alive. The living, on the other hand, are excited by everything that the dead cannot do with them.

Alien (1979), dir. Ridley Scott

Before the Xenomorph was born, there was H.R. Giger – a dark loner suffering from insomnia, a brilliant surrealist painter, a dissenter, staying away from the mainstream and the post-modern, pop art and minimalist trends dominating art. Looking at his works, it’s hard not to notice tight spaces, vaginal shapes, transhumanist visions of the female body with biomechanically modified sexual organs. Looking at Ridley Scott’s version of Alien, it’s hard not to notice similar suggestions. The interior of the Engineers’ ship suggests the structure of the epithelium lining the vagina and uterus, shiny in some places with moisture. The Alien itself is designed in such a way that it resembles a phallus dripping with metal-corrosive slime, equipped with teeth and deadly – a smaller head protrudes from a larger one (by default, from under the foreskin). In addition, the xenomorph has no eyes, so it is impossible to communicate with it visually in any way, which further increases the fear. In this perspective, the Alien is a pure drive seeking fertilization through rape, blindly pushing forward like a battering ram with an erect penis, which is opposed only by Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) – a woman.

It turns out that Alien is a tasteful depiction of various types of rape. It is hard not to notice that one type in particular stands out in the foreground – oral rape. It’s a field of a facehugger, i.e. the second stage of xenomorph development. Interestingly, the facehugger is nowadays almost an ingratiating mascot that children carry with them in prams, and adults use as a key ring. On Nostromo, however, it turned out to be an insurmountable enemy. His method of impregnating the host is violent, brutal, and full of mindless devotion. As it turns out, it can be an inspiration for transhumanoid beings. The scene has already gone down in cinema history when the android Ash (Ian Holm) wants to kill Ripley by putting a tube made of pornographic magazine to her mouth and probably choking her airways with his white spit. Analogy with oral and forced rape deep throat is all too evident here. In the background, already out of focus, there are pictures of naked women, and Ripley desperately tries to defend herself, but she is too weak. Ash plays a double role in this scene. First, it is a mindless instrument of rape, i.e. a penis, and its white sweat is an analogy to the semen that a person who is raped orally chokes on. Secondly, the android Ash, a medical officer, a scientist, created by his engineers to serve people, has enough free will in the human sense that he succumbs to the temptation to be more important than he is. He is impressed by the xenomorph and the way the facehugger attacks is almost sexually attractive. Ash wants to be like an alien, even if it means pretending or superficially assuming a role. Ash wants to be more than a robot.

The quintessence of all the above sexual allegories is the final sequence with Ripley hiding in an escape pod from the adult form of the xenomorph. Ellen’s clothing is of no small importance here – skimpy panties and nipples clearly visible through a short, revealing the stomach T-shirt. Somewhere behind her, a xenomorph is hiding in the shadows. They both want to survive. Ripley, as a symbol of exciting femininity, finally defeats the attacker, but is unable to overcome the changes that his appearance has initiated. Whoever encounters this kind of rape once, if he survives it, is forever marked. He becomes a child of violence.

The Last House on the Left (1972), dir. Wes Craven

After writing this list, I will wonder much less why rape is so “liked” by horror filmmakers. Reductively speaking, rape causes pain, and in horror movies the idea is to present the viewer with as much pain as possible causing fear, and additionally a pleasant impression that it only happens on the screen – it will never affect the person watching the film, although statistically exceptions happen. Hence the popularity of this genre, because people love to watch what hurts others, but at the same time, its fictitiousness makes sure that the voyeurs in front of the screen are completely safe in comfortable armchairs. Wes Craven has learned to exploit this fear of rape. Despite the cheapness of the technical means and shoddy acting, which overwhelms me as a viewer, he has made a name for himself as a master of horror. As a side note, I leave the assessment of the artistic quality of Craven’s films. What is important to me is the strong connection between sex and fear in his productions.

Reality turned out to be a mine of inspiration for him, especially in the case of The Last House on the Left. In the real world, worse crimes have happened and been documented than what happened to the two teenagers in Craven’s production, if there is any classification to be made of atrocities. I know horror fans love perversion rankings, which I don’t understand at all. However, young Craven, inspired by Bergman’s The Virgin Spring, wanted to tell a story of crime and retribution that matched its brutality in his own way. After all, the most important are motives for behaviour, even criminal ones. So he proposed a clever trick – he moved the camera far enough away from the plot that the narrator disappeared. The viewer was left alone with rape, pathological nudity and finally murder. The woman’s body became not only the object of unbridled sexual activities, but also took part in them with pleasure as the perpetrator of suffering – a member of Krug Still’s (David Hess) gang is Phyllis Stone (Lucy Grantham). Therefore, it is difficult to accuse Craven of creating an exclusively masculinized image of sexual violence. The story told in the film is even more moving. From today’s point of view, however, I see no point in making such films anymore. They do not bring anything to our reality, they do not teach anything, because they do not contain reflection. They are nonsensical documentaries in which actors imitate the outside world. What for? To create publicity, make some money? It’s enough that, in reality, sex and violence make a lot of money.

Human Centipede 2 (2011), dir. Tom Six

While the first part of the series was a kind of experiment, more disgusting than scary, in the second part Tom Six bet directly on fear, without giving up a huge dose of anal-coprophilic macabre. For this reason, the decision to shoot the film in black and white seemed very right. In color, Human Centipede 2 would be unbearable. The method of sexual scaring is simple – connect the mouth with the anus and from film to film add more and more people to this nightmarish work, including, what is especially nightmarish, a pregnant woman. As I wrote in last year’s review of The Human Centipede 2, staring into the eyes of the main character, Martin Lomax (Laurence R. Harvey), is like looking into the merciless face of all our ugliest fears. In this sense, Tom Six did something difficult and terrible at the same time – he personified the perversion, even created its essence and shot it in the viewer’s face, saying: This is real, next to you. This is what they do to the defenseless because they think it’s right, that this is how playing sex with the body looks like. Because in order to say no, you need to know that you have the right to do so.

The sexual references in Six’s film are mostly based on sexual abuse. Lomax was his father’s victim before he became a torturer. The louder he cried, the more it aroused his tormentor. Now he is an executioner himself and because of his past he is unable to have normal intercourse, only one with a centipede of his own making, full of stench, feces, pain and screams of victims. Somewhere in the background and partly in Lomax’s head, a baby cries from time to time. This is especially important in the final scenes of the film, where the director for a moment introduces the viewer’s doubt that maybe Lomax, sitting alone in front of a small TV set, somewhere on the night shift in the garage, only dreamed of a human centipede. The crying of a baby, however, accurately throws off balance. All those earlier scenes flash before your eyes with colored faeces gushing onto the camera, premature birth and Lomax pissing under himself in bed. A child’s cry is real, and we, as spectators of this reality, deny the reason for its existence. We don’t want to face the daydream, just like we inherit from our ancestors the cultural fear of knowing about sex, afraid that suddenly all the minors around will start practicing it in every available corner, since it is supposedly so pleasant.

A Serbian Film (2010), dir. Srdjan Spasojević

From what I’ve noticed, a lot of foreign whiskey is drunk in A Serbian Film, even when you don’t have any money. I mean the main character. As if this act itself had ritual significance, changing the standard of living, proving the value of drinkers. Also, I’ve always thought it was bad for a porn actor to drink large amounts of alcohol because of the condition of his work tool. Well, maybe in the Balkans it’s different. In addition to drinking ritual activities, there are several more in Srdjan Spasojević’s production, including the two most important ones, i.e. sex and violence. The first of these activities is not an end in itself. Nor is it any pleasure. At most, it will happen accidentally during intercourse. The most important is the so-called a rite of passage, and sex is one part of it. Violent sex gradually pushes the boundaries of morality until they are blurred. Violence is complemented by sex. It becomes expiation, almost like an orgasm, a momentary relief before the tension rises again. Evidence of the decline of values is not murder or the torture that preceded it. Spasojević controversially claims that abandoning all values is rape, but not on an adult, but on a newborn or your own child. Only in such a shocking perspective can the observer understand something, understand what the role of the victim is, how deep this pain can be. A new type of art: newborn porn, aims not only to renew humanity through just such macabre and cathartic denial of all elementary values, but also to resuscitate the dying Serbian nation, which is that suffering, raped child. In this sense, A Serbian Film is a politically engaged picture with deeply rooted ritual and religious symbolism. The only question is what will this renewal look like? Is it possible to restore anything by first destroying it in such an ethically essential way?

The victim is the most expensive commodity in the world, according to Vukmir, the movie villain. Regardless of the moral duty to say otherwise, he’s right. He is a master of utilitarianism. He earns money by filming pedophile pornography. It may seem that it is a niche, dying species. It is not. There are tens, maybe hundreds of thousands, of customers around the world for this type of film. It is impossible not to guess that the director of A Serbian Film took advantage of the reflection on the situation in the Balkans, in the former Yugoslav republics, where both human trafficking and prostitution of minors still flourish. He chose just such a way to attract the attention of the audience. Others have apparently failed, as have successive UN resolutions on social issues. We can write that Srdjan Spasojević is a perverted madman or the last son of a bitch if he had the courage to create such a movie. However, I have the impression that no one ever has made a film that would really reflect all this hell, sense of senselessness and physical degradation after the rape. A Serbian Film in this aspect is absolutely true, unacceptably realistic, and that is why it cannot be escaped by any fictitious explanation. So why do we need such gore cinema? To feel like victims. In order to expose the duplicity of the environment, which, instead of a serious discussion about the production, can only senselessly ban its display, which only increases interest in it in the gray market.

Suspiria (2018), dir. Luca Guadagnino

At the beginning there is a myth, or rather the Italian master of horror, Dario Argento, as its creator and promoter in cinema. Its main characters with unbridled appetite and causative power are three Mothers – Mother of Darkness (Mater Tenebrarum), Mother of Tears (Mater Lachrymarum) and Mother of Sighs (Mater Suspiriorum). We are interested in the latter, to which Suspiria is devoted. Just like the other two mothers, Mother of Sighs (Helena Marcos in the film) uses all those activities, emotions, impressions and beliefs whose power can cause a radical change in a person. It doesn’t say whether it’s good or bad. So mothers are waiting for weak people who cannot resist the power of politics, religion, money, and also love, etc. Fear and sex in Suspiria seem to be mutually exclusive. How much they can intertwine becomes apparent only when the main character, Susie Bannion (Dakota Johnson), appears on the somewhat theatrical stage of Luca Guadagnino’s film. Susie used to live in an American Mennonite community, so in general she knows little about violence, let alone sex and her own body’s reactions to erotic stimuli. She is a modest girl, completely unaware of why she enjoys dancing so much.

With his inhibitions and parochial beliefs, it is no accident that he ends up at Helena Marcos’s school and meets the teacher Madame Blanc (Tilda Swinton). The school founded by Marcos in the sad reality of divided Berlin in the 70s fulfills not only the task of a place where young girls are educated only artistically. Let us remind ourselves that our communist and post-communist view of the West as a mythical Arcadia was not so wonderful for the role of women in society. It only seemed so to us from behind the Iron Curtain. Similarly, other liberation myths collapse when we look at the social legislation of some of the countries that founded the EEC in the 1950s. That is why Helena Marcos created a school that emancipates women, but only those with skills and able to use their own strength. Others, unfortunately, had to be eaten by Mother.

Former Mennonite Susie Bannion is different. She quickly finds out that dancing gives her erotic pleasure, is so addictive that she could sacrifice a lot for this experience. But what about someone’s life? And it is only in this perspective of the erotic experience of dance that Suspiria combines sex and fear, and additionally, a much more primal perspective opens up. Well, Susie is such a good student that she is introduced to Mother. Her strength is awareness, youth, fertility, the desire to experience erotic pleasure, the lust for power, i.e. all the most important features of an emancipated woman. Who but her could eliminate the old Mother? In the symbolic scene, when Susie rips open her chest as if it were a woman’s genitals, it turns out that the most primal energy that can be controlled and shaped by dance is lust, both sexual and domineering, murderous, violent. The emancipation of a woman consists in realizing that she is allowed to feel the drive as something good, unrelated to procreation. Stimulating to be everything that the surrounding male world is, in spite of religious symbols like the sexually deprived mother of Jesus who was impregnated by the Holy Spirit, in spite of pornographic pictures where chicks with huge silicone tits kneel in front of faceless men’s unbuttoned pants. Emancipation is an end in itself, it is the essence of power.

Species (1995), dir. Roger Donaldson

We chose a girl to better control her, says scientist Xavier Fitch (Ben Kingsley), explaining why he chose to create a female child for a genetic project from outer space. What an idiotic statement, as evidenced by the entire production of Roger Donaldson, a quite capable director, but rather without much experience in creating a horror atmosphere, as seen in Species. Somewhere between horror and sci-fi thriller this movie was born. Fortunately, Donaldson succeeded in one important thing. He portrayed the sexual power of women well. Or maybe otherwise. He genuinely demonstrated the power of the reproductive drive, which turns out to be as strong in aliens as it is in humans and animals. Except that aliens from other planets don’t care much about our law, which causes some difficulties in mutual contacts. Sil (Natasha Henstridge) is something of a sex symbol that has long been prevalent in our culture – a slender, tall blonde with a firm mouth, firm breasts and round buttocks. It can be argued that a woman with this appearance has a better chance of fertilization on Earth, and therefore is more attractive to men. What is important, however, for some reason the alien species chose this type of beauty for replication – implicitly, the creators decided, succumbing to social trends.

So the creators quite soberly realized that sexuality is a huge determining force. One can venture to say that there is no other drive that would dominate even the self-preservation instinct, except maybe active parenting in the sense of having children. Thus wise people decided to control it and gain wealth, power, and charisma for entire generations of their elite descendants. Man as a species is a dangerous predator, fighting for higher goals, and at the same time never completely giving up animal pleasures. There’s nothing wrong with it. You have to accept your own sexual nature. This is all our intelligence, how to call things forbidden by others differently, thereby making them acceptable, although the prohibitors probably know what it is really about anyway. There are countless safety valves in our culture. However, you have to use them quite perfidiously. Certainly not all at once. Sil, unfortunately, had too little time to learn it. Being a sexy blonde blindly pursuing conception wasn’t enough.

The questions she poses are very interesting and informative. Why am I here? Where am I from? What am I living for? Ironically, one of her victims didn’t really know how to answer them either, nor did much of the human population.

Nekromantik (1987), reż. Jörg Buttgereit

The romantic approach to necrophilia in the German style may arouse nausea, but paradoxically, rational reflection too. To what extent can a man become accustomed to death and then be fascinated by it in a sexual way? Nekromantik shows that there is no such limit. Each scene in the film with the participation of a corpse, although cheap, badly filmed and accompanied by almost tragic music, is full of details and precision at the same time. In most horror movies, we will not see such a strong connection between sex and death. Bathing in blood, having three-way sex with a decomposing corpse, sucking on eyeballs, sticking your hand inside the entrails and getting aroused as if they were genitals, smearing your naked body with the guts of a murdered cat, collecting organs from accident victims, cannibalism, and a real hit , i.e. adding a wooden member to the corpse to make it sexually efficient in the riding position. One gets the impression that the director has set himself an important task in accordance with the reductive concept of human subjectivity. He wanted to show the viewer that the whole blood-curdling halo around death results only from the fact that we know little about it, at least those who have no professional contact with it know very little. And in fact, working with the dead is similar to working in a slaughterhouse. That’s why we are afraid of blood, of the inside of the body, we consider everything that is associated with decay to be hideous. After all, there is nothing more natural in life than its end.

The end of the film, however, may surprise even the most unbridled filmaholics. The main character, Robert Schmadtke (Daktari Lorenz), nailing the figurine of Jesus to the cross, notices that it is starting to bleed. This metaphysical experience helps Robert find his way to happiness. It’s not easy for a necrophile living among the living. The only way out is to enter a new level of autoerotic experiences. Robert lies down on the bed, pulls out his penis, starts to masturbate and at the same time stabs himself in the stomach with a knife. He gets so excited that he has the greatest orgasm he’s ever had in his life, even though he’s gushing bloody cum. Thus, Robert finally overcomes his fear of death. This is perhaps how necrophilic romantics end up, although it may be a good thing that I don’t know any of them personally. As for the scene with Jesus, our fear must have originated somewhere in Western culture. Was the director pointing out that it was Jesus’ fault? A bit exaggerated, I suppose. I believe that the reasons should be sought at least several thousand years before the commercial exploitation of the activity of the Jewish teacher, among the Sumerians, Egyptians and Babylonians, where the foundations of the Christian rite, repeated millions of times today during the mass, were born.

Nekromantik has one more, slightly ecological dimension. I mean the scene of bleeding a rabbit and skinning an animal mixed with interludes of sex with a decomposing corpse. Is Jörg Buttgereit pointing out to contemporary people some kind of duplicity that they are so disgusted with blood, necrophilia, dying, and somehow eat meat without a shadow of a doubt? Maybe it’s the same with people? Every day someone kills someone, not in self-defense. Every day on TV we hear how bad it is.

On a completely different note, do you think the main character actually butchered himself while masturbating so his girlfriend would come back and have sex with his corpse? Would he be so in love with her?

Girls with Balls (2018), dir. Olivier Afonso

And finally, some Netflix flavor. Imagine a bus full of attractive volleyball players. There’s a hen smeared on the windshield in the form of bloody goo, and the riotous girls inside don’t care about it at all. One licks her friend’s leg, implying that it’s a completely different part of her body, the other, in turn, persuades another to show her pussy. They spend their time quite carefree contemplating their own sexual fasting until they arrive in a mysterious forest, where they meet a group of single and armed men who are even more thirsty for a female presence. Then the carnage is just a beginning, and all sorts of references to sex can be counted in dozens. In general, in this film the woman was given a very important role. Not only does she have to match his licentiousness with the guys from a run-of-the-mill bar in some American shithole, he must far surpass them. Hence, the language used by volleyball girls is full of juicy epithets.

There is no lack of a casual approach to blowjobs, sexual violence and there is even a golden rain, although literally mixed with mud. Girls with Balls is a kind of immoral, French exploitation cinema combined with a comedy slasher, but allowing for reflection on the needs of modern women. They crave male power, hence all the erotic suggestions in which the desire to dominate, previously brutally shown to women for centuries, is visible. Personally, the concept of such “women with balls” seems very interesting to me. I am also surprised that Girls with Balls have such a low rating on IMDB.

Back to the question, how did our growing knowledge of ourselves lead to the connection of fear with sex, and how does this relate to horror movies? One theory says that after the stage of primary relationship with one’s own sexual sphere, lined with fear of not being able to get a partner and reproduce, and thus satisfying the species duty, man realized that the sphere of drives can be controlled, especially in others. The change in the perception of social relations was mainly due to the emergence of language and the formation of abstract concepts. Man also realized that control of the drive sphere may (although it does not have to) evoke fear, which in turn strengthens control, and thus power as a result. The ancients knew this many thousands of years before our era, creating basic religious rites based on the reward and sacrifice of man, and even God himself or his semi-divine relative. Many hundreds of years later, the marriage of the Roman Church with the German Empire upheld this tendency, defining our relationship to sexuality for many centuries, with which we still have a problem. And what does all this have to do with today’s horror movies?

A lot. In horror movies, we fictitiously get used to what can scare us so much that we either die or go completely mad. And we don’t want to die, we don’t want biological life to be a moment, followed by eternal darkness. We defend ourselves against these bad prophecies in the form of folk beliefs, rising dead bodies, divine punishment, devoting ourselves to religious life, as well as creating all kinds of art, including film. So we prepare ready-made solutions, and by watching them and experiencing them again, our original fear becomes less painful. According to our genetic memory, we add sex to violence, as our ancestors have been taught for hundreds of years. We maintain the legal status quo, but with today’s knowledge of our psychology and the biological principles of the body, it is up to us to decide what we consider a motive and consequence. Sex or lack thereof is sometimes a kind of folkloric monster, pain or lack of it too. Here is our choice, often covered in film productions with death masks and sacred symbolism. By meeting them on screen, we make sure that the corpses don’t come to us in reality, no devil drags us to hell, so we can laugh in their face and go beyond our parochial culture, thus leaving our Puritan identity for a while. For a moment … with the hope that we will go straight to heaven.

Odys Korczyński

For years he has been passionate about computer games, in particular RPG productions, film, medicine, religious studies, psychoanalysis, artificial intelligence, physics, bioethics, as well as audiovisual media. He considers the story of a film to be a means and a pretext to talk about human culture in general, whose cinematography is one of many splinters.

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