‘Will You Still Love Me in the Morning?’: Gender Representation and Monstrosity in Alexander Aja’s High Tension

Abstract: Current scholarship on the horror film in relation to gender focuses primarily on the representation of female as a source of monstrosity. Studies on early horror cinema indicate that these films present a kind of doppelganger effect that mirrors patriarchal society’s fear of female sexuality and difference. Studies on later horror films, particularly the slasher genre, focus on repressed feminine sexuality as a source of monstrosity. While studies such as Carol Clover’s development of the Final Girl have helped portray the heroine of the story as female, her emphasis still focuses on a depiction of feminine sexuality as a source of horror. Although many of the films produced in the horror genre lend themselves particularly well to such analyses, Alexander Aja’s 2003 slasher film High Tension presents a variation on the horror film’s traditional representation of female sexuality. While Marie the Final Girl is revealed towards the end of the film to be the psychotic killer, a reading of female sexuality as the source of monstrosity fails to perform a thorough analysis of the film’s depiction of gender. Instead I argue that High Tension presents an image of monstrosity that transcends the limitations and stereotypes associated with gender. With its conflation of both the killer and Final Girl, High Tension blurs the binary oppositions that exist between individuated masculine and feminine representations. In doing so, the film requires a spectator who observes not only the similarities but also the differences that the film shares with others in the genre. This paper draws on feminist as well as Lacanian and Kristevan psychoanalytic theory to analyze the methods that High Tension utilizes in order to comment on the state of monstrosity in modern societ