It's funny though, you combat sex negativity to such an extent but it creeps back disguised as anything but what you'd expect. Funnier still, a general underlying fear of pleasure that secretly rejoices when you suffer and erects the insidious caption of divine punishment. I'm unconsciously fond of sweeping generalisation and easy contextualising, and attributing adversity to 'sin', though rendering humanity a herd of meek penitents, offers the comfort of narrative symmetry.
I'm aware of these thoughts/feelings/tendencies in myself, and resist them despite their reinforcement.
On reinforcement, I'd like to mention a trope of the horror genre; the cavorting of nubile bodies in sexual bloom, only to have these same bodies mangled maimed and tortured as if in punishment for their natural prime. This convention excludes most suspense driven horror, is rather a motif of slasher/torture-porn horror.
What is being communicated by a cinematic coupling of sexuality with death? And not just death, but death as antagonist rather than inevitable physiological process, death as the hunter and the destroyer, especially frenzied by teenaged sexual vitality.
I'm of a mind that this coupling writes the boundaries of excess for the public imagination, establishing guilt by inducing horror of natural inclinations, using adolescence to subvert the innocent and exploratory into something dangerous and unnatural. This is also a re-conceptualising of original sin, that the stain is ever-present, born with, and innocence non-existent. That man is a born penitent and has to earn favour with the wrathful patriarchal forces, played by the slasher/spectre.
The Final Destination franchise is a good example of omnipotent deathly forces exacting revenge from hot young bodies. The 'crime' is not overtly sexual, but film being a visual language these are nevertheless sexualised characters whose transgressions are against a natural order of death, suggesting an increased vitality or libido displeases a silent witness, be it god or society.
A related horror convention is the promiscuous girl meeting grisly ends, time and again, as if being punished for abusing the power of sex. Or perhaps her death signifies the intrinsic excess of sex crossing over to death and consuming her. This, again, articulates a horror of pure gratification and by proxy elevates such institutions as marriage that serve to contain the 'innately unstable' forces of sex.
The opening scene of Scream is an interesting example of this, where the first teenage victim isn't necessarily a 'slut', but her boyfriend with whom she's presumably sexually active is a factor, captured and killed before her very eyes. They are seemingly punished for having sex at all. Furthermore, it's somehow her fault, the boyfriend merely implicated while she is the slasher's intended. God punishing Eve for her deception in the garden? A pretty fantastic reading of this scene, but there are parallels (like her remains being strung up in a tree, the site of Eve's original misdemeanour with the plucking of the forbidden fruit, which allegorises carnal knowledge anyway).
I'm stuck trying to find a film where the sex featured (duly followed by bloody chaos) is homosexual, concluding the above convention a heteronormative one, labouring to sell conservative values as immunity from a world that only means you harm. Like marking your front door with lambs blood while the angel of death roams.
And also, why would a generic convention working to shroud sex in fear sometimes deploy softly pornographic imagery? (as horror's often do).
To induce guilt. By titillating first and appalling second the viewer endures the same fall from pleasure as the sexualised protagonist, and the crime of sex is guiltily transferred onto the viewer-experience. The bare-breasted scream-queen is testament to this.
Meta-horror Cabin in the Woods acknowledges the patriarchal antagonist in the dark gods slumbering in hell, for whom all the killing and bloodshed are libations, lest they go without and wake up. Here, instead of punishing man directly, a shaky bargain is revealed between man and god, that a bureaucratic initiative will exact penance on god's behalf, enacting god's wrath in simulacrum because his actual wrath is too terrible and indiscriminate. Cabin in the Woods reveals these tropes to be arbitrary scapegoating for the purposes of a bureaucratic elite, working under the delusion of a higher power.
God doesn't give a fuck about whether or not you like to have sex, be you straight gay or undisclosed. In the world of Cabin in the Woods He hates us all equally.
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