Angel of Vengeance: Ms. 45 and The Portrayal of Women in Horror
As we go through the Halloween season, there is undeniably a great wave of people watching horror films. From slasher movies to children’s’ Halloween classics, the horror genre encompasses themes that capture the eyes of all kinds of people. With that perception, several filmmakers whose main focus lies in the horror genre, have chosen the thrill of horror as a way to expose social and political issues implicitly. Oftentimes, horror characters and plots are used as metaphors for the daily struggles of minorities.
Although such use of horror has always existed, from classical gothic literature, (i.e. Mary Shelley and Ann Radcliffe), to the recent surge seen in Jordan Peele’s Us and Get Out, it is also a genre which tends to harmfully explore portrayals of women. Critics regularly claim that “these films depict graphically detailed violence, contain erotically or sexually charged situations which verge on becoming pornographic, and focus more on injuring or killing female as opposed to non-female characters.”
Especially in the notorious slasher sub-genre, female characters always seem to be the last to die. The so-called ‘final girl’ is often seen by the male audience as a vehicle for men’s own fantasies, viewing the one woman who refuses drugs, sex, and such behaviors as superior to others, consequently receiving the ‘privilege’ of not dying. It is clear that such films consistently direct such explicit violence primarily towards women, oftentimes juxtaposed next to somewhat erotic scenes. Examples of these lie in the most notorious of horror movies, such as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Halloween, Friday the 13th, and many others.
Horror, and especially slasher and slaughterhouse films also seem to have rape as a recurrent motif. Mostly placing the theme as a reason for revenge, or simply an act committed by the antagonist, such depictions do not exactly benefit the representation of women in any way. In most films of that kind, the girl usually gets killed, having someone else seek revenge for her. Or even worse, the victim is repeatedly sexualized in the act of rape, leading to yet another sexist and extremely harmful representation.
Almost as an act of revenge for said portrayal, Abel Ferrara released, in 1981, the cult classic Ms. 45. The director makes an exquisite portrait of early 80s New York City; a dark and filthy, crime-infested city filled with reminders of the blatant misogyny women have to deal with in their daily lives. The grimy Taxi Driver-ish New York is first shown to us as Thana and her co-workers walk through the city’s Garment District as they leave work. As the girls walk, the audience becomes increasingly nauseated by the number of cat-callers who try to pick up the girls as they simply walk by, amidst the filth and crowd in the streets.
Just a few minutes into the movie, as Thana leaves her co-workers and heads home, the young girl, (who happens to be mute), is assaulted and raped not only once, but twice in a day. Some might find this to be an equivocal exaggeration on the director’s part, but what Ferrara attempts to show through this - like the fact that the girls get cat-called by virtually every man they cross on the streets - is that the everyday threat of harassment and violence against women, regularly normalized, is indeed that recurrent in their lives.
However, as the second assailant tries to rape Thana, she hits him in the head with a glass apple, later killing him with an iron – a clear reference to the images of Eve and a housewife. From this point on, Ferrara fills the story with symbolism, in a particular variation of the exploitation subgenre of horror, full of typical images of predator/prey, violence, and grime. And so, Thana, whose name derives directly from the Greek god of death, Thanatos, starts her journey through fighting back the violence perpetrated against women to this day, by ‘speaking’ through her gun.
Ferrara proceeds to juxtapose images of Thana shopping for meat, and, once again, being violently cat-called on the streets, only to immediately show her cutting up the parts of the assaulter’s body in her own apartment. This symbolism follows the ‘meat metaphor’; for the men, Thana is only a piece of meat, while the mens’ behavior is similar to that of pigs. In revenge, the girl transforms the man, “from metaphorical to literal pig”.
Throughout the whole movie, the verbal and physical violence against women endures. Both in reality and Thana’s mind, the film depicts what is frequently said to be an extremely accurate depiction of PTSD, with the main character reliving the scenes of violence while alone. As the film progresses, Thana takes that trauma and becomes a vigilante for women around New York City.
Discordantly of most films that explore such themes, Thana quickly goes from victim to guardian: Thana is set free by violence becoming increasingly confident in her own skin and gender. She takes control of her sexuality, choosing to dress and act however she wants, with no regard to how men will react. She becomes increasingly feminine and self-assured, being the pinnacle of such a transformation visible in the scene in which Thana, dressed as a nun for a Halloween party, poses with her gun and enjoys her image in front of a mirror – the only scene in the movie in which we almost see her smile.
During the aforementioned party, (Thana symbolically regaining her innocence through her nun costume), the director uses ‘eavesdropping’ on random conversations as a resource for the audience to see how women live and breathe in an atmosphere filled with verbal violence and misogynistic comments surrounding us. After building up that ambiance, the film finds its final take in Thana’s death: stabbed in the back with a knife by another woman. A knife held as a phallic symbol, shockingly taking the audience back to the imagery of rape.
Implicitly, the film also takes the audience’s attention to persisting commonplace phrases that recall the ideas of “not all men”, and, “she was asking for it.” It may shock some viewers that the main character goes on her killing spree behind all men, not only those committing an assault. But just as men, when accused of such acts, frequently voice the defense that the girl was asking for it, for Thana, the men were asking for it. Ultimately, the male gender’s behavior as a whole needs to be adjusted for women to be able to safely walk through the streets without fearing something bad might happen every second of it.