Sexual Assault in Wes Craven’s Filmography

Sexual violence is everywhere in horror, from Rosemary’s drugged impregnation in Rosemary’s Baby to the killer stalking the sorority girls in Black Christmas. The slasher subgenre is sexually violent by nature: a male villain terrorises a group of teens, only one of whom survives – the final girl. It is she who must endure the most. She is brutalised, hunted, hurt, in many cases surviving an inhuman level of injury, but she lives to fight another day. Sexual violence in horror has been decried as exploitative, misogynistic, and lurid while others have hailed it as empowering, even healing. Like any topic, stories about sexual violence have the power to both heal and hurt. No one is more aware of this than Wes Craven, one of the founding fathers of modern horror, whose work ranges from 1970s exploitation flicks to slashers to post-modern takedowns of the very genre that he helped create. Craven’s filmography is not only aware of the sexually violent undertones in horror, it is also fixated on them.

Craven got his start back in 1972 with the infamous ‘video nasty’ The Last House on the Left, which tells the story of two teenage girls from the suburbs, Mari and Phyllis, whose night out in the big city goes horribly wrong when they get kidnapped by a group of outlaw drug-dealers. They are tortured, raped, forced to rape each other, physically degraded, and ultimately murdered. The dubious reward for sitting through all this is watching Mari’s parents get revenge by killing the murderers one by one. It’s a gruelling, unforgiving watch even half a century later. The Last House on the Left does not have much to offer the modern viewer; it’s a conservative work that reflects the worst fears of ‘70s suburban middle-class audiences, but it is also the beginning of Craven’s interest in the theme of sexual violence. The idea here is that, for a woman, rape is the ultimate fear. Rape is death. The problem is that Mari and Phyllis are not really people so much as objects of sympathy. They die halfway through the film, and the viewer is encouraged to identify more with the avenging adults than the dead teenagers. Any possibility of actually talking about sexual violence dies with them.

The theme of sexual assault is present but shapeless and unformed in Craven’s films throughout the 1970s and early 80s. The Hills Have Eyes sees the Carters, a Republican all-American family, stranded in the desert and forced to defend themselves against a family of inbred hill-dwellers. When the mountain clan attacks the Carters’ caravan, the young and beautiful Brenda Carter is raped by Pluto. Part of the horror here seems to be Pluto’s physical appearance, as he is played by Michael Berryman, who was born without hair or fingernails and with cranial synostosis. Although The Hills Have Eyes takes great pains to show that the Carters’ capacity for violence and monstrosity is no less than their opponents’, the rape scene undercuts this. It uses fear of the ‘other’ (and the tired, offensive assumption that the ‘other’ is sexually violent) to evoke horror, and poor Brenda is just collateral damage in this. In this same era, sexually violent undertones also pervade Craven’s religious horror, Deadly Blessing. The most egregious example occurs when the recently widowed Martha Smith relaxes in her bath, seeking refuge from a murderous incubus. She lies with her legs spread (a shot which Craven reuses in A Nightmare on Elm Street) only for a snake to silently slip into the water. The symbolism is not exactly subtle, and yet despite the threat of an incubus looming over the film, sexual violence once more exists only as set dressing. Deadly Blessing has nothing to say about anything.

It is not until relatively late in his career that Craven’s depiction of sexual violence fully matures in the form of Scream. Scream reckons with Craven’s filmography up to that point as well as with the slasher genre as a whole, and it has a lot to say about the genre’s relationship with women. Scream does more than just comment, however; it also corrects. It corrects the misogynistic rule that women are doomed after having sex, and it corrects the use of sexual violence as merely a sensationalist add-on in horror films. Unlike Craven’s previous works, which pepper in long, uncomfortable scenes of sexual assault, Scream is actually focused on telling a story about sexual violence.

The film follows Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell), who is still reeling from the rape and murder of her mother a year ago. When a masked killer begins hounding Sidney and murdering her classmates, she is forced to revisit the traumatic death of her mother as she fights for her own life. Immediately, the sexually violent undertones of the slasher are made explicit in the manner of Sidney’s mother’s murder. We know that the killer, Ghostface, is a rapist, and rather than being a horrifying ‘other’ like Pluto or the caricaturish urban criminals of The Last House on the Left, he turns out to be none other than Sidney’s handsome, loving, slasher-obsessed boyfriend Billy Loomis (and his best friend Stu). Throughout Scream, we watch as Billy manipulates and pressures Sidney until she finally gives in and has sex with him, all so he can kill her according to genre rules. What happens between Billy and Sidney is a much less clear case of sexual violence, but it works as a means of literalising what’s already implicit in the genre, and it remains more powerful than those drawn-out rape scenes of Craven’s earlier filmography precisely because it holds meaning. Billy uses sex as a means of control and as a way to degrade, but Scream does not deem Sidney to be degraded by sex in the way that the slasher genre tends to. Sidney is not cast in the role of ‘slut’ here except in Billy’s own mind. Indeed, almost all the murders in Scream are about sexual control – Casey was Stu’s ex, Tatum was his current girlfriend, Sidney is Billy’s girlfriend, and Sidney’s mother was raped and murdered as retribution for her sexual relationship with Billy’s father.

The horror here is the horror of misogyny, of being vulnerable only to find out that your partner actually kind of despises you, of that moment where the rug is pulled out from under you and you realise that the sex you just had wasn’t two consenting, respectful adults having fun with each other but an act of control and objectification. Crucially, we have this realisation at the same time as Sidney. The Last House on the Left and The Hills Have Eyes both take a somewhat detached view of sexual assault, voyeuristically looking in on the violence; Scream has the audience follow Sidney’s emotional journey so that we can feel that heart-dropping, stomach-turning betrayal alongside her, and it’s all the more horrific for it. It’s exactly what Craven’s earlier work missed – sexual assault is horrifying because of its emotional impact. When those emotions aren’t explored, it feels pointless.

Craven’s 2005 thriller Red Eye continues this focus on the emotional horror of sexual assault. In Red Eye, hotel manager Lisa (Rachel McAdams) finds herself sitting next to the handsome and charming stranger, Jack Ripner (Cillian Murphy), on a flight home. As soon as the plane takes off, however, he reveals himself to be an assassin and claims that, unless she facilitates an assassination at her hotel, his men will kill her father. Red Eye leans even further into metaphor than Scream by not including any sex scenes, consensual or not. The entire situation, however, is unmistakably a stand-in for sexual assault. Jack wants Lisa to fall for him, taking her out for drinks at the airport and flirting with her right up until the plane takes off, and his attraction does seem to be genuine. Every bit of violence that he later inflicts upon her is sexually charged. In perhaps the most famous scene from the film, he corners her in the airplane bathroom and chokes her out, his face inches from hers, only stopping when he starts to pull her top down and notices a scar above her breast.

Where Scream is interested in the feelings of betrayal and dehumanisation that can come with sexual assault, Red Eye takes a closer look at control and lack thereof. Sidney doesn’t know that she’s not in control, but Lisa can’t escape that knowledge once the plane takes off. Red Eye is a claustrophobic nightmare. There is no way off the plane and there is no way for Lisa to get out of this situation – she is physically trapped with a dangerous, sexually violent man. After an hour of violence and coercion, Lisa gives in and makes the call, changing the governor’s hotel suite. When the plane lands, Lisa reveals that she had previously been held at knifepoint and raped, resulting in the scar. “Ever since then,” she says, “I’ve been trying to convince myself of one thing.” Jack recognises the comparison she is drawing and suggests that it was beyond her control. “No,” Lisa replies. “That it would never happen again.” This marks the moment that Lisa takes control back, from Jack and from her rapist. She stabs him with a pen and hurries to warn the governor and the hotel staff of the impending danger. By taking physical control back from Jack, she is able to put herself back together after her traumatic rape and finally regain emotional control.

It’s not just that Scream and Red Eye are less explicit and therefore more ‘tasteful’ (an amorphous, ill-defined concept), but more specifically that they engage with women’s reality in a way that Craven’s earlier filmography doesn’t. Billy Loomis and Jack Ripner masquerade as normal, even safe men. They carefully and conspicuously set themselves apart from the bad ones: Billy calls Stu and Randy on their insensitive conversation about their classmates’ murder, seemingly being considerate of Sidney’s trauma, and Jack demonstrates his safety by standing up for Lisa when she criticises a fellow passenger’s entitlement. Not only that, but they’re attractive too (notwithstanding Cillian Murphy’s god-awful 2000s haircut), and they use that. They lull their victims into a false sense of security, whether through a year-long relationship or a cute airport date. Sure, the red flags are there, but as so often happens in real life, we ignore them. Billy’s a little bit manipulative when it comes to Sidney’s sexual boundaries, but he’s so flushed and appreciative when she flashes him. Jack was slightly too violent with the demanding customer, but he was doing it for Lisa. When they reveal their true colours, it’s a genuinely terrifying shift. Ask any woman and chances are they’ll have a few stories to tell about men in their lives who suddenly changed one day, whether after marriage, a baby, or even just once the relationship was no longer new.

It’s also no mistake that Billy and Jack are explicitly misogynists. Both of them immediately reveal a general disdain for women the second they let the mask slip: Billy goes off about what a slut Sidney’s mother was, while Jack accuses Lisa of female irrationality. Scream and Red Eye aren’t just aimlessly fixated on sexual assault the way The Last House on the Left and The Hills Have Eyes are; these are films that understand the close relationship between misogyny, sexual violence, and abuse. This is not horror containing rape, this is horror about rape. These are the men that we need to fear in real life – the abusive men, the controlling men, not the psychopathic knife-wielders or the monstrous mutants. Rape and femicide are overwhelmingly committed by men who know their victims, and that leads to very complex emotions, which Scream and Red Eye are not afraid to explore.

It’s an uncomfortable truth and one that’s rarely acknowledged, but the complex emotions that come from assault by a loved one aren’t always all negative. Sometimes you still love someone even though you know what they did was wrong; sometimes it’s easier to believe that they love you; sometimes sexual assault can impact your relationship with your own sexuality; sometimes you’re attracted to the person who hurt you, even though you didn’t consent. These feelings are messy and ugly and hard to talk about, but because Scream and Red Eye identify so strongly with the protagonists and don’t make the audience privy to Billy and Jack’s true nature before Sidney and Lisa find out, we are given the space to experience the whole spectrum of emotion that can accompany sexual assault. Go online and look at audience reactions to Billy and Jack and you will see a lot of division. Many women are very attracted to these characters, some have mixed feelings about them, and many other women despise them and are horrified by their fandom. I think this is actually a testament to both films. The fixation with Billy and Jack does not solely come from the fact that they are played by attractive actors, but because they are characters who are sexually violent in a very realistic way, and that is a lot for people to process. It’s key that the audiences who are attracted to Billy and Jack do not position themselves as apart from Sidney and Lisa, but rather they identify with them. They are experiencing this story in the shoes of the victim, and naturally they struggle with these two-faced, confusing characters; they love them and they hate them, as is often the case in real life. I imagine that if we had been privy to Sidney Prescott’s emotions the day after she shot Billy, she might have been having some difficulty reconciling the man she had known him to be with the man he turned out to be. In providing a space for audiences to deal with conflicting feelings about abuse and assault, Scream and Red Eye unlock the full horror potential of sexual assault because what can be more horrifying than realising that you don’t feel the way you ‘should’ feel after such a traumatic experience?

When I watch Craven’s early films, I feel used. It’s not that I’m necessarily horrified or traumatised by the scenes of sexual assault, it’s more that I don’t like the fact that I’m supposed to be. It’s bad horror because it does not understand why the subject is horrifying. Conversely, Scream and Red Eye are far more emotionally intense, more properly horrifying despite the lack of actual rape scenes. These films don’t tell us to be afraid; instead, they go to the effort of understanding our source of fear and making us afraid. We experience (or re-experience) that feeling of being trapped with a sexually violent man whom we previously trusted, that feeling of realising that we are seen as objects to be controlled or that we are hated by someone we love. In The Last House on the Left, rape is the worst thing that can happen to a person. That’s true in Scream and Red Eye too, but it is no longer synonymous with death. In many ways, horror films are about providing catharsis; you can experience the terror and come out the other side. The women of Scream and Red Eye experience the terror and, rather than being doomed by rape, they put themselves back together and allow us to do the same.

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Written by Isy Santini

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