Journal of Gender Studies

ISSN: 0958-9236 (Print) 1465-3869 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cjgs20

Desublimating monstrous desire: the horror of

gender in new extremist cinema

Lisa Coulthard & Chelsea Birks

To cite this article: Lisa Coulthard & Chelsea Birks (2016) Desublimating monstrous desire:
the horror of gender in new extremist cinema, Journal of Gender Studies, 25:4, 461-476, DOI:
10.1080/09589236.2015.1011100

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09589236.2015.1011100

Published online: 18 Feb 2015.

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Journal of Gender Studies, 2016
Vol. 25, No. 4, 461476, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09589236.2015.1011100

RESEARCH ARTICLE
Desublimating monstrous desire: the horror of gender in new extremist
cinema
Lisa Coulthard* and Chelsea Birks1

Department of Theatre and Film, University of British Columbia, 6354 Crescent Road, Vancouver,
BC, Canada V6T1Z2

(Received 19 July 2014; accepted 13 January 2015)

Known for graphic gore and formal experimentation, films of European new extremism
stand out for the way in which they combine sex with violence, stressing the body in
extreme modes of being and rendering its materiality emphatic, uncanny and
profoundly disturbing. While this emphasis on sex and violence has been widely
recognized in scholarly literature on new extremism, its connections to gendered
conventions of genre cinema have not. In this article, we contend that films such as
Philippe Grandrieuxs Sombre (1998), Lars von Triers Antichrist (2009) and Claire
Deniss Trouble Every Day (2001) directly reference gendered tropes and conventions
of horror cinema in their explorations of desire, sexual difference and violence.
Far from being inconsequential or secondary concerns, we argue that emphatically
gendered characteristics of cinematic horror are crucial to the disturbing impact of
these films. By appropriating tropes from the horror film, but refusing them the closure
and recuperation customary to narrative conventions of the genre, new extremist films
critique these gendered implications, calling attention to the paradoxes and
contradictions inherent in the gender politics of horror.
Keywords: horror cinema; gender and film; new extremism; film violence; monstrous
femininity

Introduction
Known for graphic gore and formal experimentation, films of European new extremism
stand out for the way in which they combine sex with violence, stressing the body in
extreme modes of being and rendering its materiality emphatic, uncanny and profoundly
disturbing. First described by James Quandt in a derisive 2004 ArtForum article, new
extremism initially referred to a tendency in contemporary French art cinema towards
graphic sex and gory violence.2 The term has since come to encompass films from a range
of European countries, from Import/Export (Seidl, 2007; Austria) to Taxidermia (Palfi,
2006; Hungary) to Antichrist (von Trier 2009; Denmark). While these films are
aesthetically extremely varied and come from a range of political contexts, they share what
Horeck and Kendall (2011) call an uncompromising and highly self-reflexive appeal to
the spectator (p. 1); explicit (often unsimulated) sex and/or scenes of violent acts such as
murder, rape and cannibalism confront the viewer and affect him or her in an intense, often
brutally visceral way. Films associated with new extremism such as Grandrieuxs Sombre
(1998), von Triers Antichrist (2009), Deniss Trouble Every Day (2001), Dumonts

*Corresponding author. Email: lisa.coulthard@ubc.ca

q 2015 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group

2462 L. Coulthard and C. Birks

Twentynine Palms (2003) and de Vans Dans Ma Peau [In My Skin] (2002) appear to have
clear links to horror cinema, particularly in their engagement with gender and excessive
violence. Contemporary horror and new extremism both share an obsession with the body,
a willingness to explore explicit sex and graphic gore, and an interrogation of the body and
its limits; despite these correspondences, scholarly work on new extremism tends to
distance films like Sombre, Trouble Every Day or Antichrist from the horror genre,
focusing instead on their use of experimental aesthetics and contextualizing the films
within the tradition of European art cinema. New extremist films certainly tend to exhibit
conventional art cinema characteristics (loose causal relations, narrative ambiguity,
festival and arthouse audiences, etc.),3 and a number of its associated directors are
celebrated art cinema auteurs, (many with links to philosophy, aesthetics and politics)4;
however, the tendency to stress new extremity as a form of art cinema fails to recognize
the ways in which these films engage with genre tropes and with the gendered implications
and expectations associated with generic formulas. Far from being inconsequential or
secondary to theoretical concerns, we contend that the gendered tropes of cinematic horror
are crucial to the disturbing impact of the majority of films included within new extremity.
Horror as a genre has been traditionally conceived as being related to if not
fundamentally about anxieties of gender and sexual difference, and one of the aims of
this article is to address the ways in which new extremist films critique these gendered
implications of horror: by appropriating tropes from the horror film, but refusing them the
closure and recuperation customary to narrative conventions of the genre, new extremism
calls attention to the paradoxes and contradictions inherent in the gender politics of horror.
That gender and repression are central to the American horror film is an obvious
statement, and one rehashed in contemporary horror cinema, its parodies and the scholarly
work in this field since the 1980s. As Andrew Tudor notes, the American horror monster
since Psycho (Hitchcock, 1960) has been tied to sexuality, repression and psychosis
(Tudor, 1989, p. 47), links analysed in detail by scholars such as Robin Wood, Carol
Clover, Linda Williams and Barbara Creed. Woods (1979) argument that horror tends
towards reactionary attitudes regarding gender and sexual difference, Williams (1984)
argument that monstrosity in horror is linked to female sexuality and the punitive male
gave, Creeds (1986) theorization of the monstrous-feminine and its relation to the abject
and Clovers (1992) examination of the association between the Final Girl and the
Monster (the feminized male assailant) in the slasher film have all been enormously
influential in scholarship on film horror, accounting for horrors exploitation of the desires,
fears and anxieties of audiences. Stressing gender and its repressions, abjections and
monstrous deformations, these scholars insisted on a reconsideration of horror, in
particular the denigrated and discarded trash cinema of horror called slasher films, a group
of films characterized by exceedingly formulaic plots involving gory murders of teens and
young adults. The surplus repression of sexuality and sexual difference returns in these
films via the gendered triumvirate of monster, sexualized victim and asexual final girl,
whose fates offer narrational destruction or domestication that enables a temporary, but
fictionally and ideologically powerful, re-repression of these fundamental threats to
normative social order.
While they differ in their opinions on the latent politics of horror (Clover and Creed see
the formal devices of horror as potentially more subversive than Wood allows), they all
agree that these politics are construed in ideological terms stressing repression, the body
and gender. In the usual theoretical discourse regarding gender and horror cinema, the
problem of sexual difference (the castrated/monstrous feminine) manifests itself in the
form of a feminized (often male) monster who poses a threat to the normal sexual order,
 Journal of Gender Studies 3
463

a threat that is eventually destroyed (re-repressed) or at least deferred until the sequel.
Although these gendered binaries, tropes and conventions are most clearly articulated in
the sub-genre horror mode of the slasher film (as Clovers seminal text makes evident),
variations, playful subversions and reconceptualizations of these tropes are found
throughout contemporary horror cinema. For all the transgressions, queerings, parodies
and genre blendings, desire and difference still form the monstrous core of contemporary
horror. Further, while conventional horror films might play with these ambiguities during
the course of the narrative, they generally do so only in order to resolve them in the end: as
Rieser (2001) argues, horror generally works with rather than against hegemonic ideas of
gender, as through the course of the traditional horror narrative difference from
hegemony (queerness) is othered while heterosexuality and the sex/gender system it
maintains are reinstated (p. 388).5
The films that we are examining here also use horror tropes in order to address sexual
difference, but by failing to recontain their unleashed ambiguities they are able to
interrogate, and potentially undermine, the reactionary gender politics of horror. This is
not to suggest that they are the only films to do so, but rather to insist on the mutability of
the binaries of art and popular cinema through an insistence on taking generic conventions
seriously. While critical examinations of the films of new extremism recognize desire and
difference as central, these analyses tend to entertain an art cinema bias that obfuscates the
connection of these terms to the emphatically gendered tropes of horror. By employing
conventions from horror, but failing to re-repress or recuperate the excesses these genre
films usually serve to (safely) unleash, films such as Sombre, Antichrist and Trouble Every
Day expose the horrors at the heart of sexual difference and leave these anxieties standing,
without resolution or re-repression. Examining the violence and antagonism that root
sexual difference as a leftover, these films point to a surplus that seeks to leave the
audience dissatisfied, confused and unable to settle the contradictions that remain at each
films end. More than just using horror tropes, these new extremist films engage with
cinemas construction of monstrous desire at a deep and complex level that asks us to
query horrors gendered cliches and interrogate their ideological underpinnings. Exposing
contradictions and letting ambiguities stand, these films address the ambivalences of
ideologys relation to gendered violence and interrogate the ways these are resolved in
conventional horror cinema.6
The films we discuss here articulate their indebtedness to horror cinema in explicit
terms: the possession narrative in Antichrist, the serial killer film in Sombre and the
vampire/cannibal film in Trouble Every Day. Beyond generic referentiality, these new
extremist films undermine gendered horror tropes such as the monstrous-feminine, the
feminized male monster and the final girl, through a reworking of the genres sexually
charged substructures. Making excessive the tropes and conventions of sex and gender in
horror cinema (fantasmatically fascinating male serial killers, mad scientists, possessed
female witches, vampiric temptresses), each of these films takes on a highly gendered
stereotype of cinematic horror that is based in discourses of monstrous bodies,
transgressive desire and othering. Simultaneously exposing and utilizing horror
conventions, these films locate the gendered tropes of horror within the parameters of
an art cinema mode that emphasizes ambiguity, loosened cause and effect narration,
stylistic experimentation, and audience alienation. The result, we contend, is key to
understanding the critical disturbance associated with new extremism genre tropes are
present, but in such a way that they draw attention to themselves as such. Horror tropes are
not so much subverted as they are interrogated, reworked and rendered radically
ambiguous: these monstrous incarnations do not re-repress the libidinal energies they
4464 L. Coulthard and C. Birks

foster, but articulate the more fundamental and more terrifying underlying horror of sexual
difference in all of its incommensurability.

Sombre
The debut feature from visual artist Philippe Grandrieux, Sombre follows Jean (Marc
Barbe) a puppeteer shadowing the route of the Tour de France; he is also a serial killer,
systematically pursuing and murdering women (most of them prostitutes). This pattern is
disrupted when Jean encounters Claire (Elina Lowensohn), a shy and enigmatic virgin
who seems inexplicably drawn to him. As a serial killer, Jean belongs to a specific
category of the horror monster and Sombre plays into a number of conventions from the
serial-killer subgenre. McNaughtons Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986) serves as a
particularly apt comparison here, as until the disparate endings both films more or less
follow the same plotline: a serial killer accumulates a fairly substantial body count (in
Sombre Jean targets only women and mainly prostitutes, while Henrys modus operandi is
somewhat more omnivorous) before meeting a girl who appears to have the chance, or at
least the desire, to save him. While Becky (Tracy Arnold) in Henry is presumably
oblivious of the extent of Henrys crimes (she sees him as merely misguided and
reclusive), Sombres Claire is made explicitly aware of Jeans psychopathy early in the
narrative, discovering him in flagrante delicto in the parking lot of the hotel where they are
both staying. Despite this, she remains drawn to Jean the final scenes even imply that she
is in love with him a plot point that seems baffling to the point of inexplicability unless
interpreted in light of Sombres appropriation of horror conventions.
Critic Hainge (2008) rightly argues that Claires apparent love for Jean resists
comprehension and is therefore destined not to last and itself fall prey to the
incommensurability upon which it is premised (p. 228). However, he, like other
commentators, oversimplifies this incommensurability as a merely narrative one; rather,
Sombre reveals the contradictions inherent in the fundamental fantasy that supports this
fairy tale.7 When we contextualize Claires otherwise narratively unaccounted for love for
Jean within the tradition of horror it begins to make sense. Williams (1984) argues that
horror enacts an identification between woman and monster (p. 31), which generally
serves to punish the female protagonist for bearing a desirous, investigatory and/or active
gaze. The erotic affinity between woman and monster in horror, explained as a means of
punishing both for the threat they pose to the masculine psyche, has been commented on at
length by a variety of theorists and applied to films as diverse as The Phantom of the Opera
(Julian, 1925), Peeping Tom (Powell, 1960), The Silence of the Lambs (Demme, 1991) and
King Kong (Cooper & Schoedsack, 1933). Claires infatuation with Jean in Sombre thus
makes explicit the subtext that Williams observes in horror, in which the womans
sexuality is linked with the deviant or abnormal sexuality of the monster. By showing what
happens when the woman actually has sex with the monster, however, Sombre
desublimates the fantasy.
As is typical for a film serial killer, Jean is a creature of habit. He picks up women,
takes them somewhere secluded and begins to have sex with them. He always starts by
demanding his victim spread her legs, then he stares at her genitals (suggesting a range of
implications concerning castration anxiety, the trauma of sexual difference and the
uncanny), and finishes by putting his fingers in her mouth and choking her to death. He is
almost wordless: his dialogue primarily consists of aggressive, single-word commands
(Show! Drink! Wider!). His existence as a wandering puppeteer for children
apparently allows him the anonymity to conduct his activities without arousing suspicion,8
 Journal of Gender Studies 5
465

and frequent tracking shots of roads and roadsides in what seems like endless dusk (even
daylight scenes are coldly lit and darkened with filters) give a sense of Jean as a nomadic
shadow-creature that preys on those he meets at the margins.
Jean the monster finds his counterpart in Claire, whose virginity is an explicit reference
to the final girl figure from slasher and splatter films. Dressed plainly and wearing no
make-up, Claire fits Clovers characterization of the final girl as a figure whose
androgynous appearance and sexual unavailability marks her as distinct from the victims
whose vices the killer serves to punish (sex, drugs, alcohol).9 Like Jeans victims, Claire
encounters Jean at the side of a road: he stops to help her with her broken-down car,
inviting her into his own vehicle and offering her a towel to dry her rain-drenched hair as
he takes a look at the engine. Given that in the previous scene Jean murdered a woman who
got in his car and left her body by the roadside, the implication should be that Claire is in
danger, but Claire is obviously a different sort of woman than the ones he usually
encounters. Grandrieuxs cinematography emphasizes her clear skin and wide eyes, in
stark contrast to the pockmarked prostitutes of previous scenes. He exchanges more than
the usual number of words with her before driving her to meet her sister at the mall. From
this point, Grandrieux at most only vaguely alludes to how Jean and Claire keep coming
together, omitting narrative details that would explain or contextualize their subsequent
encounters. This becomes especially disorienting after Claire is made aware of his
psychopathy: although she catches him in the act as he strangles a woman in the parking
lot across the street from their hotel (he yells commands at a woman illuminated by a cars
headlights; she strips as he strangles another woman in the car), Claire tells no one and
continues to stay in the hotel with him. Their mutual fascination Claires evident in her
irrational decision to stay with him, Jeans in his refusal or inability to kill her is
explainable only with recourse to the history of horror and its central archetypes, the
monster and the final girl.
Claires attraction to Jean persists even after Jean attempts to rape and kill her sister
unlike uptight, unsullied Claire, Christine (Geraldine Voillat) is free-spirited and
sexually liberated, and therefore meets Jeans misogynistic modus operandi. Christine
exudes a carefree sexual confidence, and her bleach-blonde hair and tight, short outfits
are a stark contrast to the exaggeratedly chaste baggy corduroys and unflattering button-
downs worn by Claire. Claires chasteness marks her as different from her sister and
foreshadows the victimization of Christine by Jean: if Claire is the final girl, then
Christine occupies the role of the promiscuous female who, in compliance with the
conventions of the genre, must be victimized; accordingly, Jean attempts to strangle her
on a beach during a daytime excursion. Claire screams at Jean, who cowers like a scolded
animal, and the sisters escape; but inexplicably in the following scene they are back in
Jeans hotel room. There, Jean attempts to carry out his usual deadly routine with Claire,
but seems incapable: he begins by staring into her genitals, as per usual, but instead of
killing her begins to kiss her inner thighs tenderly. The sexual attraction between the
monster and the final girl is explicitly realized while simultaneously revealed to be
contradictory because, as a virgin, Claire is exempt from his murderous impulses
(although, as I shall return to below, their sexual encounter at the end of the film changes
this). Perplexed and outraged by the realization that he cannot rape or murder her, he
forces Claire to accompany him on a frenetic and alcohol-soaked excursion, leaving
Christine tied up in the hotel room.
Vacillating between expressions of ecstasy and abject terror, Claires behaviour in the
next scene is inscrutable and manic: she dances wildly with another man at an outdoor
party, explaining gleefully that Jean is dangerous and her life is at risk. Fully cognizant of
6466 L. Coulthard and C. Birks

it, she takes pleasure in the danger he poses to her, her ambiguous demeanour an
expression of enjoyment that defies rationality and threatens her position as a subject
(quite literally so, as he is likely to actually kill her). She returns with Jean to the mans
house for more drinks; the muted lighting and low thrumming bass of Bauhauss Bela
Lugosis Dead evoke a palpable feeling of dread. The man and his friend eye Claire
hungrily, and eventually attempt to take advantage of her inebriated state; Jean
uncharacteristically attempts to intervene, and Claire slips out while the two men begin to
beat him. Claire returns to her hotel room, rescues her sister and puts her on a train to Paris;
driving back, she encounters Jean on the side of the road, pulls over and, in an act that
would seem to defy all rational sense, initiates sex with him.
This scene indicates the repurposing and reframing of horror cinema conventions
regarding sex, violence and gender that we contend is evident in all of the films discussed
here monstrous desire is no longer repressed or returned, but desublimated through its
actualization. Claire idealizes her loss of virginity, describing it afterwards in transcendent
terms (It made me cry, she tells him tenderly when they are finished), feelings in stark
contradiction to the depiction of the act itself. Claire leads Jean to the gravel at the side of
the road (hardly the most comfortable place; one wonders why they do not go a few feet
further and have sex in the grass instead) and, obviously terrified, begins to undress for
him. His desire roused, he repeatedly attempts to reach up and choke her as he thrusts
roughly, her hands pushing him away as the gravel crunches audibly underneath them.
While Claire is able to distance herself from the experience by giving it symbolic support
after the fact, the spectator is left to grapple with the uncomfortable experience of
witnessing the event, a feeling of unease intensified by the disconcerting contradiction
between the cinematic rendering of the sex act and Claires symbolization of it afterwards.
Claires idealization of the event is an exaggerated example of fantasy providing a
narrative that supplements the trauma of the sexual encounter; witness to both the reality
and the fantasy, the spectator becomes aware of their total contradistinction. Imbued with
threat and danger, this sexual encounter is traumatic for the participants (her loss of
virginity to a serial killer; his thwarted murderous libidinal energy), but also for the
spectator, who like Jean is forced to witness the truth of the encounter rather than its post-
coital fantasmatic rendering.
Once their relationship is consummated, it is no longer allowed to exist except as a
fantasy because Jeans pathology precludes him from loving a woman once he has had sex
with her. Understanding this, he stops a car on a highway, pushes Claire into it and
aggressively instructs the driver to take her away; a few scenes later he murders another
woman and leaves her body in the woods, indicating that, as we will also see with Shane in
our discussion of Trouble Every Day, his disease is incurable. It is Claire who is changed
by the experience; her desire is awakened in the act and therefore requires narrativization,
as indicated in the perplexing scene in which Claire tells the woman that picks her up at the
side of the road that Jean is her husband, that they have children and that they often fight
but she is very much in love with him. Understood in light of the slasher films monster-
killers punishment of sexually active women, the disturbing implication here is that sex
with the killer is a fulfilment of the virgins fantasy, but one without impact. In Sombre,
sex and violence are not the opposite poles conceived by Clover, but rather constitutive of
sexual difference as such; the sacrificial impulse of the good girl is an empty gesture, an
offering without power, logic or sense, and heterosexual romance, sex and desire are
exposed as always already grounded in a fantasy (whether violent or romantic) that is
fundamentally at odds with the event itself.
 Journal of Gender Studies 4677

Antichrist
Detailing a traumatic story of loss, Lars von Triers Antichrist follows the archetypal
characters He (Willem Dafoe) and She (Charlotte Gainsbourg) to their terrible place in the
woods (Eden), a journey designed to cure Shes debilitating grief after the death of their
young son. Opening with a gloriously filmed scene of consensual sex between He and She
as their son falls to his accidental death, the films subsequent chapters address the Grief,
Despair and Pain (titles of the ensuing chapters), resulting from this loss. This loss
immediately splits the couple along normal (He) and abnormal (She) lines, with He taking
on the role of therapist seeking to cure She of her atypical grief patterns, extreme
anxiety and seemingly problematic sexual hunger. What begins as a confrontation of her
fears quickly turns into a terrifying story of her psychological disintegration and his
victimization, replete with references to horror cinema tropes of demonic possession,
psychosis and feminine evil. As He seeks to cure Shes grief, his arrogance and paternalism
come to the fore, to which She responds with anger, violence and brutality, torturing and
violating He and immobilizing him to keep him from leaving. After a gruesome scene of
Shes self-mutilation, He miraculously escapes and vengefully murders her. Burning
her corpse, He escapes into the woods and the film ends with a lushly filmed sequence
of his uphill journey through a forest, accompanied by faceless women seemingly risen
from the dead.
In turning her trauma into psychosis/possession, and retrospectively positing Shes
role in facilitating the death of their son, the film seems on the surface a misogynistic
treatise of the kind analysed by She in her thesis on gynocide; but yet, the film posits the
opposite, as it engages in a savage critique of the patriarchy that on the surface it seems to
endorse. That is, rather than a misogynistic treatise of the evil of female nature, Antichrist
is a powerful and emphatic critique of patriarchy, an attack waged on the smug arrogance,
ignorance and pomposity of Hes character and a condemnation of his role in exploiting
and exacerbating his wifes psychological fragility and traumatizing grief. This
interpretation also points to Hes negligence and distance as central to the eventual
death of their son as his absence and inability to read his wifes signs of despair make
him guilty.
However, her sexualized violence, his act of murder and a radically ambiguous
epilogue that disrupts the distinctions set up earlier in the film, work to deflect or derail
fixed readings of the film. Either a confirmation of female evil or its critique, Antichrist can
be read as an exorcism/cleansing of female evil, an examination of a catastrophic
mishandling of female psychosis, a traumatic repetition of historical misogyny (as if He is
the one truly possessed) or, a predetermined and irrevocable, if exaggerated, outcome of
patriarchy itself. What most disturbs in Antichrist, though, is that the film seems capable of
being read in all these ways and, more importantly, in all these ways at the same time. This
is particularly resonant when one considers the cryptic final scene that is simultaneously
suggestive of death and ascension, sacrifice and redemption and feminist rebirth and
delusional patriarchal fantasy. With its excesses of explicit sex and violence, the final act
of the film and the perplexing epilogue render interpretive certainty not only difficult but
unsatisfactory the film stresses its central ambiguities, almost gleefully willing viewers
to take its surface misogyny seriously, as it revels in gore and torture only to disavow this
violence in what appears to be a sacralizing sentimental epilogue.
While its graphic violence is frequently commented on, critical and scholarly analyses
of the film surprisingly sidestep, ignore or disavow completely the films relation to
generic film horror. Sharrett (2012) asserts that the mention of horror in reviews of the film
8468 L. Coulthard and C. Birks

is an act of misinterpretation, not irrelevant but overstated and, in my opinion, misread

(p. 18); Zolkos (2011) argues that the inscription of the plot of Antichrist within the horror
genre collapses incessantly throughout the movie, disintegrating at the encounter with
the comical, or the grotesque gesture and collapsing under the force of sublime
aestheticization (p. 181); Sinnerbrink (2011) insists that Antichrist is a trauma, rather than
horror, film because trauma resists the kind of conversion, mastery or sublimation to
which horror is supposed to be subject (p. 163); Buch-Hansen (2011) contends that only
the exceptional visual quality seemed to distinguish the film from the genres of
pornography and horror, or even the splatter sub-genre of horror films (p. 119).
Reducing horror cinema to its most basic conventions and effects, and placing it outside
the realm of serious intellectual engagement, analyses of Antichrist connect it to artistic
and philosophical elites (August Strindberg, Friedrich Nietzsche, Ingmar Bergman,
Andrei Tarkovsky, Carl Theodor Dreyer), not populist genre film conventions and
directors. While it is true that von Triers film thwarts the re-repression or mastery
associated with conventional horror, it is equally evident that much of contemporary
European horror cinema does this as well, with films such as Linterieur [Inside] (Bustillo
& Maury, 2007), Haute Tension [High Tension] (Aja, 2003), Srpski Film [A Serbian Film]
(Spasojevic, 2010) and Martyrs (Laugier, 2008) troubling the usual pleasures of horror
(mastery in Sinnerbrinks analysis, the comforts of re-repression in Wood, the temporary
subversion of boundaries in Clover) through extremes in gore, political allegory and
metaphor and intensified spectatorial implication. In spite of these trends, as well as von
Triers own comments on the film that indicate its profound connections to horror,
reductive understandings of horror cinema bolster critical recuperations of Antichrist as
art, not horror, cinema.
Disavowing the connection between Antichrist and horror becomes even more
surprising when we note that in many interviews von Trier asserts the films origins in
horror and comments on the influence of Japanese horror films such as Dark Water
(Nakata, 2002), The Ring (Nakata, 1998) and Audition (Miike,1999).10 Recognizing the
significance of these generic intertexts is not to assert that Antichrist is purely and simply a
horror film it clearly is not but rather to foreground the extent to which it engages
with, and partakes of, gendered horror conventions and tropes. Central to Antichrists
engagement with horror is its possession narrative (with the concomitant focus on the
possesseds monstrous sexuality) and its location reminiscent of a Cloverian terrible
place a remote cabin in the woods. Reworking of the narrational trope of gendered threat
and escape, it is He who is threatened by She and escapes in the films end. Like Clovers
final girl He is chaste, as he repeatedly rejects (but occasionally reluctantly succumbs) to
her sexual overtures; asserting his position as one of purity and distance, He becomes
aligned with the androgynous virginal girl, an association amplified by Willem Dafoes
performance. As several scholars and critics have noted, He and She share a physical
resemblance that draws the characters together: both Gainsbourg and Dafoe are lithe, with
high cheekbones and chiselled features (one critic refers to their features as simian),11
and both are characterized by a degree of androgyny. But it is only when He becomes
fearful of Eden, afraid of both nature and She, that his role as cliched horror victim begins
to coalesce. This shift becomes concretized in his decision to explore the sounds from the
attic, a move that echoes the conventional horror victims exploration of basements,
cellars, outbuildings or other terrifying places, an obsessively repeated error in judgement
familiar to any horror film viewer. As the terrifying place within the already terrifying
place, Edens attic stands in for Shes psychosis/possession it is marked as her place.
In the discovery of the attic, He confronts an encyclopaedic representation of horror
 Journal of Gender Studies 4699

cinema cliches indicating danger and psychosis: cluttered space, historical images of
torture, ancient texts and, most telling of all, a document revealing increasingly
indecipherable handwriting. Referencing The Shining (Kubrick, 1980) as well as many
other horror films, this horrific entry into the realm of the writer/killers secret place marks
Hes character as victim and even more explicitly, as the conventionally female victim
figure so clearly identified with the genre. As Clover (1992) notes of Lila Crane in Psycho,
this investigative drive is inseparable from the final girl who is the spunky inquirer into
the Terrible Place: the one who first grasps, however dimly, the past and present danger,
the one who looks death in the face, and the one who survives the murderers last stab
(p. 39). In pursuing his curiosity and acquiring knowledge, Hes fate is sealed he will be
chased, tortured and violated.
However, like the final girl, He survives the brutal attack and escapes, fleeing the
forest, after killing the monster and leaving the terrible place. Miraculously finding a lost
key that allows him to unshackle himself, He strangles She, burns her body on a pyre and
escapes into the forest, where he begins his journey home. As noted, this epilogic journey
is perhaps the strangest and most divisive element of the film: mirroring the stylistic
conventions of the opening, the film ends not merely with the death of the monster and the
victims escape (or, read differently, the victims death and the monsters escape), but with
an inscrutable sequence documenting Hes journey from the forest. It is, in short, an echo
of the opening scenes sublimity and, as a result, it occupies a strange place of parodic
distance: with what we have witnessed, we cannot take seriously the elevated tone and
sacralizing discourse that the style invites (lush black and white slow motion
cinematography scored by Handels aria Lascia chio pianga) this concluding portrait
of He is too clearly at odds with the dubious therapist/controlling husband represented thus
far. In mirroring the opening sex scene, the epilogue makes overt the fantasmatic support
and framing of that initial act, retroactively infecting it with the violence that has come
after. In this recasting of the initial sequence, these mirrored scenes expose fundamental
asymmetries of the sexual relationship itself; that is, although resembling each other, He
and She are marked by their sexual difference, a difference defined and determined
through the foundational violence of castration, and thus always already infected by the
threat of conflict and violence. The opening sequence is shadowed by a final image that
eradicates the initial harmonious relationship, which as we saw carried with it its own
originary violence of traumatic loss.
Drawing on horror tropes of possession and exorcism, this epilogue also suggests Hes
successful overcoming of conflict through Shes obliteration the fire cleanses as She is
sacrificed in order for He to ascend, accompanied by historys forgotten murdered female
hordes. But these oppositions are not supported unequivocally, as an ironic distance
dominates the epilogue and unhinges any interpretation that relates Shes murder to the
history of gynocide as it is figured within the diegesis. Von Triers film seems to both
confirm that female nature is evil and to critique the inherent misogyny of this assertion,
and the ending sequence renders emphatic this contradiction by suggesting both that this
exorcism of female evil dubiously repeats and sacrificially cleanses a history of masculine
misogyny and gynocide. As Sinnerbrink (2011) notes the perverse conclusion that She
draws from her thesis research into Gynocide, trumped by her own mad experience of the
malevolent force of nature, is both endorsed and questioned by the film (p. 173).
Moreover, the supernatural and definitively erotically charged nature of her possession is
foregrounded in the films diegesis through the evocation of witch hunts, a plot detail that
frames feminine monstrosity in relation to historical misogyny and provides the main
contestatory site for interpretations of the films gender dynamics. In making this
10
470 L. Coulthard and C. Birks

connection so explicit, Antichrist both takes seriously and undermines the generic tropes it
utilizes. On one level, the film is a clear genre story: the character of She is psychotic and/
or possessed and the character of He is a victim of this psychosis, as is their son. With its
eerie setting in the woods, eroticized spectacle of female evil and various implications of
strange, supernatural goings-on, the film references clear generic conventions and sets up
expectations that it appears to satisfy narrationally and emotionally the monster is
burned and the final girl escapes. Yet there is something unsettling in this reading that
renders its conclusions uncomfortable. The exorcism of evil and the triumph of the male
authority Figure (usually a doctor or a priest, here a therapist) does not provide the
anticipated narrative satisfactions and the audience is left discomfited by an ending that
seems to parody the terms of reference it encourages.
Tied to this ambivalence concluding the film, is another narrational trope that adds a
further layer of confusion the possibility that his escape is all just a dream, that he has
either passed out or died in the cabin and the events from this point onwards are purely
imaginary. This narrational convention is not, however, an easy way out or solution to the
narrational and ideological complexities, but is instead a layer of further complication.
Evidence for this interpretation lay in the central scene of her self-mutilation this close-
up shot of a self-imposed clitoridectomy by scissors marks a cut in the film itself, after
which point the film seems to shift gears entirely: he awakens, sees the animals from his
visions, murders She and miraculously escapes, an escape that as we have already noted is
connected to the resurrection of faceless women accompanying him on his journey. This
reading is readily supported by the fact that the visions of the brutality of Nature are his
and experienced only by him and that this sequence relies on these visions playing an
active role in orchestrating his escape: looked at this way, it is He who experiences
psychosis/possession and She who is the victim of his projections. Regardless of the status
of these visions, it is clear that the extreme cut of clitoridectomy marks a traumatic rupture
in the cinematic text, from which it does not recover.12 From this point forward, generic
conventions intensify, as does their parodic potential and, it follows, their implied critique.
As both dream and reality, this murder/escape from the terrible place aligns the film even
more closely with its generic compatriots, but does so in a way that renders any ideological
recuperation excessive and inconsistent. Incorporating horror film effects, obsessions and
gore, Antichrist renders obscure and difficult horrors fundamental binaries played out
along gendered lines: monster (masculine) and victim (feminine) are not merely reversed
in von Triers film but indistinguishable. They are both victims, and both monsters.

Trouble Every Day

As with Antichrist and Sombre, Trouble Every Day interrogates underlying structures and
works to expose and critique the underlying sexual subtexts of horror. In violating the
narrative logic of horror but maintaining the central pairing of the monster and the final
girl, Trouble Every Day critiques horrors underlying assumption that the repressed can be
displaced, destroyed or domesticated: it remains essential to the normal romantic
relationship, and must be liberated in order for that relationship to be realized. While
Antichrist deals with the destruction of the heterosexual relationship, beginning with its
consummation and ending with Mans escape and Womans violent eradication, Trouble
Every Day (like Sombre) deals with its inception: Shane (Vincent Gallo) and June (Tricia
Vessey), on their honeymoon in Paris, are unable to have sex because Shanes sexual
desire arouses a need to kill and devour. Similar to Claire, Junes implicit virginity we
know at least that she has not had sex with Shane, and while this does not preclude the
 Journal of Gender Studies 11
471

possibility for previous partners she is characterized as demure and innocent, even
childish is a condition of her relationship with the monster, and aligns her with the
tradition of the final girl (although she is much less masculine and assertive than the
traditional horror heroine); Junes virginity makes her stand out from the sexualized
female victims as well as the female monster (Core), and this distinction is what enables
her proximity to the male monster. This relationship between the monster and the final girl
is, however, predicated on impossibility, as Shanes love for June is in conflict with his
desire for her. Shane and June reveal the desire between the monster and the final girl to be
not an aberrant state of things, but rather business as usual, a position that problematizes
the recuperative function of horror as there is no status quo, no normal sexuality that can
be reinstated or to which one can return.
This rejection of normalized sexual relations becomes concretized in the undermining
of the honeymoon itself. Rather than a consummation of marriage, Shanes sexless
honeymoon in Paris is revealed to have an ulterior motive, as he uses the trip as an excuse
to track down Core (Beatrice Dalle), the wife of a former colleague whom he believes to
be suffering from the same bloodthirsty urges.13 The two monsters are distinguished along
gendered lines, stereotyped to the point of cliche, as Shane is associated (through the mise-
en-scene as well as his profession as a pharmaceutical scientist) with technology and
science (standard hallmarks of masculine rationalism) while Core indisputably belongs
to the natural world, connecting her to the archetypal She in Antichrist as well as to a
whole history associating Woman with the uncanny horror of nature.14 While we never see
Shane in any kind of natural setting he is always surrounded by metal, stone and
concrete Core stalks through the diegesis like a predatory animal, pursuing her prey
along highways and dragging them through the grass to be devoured. By dividing its
monster into a male/female pair, Trouble Every Day alludes to an extended history of
gendered horror monsters: impotent and pathological, Shane is an embodiment of Clovers
feminized male monster, while his blood-soaked female counterpart Core (Beatrice Dalle)
is a clear expression of Creeds monstrous-feminine (it is difficult to imagine a more
explicit expression of the idea than the image of Core soaked in gore, pacing the length of
the wall she has painted with the blood of her hapless teenage victim).
Shane and Cores shared disease seems to manifest itself differently depending on the
gender of its host: Cores cannibalism enhances her sexual desirability she easily lures
truck drivers and her teenaged victims to their violent deaths whereas Shanes disease
prevents sexual relations with his wife (their only sexual encounter begins with close-ups
of their entwining flesh and ends with Shane rushing to the bathroom and masturbating
over the sink as June cries and pounds on the door) and forces him to act out in awkward
ways that alienate the unwilling strangers he rubs against, sniffs and follows.15 It is not
until the final sequence when he murders a maid in the basement of their hotel that Shanes
cannibalism fully materializes, before which point he remains predatory in a rather benign,
unsavoury sense, in stark contrast to Cores rapacious, violent sensuality.
This gendered distinction between monsters is characteristic of the horror genre in
general: what makes the female monster sexy tends to make the male monster less so, a
fact that can be explained by horrors traditional role as a site of negotiation for masculine
sexual anxieties.16 Trouble Every Day reflects on these distinctions through its binary
monsters, one exemplifying the terrifying, seductive powers of femininity and the other
the weaknesses at the heart of masculinity; what it does differently is refuse to re-repress
the terrors that it unleashes. Wood (1979) argues that the otherness represented by the
monster must be dealt with [ . . . ] in one of two ways: either by rejecting it and if possible
annihilating it, or by rendering it safe and assimilating it (p. 9). Denis denies us both
12
472 L. Coulthard and C. Birks

possibilities, as the ambiguities and inconsistencies of her narrative thwart the

recuperation of the anxieties expressed by her monsters; the ending in particular refuses
the satisfaction offered by conventional genre cinema. While Core is killed by Shane after
she murders the neighbourhood boy, Shane is not defeated, nor even evaded, but rather
allowed to live. The final scenes seem at first to foreshadow Junes discovery of his illness,
and suggest that she might fulfil her role as final girl by evading or destroying the monster:
left to her own devices as Shane attempts to track down Core and Leo, she searches for an
explanation for Shanes frequent disappearances and aggressive, withdrawn behaviour.
She rifles through his bag, searches his computer, discovers the pills he takes in an attempt
to suppress his illness, locates his old landlady and discovers a box containing some relics
from his past life in France with Core and Leo. While in traditional horror the final girls
discovery of the monster equips both her and (more crucially) the spectator with
information that eventually leads to some sort of narrative resolution,17 Junes efforts lead
nowhere: seemingly on the verge of discovering something crucial in the landladys
apartment, she inexplicably falls asleep, and we next see her when she returns to the hotel
to find Shane showering after he has devoured the maid. While the blood on the curtain and
the extended shot of the fearful look in Junes eyes (accompanied by a disturbing low
frequency rumble on the soundtrack) might suggest that she is becoming aware of Shanes
malady, the ambiguity of the ending frustratingly leaves these narrative threads untied.
In a deliberate refusal of closure that might partially account for the films polarized
reception, Denis appropriates conventions associated with the downfall of the monster
only to abruptly abandon them, as though ending the film a few scenes too early.
More troubling still is an alternate reading suggested by the symbolism of Junes red
gloves and the blood on the shower curtain: the implication is that Junes growing
awareness of Shanes disease marks not the beginning of the end for Shane as a monster,
but rather replaces the consummation of their marriage as Junes initiation into sexual
maturity. The parallel drawn between the two couples in the film further supports this
interpretation. Rather than fearing or punishing his wife for her monstrosity, Leo treats
Core tenderly after her kills and helps her eliminate the evidence, suggesting that Junes
role in her marriage will echo Leos role in his: she will love and support the monster,
rather than abhorring or killing him. While the recuperative narrative logic of conventional
horror would dictate that Shane must die or else seal his condemnation by murdering June,
the real horror of Trouble Every Day is that the relationship is allowed to subsist. More
disturbing still is the implication that all relationships are founded on violence and
irreconcilability, a point suggested by the opening shot of a man and a woman kissing in a
car. We never see this couple again, and their disconnection from the central narrative and
appearance before the title suggests that the film is a comment on love in general, which it
envisions as a state of constant danger (trouble every day). Rather than recuperating the
anxiety and horror unleashed in the narrative by punishing or condemning the male
monster, Trouble Every Day suggests that this horror is an integral, inescapable part of
ordinary domestic life.

Conclusion
New extremist horror films are both too much and too little at the same time, too much like
genre films to sit comfortably within an art cinema context and too little like genre films to
offer the satisfaction suggested by their generic elements. These films confront the sex and
sexuality that orient and subtend horror cinemas uncanny perturbations, and the results
are ironizing, alienating and deeply disturbing. More than merely undermining the
 Journal of Gender Studies 13
473

gendered conventions of horror genre, new extremism self-reflexively engages with its
tropes and reveals them to be masking an underlying terror far more difficult to pin down,
an indeterminable sexual excess that refuses to be re-repressed. Unlike conventional
splatter and slasher films, the three films we have discussed do not suggest a clear-cut
correlation of sex with violence (those that have sex get murdered; those who do not
survive; the killer replaces sex with murder), so much as they undermine the very tropes of
sex and violence in horror. The virginal woman and libidinous monster are in Sombre and
Trouble Every Day, perversely presented as the perfect couple; in Antichrist the genders
are reversed but the structural similarities maintain. Indeed, one could go further to say
that Antichrist picks up where the former two films end with the formation of the
impossible couple. The heterosexual, sexually active couple in these films is not mere
fodder for the killer, but rather the very site where sexual difference is negotiated and
addressed. It is not that desire is monstrous in these films, but that horrific fantasies feed
and cover over the reality of everyday sexual activity. The romantic fantasy of sexual
desire as sublimely dangerous (the boy who tries to save Core, Claires fascination with
Jean, the glorious opening of Antichrist) is exposed as just that. Desire itself is not
presented as monstrous, perverse or even alien; instead desire is what covers over and
represses a more disturbing and fundamental violence. More precisely, these films explore
the domesticated sexual relationship that operates not despite, but because of, underlying
violent fantasies. Emphatic in the virginal fantasies of Trouble Every Day and Sombre, the
romantic mystification of love as something that only exists with the erasure of sexual
desire (in the former, his wife is not and must never be his lover; in the latter, the virgin
seeks to save the monster but instead merely loses her virginity to him, thus ending their
relationship) is exposed in all of its absurdity. In Antichrist sex and love are shown to be
similarly mutually exclusive, as He interprets his true gesture of love as one of a
therapeutic cure that necessitates rejecting sexual contact. Indeed, her desire and attempts
to initiate sexual contact, are seen as proof of her psychosis and are interpreted by him as
irresponsible acts that it is his duty, as paternalistic protector, to reject.
In rendering excessive gendered oppositions of horror, these films ironize and
desublimate the repressive energies at the core of the horror film. As Beugnet (2007) notes,
new extremisms surfeit of sex and gore marks an excess of sensation that pre-empts and
exceeds the requirements of a restorative discourse (p. 31). This surplus is part of what
distinguishes European new extremism from more genre-oriented film horror fare:
extremist films leave recuperation, restoration and viewer expectations unsatisfied,
incomplete or wanting. But this distinction does not warrant a rejection or disavowal of
extremisms generic engagements; indeed, we argue the opposite and assert that this
minimal difference demands analysis and examination of the generic underpinnings
central to European new extremist art cinema. This pairing of sex and violence within the
framework of gendered relations both aligns and distinguishes new extremisms horror
conventions and suggests the particular importance of the romantic couple at the core of
many of these films, including the ones we discuss in detail: Sombre, Antichrist and
Trouble Every Day. The relation between the monster and the final girl becomes in these
films co-extensive with the romantic couple: rendering overt the subtextual eroticism of
this yoking in conventional horror cinema (the slasher films analysed by Carol Clover,
Robin Wood, Creed or Linda Williams), these new extremist films trouble this opposition
and posit the intimate co-dependence of the two. Reworking slasher and splatter film
tropes and shifting the libidinal energies of that genre onto the sexually active couple as
the centre point of horror (rather than the group of friends, or isolated individuals), these
14
474 L. Coulthard and C. Birks

films subtly posit a brutality at the heart of heterosexual romance, a co-extension, rather
than separation, of violence and sex.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes
1. Email: c.birks.1@research.gla.ac.uk
2. Examples include Despentes and Trinh This Baise-moi (2000), Breillats Romance (1999), Noes
Irreversible (2002), de Vans Dans ma peau [In My Skin] (2002), Assayass Demonlover (2002)
and Dumonts Twentynine Palms (2003). For more on new extremism as a specifically French
phenomenon see Quandt (2004), as well as Beugnets Cinema and Sensation: French Film and the
Art of Transgression (2007) and Palmers Brutal Intimacy: Analyzing Contemporary French
Cinema (2011).
3. For more on the characteristics of art cinema, see Bordwells The art cinema as a mode of film
practice (1979). It also should be noted that number of French horror films sometimes
associated with new extremism, such as Haute Tension (Aja, 2003), Martyrs (Laugier, 2008),
and A Linterieur (Bustillo & Maury 2007), do not fit within the conventional definition of art
cinema and are therefore better understood as belonging to a new French wave of horror.
4. Claire Denis, for example, cites French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy as an influence, and the two
often draw from each others work. Philippe Grandrieux began his career as a visual artist and
claims to draw inspiration from Spinoza and Deleuze. Bruno Dumont, often compared to Robert
Bresson, was a former philosophy teacher.
5. As Rieser (2001) points out, this is not to discount the possibility for subversive or oppositional
readings of these films. While different interpretations are possible, however, the most powerful
ideological codes of horror remain largely misogynistic and homophobic (p. 375).
6. It is worthwhile noting the heteronormativity of each of these texts as well as more generally in
the films of new extremism. In many films of new extremism, not only is the focus on
heterosexual sex but it is frequently located in the sanctioned confines of a conventional
romantic love relationship or marriage. Rather than seeing this as a sign of regressive or
conservative gender politics, we contend in our article Horrible sex: The sexual relationship in
new extremism (Sex and Storytelling in Modern Cinema) that this emphasis on heterosexual
romantic couples comprises a critique of the inherent violence of sexual difference itself.
7. Stressing the metaphorical and allegorical, Grandrieux sees the film as a kind of dark fairy tale
(quoted in Chamarette, 2011, p. 72), and grounds it in this traditions archetypal characters
Jean as the wolf-man (as Martine Beugnet and Jenny Charmarette have pointed out) and Claire
as the virtuous virgin.
8. Sombre lacks the paralleled detective plot common to many serial films [Silence of the Lambs
(Demme, 1991), Se7En (Fincher, 1995), Zodiac (Fincher, 2007), etc.].
9. Clover describes the final girl as
boyish, in a word. Just as the killer is not fully masculine, she is not fully feminine-not,
in any case, feminine in the ways of her friends. Her smartness, gravity, competence in
mechanical and other practical matters, and sexual reluctance set her apart from the
other girls and ally her, ironically, with the very boys she fears or rejects, not to speak of
the killer himself. (Clover, 1992, p. 204)
10. See http://www.timeout.com/london/film/lars-von-trier-discusses-antichrist-1.
11. See Chiesa n.4 203.
12. The clitoridectomy has been read variously as an attempt to erase sexual difference, returning
both He (after his genital mutilation) and She to a blank, pre-sexuation slate (Buch-Hansen,
2011, p. 138), a fulfilment of patriarchys darkest wishes (Sharrett, 2012, p. 26), an erasure of
womanhood (Waddell, 2012, p. 43), and as an assertion of her over-identification with the
phallus and her need to self castrate (Chiesa, 2012, pp. 204 205).
13. Their disease is implied to be linked to research Shane had been conducting with Cores husband
Leo several years prior. A woman scientist (we are unsure of who she is, or when she says this to
 Journal of Gender Studies 15
475

Shane, although it is probably a flashback) midway through the film rebukes Shane for stealing
Leos work (a later shot of Leos website indicates that he had been researching nervous
diseases, pain, mental diseases and problems of libido) and administering it to himself and
Core.
14. In Phallic Panic, Barbara Creed argues that Nature is one element of the tripartite structure of
what she calls the primal uncanny evoked by horror, the other two elements being Woman and
Death: Core, as a female cannibal explicitly linked to nature, is an embodiment of all three.
15. For a more complete analysis of Shanes sexual dysfunction and the conflict between desire and
love in Trouble Every Day, see Coulthard and Birks (2015).
16. This of course a generalization, as there are a number of sexy male monsters in horror (vampires
being the most obvious example). However, because mainstream horror tends to serve dominant
(heterosexist) ideology, male monsters occupy a different position than female ones in relation
to masculine desire.
17. This scene is generally more for the spectators benefit than the final girls, as while she learns
crucial information about the monster she generally has to enter the terrible place to do so (as He
does in Antichrist).

Notes on contributors
Lisa Coulthard is Associate Professor of Film Studies at the University of British Columbia. Her
research focuses on film philosophy, sound and violence, and she has published widely on
contemporary American and European cinemas, especially the films of Michael Haneke, Bruno
Dumont, Catherine Breillat and Quentin Tarantino. She is currently completing a manuscript on
sound in the films of Quentin Tarantino.
Chelsea Birks is a Ph.D. student at the University of Glasgow. She wrote her MA thesis at the
University of British Columbia on Jean-Luc Nancy and European new extremist cinema. Her
research interests include film philosophy, contemporary French cinema and violence, and she was
the co-editor (with Dana Keller) of issue 8.2 of Cinephile on the topic of contemporary extremism.
She will be writing her dissertation on cinematic excess and Georges Bataille.

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