Not Your Average Teen Horror: Blood and Female Adolescence in Richard Bates’s Excision (2012)

Abstract

ABSTRACT Richard Bates’s film Excision (2012) uses blood as a metaphor to interrogate how cultural constructions of femininity affect the development of adolescent girls. Contrary to other horror films, which frequently depict adolescent girls as examples of the ‘monstrous-feminine’, this film about a girl who decides to perform a lung transplant on her sister explores the horrors caused by restricting conceptualisations of feminine bodies and identities. The film’s focus on blood interrogates problematic ideological connotations between menstruation and sexual promiscuity, and questions the veracity of supposedly realistic representations of the female body in contemporary advertising. Its protagonist’s adaptation of the ‘mad scientist’ persona gradually turns her into a character resembling Frankenstein, whose monstrosity highlights her inability to either conform to or escape from femininity as a cultural construct. Teen horror, the film suggests, is not caused by blood and bodily matter, but by extra-textual stereotypes and gender inequality.