Sexuality in Horror and Halloween

As a newcomer to North America I’m still learning about Halloween culture. I spent most of my life in Australia, where the holiday is rarely observed. You might get a single pair of kids dressed up knocking on your door expecting sweet food, and you’ll have to run around the kitchen searching cupboards and drawers for something they might enjoy. Nuts? A block of cheese? An apple? It is certainly not something that most people prepare for. So my understanding of it was founded entirely on film and television shipped over from the States. I understood it to be a time where people dress up with the apparent goal of frightening others. Parents frighten children. Children frighten parents. Older siblings frighten younger siblings. Infants don’t know what’s going on. If children come to your door and curse you with “trick or treat” they’re basically holding the upkeep of your home exterior to ransom. Give us candy or the house gets it, they say, a carton of eggs and roll of toilet paper at the ready.

Thankfully, by the time I came to North America, people have grown up enough not to be such vandalising dicks any more. However I still experienced my own Mean Girls moment when confronted with just how sexual the whole event is. Being actually frightening is almost shameful and it’s unusual for a girl not to dress as “sexy whatever”. I understand that adults want to distance themselves from the childishness that they engaged in as children. And I understand that Seattle is, for whatever reason, a pretty prudish place and Halloween presents a once a year opportunity for girls to dress as slutty as they want without fear of social prejudice.

For me, Halloween is supposed to be, and is for young kids, a time for being spooky. A time for fear. Now I’m going to talk about movies.

We’re all aware of the common trope in slasher films of hypsersexualisation of women. There’s excessive nudity to the point of blatant sexist objectification. You could argue that the primary audience of these films is adolescent males and for that reason the filmmakers add tits to cater to that demographic, which may be true in some cases. However, there’s also the observation that in many slasher films the sexually promiscuous are usually the first to die, presumably as some kind of punishment. This makes sense in films and stories released in a time when sexual promiscuity is heavily scorned by society but I’d like to think that the liberal sensibilities of modern filmmakers have matured to a point where we don’t need to punish people for being sluts. I mean, having a monster whose motivations are unexplained - who is basically acting as a piece of hazardous environment rather than a character, like a wild animal - mindlessly attack whoever is the first to take their clothes off sounds a lot like the absurd rape-victim-blaming attitudes held by folks who apparently never left the dark ages. I’d like to stay away from that discussion because I believe it’s already been done, and I just hope that if horror genre continues to kill sluts first it will do so for reasons other than attempting to curtail society to dress more conservatively and have less sex.

Note that above I’m talking about slasher films. The type of film that Cabin In The Woods sends up. Halloween, Nightmare on Elm Street, Scream, etc. I don’t strictly consider these films horror, they are a distinct genre or a subgenre of that. Actual, scary horror films sometimes also use sexuality though usually to enhance the discomforting effect. Rather than dismissing sexuality in horror as simply tacked on objectification, or some kind of social engineering I believe that sexual themes absolutely enhance the horrific experience. It’s (unfortunately) normal in society for humans to be uncomfortable with some aspects of their own sexuality and this discomfort can be exploited by crafty storytellers. Alien was loaded with imagery and themes suggesting bodily invasion, rape, and slimy penises, and this compounded to unsettle male and female viewers alike. I think part of the reason it was so effective was that it wasn't blatant, but just suggested. The idea of an enemy binding itself to your face, smothering you, shoving its appendage down your throat and into your belly, depositing a seed which then grows within you against your will, was allowed to slither about beneath the surface of our consciousness while we watched some space-miners get killed.

I’m also reminded of Hellraiser which was more explicitly about sexuality, specifically BDSM. For many, restraint or even pain during sex is a very alien idea. The acts themselves may even contain an element of fear. Bondage is something that necessarily requires a certain level of trust to be enjoyed, but when that trust is absent it becomes threatening and frightening - perhaps still sexy to some but scary nevertheless.

This is why, for my future Halloween costumes, I will be incorporating themes of bondage and restraint and those other aspects of sexuality that most people view as uncomfortable, combining the almost requisite sluttiness with discomfort and fear.