Feminist Revenge in Carrie and Midsommar
How two generations of horror use violence, catharsis, and visual style to grapple with female autonomy.
Since its creation, the horror genre has reflected cultural anxieties, acting as a mirror for the fears, uncertainties, and prejudices of their time. A reoccurring issue within the genre resulting from this is its treatment of women, as they are often painted as either dangerous due to their sexualities or helpless victims needing to be saved. A response to this has been the existence of horror films that explore feminist ideas, which often include revenge fantasies and female protagonists who subvert the traditional trope of the final girl. This paper will examine how two films, Carrie (1976) and Midsommar (2019), engage with themes of violence and revenge within a feminist lens, revealing societal anxieties surrounding female autonomy and empowerment. Carrie reflects the unease of a society beginning to grapple with feminist ideas, while Midsommar is a product of a world more willing to align with a woman’s journey to empowerment.
Brian De Palma’ Carrie is deeply interested in female autonomy and the repercussions of that power. The film follows Carrie White, an awkward teenager who is relentlessly teased by her peers and abused by her extremely religious mother. The film opens with Carrie experiencing her first period in the locker room showers; her classmates mock her naivety, and her mother punishes her. This sets the tone for the story, as this humiliation becomes a turning point in her life. At the same time, Carrie becomes more aware of her telekinetic abilities, which manifest when she feels threatened or upset. The story culminates at prom, where a bucket of pig’s blood is dumped on her head as she is crowned prom queen, causing her to unleash her powers in a fit of rage, taking revenge on all of her tormentors.
From a feminist interpretation, Carrie can be seen as a story about the consequences of female oppression. The struggles Carrie faces garner her sympathy from the audience, making her violent acts of revenge a moment of empowerment. The film can be interpreted as criticizing the pressures young women face concerning the expression of their sexuality and high school culture. Keith Booker argues how her acts of vengeance can be seen as empowering, stating, “Carrie, in a sense, stands in for all awkward adolescents who have been bullied in high school, but also for all women who have been abused because their sexual and reproductive power…we are invited to identify with her action and thus to imagine having the power to take revenge on our own tormentors.” Carrie also clearly has a stance on religion, as Booker argues, “the film opposes fundamentalism religious fanaticism, especially when that fanaticism is intended to repress feminine sexuality.” The film complicates the traditions of the final girl trope because the final girl is usually the sympathetic main character, but in Carrie it is the side character Sue Snell, since Carrie is the monster. Her character blurs the line between protagonist and antagonist, which forces the audience to sympathize with her while fearing her power. This duality makes Carrie a unique exploration of feminist ideas within the constraints of 1970s horror.
While Carrie can be interpreted as a feminist horror film, it is still a product of its time and reflects anxieties surrounding female autonomy. The film came out around the time of the Roe v. Wade decision and second-wave feminism, when people were still grappling with the feminist movement and the role and power of women within society. This can be seen in the film, because while Carrie is a sympathetic character, her autonomy is portrayed as something terrifying and destructive. Her telekinesis is linked to her starting menstruation, reinforcing fears regarding feminine sexuality. While Carrie’s revenge on her tormentors may feel cathartic, the film ultimately portrays her autonomy as dangerous and unnatural. In her novel The Monstrous-Feminine, Barbara Creed argues how women have long been vilified for their sexualities, and how despite these female villains often having autonomy, “The presence of the monstrous feminine in the popular horror film speaks to us more about male fears than about female desire or feminine subjectivity”. The feminist and misogynist interpretation of this film makes Carrie both a critique of and a product of its time, as the film explores feminist themes while also continuing the horror genre’s tradition of villainizing female power.
Midsommar, directed by Ari Aster, subverts typical horror genre conventions by integrating themes of female empowerment. Dani, a young woman recovering from the traumatic deaths of her parents and sister, joins her emotionally distant boyfriend Christian and his friends on a trip to a midsummer festival at a commune in Sweden. As they spend more time at the commune, it becomes clear that the community practices dark and violent rituals. Dani is initially afraid and hostile toward the Harga people, but gradually becomes integrated into their traditions as she grows more distant from Christian. By the end of the film, she embraces her role as the May Queen and sacrifices Christian in a ritual.
“Both characters are taking revenge against people who minimized their emotions and made them feel small.”
Unlike the traditional final girl, Dani does not survive the horror by escaping or defeating the “monster” but instead embraces it. The Harga community, while unsettling and violent, offers Dani empathy and a sense of belonging, which has been missing from her life. Her acceptance of the community and rejection of Christian symbolize her reclaiming agency. Diana Schultz interprets the end of the film as a “reclamation of the abject”, arguing, “After repressing any negative feelings for most of the film, in part due to a desire to please Christian and his friends, who act as though she’s overreacting, Dani finally reaches emotional release in Harga. In doing so, she gains back power over Christian, who acted as a masculine stand-in for an agent of women’s emotional repression”. This subversion is further emphasized through the film’s visual choices, which go against traditional horror aesthetics. The warm colors and bright pastoral setting create an atmosphere that challenges horror genre norms, reflecting the film’s thematic interest in going against expectations.
Midsommar is better able to explore feminist themes within the horror genre than Carrie because of the time it was made. Midsommar came out in a time of heightened awareness of gender inequities and female empowerment, since the #MeToo movement began only two years prior. Dani’s relationship with Christian is relevant to more modern conversations about toxic relationships, which makes her transformation at the end of the film more of a moment of liberation. Whereas with Carrie, while Carrie is clearly a victim of her circumstances, her autonomy is still depicted as something to be feared, highlighting the unease surrounding women’s empowerment. Due to its more modern lens, Midsommar frames the feminist revenge fantasy as more empowering and uses horror tropes in ways that uplift, rather than undermine, its female protagonist. As Schultz argues, “the horror genre can provide a space for female characters and writers to expose the oppression they face as a clear monster to the audience, aligning readers and viewers with their experience”.
Analyzing the climactic scenes in Carrie and Midsommar reveals how both films engage with themes of vengeance. In Carrie, the entire film builds up to the prom scene, as the prior scenes show Carrie’s bullies planning the prank. After Carrie is crowned prom queen, the suspense continues to build as the anxiety-inducing music intensifies, and the shots between Sue, Chris, and the bucket of blood cut back and forth faster and faster. The music stops and there is silence after the bucket falls, contrasting with the previous moment and adding to the shock value. Carrie’s world begins to spin, as shown through moving kaleidoscope shots of the audience laughing—the shot of Mrs. Snell, the nice teacher, laughing at her indicates to the audience that Carrie may be an unreliable narrator. When Carrie locks the doors and turns on the emergency hose, the gym goes from having pretty pastel colors to being enveloped in red lighting, just like how Carrie is coated in blood. Her expression is intense and terrifying as she causes more chaos. When she exits the gym which she has set ablaze, there are glittery stars adorning the outside, creating dream-like imagery, as if this is all Carrie’s fantasy.
In the final scene of Midsommar, Dani, who has been crowned the May Queen, chooses to sacrifice Christian in a ritual. Ambient, heavenly music plays as Christian, his friends, and the other sacrifices are set in flames in the wooden structure. As the cult members mimic the screams of the sacrifices and cry out in agony, it feels cathartic to see that release of emotion. Dani is coughing from the smoke and overwhelmed by the ritual, but when she looks at the Harga people crying and the structure crumbling, she looks relieved and smiles. Her dress of flowers, the brightness of the setting, and the music make this scene feel like a dream sequence. The music becomes creepy during certain shots of the cult members or the people being burned alive, as this is imagery that is supposed to be scary, but it ultimately ends on a more beautiful note as Dani’s smile widens.
In Carrie and Midsommar, violence is treated as a cathartic act. Both characters are taking revenge against people who minimized their emotions and made them feel small. Before these scenes, they were harboring suppressed pain, which finally gets released through the murdering of their oppressors. Both films use aesthetically pleasing imagery that contrasts with the violence and horror of the scene, which emphasizes the positive emotions Carrie and Dani feel towards their acts of revenge. The similarities between the scenes reveal the appeal of seeing the punishment of an oppressor on screen. The most important difference between these two scenes is that Carrie’s violent acts stem from a loss of control and are meant to be scary, while Dani’s revenge is a conscious decision that symbolizes her rejection of patriarchal expectations, and the audience fears the cult rather than Dani herself. While both characters are experiencing very similar emotional releases, the intended reactions to the protagonists are entirely different, demonstrating the difference in the films’ handling of feminist themes.
This recurring theme of feminist revenge within the horror world stems from the mistreatment of women within the genre and serves to reclaim the genre as something that uplifts rather than demeans women. Carrie was made during a time when people were still grappling with female autonomy, particularly regarding sexuality, which explains why the film critiques the oppression of women while simultaneously reinforcing fears about female power. Midsommar is a continuation of a movement away from the othering of women within the horror genre, since that type of story has fallen out of favor within popular culture. The similarities between these stories of feminist revenge expose an enduring desire within society to feel the catharsis of this type of vengeance, which reveals how anxieties surrounding female autonomy weigh deeply on the minds of the general public. As women’s rights continue to be a relevant topic of discussion with the overturning of Roe v. Wade, it will be interesting to see whether that cultural anxiety will cause an intensification of depictions of oppression under the patriarchy within the horror genre.