America’s Favorite Serial Killer

Dexter, so hot right now.

Showtime’s hit show Dexter finally got me this summer. And i love it! It is so gory and beautiful and funny. The main character, Dexter, is a blood splatter analyst for Miami Metro (the po po). and he’s a serial killer. I know, ridiculous, but stick with me. He kills bad people, like people who get away with murder. He kills the killers. Its brilliant.

He was “born in blood” or so they say on the show. His mother was killed in front of him in a storage container and he sat in her blood for a long time. This is the spawn of all his urges to kill. Ever since he was young he just enjoyed killing things. His foster father taught him to hone his skills so he doesnt get caught and to just go after people who deserve to die.

so violent!

Did you put something in here?!

In the Film “Teeth,” Dawn (the protagonist) has vagina dentata or teeth in her vagina. Enough said. If this idea does not scare you (and yes I’m talking to all you guys out there!) then something is wrong with you. This is possibly the scariest thing I can imagine. This film follows Dawn on her exploits in high school. She is a symbol of purity in her community, but of course, she becomes infatuated with a boy. She ends up being raped which is when she realizes that something is wrong “down there.” She (I guess) bites his dick off? He ends up bleeding and screaming to death while she sits there and screams as well. Overall, it is a very traumatic moment. And so, this is where she falls from heaven. She is afraid of what is inside her at first but then she gains control of her second set of teeth and wreaks havoc on the town. By the end she is cleansing the town of dirtbags with her vagina.

Yowzers

This is where things get tricky. Is Dawn a different form of purity from before? I know she has technically had a penis in her vagina before marriage, but she is now getting rid of bad guys in the town. She kills her brother who is just a douchebag and his Rottweiler eats his you-know-what when Dawn drops it on the floor (with no hands) and is this woman a great symbolizism of feminism by saying “I don’t want to have sex with you!” by castrating a man? I think so. I think this is why this movie (hokey and cheesy as it was) sends a great message. By Dawn biting guys penises off, she is saying “No, I do not want that inside me.” But she does it with her words first, then when the guy persists; she gets a little too rough. This is such an empowerment to the women. I know that when I was done watching this movie I didn’t want to go anywhere near sex for a long time. This says, “You better listen to what I’m going to say to you or bad things will happen.” I love it. And even though these things aren’t real, respect what a woman has to say. It’s worth as much as yours.



And they just wanted some gas….:(

“The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” is a film about a family of killers who kill people and eat them. This film follows a group of friends who travel down to Texas. They end up going into an abandoned house and hang out there for a while. The first couple to get killed go up to a house because they hear a generator running and they need gas for their van. They knock on the door, but no one answers. So the guy goes into the house and starts poking around. He encounters Leatherface, and is bludgeoned to death and taken into a back room. After a while his girlfriend enters the house looking for him and also runs into Leatherface, who hangs her up on a meat hook while he is cutting up her boyfriend with a chainsaw. Eventually, through a tale of twisted bloody events, Leatherface ends up chasing one final girl.

This theme of the final girl is what makes this film so interesting. She has almost no qualifications to be the sole-survivor of this horrid event. She is not that fast, she isn’t that smart (or at least it is not apparent in this film), and she just screams really loud. And she screams A LOT! There is probably about five solid minutes of her screaming. But this is because she is literally the only one left. This notion of the final girl is that the sole survivor of the killings is a woman. The guys always get killed because they have to be all macho and protect everyone and the other girls just get preyed on by the killer. What makes this one girl in particular so special? Is she better than all these other people? Not really. She is just attractive. That is her one saving grace. She is the blonde girl who the director just wants to keep on screen for as long as possible. This will draw in more of the audience. If the only survivor was a fat gamer guy, no one would care and they would not be as enthralled with the film. The final girl is a creation solely to sell tickets and make money. More people will go to a movie with a hot chick in the cast. In a horror film, no one wants to see the guy make it out. They always have the best deaths! They are the ones who get ripped apart onscreen. The women are just killed while they are screaming their heads off. The final girl is not a plus for feminism. She is not the only one left because she is the most capable but because she is the prettiest. Her beauty is her sole defense against the monsters.

It rubs the lotion on it’s skin

“The Silence of The Lambs” is film about a serial killer who skins women and makes a suit out of their skin. He is clearly not comfortable in his OWN skin so he wants to change it. He takes these women and literally cuts the skin off them and sews it together. He “suffers a kind of gender dysphoria that he thinks can be solved by covering himself in female skin… and he murders simply to gather the necessary fabric.”[i] Bill does not identify with any gender and this is why he is making a woman-suit and not trying to get a sex change. He is not woman, and he is not man. Our society would classify him as a man, but the point is that HE does not associate with that. “Buffalo Bill hates identity, he is simply at odds with any identity whatsoever; no body, no gender will do and so he has to sit at home with his skins and fashion a completely new one.”[ii] Bill does not feel that by wearing this woman suit he will somehow transform into a woman, he knows that he will still be a guy in a skin suit, but that places him in an awkward position, “Buffalo Bill symbolizes the problem of a kind of skin dis-ease.”[iii] He is not comfortable in his own skin.

Skin can be seen as the covering. What everyone else see’s, “[it] becomes a metaphor for surface, for the external; it is the place of pleasure and the site of pain; it is the thin sheet that masks bloody horror. But skin is also the movie screen, the destination of the gaze, the place that glows in the dark, the violated site of visual pleasure.”[iv] In this Halberstam, is saying that skin is what people view, and when watching a movie, the horror is projected onto a skin that you cannot look away from. This is like Bill in his inability to see his own skin a place where he wants to be. When Bill skins the girls he is not doing it because he gets pleasure from killing them, he does it only to attain the necessary parts to make his suit. We see this as a sick mutilation by a psycho, but in Bill’s mind he is just trying to climb into a skin where he can feel comfortable. This is like the sexual reassignment surgery that is preformed now a days. People can change their gender at whim, but it requires a cutting of the skin and playing around with the shape. This is similar to what Bill does, but he uses other people’s skin to do it. He doesn’t want to be changed, physically, but he wants to switch from gender to gender at any point he wishes. This is like a transgender person who feels that they are the opposite from what society has deemed them. Bill is not a transgender, but he is seeking to have no gender, a truly scary thing in our views.

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[i] Halberstam, Judith. “Skinflick.” Skin Shows. Durham: Duke University Press, 1995. 164-165.

[ii] Ibid.

[iii] Ibid.

[iv] Ibid.

Admittedly a few birds did act strange, but that’s no reason to…

“The Birds,” directed by Alfred Hitchcock, is a film where all the birds in Bodega Bay go apeshit when this woman, Melanie Daniels, arrives. She met a guy named Mitch in a pet store and became infatuated with him. She drives out to Bodega Bay to deliver two love birds to Mitch’s younger sister. Melanie is a very driven woman. She’ll do what she wants, when she wants. It is her overt sexuality that Hitchcock uses to warn people about a woman’s place in the world. The birds also serve to illustrate this point. The caged loved birds are the only birds that do not attack in the film. They represent how human relationships should be. They cause no trouble because they are “normal.” But the wild birds, the ones that attack, are representative of “both the aggressivity of woman and her punishment.”[i] When Melanie goes to Bodega Bay she is chasing after a man. This is not a woman’s role in society. She is supposed to be the one that is chased after. This stepping out of the constructed social roles of a woman is mirrored by the birds attacking. At first it is just one gull that attacks Melanie, but the longer she stays in Bodega Bay trying to win the object of her affection (Mitch), the more and more birds come in each attack. It’s almost as if (if you believe in God) God is sending a pretty clear message to these people that that is not the way things are done in his world, and he is sending birds in to prove his point. Since these birds represent the backlash to this strong woman who is willing to go after what she wants, we see this femininity as “both monster and victim.”[ii] Her actions are deemed monstrous, and yet she is attacked by the birds.

The final scene of the birds is the Mitch’s family and Melanie creeping cautiously to their car to leave town. We see that there house is covered with birds. ABSOLUTELY COVERED! They make it to the car and start to drive away and this is the last we see of them, “the car…holds the oedipalized family who must exit torn and tattered and leave the family home to its new occupants.”[iii] This can be seen as the new ways of women chasing what they want triumphing over the tried and true family values. But it can also be seen as a non-acceptance of those ways. The birds win and force the family to retreat, but this doesn’t say much for women’s demeanor. All the women get chased out of house and home. This could be seen as a call to action, saying that women should go out and find what they want and hold on to it. This is a very strong message to women and men. The men are no longer the only ones who have to chase after the ones they want to be with.

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[i] Halberstam, Judith. “Reading Counterclockwise.” Skin Shows. Durham: Duke University press. 130-131.

[ii] Ibid.

[iii] Ibid.

Sink your teeth into this…

Why do vampires scare us? Is that they are undead creatures who suck your blood? That might have something to do with it, but the main reason they scare us is because they penetrate us in foreign ways. They draw people in with their irresistible powers then sink their teeth into us. It is not the normal form of sexual penetration (that in penis into vagina). It is a combination of the foreign and frightening. To most of us the normal form of penetration is that which is used for procreation. This is the same with vampires. They reproduce by penetrating us in foreign, not really understood, ways. In Dracula, starring Bella Lugosi, Count Dracula lures girls in with his “magical” powers then bends them to his whim. He infects people which, in turn leads to more vampires. This foreign penetration is what scares the people that he interacts with.  Van Helsing, who is Dutch, is the only one who knows and understands these foreign forms of penetration and provides his knowledge to the others.

According to Van Helsing, the only way to kill a vampire, besides sunlight, is to penetrate them with a wooden stake to the heart. It is interesting how to create and kill a vampire involves penetration. It is this not quite understood method of penetration that leads to the fright factor of vampires. It is only a certain form of penetration that will kill the vampire as well. Bullets don’t work. Knives don’t work. It has to be a wooden stake through the heart.  Only a foreigner knows how to rid the English of the terror that is rearing its ugly head.  Not only do Dracula’s teeth penetrate you, but his vampirism does as well. Once you are bitten you are either dead or a vampire. This leads the new vampire on a quest for penetration. They need to feed; they need to drink blood, so they need to penetrate. And we’re not talking about those “twilight” douche bags either. They need to penetrate humans. They get pleasure from this. But also in return, when killing the vampires, the humans “[take] a certain sexual delight in staking her body, decapitating her, and stuffing her mouth with garlic.”[i]

Penetration is the over-arching theme of Dracula. The first form we see in the film is when the Englishman enters the small town near castle Dracula. He enters in a small coach into a small gated doorway. This shows how terrified the townspeople are of foreign penetration into their lives.  Also when we first see the vampires, they emerge from their coffins, hand first. We see the coffin open, and a pale hand emerges slowly. This is frightening because it is as if the vampires are being birthed into our worlds but not in the human sense of birth. They do not emerge head first which, as we all know, is the normal way birth happens.

There are lots of scenes in the film where people are lead through small dank and dark hallways which blatantly symbolize the vagina. It is as if the characters are frightened to enter this dark unknown place. Let’s be serious, to males, the vagina is a scary place. We barely know anything about it. And every time a man enters one without protection, they run the risk of either creating life or being killed. As long as the man has protection the whole situation becomes less terrifying. The same goes for vampires. Van Helsing knows that if he confronts Dracula with a cross and some “wolf’s bane”, a plant used to ward off vampires, that he should come out of the ordeal unscathed. These act as a condom of sorts. They are not 100% guaranteed to work, but your chances of survival are much higher with them. They protect you from the bad things that can happen, but sometimes things don’t go as planned. This same thing can happen when dealing with vampires. Renfield is given a cross when he enters Castle Dracula, but he still is powerless against Dracula. Renfield is turned into vampire with ease and is the first victim we see.

So Dracula is just one big warning about penetration. If done correctly, people will be safe, but if you tangle with the foreign and unknown, then you are likely to end up only able to go out at night and sleep the day away (kind of like college students). When penetration is done the “right” way it is beautiful and creates life. But if there is penetration with a foreign person, then things go downhill quick. So if I learned anything from Dracula, it’s that I should stay away from penetration with a stranger and become a complete xenophobe.

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[i] Halberstam, Judith. “Technologies of Monstrosity: Bram Stoker’s Dracula” Skin Shows. Durham: Duke University Press, 1995.