We all keep in mind the place we have been the first time we watched a crab eat a person’s severed penis. For many millennials, it was late at evening on our buddy’s sofa, sitting huddled up in a gaggle of friends, gazing at the tv display with a mix of horror and delight. “What in the world was that?”
That was Teeth, Mitchell Lichtenstein’s 2007 horror-comedy a few woman whose physique hides a stunning secret: the within her vagina is lined with rows of sharp enamel, able to chomp down on any undesirable intruder, to violent, bloody, and oftentimes darkly hilarious outcomes. It’s tough to think about {that a} film with that description may have ever gotten made, not to mention turn out to be one thing of a cult hit, and Lichtenstein himself can be the first to level out that its journey from web page to display was not a straightforward one.
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“LOL! No one was game for it,” he says over e mail of the film which simply celebrated the fifteenth anniversary of its theatrical launch this January. “I had a manager at the time who told me, ‘Never show this script to anyone.'” Once he had gathered the funds to make it himself, he and his crew scouted places in Austin, Texas with the native movie commissioner, who was completely useful on the first day after which by no means confirmed up on the second. “Turned out he hadn’t read the script before, and did read it the night after our first scout,” Lichtenstein says. “He called all the locations he had shown us the day before and warned them not to rent to us, that we were doing porn.”
[Courtesy of Roadside Attractions]
Teeth follows Dawn O’Keefe (Jess Weixler), a sheltered, all-American good woman who devoutly follows the purity tradition of Christian abstinence group the Promise, talking in entrance of pupil assemblies about the significance of saving oneself for marriage. Her attraction to Tobey (Hale Appleman), a tall, good-looking, curly-haired boy in her tight knit group of mates, threatens to upend her strict code of no hanky-panky. One evening, she and Tobey (sadly for him) uncover her secret: When he forces himself on her after a flirty but chaste swim in an area lake, he, effectively, will get his dick bitten off.
The film was impressed by the surprisingly pervasive fable of the “vagina dentata,” folktale that pops up throughout the world, from the Indigenous legends of North and South America to Hindu and Māori mythology. Lichtenstein first realized about it in a school course on late nineteenth century literature taught by none aside from social feminist critic Camille Paglia. “Versions of the myth appear in many cultures throughout the world,” he says. “And it sneaks, disguised, into popular culture. Just one of many examples is the female monster in Aliens that, with its well lubricated teeth, has been described as a vagina dentata figure. It seemed to me that by disguising the myth in popular culture, we’re perpetuating it, but if we showed it directly, we’d expose the absurdity of it — the absurdity of men ascribing this attribute to women. The myth says very little about women, but a whole lot about men.”
[Courtesy of Roadside Attractions]
Like its protagonist, Teeth is much more than meets the eye, utilizing a grossly misogynistic trope to inform a gratifyingly feminist story. In that sense, it is a horror film solely to the kind of particular person — an excessively attractive teen boy, a handsy gynecologist, a traitorous buddy — that Dawn’s enamel would assault. “I always thought of Dawn’s teeth as a superpower, and her journey with them follows the same arc as most superhero origin stories,” Lichtenstein explains. “First unaware that they have the power, then horrified by it, then learning its rules, then accepting it, and finally perhaps reveling in it. If you look at de Palma’s Carrie, which I consider to be a superhero movie, it’s pretty much the same arc, minus the indiscriminate slaughter at the end. Dawn will only use her superpower against those deserving of it.”
It’s this sense of nuance and a spotlight to element that make Teeth a bit extra “elevated” than the B-movies it is lovingly emulating — like The Gorgon, a 1964 Hammer horror a few monster that takes the type of a lady and terrorizes a small city, which Dawn’s stepbrother Brad (John Hensley) watches on TV. That’s additionally what obtained it into the predominant competitors slate at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival, as a substitute of the Midnight part the place extra simple horror flicks are showcased. It manages to sincerely dramatize a younger woman navigating the expertise of sexual assault, whereas additionally maintaining a sly comedic tone all through, thanks partly to Weixler’s complicated and genuinely humorous portrayal of Dawn and Lichtenstein’s dedication to not eroticize any of the assaults. It satirized the tradition of the 2000s: overly sexualized horror, obsession with purity, George W. Bush-ian state-mandated abstinence teachings. In an early scene, college students in a intercourse ed class are disturbed by the undeniable fact that their textbook pages depicting the feminine reproductive anatomy have been obscured with large stickers. “They showed the penis picture,” one pupil argues. “That’s different,” the flustered instructor replies.
[Courtesy of Roadside Attractions]
As she learns how her newly found enamel work, Dawn turns into extra used to them, maybe a metaphorical parallel to any younger particular person rising extra snug with their physique as soon as they be taught to disregard the disgrace pushed on them by the exterior world. By the finish of the movie, Dawn’s enamel have advanced from a horrifying, uncontrollable deformity to a weapon in opposition to transgressors, able to be deployed in opposition to anybody who threatens Dawn — and, by extension, any girl — with sexual violence. This willingness to see Dawn as extra than simply an object of terror and disgust makes Teeth deserving of the similar feminist horror reclamation as the likes of Ginger Snaps, The Craft, and Jennifer’s Body.
“I knew there was a danger of people seeing the movie as misogynistic because I depict the misogynistic myth of vagina dentata,” Lichtenstein says. “But I hoped that people would see that I’m satirizing the idea of men ascribing this attribute to women, and that I’m turning the myth on its head so that the woman is not the monstrous figure, but the men who assault her are.” In different phrases, a cautionary story with a severe bite.
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