INTRODUCTION

            Hello, and welcome to The Monster & The Child, where childhood studies and monster studies collide! I am Dr. Kathleen Kellett, and today we are talking about one of my very favorite topics: the monstrous teen girl. We’ll be discussing Carrie, both the 1974 novel and the 1976 film, as well as Jennifer’s Body from 2009. What do we culturally imagine is so dangerous about teenage girls – and what are we supposed to do about it?

            Before we jump into those questions, just a reminder that enrollment for my educational programming is live on themonsterandthechild.com! If you are or know a teenager who loves monster stories, consider the benefits of Youth Monsterology, my five-month program of educational mentorship and peer literary discussion. Participants will form a community of readers and learners who will then use the themes of the book club portion of the program to build their own independent academic, creative, and/or activist project, with close one-on-one mentorship through the whole process from your humble monster and childhood studies scholar. I’m trying to get the first program of that started at the end of August, so please check out the link in the description if any of that sounds interesting to you! I also have adult and teen monthly Monster Book Clubs slated to start next month. All of these programs come with ongoing access to a private Discord server where you can share your thoughts at any time, and then meetings where you not only get to talk about the monster stories, but you also get some scholarly context from me. So again, please head on over to themonsterandthechild.com/programs, which you can find linked in the description, to check those out.

            All right, so back to our monstrous teen girls. There are many examples throughout the horror genre (and related genres) of this archetype, so thank you to my patrons on Patreon for helping me choose which ones to talk about. These two stories were the winners of the poll on this topic, and hat worked out really well, because they go together perfectly – and purposefully, as Jennifer’s Body makes many explicit references to Carrie. Both deal with the perils of a boundary-less adolescent female body, the rage of a girl who has been wronged, girl-on-girl violence, and of course, blood. But Carrie and Jennifer are also very different kinds of monsters in other ways, such as how their supernatural violence manifests and who becomes their victims. Neither story can be cleanly read as either “feminist” or “anti-feminist.” They are, like the monsters they narrate, super messy.

            Carrie in particular but also Jennifer’s Body have engendered plenty of scholarly analysis over the years, often within the broader context of exploring the figure of the woman in horror. I will be drawing on a selection of this scholarship while also zeroing in on how the characters’ young age raises issues of not just the horror of womanhood but the horror of girlhood – and, by extension, of adolescence and childhood in general, all big, messy categories in their own right. To that end, we will begin our analysis with – what else? – puberty.

PLUG IT UP: EMBODIED MONSTROSITY

            If you know literally anything about Carrie, you know that she winds up covered in blood. If you know only two things about Carrie, you probably know that she begins the story that way, too. The inciting incident takes place in a high school locker room, where the girls must all shower together out in the open in front of each other after gym class. A moment of gratitude that my high school did not do this. Carrie White, the resident outcast, is in the shower when she gets her belated first period at age 16.

            The lead-up to this scene differs emotionally from the original novel to the film. In both, the majority of the high school girls are portrayed titillatingly. In the film, they laugh and move around each other playfully in a male-gaze-y kind of way, like your classic girls pillow fighting at a slumber party image, but in this case literally completely naked. This is 100% true to the book, which describes these same girls stretching and writhing. And in both, Carrie is the odd one out, but she is having a different sort of time in each version. In the novel, she just hates this. She wishes she were at a high school with individual shower stalls with doors, and she’s described as a “frog among swans.” She is a little fat and has body acne, and gym is a particularly unpleasant part of her day, because the other girls berate her for being bad at all the sports.

            In the film, Carrie is off on her own, as well, but she is lost in her own world of enjoying her body. She showers sensually, experiencing physical pleasure that to her, as we’ll later learn, is probably not conceptually related to sex, but to the audience it definitely is. Carrie is played (excellently) by Sissy Spacek, who clearly diverges from the character as she is described in the book. While her un-made-up face differs from the teen-model features of her peers – Carrie is striking but a little weird-looking – she is also willowy and swan-like in her own right. No frogs here.

            The novel and film portrayals converge, however, when Carrie gets her period and completely freaks out. She is justified in this reaction, because she does not know what’s happening. Her mother – who we’ll get into in a bit – has withheld knowledge of menstruation from her. Therefore, Carrie comes to the logical conclusion that she’s dying and goes into hysterics – and I use that word deliberately here – as she screams and begs for help. Her failure to deal with – that is, conceal – her period is a failure of adolescent girlhood, as this is time in her life is supposed to be the training ground for the socially acceptable roles of womanhood. At no point in the history of womanhood as a concept has it been acceptable to just freely reveal the workings of your body. The delight comes from the fact that this failure, to the other girls, gives them permission to be cruel. They pelt her with pads and tampons, chanting “plug it up!” Carrie has to be rescued – albeit violently, with a slap for her hysteria, her unruly womb-behaviors – by the gym teacher, who then is horrified to realize that she has to tell this sixteen-year-old what a period is.

            In her seminal text The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis, Barbara Creed elaborates on Julia Kristeva’s discussion of the abjection of menstrual blood. As a refresher, since it’s been a little while since I’ve brought Kristeva into things, the abject refers to that which threatens the stability of the subject, so it must be separated and discarded – but that does not take place easily. It’s not an object, which can be easily defined in opposition to the subject. Like, I am not this chair, which is separate from me and not me and does not have a point of view like me and has easily defined parameters in terms of how it relates to me: i.e., I sit on it. That’s an object. The abject is something that has a much more intimate relationship to the self, whether it is something like violent urges – in order to have a stable, socially acceptable subject position, you’re not supposed to have those, but where else do they originate if not from within? – or something like death, the ultimate threat to subjectivity, but also the inevitable result of having/being a body. And we see that same too-close relationship with bodily fluids, which, when externalized, very much shatter the illusion of stability. It’s hard to perceive yourself as a closed, rational system if you’re leaking. Creed points out that menstrual “defilement” specifically is a form of abjection that “threatens [identity] from within” (12). It’s coming out of you: you’re the source of this abjection, and if that’s true, then how can you not be abject yourself?

            Even in cultures that have a less deeply messed up relationship with menstruation than the Western world does, the first period is typically a destruction of an old identity and the birth of a new one. Namely, it is the end of childhood, or at least the first phase of childhood. And since it literally biologically signifies the acquisition of a new power – reproduction – it tends to metaphorically signify a social position of greater power, as well, for good or for ill. As Brandy Schillace and Andrea Wood say in their introduction to the edited collection Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity: The Birth of the Monster in Literature, Film, and Media, “With the ‘birth’ of the monster comes a particular anxiety about its self-replication, generally through perceived unnatural means. … Not surprisingly, the female reproductive body and the fertile female mind often become the loci for much of this anxiety” (2). The uterus can make something out of seemingly nothing. How much more powerful must the mind of a person with a uterus be if they truly understand that power – if they could use it on purpose? What monsters could they create if they shed all of their childhood innocence and ignorance about their bodies? Menstruation is the turning point where the body reveals its power to the child, and then what happens next is anyone’s guess.

In Carrie, this metaphorical fear is made literal, as the milestone of menstruation marks the moment Carrie comes into her power of telekinesis. Interestingly, in the novel, Carrie has had episodes – including a very powerful episode – of telekinesis as a small child, the memories of which had become repressed but which she begins to remember as her powers come back to her after her first period. Menstruation allows her to rediscover and reclaim an agency that was lost as her fanatically religious mother squashed her down into a very specific vision of pure girlhood. Telekinesis is also more explicitly medicalized in the book, as the “Carrie White case” is revealed through in-world documents like academic texts to have rocked the scientific community by proving the existence of a telekinetic gene that is expressed only in (implied cis) women. Even my very rudimentary biological knowledge rejected King’s fake science here as egregiously fake – and I say that as someone who’s created plenty of fake science of my own, and you can check out my manuscript Our Sharp Forsaken Teeth for that – but the point is that Carrie’s power is physical, embodied, and tied inextricably to her sex. When she uses it, her heart rate soars and her body temperature plummets – an interesting detail when you consider that for centuries in the West, male bodies were presumed to be hotter and therefore more vital than female ones.

            The late onset of Carrie’s period points to the extreme tension between Carrie’s childhood and “maturing” identities. As we so often talk about around here, childhood is conceptually inextricable from innocence in modern Western society, as it has been for the last three or so centuries. But that innocence has many, many conditions. Carrie, up until now, has largely been meeting them. She is completely virginal, in no small part due to her upbringing that associates anything remotely sexual as the highest sin. She is meek and unassuming (until, of course, she really isn’t), and she has not been polluted by corrupting knowledge, as she is ignorant of her own body. Even her pleasure in the shower scene from the film is presented as innocent in a way, as it takes place without her own understanding that what she may be feeling could be sexual. She is all body, no insight. But that’s also part of what makes her so repulsive to her peers: she’s too old now to be so innocent, too old to just be starting puberty. It’s one of the paradoxes of childhood innocence: as much as the adult world frets about preserving it, it becomes perceived as perverse if it persists too long.

            Now, in Jennifer’s Body, we get an extremely different kind of teenage girl. Jennifer’s monstrosity revolves entirely around her lack of innocence from before the story even begins. She is played by Megan Fox, and as such, is presented as the pinnacle of aspirational female beauty standards. And, crucially, Jennifer knows it. She strongly believes that she can use her body to get what she wants. While Carrie has been taught to perceive breasts as “dirtypillows,” Jennifer refers to them as “smart bombs”: “you point them in the right direction and shit gets real.” (It’s significant to note that, despite the differences in framing, both metaphors still present this secondary sex characteristic as something destructive or degrading.) Jennifer believes that, as a sexually attractive girl, she has the most power in any situation, but she is soon proved wrong.

            The indie band Low Shoulder – and props to the film for capturing a very specific type of late aughts insufferable musician with the frontman Nikolai – has come to the town of Devil’s Kettle to do a Satanic ritual to ensure their success in the competitive music industry. For this ritual, they need to sacrifice a virgin. The lead singer contemptuously glosses over the stereotypically more likely candidate of the mousy Needy, Jennifer’s best friend – who is played by the stunningly beautiful Amanda Seyfried in the least flattering glasses you ever did see, as a deliberate meta commentary on the ridiculousness of the Hollywood “ugly ducklings” in films like this. This film is overall a parodic satire, calling deliberate attention to horror and teen tropes in storytelling. This is why the Nikolai zeroes in on Jennifer, even though his bandmates warn that she might not be a virgin. He insists that a small-town girl like her looks the part of the temptress but probably has no real experience. Needy, in an unfortunately timed attempt to defend her friend’s honor, lies that Jennifer is, in fact, a virgin. But when Jennifer hears that the band is only interested in her as a virgin, she is offended, protesting to Needy that she’s not even a “backdoor virgin,” even though that particular act was painful. This is delivered as a darkly raunchy joke, as Jennifer talks about sitting on a bag of frozen peas the next day, but still, sex and pain are associated in Jennifer’s body – the real thing, not the title – even when she believes she is empowered by the sex that she has.

            The bar venue where the band is playing catches fire, implied to be orchestrated by the band as part of their plot, and they are able to coerce a dazed Jennifer into their van in the aftermath, despite Needy’s pleading for her not to go. Jennifer rebuffs her friend’s concern, but then as she becomes more aware in the van, she realizes that she’s in danger. The band members again call her virginity into question, and she claims that she is a virgin, thinking that that “innocence” would be a turn-off to would-be rapists: she tells them that they should find someone more experienced, because she “doesn’t know how” to have sex. Though Jennifer typically has pride in how womanly she is, she attempts to seek refuge in the trappings of sexually innocent girlhood – childhood – because she hopes that that might be a safer identity for her to inhabit.

            It is not. The band members need a virgin for their ritual, and since they believe that is what she is, they stab her to death in the woods. Here would be a good point to just mention that “virgin” is treated as like a metaphysically real category for the plot purposes of this film, but it is an extremely constructed category that we should always interrogate in real life, but anyway, since Jennifer is not this category, she experiences “demonic transference,” where the entity she was supposed to be sacrificed to inhabits and reanimates her body instead. Thus Jennifer is transformed into a succubus, a seductive demon who literally eats men – or, in her case, teenage boys – alive.

            In her book Genre, Authorship and Contemporary Women Filmmakers, Katarzyna Paszkiewicz dedicates an entire chapter to Jennifer’s Body. She discusses the myriad references to female monsters – and mediated girlhood – packed into this film. For example, in the first of Jennifer’s kills that we witness, she takes a football player, Jonas, into the woods. They begin to make out, but then Jonas is startled when he realizes that a bunch of woodland creatures have gathered to watch them. Jennifer says, “They’re waiting.” Paszkiewicz points out that command over animals is an age-old witch trope, but that the main reference brought to mind here is that of a Disney princess communing with nature. This association is meant to be ironic and humorous, because we know that Jennifer is no innocent little girl. Jennifer proceeds to devour the football player, and we get a look at her demonic form, with widely gaping jaws filled with needle-sharp teeth. So you know what we gotta talk about now: vagina dentata. This is the ultimate in monstrous-feminine, in Barbara Creed’s parlance, and is referenced on the cover of her book. The sexual and reproductive organ is transformed into a site of horror and danger and violence – and I think a lot of the implied horror comes from the concept of a woman who knows how to wield her body like a weapon. It’s not just that the danger is there, it’s that the woman chooses to use it. It is the opposite of innocence in every sense: not just guilt in doing violence, but knowledge and experience – the dispelling of ignorance about one’s own female body. Even the person who inhabits that body is not meant to intimately know it, as that is a source of corruption.

            Carrie’s mother would certainly agree with that last statement. Margaret White is a religious fanatic who purposely did not tell Carrie about menstruation because of her belief that, if Carrie remained pure and sinless, she’d never even get a period. When Carrie wails, “Why didn’t you tell me?” to her mother after her traumatic shower experience, Margaret rants and raves about the sin of Eve, who incurred the Curse of Blood. She forces Carrie into a coffin-like prayer closet to repent of her “sin.” More of Margaret’s greatest hits include the belief that breasts would not develop if a girl remained sinless, so literally puberty is evidence of evil to her. But that doesn’t mean that girlhood is any safer, as far as she’s concerned. In the novel, when Carrie was three years old, she observed a neighbor girl, then a teenager, sunbathing in a bikini. The little Carrie was fascinated by the neighbor’s body, and expressed that she wished she had breasts like her. When the neighbor, charmed by that kind of off-kilter comment from a toddler assures her that she will one day, Carrie contradicts her, saying that Momma told her she’ll never get dirtypillows as long as she’s good. The neighbor points out that Margaret also has breasts, and Carrie shamefully explains that that’s from when Momma was sinful in making Carrie. This the neighbor finds upsetting, but it pales in comparison to Margaret’s reaction when she discovers Carrie. Namely, she completely loses it, and the neighbor is terrified for Carrie when the crazed mother pulls her inside the house. And that is when the ice begins to fall in the middle of summer, and then furniture crashes through the windows from the inside out, and then stones plummet from a clear sky onto the house: all extensions of Carrie’s tiny telekinetic child body as she tries to protect herself from her mother’s attempt to carve out her eyes for their sinfulness. This is the last time Carrie is telekinetic before her period. Margaret tries to pretend it never happened, and Carrie, in the physically traumatic aftermath, loses the memory until she is older and can begin to understand the capabilities of her body for herself.

            So Margaret thinks that knowledge, however childlike, of female bodies is automatically a source of monstrosity. The presentation of Carrie’s powers does not really contradict that, however sympathetically Carrie herself is portrayed. Her body is monstrously powerful, and she comes into that power as her reproductive – and therefore technically sexual – power turns on, as well. Similarly, Jennifer’s literal body is monstrous, made more so by Jennifer’s knowledge of how to use it to get what she wants, a power that predated her demonic transference as she cultivated her own teenage sexuality. Though Jennifer is never seen literally menstruating, the specter of menstruation is repeatedly invoked – as are just vaginas in general. Jennifer and Needy’s playful nicknames for each other are Vagisil and Monistat, two yeast infection medications. They tease each other by identifying with disordered vaginas. I feel like I’m really testing what YouTube’s going to let me get away with here. But yeah, I mean, that’s an important precursor to Jennifer’s vagina dentata-esque monstrous mouth: that part of the body, specifically that part of the body with something wrong with it, is already all over this character’s identity. And it’s the knowledge of that, the language and the context, that makes the character “not innocent” as much as the body itself.

            Barbara Creed writes of the monstrous-feminine that, “As with all other stereotypes of the feminine, from virgin to whore, she is defined in terms of her sexuality” (3). Clearly and textually true of both Carrie and Jennifer, who exist on opposite ends of that social spectrum. Creed specifically identifies Carrie as an archetypal witch, though interestingly, in the text itself, Margaret is the only one to use that term about her, due to her religious convictions that “thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.” But the description is pretty apt, despite the novel’s medicalized treatment of telekinesis: Carrie’s power is both embodied in her femaleness but also requires active knowledge and training. Carrie learns to “flex” her mind – and that’s the verb that’s consistently used in the book, which like, is not not sexual. Jennifer, meanwhile, is a succubus, but she has witch-like powers, such as levitation and the aforementioned affinity with animals: wild nature. Paszkiewicz also notes that Jennifer is visually likened to snakes and vampires, since we’re just running the gamut of orifices that also penetrate. Both girls – and for Carrie, especially her book iteration – know what they are doing with their bodies when they act monstrously. But both of them also are physically sullied with the blood that is the symbol of their monstrosity.

            Like I said earlier, the most iconic image of Carrie is her in her prom dress covered with pigs’ blood. In the next section, we’re going to dive deeper into the adolescent relationships in these stories, but for context if you’re unfamiliar, this happens because the girls who bullied Carrie in the locker room were punished for their actions. The ringleader, Chris, winds up banned from the prom, so covering Carrie with blood is her very on-the-nose revenge. Creed writes, “Blood takes various forms in the film: menstrual blood, pig’s blood, birth blood, the blood of sin and the blood of death” (78). Margaret is portrayed as a dangerous lunatic for her ravings against menstruation, but the horrors of blood and its immediate aftermath of Carrie’s telekinetic rampage that kills, in the movie, most of the school, and in the book, a good portion of the entire town – well, in a way, Margaret wasn’t really wrong, textually, was she? Blood, specifically menstruation-associated blood, is the gateway to death in this story.

            Riffing directly off of Carrie, Jennifer’s Body also stages a conflict in sullied prom dresses, though, due to her genre savviness, Jennifer uses the dance itself as a red herring. She lures Needy’s boyfriend Chip to an abandoned pool, choked with dirty vegetation and debris, and attacks him in the dirty water in her ironically white dress. Needy arrives, dressed in pink (like movie Carrie, though in a brighter shade), and the two girls get into a bloody and bilious battle. (Again, we’ll be talking more about their relationship in just a minute.) The mortally wounded Chip impales – so, penetrates – Jennifer with a pool skimmer, and Jennifer, as she staggers from the wound, asks Needy if she has a tampon, because she thought Needy seemed like she was “plugging.” So, again, we’re directly invoking Carrie here, pointedly associating blood and violence with menstruation in a way that calls attention to these stereotypes. Does it subvert these stereotypes? Your mileage may vary, and we’ll talk about that more in a little bit, too. Needy then taunts Jennifer that she is no longer socially relevant and she has to take laxatives to remain skinny, invoking the abjection of waste and associating it with the sexualized female body. Then, before she flees, Jennifer vomits black bile over Needy and Chip, which Paszkiewicz points out invokes another classic adolescent female monster, Regan from The Exorcist. Needy is left in a very Carrie-like state, the markers of pink girlish femininity utterly sodden and ruined with womanly bodily fluids.

            Though Carrie and Jennifer are both destroyed at the ends of their respective stories, their monstrosity does not die with them. The film Carrie has its famous coda where, in a dream that may not be totally a dream, Carrie’s hand shoots out of the grave to seize the arm of her surviving classmate, Sue Snell. (More on Sue soon, too.) In the novel, however, the academic discussions of the Carrie White case repeatedly warn that it’s only a matter of time before another telekinetic girl reaches the heights of Carrie’s power. The very last “document” is a letter from an Appalachian mother, riddled with misspellings in an unnecessary little classist touch, talking about her toddler daughter making objects float around her. The implication is that this horrifying power could lurk in any girl child, waiting to be unleashed by her growing self-knowledge as she hurtles towards adolescence. Jennifer, meanwhile, literally transfers some of her demonic power to Needy via a vampire-like bite before she dies. Needy sheds her meek, awkward teen persona and becomes a monstrous woman in her own right, capable of embodied magic and violence. The bleeding womb, the toothed vagina, the fertile teenage mind cannot be stopped from reproducing – and no one can stop the ravages of time that turn these girls from innocent children to monsters.

            So what happens when all these teenagers come together? If one teen girl body is scary, what about a whole pack of them? How do they destroy each other? Both of these stories have a whole lot to say about that, too.

HIGH SCHOOL EVIL: THE SOCIAL WORLD OF TEEN GIRL MONSTERS    

            Carrie is infamous for its portrayal of vicious teen girl bullying, while Jennifer’s Body is famed for its toxic central friendship with Jennifer as the sexual alpha. Neither of those impressions are inaccurate, but also both stories are more complicated in their portrayals of teen girls’ social worlds. As a case in point, we can look at Carrie’s Sue Snell.

            Sue, a moderately popular but not superstar kind of teen, goes along with the cruel harassment of Carrie in the locker room. In the novel, she, too, is disgusted by both Carrie’s blood and her ignorance. But at the same time, she knows that what they’re doing is incredibly wrong, and she is horrified at herself for participating. In the aftermath, she asks her boyfriend Tommy to ask Carrie to the dance, as a roundabout sort of penance. This pity date, from an adult standpoint, is not a great idea, telekinesis notwithstanding, and in the book, in excerpts from her later memoir, Sue fully acknowledges this. She explains that she was a teenager trying to do the right thing without really knowing what the right thing would be in this situation, while also honestly trying to make herself feel better about going against her own morals so badly. She knows even at the time that there’s something selfish in her sacrifice, but it isn’t mean-spirited. Tommy, meanwhile, also doesn’t think this is a good idea, but he goes along with it because he genuinely loves Sue and wants to make her happy. He has no ill will towards Carrie – he even comes to regard her with a sort of fond pity, which, again, sure, is not what anyone actually wants people to feel towards them, but it’s better than disgust and cruelty. Tommy is fully just a pretty nice person.

            This being Stephen King, however, the cruel kids are next level. Chris Hargenson is the classic popular girl bully ringleader who uses her attractiveness and the status of her lawyer father to get her way, which is why she’s so furious when she can’t weasel her way out of punishment for the locker room assault on Carrie. Brief side note into names here: Chris is obviously an androgynous nickname, and in a narrative that’s so heavily about gender and sex, I think that’s worth pointing out – especially since she shares that name with another 70s horror character, Chris MacNeil, the possessed Regan’s mother in The Exorcist. That Chris isn’t a cruel or bad person, but her unfeminine working single mom ways are also relevant to the gendered themes of that book and film. In Carrie, despite using the trappings of femininity (especially sexually) to her advantage, this Chris is also given a more masculine association through her name to go along with her aggressive ways. Meanwhile, Carrie’s full name is Carietta, which is ultra-feminine and woefully old-fashioned and also just kind of weird, which also signifies a lot about her character.

            Chris’s cruelty is foregrounded in the film, but in the novel, she ultimately is less messed up than the boy she’s sleeping with and strings along for her pigs’ blood plan, Billy Nolan. He’s a bad boy from the wrong side of the tracks, and Chris likes the power that associating with him grants her to a) make people in her own social level mad and b) to boss around the “lower” Billy. But Billy gets way too into the pigs’ blood idea, and he thinks and later outright says to Chris that he’d dump the blood on any girl, including her. He gets an, again, not not sexual thrill from his misogyny.

            The rest of the teen characters exist on a spectrum of morality. Chris has plenty of followers, and Sue is the only one shown to regret the harassment in the locker room. On the other hand, that wasn’t the whole school, and at the prom, several other students are polite or even actually nice to Carrie – though that doesn’t excuse the fact that they were all complacent about Carrie’s habitual mistreatment for years. Chris is able to influence enough people to vote for Tommy and Carrie as king and queen so she can get them into position, and clearly plenty of peers went along with that. When the pigs’ blood rains down, some students laugh, and others react with shock – and, in the book, it is clear that most laugh because they are in shock. The bucket hits Tommy in the head in a fatal blow, and in one of the in-world documents from the book, an eyewitness explains that the bucket “made a very loud noise, like a gong. That made someone laugh. I don’t know who it was, but it wasn’t the way a person laughs when they see something funny and gay. It was raw and hysterical and awful.” Then Carrie opens her eyes, white in her bloodied face, and “That was when they all started laughing. I did too, God help me. It was so … so weird.” The witness goes on to explain that a lot of them had gotten caught up in the magic of Carrie’s transformation into the prom queen: “It was as if we were watching a person rejoin the human race, and I for one thanked the Lord for it. And that happened. That horror. And so there was nothing else to do. It was either laugh or cry, and who could bring himself to cry over Carrie after all those years?”

            In the film, through Carrie’s perspective, we see that she perceives more people laughing than is true in reality. She sees the whole school now as her enemy, and so she attacks the whole school. An interesting point of diversion from the novel to the film is that in the book, Carrie flees the gym, and then makes her decision to wreak havoc once she is already away from the other students. I totally understand the decision to keep Carrie in the gym for the movie, because it’s objectively more cinematic, but I do like how the book emphasizes that this is a deliberate choice on Carrie’s part. She’s not just swept away by her powers: she uses them on purpose. Which is not to say that Carrie is of sound mind at this point: the text repeatedly calls attention to her out-of-control emotional state, as she laughs and cries simultaneously while she destroys the town. She has snapped, but she also knows what she’s doing.

            I have taught the film Carrie in college courses, and the first time I did so, I noticed an interesting phenomenon among my students. They were overwhelmingly sympathetic towards Carrie, but because of that, they tried to soften what she does. In multiple classes, students referred to Carrie “hurting” her classmates, and in multiple classes, I corrected them: she kills them. Those people who got trapped in the gym are very dead. This is a story that asks you to empathize with and even identify with a girl who goes on a murderous rampage, and if you’re going to fully engage with it, you have to accept that. It’s a monster story. It’s making you uncomfortable on purpose, just like Carrie kills those people on purpose. That discomfort is then intended to make you confront how brutal life can be for teenagers – even the suburban American teenagers who our society likes to pretend are fully protected and safe to live youths full of fun, wholesome milestones like the prom. And if we find ourselves enjoying Carrie’s rampage – rooting for the deaths of her tormentors – the collateral damage of the less-guilty (but not necessarily innocent) teens is there to make us feel weird about our own blood thirstiness. I don’t say that to scold anyone for their vicarious thrill when, for example, Carrie wrecks Chris and Billy’s car with them inside of it. I feel that thrill, too. But for me, part of the point and the power of a monster story is that it makes you feel weird about your own feelings. It doesn’t let you hide from the implications of your darkest urges. It makes you wonder, if I had Carrie’s power and was treated like her, how dangerous would I be? Especially if that happened when you were a teenager.

            Now, peer relationships are not the only thing Carrie has going against her; her ultimate antagonist is her mother. A lot of adolescent media or media that portrays adolescence narrows its focus to just the peer stuff – and, like, guilty as charged in my own writing – but obviously parental relationships are one of the most important parts of most teenagers’ lives. Their parents are the ones who have complete legal, financial, and geographic control over them. If they use this control poorly, then the young person’s quality of life is guaranteed to suffer. Margaret’s physical, emotional, and spiritual abuse of Carrie is ultimately what strips her of every psychological resource except for violence. In the novel, Carrie returns home with the express intention of murdering her mother, though in the film, she tries to take refuge in her house after the destruction. In both versions, Margaret stabs her daughter to kill the “evil” that she produced. And in both versions, Carrie does experience some sorrow at then killing her mother, though she does not hold back. In the film, we get a very cinematic crucifixion/St. Sebastian situation, with Carrie telekinetically flinging knives at Margaret and pinning her to the house that has always been the setting of Carrie’s isolation and abuse. In the book, Carrie just slowly stops Margaret’s heart. Again, I totally get and agree with the change for the movie, because it’s harder to show that in a visual medium, but ooh, that passage is effective in the novel. Margaret says the Lord’s Prayer as she’s dying, and as she gets to the part about “thy will be done,” Carrie corrects her: “My will, Momma.” And that’s where I really feel the specific impact of Carrie’s age in this story, because generally, a teenager’s will isn’t done if it comes up against a parent’s. She has to become a monster – a being with too much power, used incorrectly, at least according to that monster’s society – in order to upend that hierarchy of age and family.

            To close out the discussion of relationships in Carrie, we’ll return to Sue Snell, the deeply flawed kid whose attempts to morally improve backfire spectacularly. In the novel, Sue, at home because she gave up her date to the prom, can feel the power of Carrie’s mind as her rampage begins, and she follows that psychic energy to find her. When she finally tracks her down, Carrie is spent. She has been fatally stabbed by her mother, she’s killed all the people that she’s going to kill, and her body is drained and cold. The two girls communicate telepathically. Carrie first assumes that Sue, in giving her Tommy, was part of the plot against her, but Sue opens her mind to Carrie so that she can see that she wasn’t, and that she was sorry for what happened in the locker room. Carrie accepts Sue’s explanation – but then either can’t or won’t let her mind go as she dies. Carrie wishes for her momma, whom she has just killed. And then, with Sue’s consciousness struggling like a trapped moth against hers, we get the following passage: “For a moment Sue felt as if she were watching a candle flame disappear down a long, black tunnel at a tremendous speed. (she’s dying o my god i’m feeling her die) And then the light was gone, and the last conscious thought had been (momma i’m sorry where) and it broke up and Sue was tuned in only on the blank, idiot frequency of the physical nerve endings that would take hours to die.”

            So that’s harrowing. Legit, I have not stopped thinking about that passage since I read it. And then, as Sue staggers away from the aftermath, her period – which had been uncharacteristically late, possibly due to the beginnings of a pregnancy – begins to flow down her legs. The linked minds and leaking bodies of teenage girls are united in their suffering at the end of Carrie’s life.

            So while I still have chills from that, let’s look at the relationships in Jennifer’s Body! As alluded to earlier, Jennifer and Needy have a not particularly healthy but very erotically charged friendship. I mean, the extremely pointed name of Needy (justified as a nickname for Anita) makes the dynamic clear. Jennifer is controlling, and has been since early childhood, as a flashback scene shows. She claims the best toys, and then as a teenager, she dictates the clothes that Needy can wear. Needy’s voiceover wryly informs us that in Jennifer-speak, “wear something cute” means that Needy has to look cool enough to be seen with Jennifer but she also can’t upstage her, which means no cleavage: “Tits were her trademark.” Regardless of her awareness of how uneven the friendship is, Needy, at the beginning of the film, worships Jennifer. She claps for Jennifer’s performance in the color guard at a pep rally, and another student derisively calls her “lesbigay” for Jennifer, which, though intended homophobically as an insult, is also true. Needy does genuinely love her boyfriend Chip, and they have a sweet, affectionate relationship, but she also desires Jennifer and all the danger that entails: not just the danger of a more overtly sexual partner, but the danger of queerness in a homophobic society. And that’s before Jennifer becomes a demon.

            So what about Jennifer’s perspective on these relationships? Well, we don’t get much of it. The film is heavily focalized through Needy. Paszkiewicz calls our attention to the fact that while, fittingly enough, Jennifer’s body is our first introduction to that character, as the camera pans over her in her bed, it is literally Needy’s gaze that we follow, unseen from the window (84). So Jennifer is presented through the perception of another teenage girl who envies her, loves her, resents her, and ultimately kills her. Paszkiewicz discusses how, while the film’s marketing material relied on the male gaze, catering to boys and men who want to ogle Megan Fox, the film itself does interesting things with the way it addresses a female spectatorship. She writes, “Subversive or not, the carnivalesque play with monstrous tropes in Jennifer’s Body, which relies on the aesthetics of artifice, excess and reduplication, does draw our attention to the generic conventions of horror film and to the constructedness of gender and, more particularly, monstrous femininity” (81). Our attention is repeatedly brought to the ways that Jennifer and Needy deliberately construct their own versions of teenage girlhood, in opposition to and in competition with each other. Often this is exaggerated and tongue-in-cheek, like with Jennifer’s iconic pink heart outfit. Sometimes it is dark and poignant, like when Jennifer slathers on foundation to conceal the demonic hunger that has leeched the youthful glow from her skin. And since Jennifer literally becomes more beautiful again when she feeds on boys, Paszkiewicz writes, “we could interpret Jennifer as a monstrous creation of hegemony, but not only in relation to her abjection – for example, as femme castratrice, who kills boys in revenge for being sacrificed/raped – but also in relation to her obsession with appearance and her absolute dependence on men” (88). It is not only the “unsocialized” female body that is monstrous here, Paszkiewicz points out – unsocialized like Carrie, bleeding and ignorant – but the hyper-socialized and deliberately constructed one, like Jennifer’s self-conscious feminine sexuality.

            For me, those more poignant moments like the makeup scene really hit, and honestly, I wish the film had a few more of them in its portrayal of Jennifer. For instance, in the bar, when the band begins to play, Jennifer grabs Needy’s hand in excitement. Needy is delighted, but then her smile fades when she realizes that Jennifer has eyes only for the frontman. Which makes me feel for Needy, but also: Jennifer is so excited to be watching this band! She has a big, open smile. She’s not in this moment trying to be seductive or impressive – she’s just a kid seeing a band that she likes. It’s one of the few times where we see Jennifer not performing, and she’s not trying to string Needy along here – she wants to share this fun moment with her friend.

            Later, when we see Jennifer’s fear and despair as she realizes that the band is going to harm her, I feel like we as the audience get another reminder of how young she is. Obviously, all of the actors were adults in their 20s, which is almost always the case for teenagers on screen, but they found some particularly young-looking guys to play Chip and then Colin, one of Jennifer’s later victims. This makes it easy to forget that Jennifer is a kid, too, which I think is deliberate on the film’s part, because these moments of Jennifer’s vulnerability hit harder when we’re sort of slammed back into that recognition. And I appreciate that Jennifer does kind of suck as a friend and is still a young person who no one is protecting, and that one doesn’t cancel out the other. I just wish that the film had given us a little bit more of the latter, because I’m not quite sure it nails the balance. The title Jennifer’s Body is so deliberate in calling attention to the ways teen girls’ bodies are perceived as sites of lust, danger, and horror, but by downplaying Jennifer’s interiority for the majority of the film, it doesn’t, to me, completely succeed in subverting that perception.

            The other tension I feel with the film is in Jennifer’s victims. Her assault and murder by the band is obviously an act of extreme misogynistic violence: literally the throwing away of a young female life in exchange for male success and glory. So a lot of writing and reactions to this film frame Jennifer’s kills in terms of revenge against the patriarchy: she consumes the boys and men who tried to consume her. Except: they’re not the boys who tried to consume her. All four of Jennifer’s victims – Ahmet the foreign exchange student, Jonas the football player, Colin the emo kid, and Chip – are all reasonably okay guys. None of them act violently or even aggressively towards Jennifer or anyone else. It is Needy, after Jennifer transfers her demonic powers, who hunts down and kills the Satanic band in the film’s epilogue. So I know I just talked about how if you’re going to like the monster, you have to accept feeling weird about their victims, but at least with Carrie, her violence wasn’t completely misplaced. She does kill her actual tormentors, just alongside loads of other people. But Jennifer only kills relatively innocent people, and Needy, when she becomes a monster, only kills the guilty. So Needy – the less overtly sexual girl, the more accommodating friend, the one the audience is positioned to identify with – gets to even be a more righteous monster than Jennifer. Again, we’re calling attention to things that we’re not necessarily subverting.

            But that’s not to say that Needy is without flaws. She is possessive of Jennifer in her own way, self-sacrificing to a fault to remain in her orbit. A lot of their tension comes from their mutual attraction to each other and the general unacceptable nature of being bi or any kind of queer in the aughts. When Chip and Needy have sex, it’s a decidedly mid experience for Needy until she starts having visions of Jennifer’s seduction and murder of Colin, taking place simultaneously. Needy begins to gasp and cry out in horror, which Chip mistakes for orgasm. Again, this is supposed to be funny, and it is – I laughed – but it’s also a really clear distillation of Needy’s feelings for Jennifer: fear, horror, desire, and pleasure in simply beholding her body and all the taboo things it can do.

            Before Jennifer tells Needy about what happened to her in the woods, she appears in Needy’s bed – objecting to Needy’s startled screams with “But we always share your bed when we have slumber parties.” Then she kisses her. Needy deepens the kiss before breaking it off and demanding an explanation for Jennifer’s scariness. Jennifer seems eager to share her newfound power with Needy, but when Needy’s not on board, she shuts down and insinuates that she’ll make people think Needy is crazy if she tells any of Jennifer’s secrets. Later, after Jennifer has killed Chip, the two girls exchange sexist and homophobic insults when Needy arrives in Jennifer’s room with a box cutter. The implications of the name of that tool are what Needy slings at Jennifer, and Jennifer responds that Needy’s choice of weapon is “butch.” Then, the ensuing stabbing isn’t just “not not sexual,” it just is straight-up fully and completely sexual.

            Back when Needy first explains what Jennifer has become to Chip, she says, “Jennifer is evil.” Chip says, “I know,” and Needy has to clarify: “Not high school evil.” The emotional torments of unhealthy situationships filled with competition and repression, to Needy, pale in comparison now to the issue of the literal demonic succubus at hand. But it’s that emotional torment that she is left with. She truly hates Jennifer when she kills her, and she truly loves her both before and after. The microcosm of a small-town high school have trapped both of them within these cycles with each other, and part of the tragedy of Jennifer’s early death and Needy’s derailment of her life is that they never get to pursue adult sexuality and love unfettered by their small adolescent worlds. Again, “high school evil” is a laugh line, but it carries a spark of truth: the institutions that teenagers are forced to inhabit do not always bring out the best in those teenagers. Who can be surprised, after enduring all the pressures to perform femininity and to maintain bodies held to impossible standards and to compete with even the friends they love, if some teen girls turn a little bit monstrous?

CONCLUSION

            At the end of her chapter about Carrie, Barbara Creed writes, “Woman is not, by her very nature, an abject being. Her representation in popular discourses as monstrous is a function of the ideological project of the horror film – a project designed to perpetuate the belief that woman’s monstrous nature is inextricably bound up with her difference as man’s sexual other” (83). In other words, Carrie’s abjection may, in the world of the film and novel, be a natural feature of her sex and/or gender, but we should not mistake this representation with real life, where women aren’t actually threats to the stability of the subject position and whatever else. Teen girls’ bodily functions are not actually a source of horror and arcane power. On the other hand, in Monstrous Bodies: Feminine Power in Young Adult Horror Fiction, June Pulliam writes, “If iterations of the monstrous feminine then can be understood as a purification of the abject that breaks down boundaries and calls their naturalness into question rather than reinforcing these boundaries, then horror is rife with subversive potential. Horror can thwart the ability of various institutional discourses about sex and gender to individualize and totalize subjects in order to more easily control them” (16-17). To which I say: two things can be true! The narrative of Carrie reinforces the embodiedness of female abjection and engenders empathy and identification with a teenage girl who has been failed not only individually but institutionally at every level. The narrative of Jennifer’s Body rages against the ways teenage girls are treated as disposable and still upholds some stereotypes about the archetype of the slut. Plenty of audiences have found both stories grossly sexist, and plenty have found them empowering as girls and women. No one’s wrong. If loving the monster requires you to confront the discomfort of aligning with violence (even if only fictionally), then loving monster stories often requires you to confront the discomfort of finding value in narratives that don’t always uphold all of your beliefs. I have some serious personal issues with both Carrie and Jennifer’s Body, and I quite like them both. Especially Carrie the book, which kind of surprised me, because I’m not usually the biggest Stephen King fan. I do think the fact that it was short really helped.

            One value that I can find in both of these stories is that they call attention to how grueling it can be to be a teenage girl. The concept of “high school evil” is very culturally embedded at this point, but it’s often not taken seriously. Things that matter only to young people, like the temporary social worlds of high school, are frequently dismissed as petty drama. Meanwhile, teenagers experience real pain and sometimes real danger in these settings. Also, I can’t tell you how often adults will say that they hate teenagers when I tell them that I research and work with adolescents – especially that they hate teen girls, who are just so much meaner than boys. And a lot of times it’s women saying it! Now, obviously not that important here, but rude: I don’t go around telling other people how much I’d hate their jobs. But the real issue is those are human people you’re talking about! I think a ton of adults take the pain that they experienced as teenagers themselves and point it in entirely the wrong direction. Teenagers didn’t create the conditions that lead to dysregulated emotional states. That doesn’t mean they’re not responsible for any harm they do – not at all – but teen girls are no more inherently monstrous than women are inherently abject. Our sexist and adultist society just keeps creating monster stories that they are forced to live out. And even though Carrie and Jennifer’s Body have their flaws, they don’t let us dismiss or step away from the monstrosized teen girl’s experiences. They make us confront how life-and-death their struggles can be.

            Like I said, this is a favorite topic of mine, so I’m sure I will be returning to it in the future. Please let me know your thoughts on Carrie and Jennifer’s Body, or tell me your favorite monstrous teen girls in the comments. If you enjoyed the video, please give it a like, and remember to subscribe to the channel so you never miss a monster conversation. If you would like to have more direct monster education and community, remember to head on over to themonsterandthechild.com to check out and sign up for my programs! We also have a nice little community on Patreon, where I would love to see you, as well. In the meantime, take care, and I will see you soon for more monstrous food for thought.

Media discussed:

• Carrie by Stephen King (1974)
• Carrie, dir. Brian de Palma (1976)
• Jennifer’s Body, dir. Karyn Kusama (2009)

References:

• Creed, B. (1993). The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. Routledge.
• Kristeva, J. (1982). Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Columbia University Press.
• Paszkiewicz, K. (2019). Genre, Authorship and Contemporary Women Filmmakers. Edinburgh University Press.
• Pulliam, J. (2014). Monstrous Bodies: Feminine Power in Young Adult Horror Fiction. McFarland.
• Schillace, B. & Wood, A. (2014). Introduction: Our Monstrous Ways. In B. Schillace & A. Wood (Eds.), Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity: The Birth of the Monster in Literature, Film, and Media, Cambria Press, pp. 1-11.