31 Days of Feminist Horror Films: ANTICHRIST + POSSESSION
A longtime cinematic pariah, Lars Von Trier is nonetheless a dedicated feminist, though it sometimes take several appraisals of his work to find the underlying pro-woman themes. Most of his films focus on incredibly complexed, often unlikable female protagonists, but Von Trier is unapologetic in his exploration of most perverse, upsetting aspects of the human experience, particularly when it comes to long-term relationships and the constant abuses women face in a patriarchal world. ANTICHRIST is Von Trier’s foray into horror, a punishing watch that explores how one woman grapples with her own grief over her son’s death, internalized misogyny, and an unbelievably condescending husband.
She (Charlotte Gainsbourg) and He (Willem Dafoe) enjoy rapturous sex in the film’s surreal opening, but just as they reach climax, their young son climbs out a window and falls to his death while a load of laundry churns and a baby monitor whines in the background — the terrors of domesticity. Of course, both parents are destroyed by grief and guilt, but He seemingly gets over it by the time the funeral ends, while She is inconsolable; hospitalized and pumped full of psychiatric drugs to deal with her all-encompassing sadness. But He, being a psychiatrist, decides that he can care for his wife better than any traditional medicine can, and takes her into his own care.
It’s an especially creepy update on the paternalistic doctor/hysterical woman trope, and He immediately begins acting as as the good doctor, denying her sex because she’s now his patient, and insisting that no other doctor knows her as well as he does. She fires back: “You’ve never been interested in me until I was your patient…you’re indifferent to whether or not your child is alive,” wanting to die right along with their son as her anxiety becomes physically crippling, manifesting itself as violent nightmares, masochistic behavior, and dreams of a decrepit forest where they have a cabin, Eden, where She was working on her thesis about gynocide with their son. The only thing that calms She down after these fits is increasingly violent sex, so He decides that exposure therapy to the woods, a literal return to Eden, is the best course of treatment, barring constant sex. But as soon as they arrive, the woods prove to be full of terrors — misty, rotting landscapes shot in high contrast that feel indicative of She’s troubled femininity — and He can’t stop spewing therapy talk at She. It’s only after He sees a doe with a stillborn fawn hanging out of it that He realizes just how isolated they are, and what future horror are in store for them as chapter two begins, and chaos reigns.
The doe is the first of three key animals that appear in the film to signify She’s perceived failures as a wife and mother. The stillborn fawn of course represents the sense of loss She feels as a mother for letting her child die while experiencing sexual pleasure, and her failed maternity. Soon after He’s attacked by ticks and grows increasingly paranoid about acorns from an oak tree hitting their roof, which represent seeds to be fertilized in the future, something She will never do again. The vaginal, encompassing nature of the underbrush that She experiences via exposure therapy becomes omnipresent, and we see a deformed baby chick being consumed by ants before its devoured by a hawk. As we later learn, She was purposefully deforming her son’s feet by putting his shoes on the wrong feet, and the chick represents this failure in She’s parenting, and she breaks down, admitting how much she misses her child after hearing her son’s phantom cries in the forest. And finally, there’s the infamous “chaos reigns” fox, which He discovers dying alone in the forest, disemboweling himself, after She appears to be seemingly cured (or at least so she says) by the exposure therapy. The fox represents the coming descent into sexual madness and She’s reign of extreme violence, the intersection of learned feminine violence and the inherent violence of nature and the animal kingdom. This motif of three is present elsewhere in the film — the idea that it makes three people to make a full family, and of course, in the Three Beggars, (Pain, Grief, and Despair) which She has become obsessed with in writing her thesis on gynocide. This classic idea of three gets into She and He’s larger discussions of good and evil (“Nature is Satan’s church”) and of course alludes to the Holy Trinity.
As ANTICHRIST moves into its chaos-reigning third act, He discovers She’s increasingly disturbing thesis research involving witches and witch hunts, as realized in disturbing drawings and disintegrating handwriting. Most disturbingly, He discovers that in trying to disprove notions about historical gynocide, She has become convinced that women are inherently evil. With this, ANTICHRIST explores how She has internalized misogyny to the point where it’s poisoned her entire worldview and her ideas about herself and all women, and He has helped foster and support these ideas in her through daily, casual derision of her entire self. Throughout the film, He makes dismissive comments about She’s academic pursuits, which further gets at the idea of female intelligence being undermined by male academics at every turn, and She’s work somehow being less valuable than He’s.
After a particularly violent sex scene under the oak tree (as thousands of female hands reach out to them from the roots of the tree, another potent image of vengeful female power) and a fight about She’s abuse of their son’s feet, She snaps. After She accuses Him of wanting to leave her, She extracts some particularly unique sexual violence on her husband with a block of wood, effectively ending any future sexual pleasure for him. She also bolts a rusty weight to his leg, fingering the wound as she does — this immobilizes him, and shows that She is now the alpha in their relationship. When he wakes up, he manages to drag himself into a dark, vaginal foxhole, and She searches the woods for him — a crazed final girl seeking out her own boogeyman for one final confrontation. She buries him, then unburies him in the foxhole, briefly remorseful, but knowing that the Three Beggars are coming, and that one of them must die, she flashes backs to admit possible guilt by inaction in their son’s death.
Unable to deal with that guilt, she attempts one final orgasm with He, but tearfully cannot finish…so decides instead to mutilate her genitals, removing her clitoris with a pair of scissors (a thoroughly feminine weapon) ending her sexual pleasure forever too — the film cuts to the doe after she does, and the trio of animals surround her semi-nude, wounded body, further linking femininity and nature. She makes a final attempt to kill him, with the same scissors, so He brutally strangles her, and burns her, just like a witch. He seems to survive, fleeing back into the forest, but he’s soon surrounded by thousands of women in old clothes, their faces blurred, and they consume him — He has been made to answer not only for the denigration and murder of his own wife, but centuries of violence against the women (and all women) who have come to kill him.
It’s easy to classify ANTICHRIST as anti-woman (I certainly did upon my first watch) but further thought about the film’s themes and about Dafoe as emblematic as the failures of the patriarchy as a whole proves that Von Trier’s film is indeed an indictment of male power structures that have oppressed, abused, and killed women since the dawn of time. Gainsbourg’s She has been so corrupted by the patriarchy that she turns societal male hatred inward, and begins hating herself and believing that all women are evil, because men, especially her husband, have constantly told her that such a thing is true. She becomes a female monster when this hatred, her maternal grief, and professional failures become too much to bear — her sexually violent revenge reflects how her own lust has been seen as base throughout the film, so she decides to take total ownership of all future marital sexual pleasure into her own hands. ANTICHRIST is a complicated film from a complicated filmmaker, but it uses extreme body horror to explore female rage, sexual pleasure, and maternity in a totally singular way.
ANTICHRIST is available from Hulu and other streaming services.
ANTICHRIST and POSSESSION are an ideal duo of films that use sexually-motivatd body horror to explore the extreme emotional depths of disintegrating marriages. In ANTICHRIST, the couple is grieving the loss of a child, and in POSSESSION, the couple is grieving the loss of their marriage, but in either case, body horror is used as a metaphor for the emotional toll of such intense circumstances. She and Anna both wrestle control back from their husbands after years of being abused in a myriad of ways, from everyday misogyny and casual insults to actual abuse and violence. Both women are forced to use violence to regain personal autonomy after only existing as one (inferior) half of a pair for many years. The female body and maternal imagery are used as subversive symbols of horror in both films, as She and Anna find that seeking their own independence means a radical, violent rebirth of both of their own bodies. ANTICHRIST and POSSESSION both reach a level of extremity in exploring horrors of marriage and of the female body that is matched by few other films.
Andrzej Zulawski’s unforgettable 1981 film, unavailable uncut in the States until very recently, is a classic example of a film you need to just see with as little prior knowledge as possible, so I’ll try to not to give too much away. POSSESSION is an all-encompassing experience, a gruesome two hour tilt-a-whirl through a couple’s disintegrating marriage in 1980s Germany. Anna (Isabelle Adjani), a housewife, tells her husband Mark (Sam Neill), a government agent of mysterious origin, that their marriage is over and that she’s been cheating with an older man named Heinrich (Heinz Bennent) upon Mark’s return from a business trip. Mark refuses to believe his wife at first, unable to make sense of what this means for his life with Anna and their young son, Bob.
From this point on, the film begins show the slow, steady deterioration of both Mark and Anna’s psyches as their break-up becomes realized in surreal, bloody detail. However, most of the initial violence — psychological and physical — comes from Mark, who constantly states that he cannot believe Anna could sleep with another man, could betray him, and could do anything at all without his express permission. Zulawski’s constantly spinning camera (the blocking is exquisite throughout, with incredible shot selections of oppressive domestic interiors) adds to this sense of nauseating violence as it goes from screaming matches in the kitchen to a brutal beating of Anna to more bizarre directions. Throughout, Zulawski makes the point that Mark’s sense of entitlement when it comes to controlling Anna is totally toxic, and misses no opportunity to show how pathetic wounded masculinity can be.
Anna eventually has the good sense to get an apartment of her own, leaving Mark to take care of Bob, but Mark has hired a private investigator to follow her. The PI gets more than he bargained for when he discovers Anna’s grisly sexual treatment of men in her new place — the incredibly gruesome scene in Anna’s apartment is best seen rather than described. Even as we see her victims, it’s sort of impossible not to empathize with Anna, as her sexually-motivated killings become a manifestation of the violence she’s experienced in her marriage. As the film progresses, Anna’s transformation is beautifully realized by Adjani, giving one of the bravest, most inedible performances ever put to film (she won a Cesar and Best Actress at Cannes for the role.) In the film’s most breathtaking sequence, Anna walks through an abandoned subway tunnel, and totally loses her shit, exorcising the pervasive violence of her warped marriage. In a long unbroken shot, we watch as Anna whirls through the tunnel, her movements somehow simultaneously animalistic and controlled. We watch as Anna’s body, a body that has been subjected to a wide variety of abuse from Mark, acts out that trauma in stunning, horrific fashion. The sequence climaxes with a totally singular image of Anna’s reproductive power that reflects the inherent fear of female bodies that many men have, especially of miscarriage.
While we may spend more time throughout the film in Mark’s POV, Zulawski is constantly reminding the audience that without Mark’s need for total dominance over Anna (and frankly, all women, as he says, “’I’m at war with women”), the extreme violence of her acts could have been avoided. If Mark would’ve simply been able to let her go, to let her move on with a new man, the ensuing horrors their break-up wouldn’t exist. Like so many other horror films with a central romantic relationship, POSSESSION uses brutal violence and challenging thematic concepts to explore the much more grounded threat of the masculine inability to let go of romantic partners.
In the film’s final act, Mark begins to match Anna’s violence, and becomes strangely protective of her killings, helping her cover up the growing horrors in her apartment. Mark also gets to know the other major female characters more intimately in the film’s final third — Bob’s teacher, Helen, also played by Adjani but as an idealized, saintly version of herself; Anna’s best friend, Margie, who’s thirsty for Mark as she assumes some of Anna’s domestic duties (but also pays a terrible price for doing so); and Heinrich’s mother, who challenges Mark’s philosophical convictions, and forces him to consider the full weight of what he has done in helping cover for Anna. After a violent confrontation with his former employers and the police, Mark is pursued by Anna, who shows him what she’s been working on in her apartment. As Helen represents the idealized version of Anna, Anna too has been crafting an idealized Mark out of blood, viscera, and various vaginal secretions, eventually fucking the creature once it becomes sentient to help it along in the process to become more like Mark.
This leads to the final moments of the film, which find Anna and Mark going down togethre in a bloody final coupling, and poor Bob left alone with doppleganger Mark and Helen. The psychological complexity of this film is such that no small explanation could do justice to the many layers of relationship violence at play, the conceptual horror of Anna’s killings, or the notion of the divine as discussed at numerous points throughout the narrative — this simply speaks to the must-see nature of this story. POSSESSION’s significant reputation within cult film circles is totally earned, and its grisly depiction of how violent intense intimacy can be is realized in stunning fashion, thanks to Zulawski’s focus on close shooting, much in the mold of the domestic dramas of John Cassavetes or Ingmar Bergman. POSSESSION uses bloody, sexual violence to bring the psychological wounds of a disintegrating relationship to life in gruesome fashion.
POSSESSION is available from Amazon.
