Take One (Mar-Apr 1973)

She Creature, She Devil, She Demons, She Beast, She Freak, The Astounding She Monster and Attack of the 50 Foot Woman began to crowd the screen. But this sudden abundance of frightening females did not necessarily represent a monstrous step towards equal fright rights. Most of the female monster films hinged on a simple sexual reversal of standard monster movie plots. With a few minor script and casting alterations, most could have been filmed with males in the monster leads. Indeed, most had been already. There were a few instances of films sporting exclusively “female” monsters. One of the most durable of these involved women driven by vanity/insecurity into illicitly prolonging/preserving their youth/beauty at any/all costs. Roger Corman’s Wasp Woman (1959) was not about the horror of being a female White Anglo Saxon Protestant but of the plight of a wicked cosmetics exec who included wasp enzymes in her beauty formula and, as a result, would sporadically change into a murderous insect woman. The Leech Woman (1960) learned that lost beauty could be regained by killing men, extracting their precious bodily fluids, mixing them with a secret serum and injecting the results into her veins. Prior to making this discovery, the Leech Woman is depicted as a fairly attractive 40ish woman married to a callous doctor who is rapidly losing interest in her fading charms. The idea that such a woman could sooner submit to a life of constant violence and anxiety (the serum would wear off without warning and age her more drastically each time she came down) in order to lose 20 years of ugly life is apparently an acceptable one to horror film audiences. Were the film about an equally attractive male of comparable age, it would doubtless strain credulity. With What Ever Happened To Baby Jane? (1962), director Robert Aldrich introduced a fresh variety of female fiend — the menopause monster — ina film that fashioned a whole new horror subgenre devoted to exploiting a male fear of aging women. Once women “lose” their erotic appeal, without having the grace to discard their sexual appetites, they become mysterious and vaguely threatening figures to some men, particularly those who've understood women only physically, if at all. Shorn of their erotic allure, such women seem to some men to transform into quite another animal, one that resembles something, well... almost human. The psychic uncertainty experienced by some women undergoing menopause minus sympathy leads to many nervous breakdowns and unsettling bouts with previously caged emotional demons. Films that show such women — greatly exaggerated, of course, to meet reel life specifications — embarking on orgies of violent revenge that send many a male head rolling 10 must no doubt appeal to a certain segment of the female audience as well. In horror filmmaking, where the strategy has generally been ‘Speak softly and Carry a big schtick’, a successful film inevitably inspires a spate of imitations; endless xeroxes are made from the original, stamped with different but derivative titles, and released for short, saturated runs. So it wasn’t surprising to see Bette Davis, after appearing in Baby Jane, return for similar roles in The Nanny and Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte (whose Original title was, not unexpectedly, What Ever Happened To Cousin Chariotte?), and Joan Crawford, another Baby Jane alumnus, come back to star in StraitJacket and Berserk. Tallulah Bankhead played a madwoman in Die! Die! My Darling!, while Geraldine Page did What Ever Happened To Aunt Alice?, and Debbie Reynolds and Shelley Winters costarred in What’s the Matter With Helen? And so on, ad nauseum or ad infinitum, whichever comes first. While the potential of women to behave psychotically has never been questioned by horror filmmakers, they’re still reluctant to turn one loose in a fully-equipped, up-to-date mad doctor’s lab. Male mad doctors and power-crazed scientists have been a staple of literally hundreds of horror films, but madwomen are rarely granted access to any kind of true technological power. Sure, they can sink their feminine fangs into unwary male necks and otherwise bite, claw, murder and maim hapless men, but the thought of a woman having the influence of a Dr. No or even a Dr. Frankenstein is apparently too frightening to entertain... even in a horror film. There have been a few exceptions to this rule — the late Veronica Lake’s last movie role saw her as a mad scientist keeping Adolph Hitler alive in a desperate 1970 quickie called Flesh Feast — but none of any significance. This is especially surprising in a genre that has so little respect for its own conventions and traditions that it can produce titles like Jesse James Meets Frankenstein’s Daughter and Billy the Kid Vs. Dracula, which it did back in 1965. And neither film was designed as a satire. But not only have women been molested by male monsters and mistreated as monsters by male filmmakers, they’ve also had to depend on male heroes, be it rugged romantic lead or reasonable paternal scientist, for their salvation. Most monster films have been working out the same primal drama over and over again: Beast bothers Beauty; Hero beats Beast, bags Beauty. The enduring image of woman as virgin/whore is everywhere apparent in the horror film. Females are put on this planet to be defiled by fiends and then saved by heroes for a fate worse than death: eternal gratitude. Horror film heroes were not always satisfied to just save individual distressed damsels from the carnal clutches of madmen and monsters; sometimes they rescued entire female civilizations. Throughout the ’50s stalwart crews of bland, banal American explorers were forever trekking to (a) faraway planets, and (b) uncharted isles, where they were constantly uncovering tribes of (a) advanced women without men, and (b) primitive women sans same. These films, like Cat-Women of the Moon (where a mindless Hollywood moon maiden greets spaceman Sonny Tufts with a casual cry of “Welcome to the Moon!”) and Queen Of Outer Space (in which Zsa Zsa Gabor is the only Venusian with a Hungarian accent), were usually tacky, low-grade affairs full of scantily-clad extras and cheap cardboard sets ever threatening to topple in mid-scene. Plot variations from film to film were minimal. The gallant gringos would simply stagger the space ladies with their manly charms and American know-how, save them from whatever peril happened to be facing them, and the females in question were summarily wooed and won. And these were advanced women, mind you. Their primitive counterparts, in films like Mesa of Lost Women and Untamed Women, fared no better. Like the all-woman films, the all-female island movies proposed that any four or five males could straighten out any problems that might confront a whole female culture in 75 minutes or less. At times the exploitation of women in the horror film could be quite involved. In the classic King Kong, a film that established many of the monster movie’s most durable and cherished clichés, Fay Wray is manipulated not only by the title monster but by every important male character in the film. First, in the opening scenes, Fay, a starving Depression stray forced to steal for her supper, is rescued from an angry merchant's wrath by fasttalking promoter and all-around American Dreamer Carl Denham (Robert Armstrong), who decides he wants to use her in a movie he plans to shoot on dangerous Skull Island. After sailing to that exotic isle, the golden girl is promptly abducted by the requisite black natives who want to sacrifice her to a demanding god who's apparently into white women. But no sooner is she in the natives’ clutches than Kong shows up to claim her. After he has his way with her a while, she’s snatched back by hero Jack Driscoll (Bruce Cabot). Back in New York, Kong breaks his Broadway contract, recaptures Fay — who’s already spent most of her screentime screaming — and takes her on a tour of the Empire State Building, before Driscoll again reclaims her. After suffering the humiliation of being passed from one sweaty set of male hands to another, Fay even gets blamed for the ape’s demise when Denham looks at Kong’s fallen carcass and sighs, “Twas Beauty killed the Beast.” | mean, really... it’s enough to make a grown monster cry.