The monsters they made us: How the horror genre positions young female desire

There's a moment in AMC's new adaptation of Interview with the Vampire, right after 14-year-old Claudia is made into a vampire, where her childish beliefs fall away completely.

As she examines her surroundings with new, vampiric eyes, she realizes with a start that she's not in "Heaven" as she first thought; she's just in a room. Louis and Lestat, the men who took her from her burning home and stole her humanity, are not "angels" at all; they're hell demons. Whatever innocence Claudia had before this, her demonic fathers ripped from her abruptly and unceremoniously, never once considering what that loss might cost her.

Every teenage girl has that moment where she loses her innocence. For many, that moment coincides with the unexpected arrival of your first period; in effect, your carefree childhood ends where your potential motherhood begins. For others, the idea of lost innocence coincides with first having sex; childhood ends when sex begins. And yet, despite the fact that the phrase "becoming a woman" is used to describe both of these actions in a girl's life, there is a distinct difference between the two: choice.

A young girl has as little control over when she begins menstruating as Claudia had over her demonic fathers turning her into a vampire. But, ideally, a young woman can choose who she loses her virginity to — and it's that element of choice, of a young girl actually having agency over her own sexuality, that has historically terrified generations of people into seeing female desire as chaos personified. This is certainly the case in poor Claudia's life: when her "unfeminine" desire causes her to push the boy she loves for sex, she ends up losing control and accidentally killing him. Becoming a woman who desires, then, is necessarily becoming a woman who destroys.

For me, these two moments in Interview with the Vampire — Claudia's vampiric birth and her murderous loss of her virginity — brought to mind the Biblical story of Eve, the first woman. Her story could very well be considered one of the earliest horror stories about women's disobedience: her sinful desire to know more than God wanted her to know; her shameful act of plucking forbidden fruit from the tree of knowledge and taking a bite, giving her knowledge of her own nakedness; her supposedly seducing Adam into disobeying God and taking a bite, as well. In the Bible, Eve's hunger for more than she was given was more than a simple mistake. It was the original sin, causing all of humanity to be locked out of paradise.

Never mind that Adam chose to take a bite, too. Never mind that God never told either of them the consequences of wanting more than he was willing to share. The horror wasn't in the trap of a situation God placed the first humans in — putting that tree in the middle of their garden home and telling them they must never eat its fruit, cruelly testing them and their curiosity like an Old Testament Bluebeard. No, the horror was in a woman wanting more than she should. The horror was that a woman's desire could cause the downfall of all of humankind. The moral implication being a woman's hunger could destroy everything, for everyone, if left uncontrolled. 

Horror movies and TV shows have gladly taken up this societal fear of woman's desire ever since the Book of Genesis. It's become a trope in slasher films: the teen girls who dare to have sex are picked off first by masked serial killers, while the "final girl" is the one who has refused temptations and kept her chastity firmly intact, as if virginity is some primal force she must draw her power from in order to survive.

But what about the girls like Claudia, whose innocence is stolen by the men around them, only to be blamed for their own desires afterwards? Why must their hunger — for knowledge, agency and especially sex — always be punished and controlled by those around them?

In the fourth episode of Interview with the Vampire, Lestat encourages Claudia to kill viciously and indiscriminately. He takes Claudia to a place where young couples go to have sex to teach her how to kill two people at once. But as she watches her victims — a couple intertwined, unclothed and desperate for one another's bodies — she becomes so entranced she doesn't move to kill them until they notice she's there. 

She has, in that moment, a sexual awakening — one that drives her to distraction and disobedience. Instead of doing what Lestat brought her there to do, which is to kill the couple, Claudia becomes lost in her own curiosity and desire. This is where the trouble starts. She writes in her diary later, "I can't quite put it into words, but it's like somethin' opened up in my head, in my body."

Like many teen girls before her, she decides she wants to stop dressing like a little girl and start dressing like a woman. She meets a young man named Charlie with "veins like rivers," whose tongue she writes she wants to taste. And after their first date, when Charlie drives her to a secluded area so they can kiss, Claudia's hunger for him is overwhelming. Even when Charlie wants her to slow down, accusing her of being "real forward" (which young girls like Claudia are not supposed to be), all she can hear is his heartbeat pounding in her ears. She cannot stop herself: she bites his neck. Her thirst is too much for her to control, and by the time she pulls away, face bloody, Charlie's face has turned gray with the pallor of death. 

Her accidental murder of her first love devastates her — a trauma that is compounded by Lestat blaming her for what happened and for her conduct afterwards, and by Louis infantilizing her, taking away any agency she has. But neither of them consider that she is exactly the monster that they made her to be. For what life can she really have when she's stuck in a "14-year-old baby doll body as her mind and spirit turn 19, 20, 25, 63, 358"?

Isn't this what so many parents expect of their daughters: that they'll be innocent little girls trapped in blissful ignorance forever, always obedient? Isn't that why so many parents become disappointed in their daughters: because they pluck knowledge from places their parents say they shouldn't and unabashedly take big, hungry bites?

Canadian horror film Ginger Snaps (2000) shows us another angsty, disobedient daughter whose monstrous hunger for blood and teenage desire for sexuality ends up destroying not only her family, but her entire community.

As with Claudia, 16-year-old Ginger Fitzgerald's transformation into a monster coincides with puberty. Within minutes of getting her first period — she even disdainfully calls it "the curse" — a werewolf attacks her, presumably drawn by that very blood. It's a reminder of what every young girl knows: the physical changes brought on by puberty forever alter the way that men look at you. You're no longer a child to be protected, but a sexual target to pursue. If any woman tries to reverse this supposedly natural order of things, with men as the pursuers and women as the pursued, she's a monster who needs to be stopped.

Much to her sister Brigette's confusion and annoyance, Ginger becomes a monster, both figuratively and literally. Once she's been bitten by the werewolf, she goes from hiding her body in baggy sweatshirts to going to school in tight, revealing clothes, relishing the stares of those around her. Her hunger not only matches that of the hormone-addled boys around her — it exceeds it. The teens around her are quick to call her a "slut" for being so open with her hunger; for what is a slut but a woman whose desire is considered too much, too monstrous for her to be considered "good"?

Interestingly, the similarities between "becoming a woman" via puberty and becoming a werewolf via violent attack are not only emphasized in the film, but made to seem almost interchangeable. Hair growing in strange places, wildly painful cramps, seemingly extreme bodily changes that make you feel alien in your own skin, sudden sexual attraction, sudden mood changes that scare those around you: all of them could be either puberty or lycanthropy. Indeed, those changes, combined with the knowledge that, as a nurse tells Ginger and Brigitte, your period will come "every 28 days for the next 30 years," do make a good case for menstruation to be considered a life-long body horror.

A person painfully hemorrhaging red blood and blackened clots for 3-8 days is the type of gore that could make anyone's stomach turn in a horror movie — yet for people who have periods, this is considered "normal." Worse, it's a monthly test run for what is arguably one of the most traumatic things a body can go through: childbirth. The terror and alienation of pregnancy, of carrying a strange being in your body that will one day force its way out in a bloody, excruciating hours-long climax, is unsurprisingly also metaphorically explored in horror movies. If metaphors for these experiences are the stuff of body horror nightmares, then so are the experiences themselves.

While there is body horror inherent in Ginger's transformation, the central conflict of Ginger Snaps is her insatiable hunger and desire. In a scene eerily similar to Claudia's scene with Charlie, Ginger is in the backseat of a car with her new boyfriend Jason, unfemininely pushing for sex even faster, when her monstrous nature takes over. Her spine cracks and bends before our eyes; either her lycanthropy or her hormones causes her to lose control and rip Jason's shirt off. But even after losing her virginity to Jason, she's still not satisfied until she eats the neighbour's dog. She has an "ache," she tells her sister, which she originally thought was for sex, but is actually to "tear everything to f--king pieces." It's Brigette's job to figure out how to curb her sister Ginger's insatiable desire to both kill and seduce if she wants to save her — and their family and town. 

In both Interview with the Vampire and Ginger Snaps, a young woman's sexual awakening is like a tornado that rains destruction upon all around her; a terrifying natural disaster that nonetheless needs to be stopped by any means necessary. The tragic part is, neither Claudia or Ginger chose these lives for themselves. Even worse, they're keenly aware of what they've lost. Claudia laments what her simple little life would have been if Louis and Lestat hadn't turned her into a vampire; Ginger's relationship with her sister falls apart after she is preyed upon by a male werewolf. Both mourn the loss of not only their innocence, but what they'd always imagined their lives could be. Their futures — their dreams — were cut short the second that monstrous men saw them and decided to turn them into monsters, too.

These monstrous men's hunger is seen as normal. Their desire is normal. Their sexuality is normal. Their violence is normal. It's only when that hunger, desire, sexuality and violence is wielded by young women that their families and communities are endangered.

Unfortunately, just like in real life, the monstrous men who destroyed these girls' lives without their consent are never thought to be the biggest problems. It is not Louis or Lestat whose bloodthirst cascades across the city, eventually causing the police to search their home. Nor is it the male werewolf that first attacks Ginger that leaves a trail of dead bodies to be cleaned up. These monstrous men's hunger is seen as normal. Their desire is normal. Their sexuality is normal. Their violence is normal. It's only when that hunger, desire, sexuality and violence is wielded by young women — by Claudia and Ginger — that their families and communities are endangered. 

In a world of monstrous men, teenage girls are the ones who are positioned as truly dangerous, blamed for urges and desires they can't control. Men may be just as hungry as they are, just as compelled to have sex and do bad things and hurt people, but for Claudia and Ginger, it is their hunger, their desire as women that must be punished. Like Eve before them, they are expected to be paragons of innocence and subservience to the men around them — to never want more than they are told they can have. And like Eve, their sins are made out to be the ultimate sins, so unforgivable they're responsible for slamming shut the gates of paradise — or at least peace — behind them. 

But women wondering the same things men wonder, wanting the same things men want, succumbing to the same urges men succumb to — in essence, women being as fallible and human as men are — is not what is truly horrific. What is truly horrific is the misogyny that demands women somehow repress and ignore our very human urges, needs and desires to cater to the urges, needs and desires of men, then treats us as less than human and blames us for everything that goes wrong regardless. 

If, under such impossible expectations, we as women become monsters, then we are the monsters misogyny has made us.