3 - Beyond Binaries: The Position of the Transgender Victim in Horror Narratives

Summary

Abstract

Academic discussions of the transgender presence in horror film have focused mostly on the problematic association between transness and monstrosity, neglecting readings of transgender in proximity to victimhood. This chapter considers how, in the portrayal of transgender characters in horror film, the dissolution of gender boundaries often coincides with the conflation of victimhood and villainy. Relying on the concepts of the Final Girl and the monstrous-feminine, the chapter discusses the changing position of the transgender killer in three films: A Reflection of Fear by William A. Fraker (1972), Hiltzik’s Sleepaway Camp (1983) and Ari Aster’s Hereditary (2018). The analysis explores the transgender characters’ movements from victims to monsters while investigating the extent to which these characters complicate the binary approach.

Keywords: gender, A Reflection of Fear, Sleepaway Camp, Hereditary, monstrosity, film

In November 1957, residents of the small town of Plainfield, Wisconsin, opened their morning newspapers to learn that their lonesome neighbour Ed Gein was not the mild-mannered handyman that he seemed. The police investigation into Gein’s home soon revealed that this ordinary, quiet American man was in fact a gruesome serial killer who dismembered women, preserved their bodily remains and fashioned them into clothing items and household furniture. The revelation that Gein simply enjoyed wearing women’s flesh as clothes, rather than using women’s flesh for sexual gratification, had a significant impact on the popular mythology of his crimes surrounding his alleged “transsexuality.” In the wake of the investigation of the Butcher of Plainfield’s crimes, the psychotic, murderous cross-dresser has become a well-known trope in American horror cinema, popularised most notably in Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) and Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs (1991). By framing experiences of gender-bending in these narratives of violence, such films, of which there are more, have contributed to a negative codification of transgender people as murderous, monstrous and mentally ill.

Both Psycho and The Silence of the Lambs, however, seem to be less concerned with depicting a transgender biography and more with the assertion of the character’s mental instability by portraying the act of cross-dressing as a mere performance ritual within the greater act of killing.