This paper analyzes gender roles in two landmark horror films: John Carpenter's Halloween (1978) and Guillermo del Toro's Mimic (1997). While Halloween presents the archetypal helpless female victim saved by male authority, Mimic reimagines the female protagonist as an active scientist and reluctant savior. Using structuralist, apparatus theory, and psychoanalytic approaches, the paper argues that both films employ visual and narrative conventions to negotiate shifting social attitudes toward gender, feminism, and women's participation in science and society. The analysis reveals how horror cinema both reflects and contests dominant gender codes of its era.
According to Katherine Bennhold (2009), the Women's Movement of mid to late twentieth century America opened the world of science to women, so much so that they currently earn 42% of all science degrees around the world. Therefore, it is no surprise to find that Guillermo del Toro's 1997 horror film Mimic has a female scientist (an entomologist) as its heroine. Unlike the archetypal horror film, John Carpenter's 1978 Halloween, starring a young Jamie Lee Curtis in a more traditionally feminine role—babysitter—Mimic's heroine takes the horror genre gender role in a new direction.
Interestingly, the heroine of the monster-bug film begins the film as a young professional who, like Shelley's Frankenstein, has created a monster. The female unwittingly takes on the role of the male scientist from the Romantic/Enlightenment horror novel, and in doing so, must track down the bugs and kill them. Unlike Curtis' character Laurie Strode, Mira Sorvino's Susan Tyler is not the helpless innocent victim who has to flee danger just long enough to be saved by a masculine authority. Tyler leads an expedition into the subway tunnels to destroy the danger.
Yet one similarity the two female characters display is that they both, ultimately, are responsible for the life of a child. Both gender roles confirm a maternal imperative that in other horror films, such as Species, is viewed as alien and deadly. This paper will show how both Halloween and Mimic use visual and narrative horror genre conventions to communicate both conformity to and departure from dominant codes of gender.
Guillermo del Toro's Mimic effectually blends genres just as it blends gender roles. The opening mise-en-scène reveals a desolate city, recoiling from a collapse of industry. Soft white snow covers every shot, like a pall, resembling a kind of film noir aesthetic, where good and evil are as tangled together as light and shadow. The images of empty buildings and gated lots convey a stark reminder of death—which is at the heart of all horror films. Del Toro's Mimic begins by paying homage to two genres (noir and horror), the latter of which it will have tried to reinvent by the end of the film.
Carpenter's Halloween also establishes itself in the horror genre. In fact, Halloween essentially reinvented the horror genre in the late 1970s. Halloween brought together the essential elements of obsession, madness, immortality (previous slashers could be killed), one-by-one teenage victims, hints of the mythic and supernatural (the killer, who is compared to the boogeyman, is fueled, at least in part, by the energy and folklore of Halloween), the butcher knife, the mask, the unspeaking killer, the resourceful female survivor, and sex (that is, sex scenes that are associated with bloody death) (Mast, 2006, p. 628).
Halloween, in fact, spawned a litany of horror classics, from the Friday the 13th franchise to A Nightmare on Elm Street, in which characters of the former are massacred for possessing libidos that are freed from authoritative restraint, and characters of the latter are forced to "stay awake" or else be slaughtered by a pestilence in their dreams. Halloween's gift to gender roles in the horror genre is the lone survivor, whose resourcefulness is coupled with a genuine goodness of character—a moral uprightness in the face of premarital sex. The fact that Curtis' Laurie Strode does take a hit from a marijuana joint presages her later trial; perhaps since her flirtation with drugs does not lead to sexual behavior, she is spared her life at the end.
Del Toro's Mimic is equally adept at maintaining its horror genre footing by giving the giant menacing bugs a mythical characterization. Again, it is a mythical characterization that identifies itself with childhood—just as Halloween is a season that centers on children. The child in the case of Mimic is a boy who explains the appearance of the giant bugs to the adults through a mythical association. It is the adult's first clue—in this case, Sorvino's female scientist Tyler—and ultimate initiation into the underground world of horror. Through the mythical associations in both films, the heroines are introduced to the danger by way of a child's observations.
What stands Mimic apart is that Tyler will abandon her modern, sexless scientific role for the more traditional gender-oriented role of mother, protectress, and self-sacrificer. As E. Michael Jones (1997) notes, Mimic follows in the tradition of Them! but differs on both counts. To begin with, there is no army ready outside the tunnels to save the people from the giant bugs. Beyond that, there is not even a scientific plan to deal with the bugs. The female entomologist who created the bugs by mixing DNA spends a lot of time wandering around the subway station but does not really have a plan. In fact, no one does, which leads one to believe that there is no plan anymore.
What Mimic does go on to do is convert the gender identity of Tyler from childless scientist—whose sole creation to date has been a horrific mutating, man-eating bug—to a child-rearing, rosary-wielding mother-figure. In a sense, her admission into the world of mythology through the boy's description of the horror she herself has created moves her by the end of the film to embrace another cultural myth whose emblem is typified by the rosary beads, and whose hero is the sacrificed Christ. Del Toro not only blends genres, he also blends gender roles and mythological traditions.
If apparatus theory maintains that film derives its ideology from the culture of the viewers, horror film is especially adept at revealing the dominant gender codes of the past several decades. Yet, as Stephen Jay Schneider (2004) notes, analyses often differ, and none are combated more than those offered by psychoanalytic theorists. Especially since the late 1970s, there has been a tremendous diversity of psychoanalytic approaches to the horror film. These approaches differ, and often conflict, in substantial ways. But the objections levied in recent years by analytic philosophers, film aestheticians, sociologists and cultural theorists, cognitive and feminist film theorists, and empirical psychologists constitute a far more serious threat or challenge to psychoanalytical horror film theory.
Schneider continues, stating that "horror film monsters are typically defined as male, with women as their primary victims." Such a statement certainly applies to Carpenter's Halloween. And to a certain extent it fits Mimic as well. The giant cockroaches, for example, blend into society by imitating, or mimicking, adult males in trench coats. Why such a theory helps explain the general horror genre paradigm may have something to do with the spate of horror films that came out of the late 1970s and 1980s.
The dominating ideology of the sexual revolution of the 1960s and the Women's Movement of the 1970s, whose leaders, like Betty Friedan, expounded the feminist cause, contraception, and legalization of abortion, found relief in the horror genre of American cinema. Sexually transmitted diseases, legalized abortions, the rise in the divorce rate, and women in the work force all contributed to a redefining of gender norms and imperatives.
How such norms are reflected in Halloween and Mimic is what theorists cannot agree upon. And while Schneider argues for a more psychoanalytic approach, Jones takes a line out of apparatus theory: "Horror is a sign of ambivalence. It's so bad, people like Mary Shelley seem to tell us through her fictions, I can't talk about it, but then she turns around and says the exact opposite too. It's so bad, I can't not talk about it either. Hence, the monster, who in many ways does the talking about the unspeakable for her (2004)."
Jones asserts that just as Shelley repudiated Enlightenment doctrine through her novel Frankenstein, modern horror films do the same, either subconsciously or—as in the case of Mimic—consciously.
According to Jones, Halloween would be an example of subconscious repudiation of Enlightenment doctrine—and for that matter the feminist social doctrine of the 1970s. By casting the heroine, not as the sexually active, independent woman type but as the chaste, innocent, strong and grounded girl whose morals reflect traditional gender mores, such as domesticity for women and authority for men, Halloween suggests that gender equality may not mean exactly what people like Friedan say.
However, a psychoanalytic interpretation might easily render a different analysis: the male threat of patriarcic society is embodied in the abnormal psycho killer Michael, whose sole desire is to curb the sexual desires of teenagers and chase other women, such as Laurie (who have not yet fully abandoned "the nest," but may be on the verge of doing so) back into the house and up the stairs to check on and rear the children.
Jones makes no mention of Halloween but he does argue that horror's basis has always been the subconscious repudiation of Enlightenment doctrine and that "horror may be becoming conscious" of the fact: "Wes Craven's Scream is an attempt to make sense of the clichés of the slasher film," while Fritz Lang's Metropolis is a "sign that the Enlightenment has failed," and "in Species the 'monster' is a woman whose chief flaw is her desire to have non-contraceptive sex." Mimic, however, is to Jones the beginning of horror's conscious assessment of the ideology that spawned the horror in the first place. Mimic is neither campy nor self-conscious. It is a classic creepy film in the tradition of Them!, beginning with a plague carried by roaches in the subterranean tunnels of New York City. In order to stop the plague, which is killing the city's children, a female entomologist, who wants to have children herself but cannot, invents a new bug by recombining DNA from two different species.
The premise of the film, in fact, would return to cinemas in 2006 in Alfonso CuarĂłn's Children of Men, in which a society that can no longer reproduce is on the verge of annihilation. Perhaps it is no coincidence that the theme of missing children returns, since CuarĂłn and Del Toro have long been friends.
The iconographic setting of Halloween typifies most modern horror films: the nice, quiet suburb is seen again and again from A Nightmare on Elm Street to Dawn of the Dead. Hope resides in the restoration of order to the pristine civilized society of suburbia. However, in Mimic the setting is skewed, for, according to Jones, "all such hope is gone." There is no army out there ready to rescue us from the monsters science has created. We are all left to deal with them alone, after our technological solutions have failed—alone amidst the ruins of the Radiant City in a dank, dripping subway tunnel. The only solution left is the prime totem of folk Catholicism, the rosary, employed as the only possible hope of destroying the monsters created by Enlightenment science (Jones, 2004).
Jones, of course, is referring to the end scene, in which the technology of man fails first with the subway train, which is meant to carry the survivors away, then the elevator lift, which snaps. As the men, one by one, offer themselves in sacrificial roles to allow the others a chance to escape—first occasioned by the officer, then the husband of Tyler. Finally, the female scientist Tyler crosses over from barren scientist to self-sacrificer by drawing blood from her hand with the aid of the crucifix on the rosary.
By first abandoning traditional gender norms for those presented by the Women's Movement, the childless Tyler becomes part of a scientific community that breeds a bug meant to save all the children of the social community, but which then threatens to destroy all humanity. Through the subterranean setting, Tyler separates herself from traditional scientific norms, as her group becomes virtually lost in the labyrinth of her own making. Finally, by placing herself in the salvific role, she is restored to that role she did not possess (although she desires it) at the beginning of the film: the traditional gender norm—the maternal role.
Halloween sparks the modern horror slasher genre, but Mimic effectively takes the horror genre out of itself by giving it a kind of fairy tale virtuosity that reaches all the way back to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and beyond—to the mythology that helped fabricate the society of pre-Enlightenment years. In this sense, Mimic fulfills the demands of the horror genre but also removes restrictions by altering atmospheres (terrain to sub-terrain), gender roles (career woman to helpless woman to woman as the role of savior and mother), and social themes (Romantic/Enlightenment horror for Christianized mythology).
Through conventional visuals (such as the iconographic suburb of Halloween or the darkly lit, claustrophobic, subterranean atmosphere of Mimic) and conventional narration (killer on the loose, teenagers in fear; bugs on the loose, humanity in fear), John Carpenter's Halloween and Guillermo del Toro's Mimic typify the story-telling of the horror genre. However, while Halloween serves as the archetypal horror film concerning dominant gender codes (helpless woman in peril from crazed, immortal male character, saved by upright male authority), Mimic departs from the dominant gender codes to re-establish a gender norm that pre-dates Enlightenment ideology.
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