Finals Week: 'Bisexual Horror: Gaze and Desire in David DeCoteau’s The Sisterhood'

Bisexual Horror: Gaze and Desire in David DeCoteau’s The Sisterhood by Heidi Martinuzzi

Traditionally, horror films have been made for a straight, white, male audience. Most film studios release their horror movies with young males, aged 14-22, in mind and tend to create storylines to accommodate their perceived tastes; gratuitous amounts of blood and sexualized female nudity. While mainstream cinema has included gay storylines and filmmakers in increasing numbers in recent years, horror movies have invariably catered to a static audience and excluded gay characters (except as villains and comic relief.) This reluctance to sell and make queer horror movies has relegated those films to low-budget releasing and production budgets through select studios like Here!...

David DeCoteau is a queer filmmaker in the low-budget b-movie industry, having directed and written nearly one hundred films involving some level of exploitation of either the male or female body. At the beginning of his directing career, he made the transition from porn to sleazy horror movies for a VHS rental audience with titles like Sorority Sisters in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama. As his audience grew, so did his desire to expand into gay horror. With films like The Brotherhood and The Sisterhood , DeCoteau created a new horror sub genre inhabited by ambiguous sexuality and a plethora of sexualized male and female bodies. In these films, supernatural activities like witchcraft, lycanthropy and vampirism become euphemisms for queer sexuality. These elements are usually shown with a strong regard to sexual gaze and identification. DeCoteau discusses why he wanted to put nude young males in horror films along with females:

Because I knew there was an untapped market out their for homoerotic horror that kept teen girls interested too. I think there are about 450,000 DVDs of The Brotherhood out there in the US. Unbelievable. (Horror Asylum)

That's Barbara Crampton slumming it in 'The Sisterhood'

DeCoteau found that if you stayed within certain horror cliché parameters, you could experiment with sexuality. He also believes that what he wants to see onscreen, as a gay male, definitely influences how he creates desire and gaze with his camera:

If I had to direct horror movies, I wanted to make the kind I would want to see. Horror is a great genre to experiment in because if you stay within a certain formula you can do some cool things… Maybe being in the closet for so long and then coming out has allowed me to not have any more secrets. I guess that would affect my point of view when making a film. (Camp Blood)

Laura Mulvey’s article “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, addresses the idea that straight white males are the target audience and the cultural dominants in most mainstream cinema. Using Freudian ideology and concrete examples from Hitchcockian movies, Mulvey shows us how desire is created through the camera’s gaze, and how the audience is told to identify with that stare:

Traditionally, the woman displayed has functioned on two levels: as erotic object for the characters within the story, and as erotic object for the spectator within the auditorium, with a shifting tension between the looks on the other side of the screen. (Mulvey)

Most films that fall into the horror genre traditionally feature females as the object of lust and recognition– because being in a woman’s place is the most terrifying thing most men can envision, especially when she’s being chased by a chainsaw-wielding maniac. Not to mention that the straight male enjoys watching the female body as an object of lust. (Clover) Similar to Halberstram’s concept of a transgender gaze in the film Boys Don’t Cry, horror director DeCoteau deviates from mainstream cinema ideals and creates a bisexual gaze in the horror film The Sisterhood.

Unfortunately, men did not dress like this when I was an undergrad.

The Sisterhood is, in every sense, a remake of The Brotherhood. Christine is a new student at a nameless university who becomes embroiled in the evil-doings of the BATS (Beta Alpha Tau), the most popular sorority on campus. Seduced literally and figuratively by Devin and her sisters, Christine is at once viewer and viewed in alternating sex scenes that shift between lesbian and bisexual orientation throughout the film. DeCoteau supplies us with both males and females as objects of lust as well as scenes of bisexual sex wherein Christine engages in sex with women, men, and both at the same time, finding both equally sexually attractive. The males in the film often walk around shirtless, their muscles exposed, and female attributes are also given ample attention. Christine and her roommate Reagan strip in front of each other often, and we catch glimpses of Christine admiring Reagan’s nude body as she undresses. Christine is also heavily attracted to Josh and Devin throughout and becomes jealous when the two of them begin a sexual relationship.

In the opening scene of the movie, we are watching a heterosexual couple enjoying a sexual liaison. The camera lingers equally upon the shirtless young man, his pectoral muscles exposed, and the buttocks and breasts of the young attractive girl. The couple shifts from man-on-top to female-on-top, and back again, while the camera maintains a gaze at the body of the person on top, moving from legs to face and everything in between. It isn’t until Devin walks in on the couple, enraged, and the girl apologizes as if to a lover, that we realize the heterosexual sex with a violation of her lesbian relationship.

There are several moments in the film where heterosexual sex is viewed in an equal opportunity way – audience members are told to find both the male and the female attractive, to linger on both of their bodies and then, last, to consider the heterosexuality as the disobedience instead of, more traditionally, the homosexuality.

The voyeurism continues, as the audience silently watches several more scenes where people engage in sex. Christine herself and Devin are taken in and out of the sex at times, to sit and watch with the audience, and then put back in to become part of the show again. There are two scenes where this effect is strongest – the first being when Devin and Liz have a sexual encounter on Devin’s bed, and Christine sits in a chair and masturbates while watching them. We, as the audience, are watching the sex between the two women, and so is Christine. Then the camera shows us only Christine. We watch her masturbating while she watches the two women together. Then the camera shifts back to the two women, slowly allowing us to take in their bodies and their lesbian activities, and to enjoy them as sexy. This (dare I use the word sophisticated and ‘DeCoteau’ in the same sentence?) sophisticated technique engages the audience in all aspects of voyeurism. We enjoy what Christine sees, and we identify with her as she enjoys it, but we also enjoy watching Christine.

Christrine, watching people having sex.

Towards the end of the film, Josh is shirtless and blindfolded in an extremely erotic act of submission to Devin and the sorority and the bisexuality and erotic voyeurism are at their height. With the extremely sexy young man at her disposal, Devin begins touching him and the camera lingers on the areas of her body where her hands rest. Christine is watching, turned on but also visibly afraid. Devin then turns the activity in a bisexual direction by inviting another woman and two more men into the sex. The three new members of the party also caress Josh’s helpless and eroticized body, all of them attracted to his maleness. The men touch each other and the women. Christine is still watching, and enjoying, the scene. Then, Christine becomes a part of the orgy and also an object to be desired.

The bisexual gaze is reinforced in both what the audience views, and what we are told to find attractive through Christine. Devin also blatantly tells us,, that Christine should desire men and women, and use her newfound power as a BAT to fulfill those desires. One of the last things Christine hears Devin say, as she is about to be initiated into the sorority, is, “You can have as many experiences as you want, as many lovers as you want; both male and female.” By saying this to Christine Devin is speaking to the audience; you can desire both sexes, and will, when you watch The Sisterhood. At another point in the movie, when Devin is explaining her attitude towards relationships, she says to Christine, "We seduce men for fun, but our real pleasure is in each other." By ‘real’ pleasure we can only assume that she either prefers women to men or only has relationships with men, but in any case. Devin and the BATS sleep with both.

Like all low budget horror movies, sex is the biggest draw to an audience. What DeCoteau does with The Sisterhood is give us a little bit of everything to enjoy sexually, so that anyone who watches it is bound to find someone or something eroticized in a way they can sexually appreciate. This is a bold move for horror films since so many distributors have been so reluctant to release anything ‘gay’ to straight audiences. By including lesbian scenes, which straight men are accustomed to, he accommodates both straight males and lesbians. Including the attractive, shirtless men in submissive roles is enticing to gay males and straight females. Mulvey says:

The man controls the film phantasy and also emerges as the representative of power in a further sense: as the bearer of the look of the spectator, transferring it behind the screen to neutralize the extra-diegetic tendencies represented by woman as spectacle. (Mulvey)

Nowhere is this statement more challenged in the field of modern horror films than by The Sisterhood, wherein the sex and sexuality of the spectator is both male and female. Even Clover, in her Freudian examination of sexuality and gender in horror movies, states:

For although the factors we have considered thus far – the conventions of the male gaze, the feminine constitution of abject terror, the value for the male viewer of the emotional distance from the taboos in question… they do not finally account for our strong sense that gender is simply being fooled with, and that part of the thrill lies precisely in the resulting "intellectual uncertainty" of sexual identity.(Clover, pg. 56)

It is this 'uncertainty' that Clover touches on that makes DeCoteau’s films titillating. By experiencing The Sisterhood as a statement of unknown, unclear, or decidedly bisexual erotica, DeCoteau is able to play with the traditions of horror and gaze while still providing a traditional horror movie plot. DeCoteau is also able to engage a non-straight audience in the visual sexuality that is a staple of the horror genre, drawing them into the movie just as surely as traditional horror draws young white males.

Sources

Brown, Phil Davies. "Dave DeCoteau." Web.

Clover, Carol J. Men, Women, and Chainsaws. Princeton University Press (1992)

Halberstam, Judith. "The Transgender Gaze in Boys Don't Cry." Screen 42:3. (Autumn 2001): 294-298.

Jeurgens, Brian. "Dave DeCoteau Interview." Web.

Mulvey, Laura. "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema". Screen 16(3): 6–18 (1975)