“My Mother, She Butchered Me, My Father, He Ate Me”: Vampires, Fairy Tales, and Feminist Filmmaking in The Moth Diaries

Abstract

Director Mary Harron's 2011 film The Moth Diaries is a study of adolescent friendship, a vampire tale, and a story of female self-harm. The sensitive subject matters Moth considers, from self-harm in suicide and anorexia to passionate female companionship, intersect and intertwine where sexuality, death, and alimentary consumption are regulated through the normative discourses influencing their representation in cinema. Moth's narrative contours involving two suicidal adolescent girls, one of whom chooses to live, are familiar in heteronormative Anglo-American cinema, yet Harron's supernatural take and its emphasis on female friendships' role in the protagonist's recovery marks a feminist view on the topic. Main character Rebecca is influenced by her father's suicide, and offered a rescue through heterosexual romance, yet with the help of the vampire and her allusions to ATU 720, "The Juniper Tree," Rebecca gains agency and frees herself. Using crucial scenes and an interview with the director, we deconstruct the film's gendered visual economy of representation, rendered by Harron as a feminist resisting more conventional depictions. We see Moth, in its figure of the woman (sometimes lesbian) vampire, and in references to fairy tale, refusing a conventional understanding of young women's self-harm and recovery in passive, heteronormative modes.