The term menstruosity comes from the way these films link the monstrous and female coming-of-age (often but not always signified by menstruation) as a way to characterize the complex experience of adolescence. While teen girl puberty horror existed in earlier films such as Neil Jordan’s The Company of Wolves (1984) or Brian de Palma’s Carrie (1976), they differ in theme and narrative tropes from the films in this genre cycle, which I will call the “menstruosity” cycle. Currently, there are a plethora of diverse women characters throughout horror, but even more specifically there is a trend in teen girl coming-of-age-horror films that began with the release of John Fawcett’s Ginger Snaps (2000), about a teen who is bitten by a werewolf immediately after getting her first period. Themes of sexual exploration and discovery, key elements of adolescence, are indeed depicted in golden age monster movies like Jacques Tourneur’s Cat People (1942).įilms of the 1970s brought on the onset of Final Girls, and teenagers have been at the forefront of the horror genre ever since.
Stories of teen girls coming of age depicted through horror can be traced as far back as Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla, an 1872 novella about two adolescent girls forming a “close” relationship until one of them is revealed to be a centuries-old vampire. Girlhood and horror have a long and complicated history.
