Growing up, being the edgy teenager that I was, I was always entranced with movies that offered a level of ‘bite.’ Movies that really had a lot to say and weren’t afraid of saying it, no matter how bizarre and obscure the messaging. So, when I watched Mitchell Lichtenstein’s film, Teeth (2007), with a group of my pals in my parent’s basement in 2012, I was simply enchanted. I remember hearty laughter, white knuckling with tension, as well as a few thoughtful, “oh”’s being stuttered.
Teeth follows the deeply religious Dawn, who is an active spokesperson for her local abstinence group and doting daughter of a sick mother. After an attempted rape that resulted in the perpetrator and fellow chastity group member, having his penis ‘bitten’ off by Dawn’s vagina, she begins her research into ‘vagina dentata.’ These teeth only emerge when Dawn isn’t consenting, as we see her put into peril over and over again before accepting her body and using it to empower her.
I think this was the film that introduced me (and not subtly, mind you) to the concept of the male gaze. And mostly because I felt it happen in real time, in a very visceral way. I remember explicitly my female friends finding a great deal of joy and laughter at the idea of vagina teeth, while my male friends appearing to recoil in genuine horror and disgust. When Dawn goes to a gynecologist for help, I was more horrified at the idea of a medical professional assaulting a patient that needs help, rather than a vagina clamping down on a man’s hand with brute force in a darkly hilarious scene. (Jess Weixler earned the Special Jury Prize at Sundance, absolutely, no question.)
Image courtesy of IMDB
Katherine Fairrimond summed up a great deal of the gender in horror cinema when she said, “Horror [...] is positioned as a comfortable genre for men, but an inhospitable one for women.” Unlike many rape-revenge narratives, Teeth doesn’t sensationalise sexual violence purely for the audience’s own thrill. Acts of sexual violence in Teeth are political and social commentary for how the world perceives female sexuality and reproduction. Teeth is notably not anti-men, it’s anti-patriarchy.
Lichtenstein’s work deliberately takes what has been seen constructed as a symbol for men’s pleasure, and plays with the audience’s (general) lack of knowledge about the female reproductive system and turns it into something that is specifically a threat to the male characters in the movie, and to a certain extent changes where the horror lies for the traditionally male horror viewer. Scholar Linda Williams speaks to the relationship between horror ‘monster’ and woman as that, “that acknowledges their ‘similar status within patriarchal structures of seeing.” Williams and Farrimond both also acknowledge that the horror genre is filled with female fans despite the gaze being predominantly masculine, which makes films like Teeth so important.
By turning the societal image of purity and femininity into a mythical horror villain, women can find catharsis in its level of absurdity and seeing the power shift for Dawn. Teeth flips the traditional gender script of genitalia by making the vagina something to fear, something that exists outside of the world of male pleasure. I can’t help but wonder about the classification of Teeth as a horror film at all. Perhaps in a world of better (and less religiously driven) sexual education, less taboo around the vagina and folks who have them, as well as sexual agency, this film is a slapstick comedy. In a world where women’s and trans rights are continually under attack and scrutiny, Teeth stays politically and socially relevant. As more and more disinformation floats around in the mainstream media about how women are able to “stop pregnancies” and “control periods” - there is a certain catharsis that comes from the idea of a mysterious vulvic curse that men fear. A ‘curse’ that could only exist to create a level of shock and horror in a world that continues to oppress and misunderstand female sexuality.
Image courtesy of horrornews.net
WORKS CITED
Farrimond, Katherine (2020). ‘Being a horror fan and being a feminist are often a conflicting business’: feminist horror, the opinion economy and Teeth’s gendered audiences. University of Sussex. Journal contribution. https://hdl.handle.net/10779/uos.23308085.v1
Linda Williams, ‘When the Woman Looks’, from Mary Ann Doane, Patricia Mellencamp and Linda Williams, eds, Re-Vision: Essays in Feminist Film Criticism Los Angeles, American Film Institute), pp. 83–99.
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