Under the Skin, or, a Feminist Horror Tragedy in Two Parts

A24’s film Under the Skin (2013) stars the inimitable Scarlet Johansson playing “the woman,” a character who rides around the streets of Scotland in a van, picks up men, seduces them, and then brings them to a strange building in which they walk forward through a black room until they are absorbed by a strange black liquid in the floor that slowly leeches their vitality and body structure, until they are ribbons of maleness floating around in viscous soup. Late in the film, it’s revealed that she’s some kind of alien, wearing a skin suit; her true corporeal form appears to be a congealed or at least solid-state hominoid version of the same black liquid that absorbs her marks.

So that’s a lot. But it’s also, from a plot synoptic standpoint, not too surprising. Monstrous bitch attacks and consumes men, using her sexual power to seduce them first? We saw this in the Species franchise of the 1990s and early 2000s. We saw this in Ginger Snaps (2001). We saw it in Teeth (2007). We also saw it half a century ago in the absurdly pornographic Werewolf Woman (1976). The cannibalistic succubus Monstrous Bitch genre is, well, a genre.

In fact, it’s so noninnovative that, the first time I saw the film, I thought to myself, Well, there’s nothing I can do here: the movie wears its engagement with female sexual monstrosity like right on its sleeve. No need for further interpretation.

But the second time I watched it, which was yesterday, I realized how wrong I was. First of all, it became clearer to me on second viewing that The Woman (Johansson) is hunting in order to fill orders that she’s receiving from another alien—called The Biker in the film’s credits. He stalks her when she starts failing to deliver her prey to the black soup, and it’s clear she’s afraid of him. So, unlike all of those other cannibalistic succubus Monstrous Bitch films, she’s on payroll for someone else, and that someone else is a threat to her. She is, in effect, a transspecial sex-worker with an angry pimp, though she doesn’t ever have sex with anyone (in part because she cannot, anatomically, have it, as we find out late in the film.)

Second, I realized that the plot arc, though it strongly echoes the other cannibal succubus monster bitch films I mentioned above, is actually importantly different. In Species, Ginger Snaps, Teeth, and even Werewolf Woman, the monstrous bitch gets more monstery and more bitchy as the film goes onward. This is particularly notable in Teeth, because Dawn is, for most of the film, an unwilling predator, but by the end, it appears to have become something of a calling. But in Under the Skin, the trajectory is completely reversed. In fact, what the film really chronicles is the gradual conversion of this seductive intergalactic bitch into, well, a human person with fully developed empathy.

Let me get a little deeper into that for a minute, before I say why I think it’s so important.

Over the course of the film, we see The Woman seduce maybe half a dozen men. They all wind up in the black viscous liquid, being drained and consumed. She shows very little mercy toward, or even interest in, her victims. She behaves like a psychopath: no empathy, no remorse. Easy peasy black goo squeezy.

But one night, she picks up a man (Adam Pearson) with neurofibromatosis, who exhibits significant facial deformities. She can’t use her usual “moves” on him, like flattering his “handsome face,” as she had done with previous marks. So she compliments his “beautiful hands.”  She holds them. She invites him to touch her face, and he reveals that he’s never had a girlfriend, nor really touched women. She seduces him into the black liquid, just like all the others. But this time, afterward, she catches a glimpse of herself in the mirror. We don’t know what she thinks, but the strong implication is that she’s thinking about her face and his face. Next thing we know, the man with the facial differences has been freed, and is walking naked across a field, toward home. She spared him.  

After that, her ability to do her job is broken. She goes on a highlands walkabout, and finds her way into the home of a kind man, who cares for her and is clearly smitten. One night, they try to have sex, but can’t, because, well, she doesn’t have a vagina. She appears surprised that it doesn’t work, grabbing a light to shine on her genital area, so she can understand what’s (not) going on down there. She appears surprised because she, on some level, has come to see herself as and experience herself as a person. There is a brilliant hint at this, earlier in this episode of the story, where she is listening to music and, for the first time in the entire film, she appears to have a reflexive, physiological response to the music: she taps her fingers in rhythm to it.

One she realizes she’s not-quite-human, but feels quite human, she takes off for the woods, in part hoping to escape The Biker who’s stalking her. But in the woods, she is found by a group of men, and she has to flee. In her flight, she is found by a rapist park ranger, who throws her to the ground and brutally assaults her. As he does so, the fissure lines really begin to appear between the human she wishes to become and the alien underneath: her skin suit starts separating, and peeling off, as the ranger forces her and rolls her around on the ground. She escapes, but not for long: she peels off the skin suit most of the way, and gazes into her own face.

She looks confused. Which one am I, really? This smooth, illegible anthropoid alien? Or the beautiful mask? Now there’s a feminist question for you. Who is she, really? Is she the image or the dark, impenetrable substance underneath? Someone every man wants to fuck, or someone every man will be terrified of, and seek to destroy? (As, indeed, happens immediately after this still image: the ranger catches up with her, douses her with gasoline, and torches her. She ends the film in a pile of charred remains.)

Someone to fuck? Or someone to fear?

And that’s when I realized that this film isn’t just a succubus bitch horror film. It is that, sure. But it’s also a tragic allegorical figuration of what it is to be a young woman. Who are you going to be? The fuckable siren, or the terrifyingly illegible alien? The alien, in the film, decides she wants to be the fuckable siren. She wants to have sex with that guy who takes care of her. She likes him. She also likes the man with the unusual face whom she rescues. She likes people. And she wants them to like her. She likes her mask, because it enables her to get close to people. But ultimately, she has to face the reality that there is a world of real self under that beautiful, Johanssonian mask, and that that self has to be reckoned with. Acknowledged. Lived in. Embodied.

The tragic paradox, of course, is that the moment at which The Woman comes to term with her own non-woman status by taking off the mask, she has to die. In a snowy inferno, in the middle of nowhere.

When she burns up, and we see the black smoke from her body going up into the pale sky, I was reminded of my favorite scene from Alien. The scene I wrote about in my post about from August 4, 2023, when Kane’s dead body is ejected from the Nostromo, and we watch him rolling forever out into space. Alone. Far from home. Gone. Lost to the entire world that gave him birth. The Woman-Alien in Under the Skin meets with an analogous fate. She is killed on a foreign world, far, far from home. Far from anything that gave her birth. She will be a dark stain on the forest floor of some random locale in the Scottish highlands. Gone. Lost. Annihilated. Deleted. Erased.

So, yes, on the one hand, Under the Skin is an abnormally excellent and artful instantiation of the Monstrous Succubus Bitch genre. She’s a monster, and she’s terrifying. On that hand, the film is a gender-reversal, too, of the scores and scores of films out there about men who stalk and murder women, taking them back to their apartments before raping them and slaughtering them. She appears, for most of the film, to be on a kind of revenge-rampage: she’s the stalker, she’s the murderer. But in the end, it turns out that human males win out as the Arch Bad Guy. The ranger who wanted to rape her winds up incinerating her like a witch.

Put otherwise, we spend most of the film thinking she’s a hunter, and that human males are her quarry. But in the end, we find out that she is the hunted—both by The Biker and by The Ranger. And it’s worth noting that her transformation from hunter to hunted has everything to do with her slowly becoming more human: she develops empathy, she develops a sense of rhythm, she develops sexual desire, she develops a wish for companionship, she loses her taste for murder. This film, marketed as horror, is tragedy. Its claim is that what epitomizes the status of being a human woman is susceptibility to being hunted. What make her most at risk for actual death, however, is her decision to look at herself and expose herself as she truly is, underneath her skin, no matter how unrecognizable, illegible, unparseable, and cypher-like she may be.