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Introduction
It has been duly noted that in 20th century cinema, the creation of an emotionally stable female character is an unrealistic enterprise (Janisse 8). A common archetype in the Horror genre has been the inexplicable mad woman. Mad women have been in films as early as the late teens, with the “swooning girls” of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and the Universal horror films of the 1930s, evolving into a familiar terror (Janisse 8). The horror genre has always been a place where societal anxieties and moral panic play out on screen and the source of anxiety is demonized and, very often, silenced. It is not a coincidence that women’s minds were being presented as more twisted and disturbed in films as women gained more autonomy in the home, workplace, and society.
Furthermore, the development of the mental health field can be seen as a root for these characterizations. Stemming from early theories surrounding personality and psychopathology, personality disorders have been associated with the feminine (Brown, 212) 1 . Kier-la Janisse points out that the “female neurotic” lives in opposition to the mentally unstable male “eccentric” (8). Although my purpose in this paper is not to make a comparison between representations of male and female neurosis, it is important to point out that while this dichotomy is very present in the horror genre and is, I would argue, representative of societal beliefs, it cannot be justified using biological determinism in real life. There is no definite neurological model that has been produced that can prove real sex differences in the brain. 2
The stigmatization of the “crazy woman” has become ever-present in our society and can be seen as embodied by the countless female antagonists in horror films whose ontological confusions lead to destruction. These women, unable to distinguish themselves from others, good from evil, and the physical from the metaphysical, transport us as viewers to a liminal space where we are drawn into the same confusions. While some horror films do represent the mad woman as so far gone that she embodies a monster that must be destroyed, I will be focusing on films that bring us to this space of confusion and leave us there: Robert Altman’s 3 Women (1977) and Images