Hell is a Teenage Girl: A Gory Guide to The Horrors of Adolescence Without All the Pesky Cleanup

As someone who is absolutely obsessed with horror, I can honestly tell you that one of the most grotesque, confusing, and unpredictable scripts is the one written by puberty, and it’s especially cruel to teenage girls. Having been one myself, I can assure you it not only changes your view of Carrie but has you rooting for her by the end. I can also assure you that there are some phenomenal horror movies  out there that fully encapsulate all of the bodily transformations and array of emotions you feel at any given time. Between the peer pressure of The Craft, the complicated friendship of Jennifer’s Body, the hormonal haze of Ginger Snaps, the growing responsibilities of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and learning to embrace the different bits of yourself in Teeth, I can piece together (pun intended) an introductory guide to the world of being a teenage girl. 

The Craft is a movie I can watch at any point in my life and throughly enjoy. Have the flu? Watch The Craft. Celebrating a new job? Watch The Craft. Writing a piece about being the dangers of peer pressure? Watch The Craft. Robin Tunney’s Sarah Bailey is pressured by Skeet Ulrich’s Chris Hooker to have sex, and when she turns him down, he spreads rumors about her. Fairuza Balk’s ICONIC Nancy Downs, Neve Campbell’s Bonnie, and Rachel True’s Rochelle, not only peer pressure Sarah into the world of witchcraft or pressure her into diving deeper into her powers but also turn on her the minute she wants out and collectively bring all of her phobias and nightmares to life. Granted, Sarah does make it out alive (and causally becomes BFFs with the entity they invoked to drive Nancy to the insane asylum), but she’s constantly peer pressured but everyone around to be something she’s not, and she has to go through both hell and high school (which are essentially one and the same) to reclaim her own identity, which happens to be a strong witch who can manipulate the weather and everything around her. 

Speaking of manipulation, the next chapter in our guide focuses on the one and only Jennifer’s Body. If you haven’t seen this movie, watch it immediately because it’s directed by powerhouse Karyn Kusama and written by powerhouse Diablo Cody, and the chemistry between Amanda Seyfried’s Needy Lesnicky and Megan Fox’s Jennifer Check is electric, palpable, and still, on some level, relatable.  The portrayal of Jennifer and Needy’s friendship is brilliant. It represents outgrowing a childhood friendship but still trying to cling to something familiar because so many things change during high school, and it’s nice to have a constant. Needy and Jennifer’s friendship is toxic and detrimental to Needy’s relationship, but again, it’s hard to give up that long term bond, especially when you know it’s for the better (and even more so when one of you becomes a man-munching Succubus). It’s made more complicated by the unclear feelings Needy and Jennifer share for one another (as shown in one of the hottest make out scenes in horror that I’m flushed just writing about), and their bond best described by Needy as “sandbox love never dies,” grows more and more complex and twisted and malignant until Needy finally stabs Jennifer in the heart, killing the Succubus, and more importantly, their friendship. Needy has to let Jennifer go because their friendship’s foundation has completely rotted. People grow up and grow apart, and the ties that bind so frayed they eventually sever. High school is unfamiliar terrain, and it begins the trek to adulthood; often times, that means leaving the things from your childhood behind, including friendships. 

Sisterhood is yet another example of a complicated relationship but is an entirely different monster. In the case of Brigette and Ginger Fitzgerald, I mean that quite literally. The two sisters are inseparable queens of the macabre...until Ginger starts menstruating and gets bitten by a werewolf. To be fair, I’m not doing the plot justice at all, but Ginger genuinely starts her period, the blood attracts a lycanthrope, and Ginger gets attacked. After her encounter, Ginger begins to change, leaving her sister Brigette to try to make a sense of everything. Ginger becomes sexually active, starts wearing different clothes, and begins transforming into a flesh-feasting fiend. Also, Ginger can apparently infect people by having unprotected sex with them, which is wild, but I digress. Despite her transformation into a wolf that John Landis would be proud of, Ginger’s worst ailment is succumbing to the puberty she and her younger sister so desperately tried to avoid, and the fact that Writer/Director John Fawcett and Writer Karen Walton thought to use lycanthropy as a comparison is unparalleled. 

I would be committing an absolute horror sin not to include Buffy the Vampire Slayer on this list, and I don’t feel like repenting today. Buffy Summers is the perfect, all-American cheerleader who struggles to not only maintain her status as the most popular girl in school but to protect the entire town from becoming vampire chow. Buffy’s double life demonstrates the challenges high schoolers face in preparation of their impending adulthood. High school results in a lot of firsts (and no, we’re not going to talk about the clichéd one). Your first job. Your first car. Your first slay. Your first real taste of adulthood. You’re slowly gaining all of these responsibilities, and it’s scary, so when Buffy discovers she is The Chosen One aka The Slayer, we get why she’s so dismissive. She knows she’s growing up, but she still wants to retain the part of her youth without responsibilities. She gets to frolic through the mall and plan dances and go out with her friends; she doesn’t want to be bothered with training and studying and fighting, but unfortunately, high school ends, and you have to be able to fend for yourself. Buffy winds up kicking some major undead ass but only after she accepts her newfound responsibility aka the idea of growing up. 

I thought of a million segues, but none of them had enough bite (yikes), so here we go. Teeth has become synonymous with its well-known plot point of Vagina Dentata. Those two words have made people cringe, laugh, and everything in-between for years, but you know exactly which movie I’m talking about when I mention it, so it’s a lot more potent than you might think. Teeth centers around Jess Weixler’s Dawn, who soon learns her body is different...and not in the sense of loneliness most teenagers feel; however, her condition, for lack of a better term, is a great representation for your changing makes you feel absolutely alien. Sure, Vagina Dentata is a fictional medical condition, but during your teenage years, you feel like no one can relate to you. You feel like your body is some foreign vessel, whose oddities make it almost unrecognizable. Also, being from a small town where the coaches taught us sex education and could barely say “Human Papillomavirus” without turning a shade of bright red that would make a bull charge, the scene where Dawn has to soak her anatomy book in water to peel off the sticker covering a vagina is too relatable. I was blessed with having a nurse for a mom, so no subject or health concern was taboo. However, Dawn’s not comfortable asking because sex is presented as such a shameful subject. The good news is she does finally embrace her biting bits, and it turns out they act as a defense mechanism and save her from multiple sexual assaults. She learns to adapt to her body’s growing changes, while also shedding light on sexual violence (all of which is absolutely more disgusting than any of the body horror depicted in the film and saddens me to think about how many people have been in these exact same situations without having any defense mechanisms or assistance) and the dangers of abstinence-only education. 

I can say with complete honesty that my teenage years turned me into a monster. Sure, it may not have been a literal one like some of our aforementioned girls of gore, but it was close enough. You start trying to figure out who you are while also being pressure to fit in with people who you are going to be passing thoughts in a few years. You have to say goodbye to some friends you’ve known since childhood. You have to start navigating the world of tampons and pads and be constantly afraid of Toxic Shock Syndrome (at least I was). You have to start worrying about college and getting a job to learn responsibility. You start changing and learning about sex and all of the real world dangers that felt so distant before. Being a teenage girl is bloody hard. Period.