Abstract
Fazekas and Vena evaluate the impact of Catherine Hardwicke’s Twilight in light of the ongoing cultural assumption that women do not engage with horror. Contextualizing the film against a contemporary wave of women-directed horror, the chapter analyzes how Hardwicke’s Twilight uses its central heroine, Bella, to re-prioritize female expressions of desire and pleasure within the genre. Although male fans and horror critics have dismissed the film, the breadth of female-authored fan fiction testifies to its importance. Looking at the fan fiction trope of ‘the Mary Sue,’ the authors show how female horror fans derive pleasure from the text, and how this engagement prompts a re-negotiation of horror’s boundaries, affects and audience.
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Notes
- 1.
There is an ongoing debate in feminist communities whether horror is, in fact, a politically productive genre. Examples of this discourse can be found in online spaces such as The Mary Sue website, where one blogger records and engages with a Twitter debate over the feminist possibilities of the Final Girl trope (see Princess Weekes ‘Is the “Final Girl” in Horror Movies a Feminist Concept?’).
- 2.
Beyond Clover’s Men, Women, and Chain Saws, feminist scholars have paid attention to the female spectator’s place in horror cinema. Important works on this topic include Tania Modleski’s The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory (1988/2005); Jack Halberstam’s Skin Shows: Horror and the Technology of Monsters (1995); Rhona J. Berenstein’s Attack of the Leading Ladies: Gender, Sexuality, and Spectatorship in Classic Horror Cinema (1996); Isabel Pinedo’s Recreational Terror: Women and the Pleasures of Horror Film Viewing (1997); and Brigid Cherry’s ‘Refusing to Refuse to Look: Female Viewers of the Horror Film’ (in Horror, the Film Reader, 2001).
- 3.
To suggest, however, that all these films are feminist in nature is an over-generalization. This cinema, while it invites the possibility for a more feminist-centric lens, does not always align with feminist/intersectional politics.
- 4.
- 5.
We are careful here to caveat our point within the modern horror context. As Rhona J. Berenstein (1996) suggests, classical horror cinema had an extensive female following. Tod Browning’s Dracula (1931), for instance, can also be considered a women-driven horror phenomenon, which specifically targeted female audience members in its marketing campaigns and promotion of actor Bela Lugosi. For this study, we wish to emphasize the historic place Twilight has had within the modern horror landscape as one of the first films written and directed by women after the 1980s. Following the immense popularity of the Twilight book series (Meyer 2005), the first film adaptation was expected to gross anywhere from $35 million to $60 million in its first weekend (Verrier 2008). Outperforming even these high expectations by grossing $70.6 million on the opening weekend (Verrier 2008), Twilight solidified its place in film history as, at the time, the highest-grossing film ever directed by a woman.
- 6.
Katarzyna Paszkiewicz (2018) addresses this point in relation to Diablo Cody’s and Karyn Kusama’s Jennifer’s Body (2009). In her study, Paszkiewicz explores the competing ways in which Jennifer’s Body was marketed and subsequently taken up by critics as contradictorily appealing to both male audiences (and thus, reasserting the genre’s misogynistic inflection) and to women horror fans (thereby offering a feminist intervention into the genre). Rather than place responsibility for this mixed reception on Cody and Kusama, Paszkiewicz shows how the film’s reception and textual negotiations operate in a much larger network of artistic, economic and generic contexts.
- 7.
In replacing a female director with a male one, the assumption here was that Hardwicke as a woman was not up to the task of ‘adding some horror,’ similar to how reviewers presumed female fans were attracted to Twilight solely for the romance aspects rather than the horror. In both cases, the reviewer takes male ownership of the horror genre as a given, suggesting that women’s involvement or interest must be about something other than horror.
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Filmography
A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014, USA, dir. Ana Lily Amirpour).
American Mary (2012, Canada, dir. Jennifer Soska and Sylvia Soska).
Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992, USA, dir. Francis Ford Coppola).
Carrie (2013, USA, dir. Kimberly Peirce).
Jennifer’s Body (2009, USA, dir. Karyn Kusama).
Prevenge (2016, UK, dir. Alice Lowe).
Raw (2016, France/Belgium, dir. Julia Ducournau).
The Babadook (2014, Australia, dir. Jennifer Kent).
Twilight (2008, USA, dir. Catherine Hardwicke).
XX (2017, USA, dir. Jovanka Vuckovic, Annie Clark, Roxanne Benjamin and Karyn Kusama).
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Fazekas, A., Vena, D. (2020). ‘What Were We—Idiots?’: Re-evaluating Female Spectatorship and the New Horror Heroine with Catherine Hardwicke’s Twilight. In: Paszkiewicz, K., Rusnak, S. (eds) Final Girls, Feminism and Popular Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31523-8_12
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