Now, most of the time, I am first in line for defending the character of awesome fictional ladies. There is nothing I want more than a high-grossing video game with a female protagonist — not a high-grossing game where you can play as a lady, but one where it’s the only choice. Or, you know, someone other than generic action hero white guy.
I think we can all agree that a girl not running away screaming in a horror movie is a step in the right direction. The problem, though, is that horror stories are pretty much built around watching terrified women survive horrible things. In Bram Stoker’s verbose Dracula we want to know if Mina Harker survives, in Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw we become terrified for the governess, and in almost every major horror movie the lone survivor is the scared virgin who wouldn’t hurt a fly.
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So, when you give a girl a knife and let her use it, you create fundamental problems with the way horror has traditionally been told. Sure, there are cases where the protagonist is male, but those usually tend to be less scary and more suspenseful. Because we view men as capable. You’re Next, a slasher movie in the same vein as The Strangers, gives us a BAMF survivalist protagonist and we watch her take out three ex-Army-turned-mercenaries and three spoiled rich kids with terrible priorities. And it is great fun.
But you never really feel that she is in danger. And that takes all the real terror out of the equation, because there is no way in hell that our female John McClane is getting killed in this movie.
The Evil Dead’s remake this year decided to kick things off by giving us a divided plot with two protagonists, one of whom disappears for half the movie, and the other who dies rather heroically. Of course, having a woman rip her own hand off and proceed to apply a chainsaw to the face of pure evil is awesome. However, it makes for a muddied story and an uncompelling ending.
As much as I hate how sexist it is, the genre cannot work like this.
With Chloë Grace Moretz as Carrie in the upcoming remake, I am seriously fearing for my beloved genre. Moretz typically plays strong characters, and from the trailer, it seems as if her Carrie will be no different. This poses several problems, but maybe solves the problem that Evil Dead and You’re Next ran into. Carrie is the story of an abused girl who discovers that she has telekinetic powers and uses them to get back at her tormentors. It is a classic revenge story, but it doesn’t work if we see Carrie as capable before she gets covered in pig’s blood. That is supposed to be the turning point.
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However, with a protagonist who is, possibly, practiced at her skill and shows enjoyment of it, we might actually have a real villain in Carrie and not just a victim gone berserk. Sure, it takes away from any sympathy the character might garner, but fuck it. Because then we have a protagonist who goes from weird loner to absolute power-hungry psychopath, and that is something we don’t really see from women in film. So it might just be worth fucking over some of the finer plot points.
But really, somebody should get on Die Hard with ladies. I’d watch the shit out of that — wait, no! I’ll write it. Nobody take that.
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