Williams, Linda. “When the Woman Looks.” 1983. The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film. Ed. Barry Keith Grant. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996. 15-34.

Like the female spectator, the female protagonist often fails to look, to return the gaze of the male who desires her. In the classical narrative cinema, to see is to desire. It comes as no surprise, then, that many of the “good girl” heroines of the silent screen were often figuratively, or even literally, blind. Blindness in this context signifies a perfect absence of desire, allowing the look of the male protagonist to regard the woman at the requisite safe distance necessary to the voyeur’s pleasure. 15

But even when the heroine is not literally blind, the failure and frustration of her vision can be the most important mark of her sexual purity. 16

The bold, smouldering dark eyes of the silent screen vamp offer an obvious example of a powerful female look. But the dubious moral status of such heroines, and the fact that they must be punished in the end, undermine the legitimacy and authentic subjectivity of this look, frequently turning it into a mere parody of the male look. More instructive are those moments when the “good girl” heroines are granted the power of the look, whether in the woman’s film, as discussed by Mary Ann Doane, or in the horror film as discussed below. In both cases, as Doane suggests, “the woman’s exercise of an active investigating gaze can only be simultaneous with her own victimization.” The woman’s gaze is punished, in other words, by narrative processes that transform curiosity and desire into masochistic fantasy. 17

I hope to reveal not only the process of punishment but a surprising (and at times subversive) affinity between monster and woman, in the sense in which her look at the monster recognizes their similar status within patriarchal structures of seeing. 18

First, Nina’s look at the vampire fails to maintain the distance between observer and observed so essential to the “pleasure” of the voyeur. For where the (male) voyeur’s properly distanced look safely masters the potential threat of the (female) body it views, the woman’s look of horror paralyzes her in such a way that distance is overcome; the monster or the freak’s own spectacular appearance holds her originally active, curious look in a trancelike passivity that allows him to master her through her look. 18

Thus her look [in The Phantom of the Opera, 1925] occurs after the film audience has had its own chance to see him—they are framed in a two-shot that has him standing slightly behind her; only when she turns does she see his masked face. 18

The audience’s belated adoption of the woman’s point of view undermines the usual audience identification and sympathy with the look of the cinematic character. But it may also permit a different form of identification and sympathy to take place, not between the audience and the character who looks, but / between the two objects of the cinematic spectacle who encounter one another in this look—the woman and the monster. 19-20

Clearly the monster’s power is one of sexual difference from the normal male. In this difference he is remarkably like the woman in the eyes of the traumatized male: a biological freak with impossible and threatening appetites that suggest a frightening potency precisely where the normal male would perceive a lack. 20

It may very well be, then, that the power and potency of the monster body in many classic horror films . . . should not be interpreted as an eruption of the normally repressed animal sexuality of the civilized male (the monster as double for the male viewer and characters in the film), but as the feared power and potency of a different kind of sexuality (the monster as double for the women). 20

The male look expresses conventional fear at that which differs from itself. The female look—/a look given preeminent position in the horror film—shares the male of the monster’s freakishness, but also recognizes the sense in which this freakishness is similar to her own difference. For she too has been constituted as an exhibitionist-object by the desiring look of the male. There is not that much difference between an object of desire and an object of horror as far as the male look is concerned. 20-21

The strange sympathy and affinity that often develops between the monster and the girl may thus be less an expression of sexual desire (as in King Kong, Beauty and the Beast) and more a flash of sympathetic identification. 21

Laura Mulvey has shown that the male look at the woman in the cinema involves two forms of mastery over the threat of castration posed by her “lack” of a penis: a sadistic voyeurism which punishes or endangers the woman through the agency of an active and powerful male character; and fetishistic overvaluation, which masters the threat of castration by investing the woman’s body with an excess of aesthetic perfection. 22

According to Lurie, the real trauma for the young boy is not that the mother is castrated but that she isn’t: she is obviously not mutilated the way he would be if his penis were taken from him. The notion of the woman as a castrated version of the male is, according to Lurie, a comforting, wishful fantasy intended to combat the child’s imagined dread of what his mother’s very real power could do to him. This protective fantasy is aimed at convincing himself that “women are what men would be if they had no penises—bereft of sexuality, helpless, incapable.” 23

For, looked at from the woman’s perspective, the monster is not so much lacking as he is powerful in a different way. The vampire film offers a clear example of the threat this different form of sexuality represents to the male. The vampiric act of sucking blood, sapping the life fluid of a victim so that the victim in turn becomes a vampire, is similar to the female role of milking the sperm of the male during intercourse. What the vampire seems to represent then is a sexual power whose threat lies in its difference from a phallic “norm.” 23

The vampire’s insatiable need for blood seems a particularly apt analogue for what must seem to the man to be an insatiable sexual appetite—yet another threat to his potency. So there is a sense in which the woman’s look at the monster is more than simply a punishment for looking or a narcissistic fascination with the distortion of her own image in the mirror that patriarchy holds up to her; it is also a recognition of their similar status as potent threats to a vulnerable male power. 23

Helen’s [in Peeping Tom, 1960] refusal of narcissism also turns out to be a refusal of the only way patriarchal cinema has of representing woman’s desire. If she has the power to recognize and refuse the mirror-trap, it is because she is portrayed as ignorant of sexual desire altogether. She is like the one virginal babysitter who survives the attacks of the monster in Halloween (1978), or like Lila, Marion Crane’s “good girl” sister in Psycho, who survives Norman Bates’s final attack, or even like Helen’s blind mother in Peeping Tom who immediately “sees”—in the tradition of the blind seer—the turbulence in Mark’s soul. In other words, in most horror films the tradition of the power of the woman “pure of heart” is still going strong: the woman’s power to resist the monster is directly proportional to her absence of sexual desire. Clarity of vision, it would seem, can exist only in absence. 27

Psycho has been the model for the new form of the “psycho at large” horror films that began to emerge in the early 1960s and which now dominate the market. There is no more convincing proof of the influence of this model / than de Palma’s flagrant imitation of it in Dressed to Kill. 27-28

We have seen that in the classic horror film the woman’s sexually charged look at the monster encounters a horror version of her own body. The monster is thus one of many mirrors held up to her by her patriarchy. But, as I have tried to suggest, she also encounters in this mirror at least the possibility of a power located in her very difference from the male. 31

Ebert points out that in these films we rarely see the psychopathic murderer whose point of view the audience nevertheless adopts. This “non-specific male killing force” thus displaces what was once the subjective point of view of the female victim onto an audience that is now asked to view the body of the woman victim as the only visible monster in the film. In other words, in these films the recognition and affinity between woman and monster of the classic horror film gives way to pure identity: she is the monster, her mutilated body is the only visible horror. 31

In this light, Bobbie’s vengeance on Kate [in Dressed to Kill, 1980] can be viewed not as the act of a jealous woman eliminating her rival, but as acting out the male fantasy that woman is castrated, mutilated, “what men would be if they had no penises—bereft of sexuality, helpless, incapable.” 32

The horror film may be a rare example of a genre that permits the expression of women’s sexual potency and desire and that associates this desire with the autonomous act of looking, but it does so / in these more recent examples only to punish her for this very act, only to demonstrate how monstrous female desire can be. 32-33