Stitched-On Sex

Written for CompLit 357: Junior Year Writing (Instructor: Prof Corine Tachtiris)

Fear around gender and sex is not new to horror, neither in undertones nor overtones. Historically in horror films the victims have been markedly skewed female, almost always by male killers. This is found in the very roots of Western horror literature – Dracula targets Lucy and Mina, Frankenstein’s monster kills Elizabeth, etc. In the 1970s and 1980s, with the rise in popularity of slasher horror (begotten by the 1960 Psycho, in which Norman Bates’ first victim is Marion Crane), sex and sexuality came further into the foreground of horror, leading to a discussion of the role of gender. The breaking down, inverting, or otherwise othering of gender in horror is not a new phenomenon, either – Norman Bates is a crossdresser, after all. The idea of women being so markedly different from men to the point of near-complete dehumanization occurs in horror at large. Two films that focus not just on this difference but on the fear of this difference spreading from women to men – of men being degraded to the role of women through forced feminization – are the 1983 horror film Sleepaway Camp (dir. Robert Hiltzik) and the 1990 horror-comedy Frankenhooker (dir. Frank Henenlotter). By looking at these texts alongside the ideas of critical feminists such as Simone De Beauvoir and Luce Irigaray, I hope to examine the way that womanhood as derogatory – and the castration fear that goes along with that belief – underlines itself as the true “horror” of these films.

Sleepaway Camp follows the adolescent Angela, who, as a young child, witnessed the accidental deaths of her brother, Peter and their father. Now living with her aunt Martha and cousin Ricky, the film follows the children’s summer trip to Camp Arawak, which is soon to be terrorized by a mysterious serial killer. Of the two, Ricky is more popular, as he is a “regular” boy – sporty, interested in girls, etcetera, whereas Angela is selectively mute, often stares at others, expressionless, and is generally uncomfortable around the other girls – she doesn’t participate in activities, she showers alone, etc. Sleepaway Camp largely focuses on the adolescent characters in the film, as the campers discover their newly budding sexualities, and begin to other those who don’t – e.g, Angela. However, almost all the focus is on the maturation of the girls, rather than the boys. Upon getting to camp, Ricky’s best friend Paul almost immediately brings up fellow camper Judy’s chest development, and Judy is quickly characterized by the film as sexually promiscuous and conniving. Judy singles Angela out not only for her selective mutism and general introversion, but also for her perceived lack of pubescent development. After first suggesting that Angela showers alone because she’s a “queer,” Judy calls her “flat as a board” and accuses her instead of not showering with the other girls due to embarrassment at not having undergone puberty yet. These same qualities are what attract the pedophilic camp cook Artie to Angela earlier in the film, leading to him attempting to sexually assault her. In the very same scene that Paul comments on Judy’s body, Artie remarks to his coworkers, “Look at all that young, fresh chicken. Where I come from, we call them baldies.” Evidently, as a girl/woman, there’s no escape – either you’re fetishized for having developed, or you’re fetishized for not, as shown dually through Judy and Angela.

Throughout the film, more and more of Angela’s backstory is revealed to the viewer to further contextualize her odd behavior – or perhaps unnatural behavior, for what is “odd” really if simply nonnormative, and what is the norm seen as in our culture if not “natural.” As Paul kisses Angela on the beach, we fade to a flashback and learn that as a child, Angela and her brother witnessed their father in bed with another man – nothing sexual occurs, the men just hold each other, sweetly. In the dreamlike scene which follows, we see the children sitting across from each other on their bed, the rest of the set a black void, as Peter points wordlessly at Angela. The camera circles the bed, faster and faster, until the flashback cuts back into reality. Nothing more is directly said about either scene of the film. As the narrative takes its course, murder scenes are interspersed between scenes of Angela being clumsily romanced by Paul and conversely, being bullied by not only her fellow campers, but staff members such as Artie the cook and her counselor, Megan. In fact, her bullies are the ones who begin dropping dead.

The murders are brutal; Artie has a huge vat of boiling water toppled onto him, Megan is stabbed to death in the shower in a scene mirroring Psycho and its telltale death by penetration, and Judy is suffocated under a pillow as a figure – seen only in shadow – takes her hot hair iron and applies it to her body, offscreen, with the implication of having pressed it to or into her genitalia. Both Judy and Megan, if not Judy more directly, are sexualized even in death. Artie, despite being an active pedophile, is spared this insult added to his injury. The killing spree culminates in two counselors finding Angela and Paul by the shore, with Paul’s head in Angela’s lap. She stands, and the head rolls away, decapitated. The counselors’ ensuing shock is not just at the gory scene before them, but at the “reveal” of Angela’s “true sex,” that being “male,” as both the counselors and we the audience are shown Angela’s entire nude form. Through flashbacks, we come to learn that Angela is not truly Angela at all, but was originally Peter. Her aunt Martha didn’t want another boy in the house, and after adopting Peter, raised him as his deceased sister, Angela. In the present, Peter/Angela stands stock-still, knife in hand, eyes wide and mouth open, breathing heavily, grunting like an animal. He/She has become subhuman, his/her masculinity having been forcibly stripped away and replaced with femininity. The motive for Paul’s death becomes muddied – not only did he cheat on Peter/Angela with Judy, but by pursuing him/her at all, and by his/her own reciprocation, Paul (and their relationship) is made queer – literally and figuratively. The natural is made unnatural. The previous flashback to the children’s bed is made an omen in retrospect, as Peter/Angela points at Angela, the girl he/she is to become, the mark he/she is to take on. The film ends here, and we are given no reason for Peter/Angela’s homicidal behavior besides the sex/gender dissonance forced upon him/her by Martha.

Where Sleepaway Camp focuses on the apparent sociobehavioral repercussions of the dissolution of gender identity, the 1990 horror/comedy/sexploitation film Frankenhooker realizes a much more material and visually grotesque display of what gender “should” and “shouldn’t” be. Ultimately, it has its own “sex change” scene, which serves as a final reveal (as well as a punchline). Loosely based on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the film follows amateur “bio-electro-technician” Jeffrey in his mission to reanimate his deceased girlfriend, Elizabeth, who, after a morbid accident, has been reduced to just a few dismembered body parts, including her head. Jeffrey must now find – or build – a new body for her if he wants to bring her back. His priority is not to find a body that is as similar to Elizabeth’s previous form as possible, but rather to make her a new body that is “better” than what she had, a continuation of the at-home stomach stapling surgeries he had conducted on her when she was still alive. He collages cut-out pictures of her (living) head onto pin-up girls for inspiration – women who are more “feminine” or ideally feminine than Elizabeth had been in life, with larger breasts, skinnier bodies, etc., and Jeffrey soon turns to the red light district to find the parts he needs. The film revels in hyperbolic absurdity in a scene where Jeffrey, dressed in a cartoonish doctor’s outfit which he never wears when actually working in his garage-laboratory, examines the body parts of a group of sex workers in a montage where the women humor him before being killed and dismembered in an explosively camp fashion.

First societally objectified as products to be bought via sex work, even literally branded by their pimp, the women are then materially objectified and piled into bags for Jeffrey to bring back to the laboratory, where he sifts through them to find his favorite parts with which to recreate Elizabeth. Well, not “recreate,” per se – he isn’t really recreating Elizabeth at all, but creating a new Elizabeth who better fits his own desires and ideals, even if he himself cannot recognize that fact. When it comes to what is “natural” or “unnatural” (which can run parallel to, if not equate with, the implications of normal and different seen in Sleepaway Camp), Jeffrey has a very different outlook than Elizabeth seems to, judging by her anger at being reanimated in a mismatched body that is not hers, and Jeffrey’s confusion at her response. He admits only to his work as being “unorthodox.” With the exception of the deaths of his fiancé and of the sex workers, all of which he himself causes (in varying degrees of directness), there are only two other things that we the audience ever see him truly horrified by. The first is when two female sex workers make out in front of him – “That’s not natural!” he screams, as the women around him smoke the fatal crack he engineered to kill them; though he tries to warn them not to take it, he still takes the time to be upset with the women displaying sexual autonomy that does not involve him, or by extension, any man at all. “Odd” or “unorthodox” behavior is only acceptable when he perpetuates it. The second is when he sees the new body that Elizabeth has created for him when she reanimates him after his own decapitation – a “female” body made from remaining sex worker parts, rendering him incapable of having any sexual experience that could be construed as heteronormative.

It can be inferred that Jeffrey doesn’t see his creation of a body for Elizabeth as “bad” or “unnatural” because its gender “matches” what she already had. He doesn’t seem able to sympathize with Elizabeth’s anger at what he’s done to her because ultimately, in his eyes, she’s still a woman, and that matters more than her body being her own. However, when she makes Jeffrey a new body out of “female” parts, he is utterly horrified. Though essentially it’s exactly what he did to her, because there is a switch in perceived “gender/sex” markings, he sees it as monstrous. Furthermore, he has very specifically become female – disgusted, he comments on his new breasts, and his lack of “male” genitalia. It is an ultimate castration, and notably, it is done to him by a woman. From an audience point of view, I also find it important to note whose shoes we are in for the majority of the film, especially the scenes where Elizabeth and Jeffrey see their reanimated bodies. Almost the entire film takes the point of view of a detached third person, following both Jeffrey and Elizabeth in turns (though mostly Jeffrey), and this is true in both of Elizabeth’s reanimation scenes. However, in Jeffrey’s reanimation, we are visually placed in his position – the scene blinks into view as he blinks awake, Elizabeth staring into our/Jeffrey’s eyes, wearing the doctor costume that Jeffrey previously had on. Though we switch shortly after to our usual third-person, the framing of the scene keeps Jeffrey’s new parts out of view until he himself realizes they are there, climaxing in Elizabeth revealing the entirety of his new body by pulling a cloth off a full-length mirror. Jeffrey’s “sex change” is the final punchline of the film, the final absurdity for the audience to laugh at while Jeffrey screams in disgusted terror. Though Peter/Angela’s sex reveal is not played for laughs in Sleepaway Camp, the spectacle, to be mocked or reviled, remains.

In both films, the forced feminization of boys/men is the ultimate horror, the ultimate punishment, whether that is socially and psychologically, as with Peter/Angela, or through material, physical forced change, as with Jeffrey. What is it about the shift from male to female, from psychological or physical castration, that drives these characters to madness? They are not alone in this regard – as I mentioned before, Psycho’s Norman Bates plays into this trope as well, taking on the “alternate personality” of his late mother when he kills (which has its own slew of ableist critiques), Leatherface of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is seen wearing a “woman-face,” and Silence of the Lambs’ Buffalo Bill attempts to make an entire “woman-suit” – the examples go on. At the center of these ideas is the dichotomous gender framework that dominates our popular culture, and which I’ve been alluding to throughout the paper. The dichotomy between man-woman is not an equal one. Yes, in the heterosexed understanding of the world, man and woman together make a whole, but it is only ever woman who is really unwhole, who can only be fulfilled by a heterosex partnering. As described by Simone de Beauvoir, “humanity is male and man defines woman not in herself but as relative to him; she is not regarded as an autonomous being. … She is defined and differentiated with reference to man and not he with reference to her; she is the incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential. He is the Subject, he is the Absolute – she is the Other” (de Beauvoir 41). Not only is man whole, he is neutral, he is the baseline against which women are defined in difference to him. By this definition, “women” are dependent on “men” in the most ontological sense.

Freud’s psychosexual theorizations on sex/gender fall in line with this idea, especially with his notions of the mirroring “penis envy” experienced by women and “castration fear” experienced by men. Being a phallocentric ideology, once more it is men who have and women who have not. Women, of course, want to be on the same level as men, want the phallus, and penis envy is born. As for men, they already have the signifier of wholeness, the phallus – all that’s left is fear of losing it, e.g., becoming a woman via castration. According to Luce Irigaray, “The possibility of losing his penis, of having it cut off, would find a real basis in the biological fact of woman’s castration” (Irigaray 51) – the woman is not only the other, but she is a source of revilement and fear, she is the mirror of what the man could be should he lose his phallus. Furthermore, she becomes a threat; her “desire to have it [the phallus] would confirm man in the assurance that he has it, still, while reminding him at the same time… that he risks having her take it away from him” (Irigaray 51). “Penis envy” is transformed from a way of keeping the woman in line, below the man, into a danger for men in terms of their maintaining their place as the center/whole. In both Sleepaway Camp and Frankenhooker, it is female characters that ideologically or literally castrate the male protagonists – Aunt Martha castrates Peter/Angela, and Elizabeth castrates Jeffrey. By removing their phalluses, they are degraded to the level of women – the other, the shadow. If man is human, what is woman? Contemporarily, the strict gender binary of American culture is beginning to dissolve in the mainstream, sparking both widespread fear and its twin, anger. In reaction, some call for a total recapitulation and reinforcement of the binary, as they fear men losing their position in the patriarchy, losing their position as the one, their ideological dominion over women. In the closing scenes of both Sleepaway Camp and Frankenhooker, the feminized men grunt low in their throats, make animal noises of anger and fear as their castrated truths are revealed. They are frightening images not just because they have been sexually violated, but because it brings to a male audience’s mind the possibility that this, too, could be them; degraded into womanhood.

Works Cited 

de Beauvoir, Simone. “Introduction,” from The Second Sex, translated by H.M. Parshley. Feminist Theory Reader: Local and Global Perspectives, edited by Carole McCann, and Seung-kyung Kim, Taylor & Francis Group, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uma/detail.action?docID=1211688.

Frankenhooker. Directed by Frank Henenlotter. Shapiro-Glickenhaus Entertainment, 1990.

Irigaray, Luce. “Another “Cause” – Castration,” from Speculum of the Other Woman, translated by Gillian C. Gill. Cornell University Press, 1985. Google Books, https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=cZX3HfxO9XkC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_vp t_read#v=onepage&q&f=true

Psycho. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Paramount Film Service, 1960.

Sleepaway Camp. Directed by Robert Hiltzik. United Film Distribution Company, 1983.

Lucius Pereira Murphy is a senior in Comparative Literature, minoring in Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies. His primary focus of interest is horror films, mostly those in what’s colloquially called the “B” or “Z” tiers of horror, and how they intersect with and represent deviances from cisheteronormativity. Outside of academia, he enjoys creative writing, drawing, and grunge music.