Tag: horror

His Body is a Temple, but Hers is a Prison: In My Skin (2002)

Trigger Warning: Self-harm & Gore

I have seen many films within the feminist body horror genre, and I normally understand the metaphors and general themes, which are commonly about coming of age as a young woman or teenager, beauty and aging, and/or about sexuality and sexual awakenings. 

So when I saw the film In My Skin (2002), I was left somewhat unsure. While I had many thoughts brewing about women’s bodies, mental health, autonomy, trauma and pain, I couldn’t exactly put into words what the film was attempting to convey. And though I couldn’t explain it, I somehow understood it (or atleast I understood how it made me feel). 

In My Skin is a French film directed by and starring Marina de Van, about a woman named Esther (Marina de Van) whose story begins when she attends a party; while she’s outside, she scrapes her leg against something metal. She doesn’t notice for hours that her leg is deeply injured and bloodied. 

After this injury, she becomes somewhat allured by the concept of self-harm; she begins to have overwhelming urges to cut her legs and arms up. Her friends and her partner find out and begin to treat her differently; they become upset with her for hurting herself; however, it does not seem as if she feels much about what she’s done. She refuses to discuss it with anyone. 

The urges become stronger, and she begins lying to her boyfriend so as to not upset him (or they will begin to fight). Things begin to spiral; Esther begins to hallucinate, lose control of body parts, and the urge to self-harm becomes a form of pleasure to her that she cannot seem to stop engaging with. She keeps making up lies so she can keep going.

All the while, her boyfriend continues to press her for explanations; he doesn’t trust her with her own body and feels he needs to be with her all the time in order to prevent her from getting hurt. However, this doesn’t stop her; her obsession only grows stronger.

In this film, Esther’s pain, isolation, mental illness, and frustrations are explored through the self-mutilation of her body. She gains pleasure through this, while she knows it hurts those around her (namely, her boyfriend). 

After watching the film, I ran to Letterboxd to read reviews, hoping someone would help me put my thoughts into words and make sense of everything; then I stumbled across this review by Letterboxd user Emma Katherine (or @exsanguinate):

“Am I at least entitled to my own body? They tell me it belongs to them, like everything else. So before they can take it I will shred it from the fucking seams because if no one else wants it, it’ll finally be mine.”(@exsanguinate, 2023). 

And things began to click. While I also interpreted other sentiments from this film, this quote really resonated. 

Body horror is and should be a feminist genre. It challenges patriarchal systems and provides deep and dark insight into being in a non-cisgender-male’s body. It goes beyond “body positivity” and ties to identity, pain, trauma, and autonomy.

Within the feminist body horror genre, women are not the stereotypical victim (as they so commonly are in the horror genre). In a space where women’s bodies are taken from them by men, harmed, and sexualized, this genre takes the control out of the men’s hands and gives the women their bodies back; Esther is not a victim of someone else’s harm; she is the one performing harm on herself. 

The distance between the pain Esther’s body feels versus what she doesn’t creates a kind of separation between her and her body, and she finds herself constantly questioning this notion.

Director Marina de Van sheds some light on what she intended to convey in the film in this 2002 interview:

This feminist body horror film deals with  some very different themes from other body horror films I’ve seen (see my post Beauty is Pain but at What Cost: The Ugly Stepsister (2025), and I think it is why it has left me with so many thoughts and questions; it’s unlike anything I have seen to date.

Carina Stopenski puts it beautifully in her text Exploring Mutilation: Women, Affect, and the Body Horror Genre,:

“Body horror is paradoxical, both embodied and disembodied, both subverting feminist expectations and fulfilling them. Whether it be beauty, sexuality, action—the female mutilator laughs in the face of these standards, an island of her own in a genre that is constantly forcing women into submission. […]Mutilation of others and the self allows the traumatized female mutilator to come to terms with her Otheredness, and in the process, she frees herself from the threat of abjection: she casts herself out voluntarily before society can do so.” (Stolpenski, 2022).

I feel as if I understand the film and yet I am left with so many questions  at the same time. The film deals with complex themes, and there is much to be taken from it. I encourage you to watch the film and share what you took from it. Do you understand her reasoning for her actions? How does the ending leave you feeling? I’d love to hear more insights from others and truly peel back the layers about this bizarre, complex, and gory film (or get under its skin, so to speak).

Check out my blog page to read more.

Till next time, dolls!

Work Cited

Beauty is Pain, But at What Cost: The Ugly Stepsister (2025)

#GRWM: chopping off my toes to fit the glass slipper!

What better time to talk about a girl putting herself through hell to look beautiful for a ball than after the 2026 Met Gala?

In the time of Ozempic and plastic surgery, I thought this was an appropriate time to talk about the film The Ugly Step Sister, directed by Emilie Blichfeldt.

A classic Cinderella tale, from the perspective of one of the ugly stepsisters, rings eerily true to today’s cultural climate when it comes to beauty standards.

The story follows Elvira (Lea Myren), who lives with her mother (Ane Dahl Torp) and her sister, Alma (Flo Fagerli). When her mother remarries, she ends up with her stepsister, Agnes (Thea Sofie Loch Naess). Agnes is older than Elvira and very beautiful, and she becomes somewhat fascinated by her at first, but her fascination slowly grows into jealousy. 

When Agnes’s father dies, the family is left broke. One day, the daughters receive an invitation to the ball to meet the prince. Elvira is a huge fan of the prince, think One Direction fan fiction level. Hoping to marry the prince and become rich, she and her mother try their best to make Elvira beautiful enough for the prince to fall in love with, and their methods are as simple as a blowout and a spray tan.

Elvira’s body is put through the wringer, but not without her enthusiasm. She goes through brutal procedures, like nose surgery and sewn-on eyelashes. But what really stood out to me (especially in the current cultural climate) was when someone gave her a tapeworm to help her lose weight. That was a hard watch because it didn’t feel very far-fetched. You watch her binge eat because she’s starving, but she can never satisfy the hunger; she starts losing her hair and looking more and more unwell. 

It’s a really heartbreaking tale- I don’t need to spell it out to you, of course, but the lengths women are pressured to go to be accepted and feel adequate are kind of what we’re seeing now, only less graphic and painful. 

Her sister Alma, in contrast, seems free of this lust to look perfect, to win the man. She watches her sister continuously hurt herself in disgust. Alma acts as the clarity and the moral conscience of the film.

I watched the film alone on an afternoon, and I think the mindset and scenarios in which you watch a film really do change the experience. I had trouble figuring out whether I liked it or understood it. I could figure out the tone. It felt like a slow burn. About halfway through, it occurred to me… wait… is this… camp?

And then everything clicked.

The minute you declare a movie camp, everything changes, and suddenly, I understood it.

Strange costuming and comedic dream sequences contrasted by graphic body horror. This film suddenly became everything I’d been looking for. Not to mention, the plot really resonated with me.

It may seem like an obvious or simple concept, but if that is so, why, as a society, does it feel even more prevalent? This film may be dramatized and more graphic, but it’s not entirely untrue when you look at history, and really, the thing that has changed the most is the ease and painlessness with which we are able to achieve these standards now (at face value), and instead, it’s the amount we spend on it that hurts most 

The value Elvira places on her appearance drives her to the edge of death. It feels as if this is sometimes what it takes to be released from those shackles. We must learn to put less importance on our appearance altogether, maybe things like jealousy of someone’s “natural beauty,” like how Elvira felt about Agnes (or what is seemingly natural beauty), rather than trying to match or exceed beauty expectations, because that puts us in a cycle where we never win. 

Body horror is a growing genre in film about/ and made by women, ( See my post His Body is a Temple, but Hers is a Prison: In My Skin (2002) ), and I think it’s because of the current climate in which women’s body/beaty standards have been held to. It feels eerily like we have started going backward. While no one film has done it perfectly, I think it’s important to keep watching films like this and push yourself to engage with and think about these things.

I urge you to watch The Ugly Stepsister and reflect on how you feel about the messages they aim to convey. Do you agree? Disagree? Let me know in the comments and let’s get a discussion going!

Check out my blog page to read more.

Till next time, dolls!