This weeks screening was A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, and I found the film to be incredibly exciting and well done. It is a great role reversal of the girl being targeted in a film, especially a horror film. Now I am not saying a horror film cannot be feminist, but usually we see this with the “final girl” such as Jamie Lee Curtis in the Halloween films. However, the final girl trope has been criticized in more recent years. This is because there are some sexist undertones to the trope. The final girl must be innocent, she must not have been sexually promiscuous and she must not have done any drugs. Essentially, the final girl has to fit into a PG-13 (at worst) archetype.
A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is much more comparable to a film such as Jennifer’s Body. At first glance, these movies might not seem to have anything in common. A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is a foreign language drama whereas Jennifer’s Body seems like a fun casual popcorn flick, but there is something both incredibly interesting about these movies, and that is the fact that the monsters are women. Not only are they women, but Jennifer and the Girl both use their sexuality to their advantage. I found this to be incredibly unique and feminist about both of these films. In nearly every horror film, the “slutty” woman gets punished early on for her sins. The Girl watches for men who take advantage of women and their sexuality and she uses hers to wreak havoc on them. Jennifer does the same, the boys she targets even seem to be reflections of the misogynistic creators and viewers of horror films that create a negative idea of a woman’s sexuality. It is great that films like these are being made in the current day and are dismissing sexist notions that were previously pushed in films like this.
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