Female Objectification In Stephen King's Carrie

Vampires, werewolves, and monsters of all kinds have been prevalent in the horror genre, but the monstrous-feminine is comparably different. Whereas male monsters shock and terrify the audience through violence and bodily transformations, the female monster is horrifying in relation to her sexuality. The horror genre has frequently perpetuated patriarchal ideologies with scenes objectifying women using the ‘male gaze’ and punishing women for any kind of sexuality. Brian de Palma’s 1976 film adaption of Stephen King’s novel Carrie is no different. Although marketed to young women, Carrie is fraught with female objectification and fetishization with an overall lack of progressive female characters. It would seem having a female protagonist as …show more content…
Laura Mulvey notes Freud’s term ‘scopophillia’ in relation to objectifying women on screen, because of the pleasure in looking and “taking other people as object, subjecting them to a controlling and curious gaze” (6). Mulvey calls this the ‘male-gaze’. In a film with almost exclusively female characters, it seems the male-gaze should be abolished with female subjectivity, but De Palma manages to include it taking on the gaze himself through the camera lens. Particularly in the shower scene, the male-gaze is seen when the camera pans through the locker room roaming over the naked bodies of the high school girls. The scene plays out like a misogynistic fantasy of young female bodies on display touching each other through the steam-filled lock room like “ethereal creatures, nymphs at the water pond” (Lindsey, 35). The audience is removed from the scene by lack of diegetic sound and put into a voyeuristic point of view taking pleasure and power over the passive female characters. The next shot is of Carrie sensually washing her body and touching her breasts, but the shots cut up her body into tiny sexualized pieces thereby fetishizing her body. Alternatively Peirce’s version of the shower scene takes out the nudity and projected male fantasy to portray a more realistic version of a female locker room from a female perspective. Instead the scene shows Carrie’s vulnerability and isolation as she carefully undresses and uses the open shower, when no one else is around. The scene is juxtaposed by as shot of the clamoring girls in the locker room changing and interacting without any sexualized connotation. Peirce’s shower scene provokes deeper meaning into the emotional state of Carrie and the reality of high school females without objectification or