HAMMER OF THE DOMMES

The term 'Freudian slip' is part of the modern lexicon, and shows how successfully an idea can chime with our instinctive understanding. With this term we can describe 'that awkward moment...' when people say what is actually on their minds rather than what they are trying to say; the moment when the mask of the superego slips, and lets us see the messy subconscious underneath. And, this being Freud, the messy subconscious is all about sex.

The horror and gothic genres have long lent themselves to this kind of analysis; with the blood, murder, hauntings, cruelty and other libidinal undercurrents of the horror culture we are used to dismissing films and books as a 'metaphor' for sex:. From 'The Howling' to 'The Blob', from 'Ginger Snaps' to 'The Thing', from 'Lost Boys' to 'Twilight', it's all about sex. This is standard stuff nowadays. In fact even if it's not about sex we suspect that it kinda is about sex after all (cue many a feminist critique of 'Prometheus' or 'Saw').

What we also assume is that this is an intention on the part of the artist – that such motives are an explicit subtext as intended by the writer. But what if it isn't, and what we have is simply a massive Freudian slip?

Take Stoker's 'Dracula', for example – it is generally assumed nowadays that the proliferation of phallic symbols, neo-orgasmic death scenes, tortured innuendos and being 'hard at it' in the bedroom was intentional, in which case it makes perfect sense; but Stoker actually railed against such smut and even wrote an article condemning sexually explicit horror - meaning that all this was actually accidental. Oh dear...how embarrassing!

So what, then, are we to make of what can only be described as Hammer's 'femdom' period? During a 6-year period Hammer produced three films – 'She' (1965), 'Prehistoric Women' (1967) and 'Countess Dracula' (1971) – which all riffed on the single idea of dominant, cruel women who must be obeyed. Pretty racy stuff for the '60s/'70s before the ideas of fetish and BDSM had begun to gain any cultural cache. So were these films radical forerunners of a soon-to-be resurgent theme in sexual politics? Or were they simply the baffling offshoot of a cringingly exploitative cinema aesthetic?

In 'She', the titular figure is an immortal goddess with a stunning beauty that leads to her having an army of adoring supplicants, as well as an egomaniacal cruelty which involves throwing be-chained men in loincloths into a deep pit. In 'Prehistoric Women' the tyrannical Kari rules a tribe of brunettes who have enslaved a tribe of blondes whilst all the men are kept chained in a dungeon (and no, I am not making this up), and as the 'white hunter' male archetype lead tries to resist her domineering cruelty he ends up a slave like the rest of them due to Kari's overpowering jealousy and anger. And in 'Countess Dracula' our eponymous heroine is rejuvenated by the blood of female virgins (which she naturally obtains by beating them in a cruel and domineering manner) before using her rediscovered sexual power to dominate the court. So tell me – what the hell would Freud have made of that lot, then?

Whether or not these films were picking up on cultural changes in the zeitgeist of the '60s counterculture and laying the foundations for what was to be become the fetish/BDSM scene, or were simply just an excuse to have a lot of chaining up done by women in leopardskin bikinis, is hard to tell. And of course even if the latter was the case it wouldn't necessarily mean there was nothing in them that was indeed an indicator of changes in modern sexuality. But what Freud would have to make of them is anyone's guess...

Posted in: Column2,Joel Heyes