Let's Talk About Teeth, Baby

and vampires, and Godzilla, and 2007

Hi everyone!

This week, I presented part of my master’s thesis at the Popular Culture Association. This year’s virtual conference made me think back to last year’s regional conference in Albuquerque (which was actually my last pre-Covid trip), where I presented a paper about the horror film Teeth. 

This month, I decided to share a slightly abbreviated version of that paper with you! If you want a slightly more robust version, you can read that here, in The American Papers.

This essay is much more academic and formal than what I usually share here (here’s looking at you, Dude Salad), but a girl’s gotta have range.

Content warning for discussion of sexual violence. I would also give a spoiler alert, but this movie came out in 2007 and if you’ve made it this far without seeing it, I’m happy for you! 

“I Think She Bit It”: Patriarchy, Sexual Assault, and Selective Safety in Teeth

Teeth follows the story of Dawn, a teen girl who discovers monstrosity in her own body in the form of vagina dentata, meaning that there are teeth in her vagina that have the power to sever a phallus. Dawn’s body and cultural context harken back to the narrative traditions of vampires, and cultural creatures like Godzilla. While the movie subverts patriarchal power structures within Dawn’s own experiences, and offers a space for fantasizing about vengeance for sexual assault, it falls short of addressing an effective solution to common violence and collective trauma, even in fantasy. 

The movie begins with two soon-to-be stepsiblings in a kiddie pool together, Dawn and Brad. Brad is giving Dawn a hard time when suddenly, he cries out in pain. Their parents rush over to find a mysterious bloody wound on his finger, and no explanation is ever given. The movie then moves to the present, with Dawn in high school serving as a primary member of a Christian chastity program. Dawn’s mother is sick, and Brad has become a deviant, violent, disrespectful adult who still lives with Dawn and their parents. 

Dawn’s fierce commitment to chastity is her most defining characteristic, and it stands in stark contrast with her stepbrother and his girlfriend, who he sexually abuses. Dawn regularly speaks at in-school events, and proudly wears her purity ring. One particular scene in her health class highlights a double standard that she has clearly been immersed in. On one page of their health textbooks, the students can see a detailed scientific sketch of the male reproductive system. When they turn the page, they each find a sticker covering the diagram of the female reproductive system. The teacher is not even able to bring himself to use the word vagina, and explains that of course, the school cannot show “that.” While many students voice disapproval for this double standard, Dawn offers the explanation that “women have a natural modesty,” and the class ridicules her for it. 

With this context established, Dawn meets a boy named Toby who has just arrived at her school and claims to share her views on chastity. The two teens go on a supervised double date and later decide to go on a solo date swimming in a nearby river. They are unable to resist the temptation of each other in their bathing suits, but Toby goes much too far and rapes Dawn after she tries to get away and repeatedly says no. While the rape is happening, Toby suddenly cries out in pain, and pulls away to find his penis severed from his body. Dawn, unsure of what to do, runs away. Toby’s body is later found in the water. 

Dawn begins to experience a kind of PTSD, as she is catatonic, detached, and blames herself for losing her purity even though the sexual activity was not consensual. She begins to research what happened, and discovers the mythological vagina dentata. The myth, as she reads, “springs from a primitive masculine dread of the mysteries of women and sexual union.” 

Dawn is repeatedly sexually assaulted throughout the film, and each time the teeth maim the man committing sexual violence against her. As scholar Jeffrey Cohen defines in his seven theses on monster theory, “the fear of the monster is really a kind of desire.” Men lust after Dawn, and the sexual violence that comes from their lust is what leads to each of their demises.

Vagina dentata is closely related to vampiric themes in terms of the physical aspect of monstrous teeth, as well as the intimate nature of the violence, the sensuality associated with the ‘bite,’ and other sexual aspects like bodily fluid exchange and actual intercourse. Vampires are traditionally portrayed as sexually alluring and seductive, a framework that Dawn certainly grows into as she discovers the power that the teeth grant her in sexual situations. Comparatively speaking, the sexuality of her bite is much less metaphoric, as her teeth are literally a part of her sexual organs. 

Teeth brings many of the subverted anxieties and desires surrounding vampires to the forefront, but Dawn’s monstrosity remains trapped in a strictly heterosexual framework. While Dracula’s non-gender-exclusive victim choices can easily be read as queer, Teeth does not create the same space for vagina dentata. The only sexual experiences Dawn has are all with men, so all of her victims are male. Dawn and Dracula share physical similarities in their monstrous bodies, and both bring the intended audience’s intercourse-related anxieties to the surface.

While Dawn’s story upholds heterosexuality as the only visible sexual orientation, the traditional patriarchal power dynamic in which the woman is subordinate to the man is certainly challenged. Dawn finds herself equipped to fight back against sexual violence perpetrated against her by men in a way that women with typical sex organs do not, reclaiming a power that is not usually granted to victims of sexual violence. The use of a monstrous body to discuss and subvert collective trauma can also be seen in the story of Godzilla. 

While this may seem like an unlikely connection, the relationship between Godzilla and the traumatic aftermath of the nuclear bombs dropped in Japan contains a lot of the same devices used in Teeth to discuss and process the collective trauma of sexual violence against women through a monster, who has the power to both experience and subvert this violence.

Monster narratives “provide a place to hold conversations about our public anxieties. Our monsters register our national traumas.” Godzilla’s skin is scaly and highly textured, one of the features that links his body to nuclear trauma. The actual humans who bear these scars, known as hibakusha, are not pitied as victims or revered as survivors, but are instead ostracized and rejected by their own society. Their bodies are physical reminders of the trauma that their country still struggles with. 

Though Teeth does not show a large-scale collective response from women to Dawn’s vagina dentata, the reaction of repulsion toward these damaged bodies is similar to Dawn’s reaction to her own body, when she discovers the teeth after she is first sexually assaulted. The repulsion stems from fear of the unknown, but also from the shame she has already internalized and perpetuated. The need for monstrous protection calls attention to the history of bodies being conquered and invaded, and in both of these cases, the aftermath of the carried trauma is not to be celebrated.

No text exists in a vacuum, so it is necessary to consider the specific context in which Teeth was released. Even though the film did not achieve any kind of blockbuster fame, it remains part of an ongoing conversation about sexual violence and is often referred to as a feminist horror movie. The film was released in 2007, the same year that The National Criminal Justice Reference Service released the final report from the Campus Sexual Assault Study, which states that one in five female college students in America has been the victim of sexual assault. While the methods and scope of the study have been criticized, this statistic has become widely cited in discussions of sexual assault in America. 

Of course, the prevalence and frequency of sexual assault is not new. However, this clear and high statistic of women experiencing sexual assault on college campuses challenged the widely accepted notion that women could be safe, even in privileged economic or educational positions. The film does not address intersectional feminist issues, such as the role that race and privilege play in a person’s potential risk of sexual assault. Dawn is a white woman in a mostly white community, and this silence may speak to the film’s intended audience. Dawn’s privilege and chastity do not protect her from suffering multiple sexual assaults, potentially appealing to the freshly awakened anxiety raised by the CSA report.

The themes of sexual assault and female self-defense in Teeth create a resonant violation. All of the assaults Dawn experiences take place in realistic settings that are reported in America daily. All five men who ironically fall victim to her teeth represent unfortunately common situations. The first boy who rapes her, Toby, is her age, and appears trustworthy and respectful until he isn’t. This assault from a peer directly echoes the findings of the CSA survey. 

Dawn’s second ‘victim’ is a gynecologist who also appears trustworthy and comforting at first. However, once he realizes it is her first visit to the gynecologist and she does not know what to expect, he takes advantage of the situation by removing his glove and forcing his whole hand into her vagina while she screams in protest. This scene echoes a long history of women being abused and violated by medical practitioners. 

Dawn’s next victim is another male friend, Ryan, who she goes to seeking safety. He offers her a pill his mother takes for her nerves, which leaves her hazy, drugged, and unable to stand on her own. Their sexual interaction is not consensual because of this context, but is portrayed as such in the beginning of the scene. However, Dawn revokes her consent and realizes that she can actually control when the teeth come out, leaving Ryan in the same condition as the others. Once Dawn makes this discovery, she is no longer afraid of her own body, and begins to harness this newfound power. She uses her teeth to take revenge on her abusive stepbrother, and avenge the recent death of her own mother, which she blames him for. At the end of the movie, Dawn hitchhikes to escape the town full of police looking for her. 

The man who gives her a ride will not unlock the doors of the car when she wants to get out. After a brief moment of panic, Dawn realizes what the consequences of his actions will be, and smiles knowingly at the camera, implying a continuation of her serial kills.

Teeth switches the gender roles that are traditionally assigned in horror films, with a woman acting as the killer and the victims all being heterosexual white men. In “Her Body, Himself” Carol Clover discusses generic gender roles and expectations in a wide range of slasher films. The killers are predominantly mentally disturbed men, and sexually active women are almost always among their victims. The subversion of gender in the film may partially explain why it did not garner much popularity among typical horror genre audiences.

As Clover discusses, the intended audience of the horror genre is mostly male, which relates to the common intentional gendering of the ‘final girl’ as masculine and the male killer as sexually or intellectually disturbed. These generic components, however, are not present in Teeth. If we read Dawn as a sort of ‘final girl’ who survives multiple violent attacks by men, she is a final girl that a male audience is not explicitly invited to identify with. Though gender cross-identification is entirely possible, most horror movies make the process more palatable for their male audiences. In stark contrast, Dawn harnesses an explicitly feminine weapon to physically and brutally dismember men.

It is interesting to note that while the vagina dentata myth stems from a tradition of male anxiety and fear, the movie grants no merit or sympathy to the male victims. None of the men who are dismembered are portrayed as redeemable in any way, they are one-dimensional sexual assailants who earn their fate one way or another. It is understandable, then, that the movie was not celebrated by typical male horror movie audiences. 

However, this film has not achieved widespread celebration in the feminist community either. Dawn does not have any strong, influential female characters in her circle who can offer her support or contribute to the plot. This lack of community makes Dawn’s condition even more isolating, and blocks potential feminist interpretations of her situation that would involve women collectively healing from collective trauma. Instead, one single white woman is empowered to rise above the violence. The only other woman that Dawn is close to is her mother, who is weak and dying for most of the movie. The juxtaposition of Dawn’s horrific and powerful ability and her mother’s fragility creates an important and polarizing dynamic of femininity. 

The women in the movie can either be weak and abused, like Dawn’s mother and her stepbrother’s girlfriend, or violent and monstrous like Dawn. This is a very simplistic and harmful representation of femininity and, ultimately, of victimhood. Luckily, we are beginning to see more complex stories about sexual violence being told in film and television within the context of the #MeToo movement. Many of these stories address the systemic nature of sexual violence, and show survivors of sexual violence finding healing and community with each other.

The most resonant aspect of Dawn’s journey in Teeth is the realistic and commonplace nature of Dawn’s encounters with sexual violence. As Scott Poole observes, “monstrous metaphors in American historical life have a way of becoming real, intertwined with attitudes and social structures that make monsters possible.” Dawn’s isolation from other women is a part of the attitudes and social structures that surround sexual assault and victimhood. She finds herself in real-life situations that women and girls fear and face in their daily lives, but she is actually equipped to enforce consent as mandatory for the survival of her partners during sex. This monstrous ability empowers her, and grants her the sexual agency that chastity did not, but the escape from patriarchal sexual violence is limited to her as a lone survivor.

Well, I hope you enjoyed (?) this essay. If you know someone who might enjoy reading it, send it to them!

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Thanks for being here. See you soon!

-Christina