Sex, Scares and Sensation

Horror movies are built to ignite our most primal reactions, for better and for worse. The primary objective of most any scary movie is to create scares, but the easiest way to do so, is also the sleaziest. Horror has always been gratuitous at its core, it’s a category of entertainment teeming with decapitations and disemboweling, it has always leaned into excess over restraint. If the goal is to scare the pants off the audience, sometimes horror movies will just take the pants off their characters.

It’s easy to scare someone when their senses are already heightened, and an easy way to heighten someone’s senses is with sex. Introduce just a sliver of eroticism and the audience becomes a little more excitable. Once the docile thrills of some extra skin begin to rev the audience’s engines, they are supremely more vulnerable to fear. The fun of horror, much like sex, is predicated upon anticipation and release. It’s the suspense and the climax, the tension and the payoff. It’s one of horror’s bigger clichés; the co-ed in the shower as she’s being stalked by a killer, the couple in bed on the verge of climax, or the girl undressing in her room, while the psycho under the bed. What you’ll notice about those kinds of scenes is that the frame is overly interested in lingering on the bodies, shapes and curves of the soon-to-be victims. A horny audience is a vulnerable audience.

Horror movies leaning into explicit eroticism to sell tickets and scares makes complete sense when you figure that the target audience is teenagers. There are no hornier creatures on the planet than teenagers, and aside from the entire internet, a horror movie is probably the easiest place to see nudity. That means you’ve got a big audience, teeming with pubescence, that bought a ticket to be scared. The audience is helplessly predisposed to fall for the tactics implemented by horror movies to amplify those scares. It’s almost too easy.

It’s not just teenagers though, there’s something innately exhilarating about sexuality, and much like the unlucky characters on screen, we are all ultimately prey to the movie. However, in capitalizing on our conflated senses to get shrieks, it raises the question of ethics. Is it worth potentially warping someone sense of excitement with a weird amalgam of fear, violence and sexual desire? But then again, is horror even worth holding to some moral code? The genre is famous for depravity and unspeakable violence, I’m not sure it owes its audience any more kindness and sensitivity than it bestows on its characters.

Nudity gets butts in seats, but at what point does it become misuse? At a certain point, the naked teen unknowingly awaiting their demise shifts from trope to exploitation. It’s predominantly female characters who become overly sexualized, stripped of their clothes and at times, their dignity. There’s countless instances of horror heroines being empowered sexually and otherwise, but when a female character, whose entire development can be tracked in the time it takes for her to remove her shirt, then things become exploitative. Then you don’t really have a character, you have a bra waiting to come off, so the audience is easier to scare. It’s unsurprising given the legacy of male directors and writers looking to cheaply make and sell movies. That’s how you end up with a re-animated, decapitated head nearly performing oral sex on a hapless med student, or a woman getting bifurcated with a chainsaw just as she reaches climax.

For all the atrocities that have been done to the human body in horror movies, the genre is perhaps less concerned with a mutilated one, than it is with a naked one. In horror, violence always follows intimacy, it’s almost like a punishment, as if to say that death is the consequence for being sensual. Randy Meeks explains as much in Scream, if you want to survive, you cannot have sex. It remains ironic that for the variance of gratuity that horror is known for, the rules within the genre are so prudish.

Take 1988’s Slumber Party Massacre for instance, a fantastic and sometimes subversive film, boils down to young women being punished for being sexual and attractive. The movie spends its first third showing young women naked in the shower, changing in the bedroom, getting felt up in cars and getting naked with their friends. For the rest of the runtime characters are picked off, one by one, by the most phallic killer of all time - wielding a footlong drill he often holds between his legs. The antagonist explains his motive in the film’s waining minutes, standing over his potential victims and saying, “Takes a lot of love for a person to do this, you know you want it, you love it.” As if to say that these young women court death and violence by merely existing as sexual beings.

There’s no greater example of punishment being a consequence of sex than the Friday the 13th franchise. Friday the 13th movies are as much about Jason Vorhees slaughtering horny camp counsellors as they are about those horny counsellors hooking up with each other. Throughout the twelve movies in the series, there are 181 kills, 56 of which involve the victim being naked, in the middle of sex, or about to have sex as well as taking place in a bathroom or bedroom. That means that just shy of 1/3 of all kills in the franchise are tied to sex in one way or another. In fact, Friday the 13th movies are notorious for how frequently horniness is punished. The aforementioned ‘orgasm-interrupted-by-chainsaw’ might be the most egregious example, but there are plenty of others…

The topless water skier who gets stabbed through the head and pulled out of the water so we can see her bare chest.

The guy who gets his head popped against a tree after sex.

The young woman who gets a pair of garden shears to the face… after sex.

The couple that gets impaled during sex.

The naked girl in her sleeping bag who gets thwacked against a tree.

The guy who gets an arrow to the neck after hooking up.

The girl who gets an axe to the face after having sex.

The guy who gets his face crushed after sex.

The girl who gets an axe to the chest in a towel.

The girl who gets stabbed through the stomach after skinny dipping.

In fact, the entire character of Terri in Friday the 13th II only exists to wear tiny shorts, crop tops, go skinny dipping, and then die.

One of the most iconic images in all of horror is Freddy Kruger’s glove emerging from between a bathing Nancy Thompson’s splayed legs. Terrifying, startling, unsettling and intimate, it’s the ultimate distillation of horror’s dirty, if also effective, trick. It worked when Michael Myers killed Bob and Lynda after they have sex in Halloween, or in Halloween II when Myers drowns a nurse, displaying her corpse so the audience can see her chest. It continues to work in the modern era, being that sex and consequence is a major theme of It Follows, and even in The VVitch, the acknowledgment of sensuality begets tragedy for the main characters.

You can form your own debates about the integrity of using eroticism to maximize scares, but I don’t think the genre has ever been overly concerned with righteousness - except for when it is. There’s an odd double standard between the way horror, as an art form, has embraced sex and vulgarity, and the way sexuality is looked upon within the universe of horror movies. The goal has always been to push the envelope beyond the pale of comfort, to make audiences shriek, groan, wince and shudder. It is, at its core, a means for sensory and physical anticipation and discomfort. Much of horror exists in the confluence between sex and violence. As long as the promise of nudity helps to intensify fear, it’s always going to be a tool of the genre, and I don’t see audiences becoming any less susceptible to primal agitation.