Shifters Everywhere - Excerpt From Consorting With The Shadow By Alison Armstrong

Alison Armstrong
Excerpt from my book Consorting with the Shadow: Phantasms and the Dark Side of Female Consciousness:


Beast Within--Ginger Snaps, Cat People, and Black Swan


Fleeing fairytales of prince-pleasing Cinderellas and toe-confining glass slippers, a girl hibernates in her fantasy lair. She, like the passive damsels she despises, desires transformation, but the metamorphosis she craves is as terrifying as it is ecstatic. A beast within her moans, and the girl-skin casing splits open.
Unlike vampire films, in which females appear about as frequently as males in the predatory role, most movies involving shape-shifting, at least until recently, have featured a man as their growling, hair-sprouting main character, the “beast” seeking his young, innocent, succulent, smoothly depilated female “beauty.” Despite the modern settings and modern characters in many of these films, the same beast/beauty gender roles usually predominate, indicating that even in the supernatural realm a certain degree of raw animal attributes are accepted, at times even celebrated, amongst men, whereas women are generally encouraged to embody a sweetly perfumed, cheerful, sanitized, unaggressively alluring yet pleasantly sensual ideal that is often at odds with their bodily processes and personality. Although women spend their reproductive years enmired in the animality of their menstrual cycles, they are still expected to conceal the evidence of their beastly biological bondage, the tell-tale ebbings guiltily staunched like the blood of a murder victim, the odor disguised by pretty-smelling, potentially poisonous chemicals. Women battle against their bodies, the physical aspect of themselves by which they are judged and because of which they often suffer. Therefore, it is even more relevant perhaps for the shapeshifter film to have a woman instead of a man undergo this physical transformation of self and body.
Ginger Snaps, Cat People, and Black Swan feature a female shapeshifter/beastly doppelganger to explore themes of sexuality and self-identity. Of these three films, Ginger Snaps makes the most blatant use of traditional horror movie conventions related to shapeshifters but subverts these clichés to examine puberty and adolescent psychology from a female perspective. . . .
Although shapeshifting offers the potential to attain in animal form an ecstatic sensory experience that transcends the language-filtered limitations of human consciousness, it often imposes its own restrictions, the transformations occurring unbidden, the result of lunar phases or turbulent emotions, such as anger or lust. Its addictive thrills can, as with Ginger, overpower the will, imprison the soul. For some, however, as with the protagonist Irena in Cat People, shapeshifting can bring escape into a form of being that, though imprisoning, liberates the true self. . . .