The monstrous man-boy: white masculinity’s uncanny immaturity in contemporary horror

ABSTRACT

The “monstrous man-boy” is an uncanny white male villain in the horror genre who, despite his adult appearance and age, acts childishly and violently toward others. His monstrosity is reminiscent of the white male immaturity that has defined the politics of the Trump presidency. Utilizing feminist critical age and psychoanalytic revisionist theory in combination with critical media communication studies, this essay examines the monstrous man-boy in the film The Boy (2016) and the Apocalypse season of American Horror Story (2018). Within these narratives, white women are often framed as mother figures who are blamed for having nurtured the man-boy, but who are also granted the opportunity to redeem themselves by defeating him. However, people of color who enable the man-boy are denied any chance at redemption and are fatally punished. Thus, even when these texts critique and challenge the monstrousness of white patriarchal immaturity, whiteness itself remains problematically uncontested.

KEYWORDS:

• White Masculinity
• immaturity
• age
• monstrosity
• horror

Acknowledgments

The author wishes to thank Claire Sisco King, Chris Morse, and the reviewers for their feedback and support of this essay.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. As Segal (2014) states, “For Freud, the abhorrence of old age was presented as a given, seemingly in little need of explanation” (p. 20).

2. For canonical critiques of the androcentrism of Freudian psychoanalysis and Freud’s inattentiveness toward race and racial difference, see (Millett, 1970; Spillers, 1997). Although outside the scope of this essay to explore, Gilman (1993) argues that Freud fixated on gender difference because it afforded him a site onto which he could displace race and project anxieties about his own racial identity as a Jewish man.

3. Staiger (2015) notes that adult-child characters are especially prevalent in slasher horror films like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, stating, “These slasher movies are not about [the childish villain] growing up, but staying young…of never finally becoming the adult across the abyss…” (p. 226).

4. It is no wonder then why Trump and other conservatives have rallied around Kyle Rittenhouse, a 17-year-old white boy who received national attention after killing two people at a Black Lives Matter protest in August 2020, but have often overlooked or demonized young Black victims of police brutality like Trayvon Martin and Tamir Rice. For more scholarship on how whiteness has become integral to normative constructions of childhood innocence, see (Rand, 2019).

5. The same is true of the U.S.’s own uncanny white man-boy, Trump. Kelly (2020) argues that Trump promises his followers “an intoxicating fantasy of return to an imagined past before feminism, the Black freedom struggle, and queer activism fundamentally questioned cisgender heterosexual white men’s primacy in all aspects of public and private life” (p. 2). Kelly adds that this rhetoric “asserts that relative gains by women, people of color, immigrants, and GLBTQ movements threaten white men’s social status and upward mobility” (p. 3). The unfortunate implication is that socially marginalized communities are blamed for the monstrous rise of Trump, since their successes and gradual integration into U.S. American society were what compelled many to throw their support to Trump and vote to put the man-boy in the Oval Office. The implication of this logic is that socially marginalized “Others,” not Trump, are the “real” monsters (Martinez, 2017).

6. Cordelia and the witches previously appeared in Coven, American Horror Story’s third season. Scholars have critiqued Coven not only for how it depicts the brutalization of Black bodies (LeBlanc, 2018), but for how its portrayals of white women perpetuate white supremacy (Naumoff, 2018).

7. One exception is Queenie (Gabourey Sidibe), a Black woman and member of Cordelia’s coven. Rather disappointing, Queenie is refused her own individuality as a woman of color and gets absorbed in the whiteness of the coven. In comparison to her first appearance in American Horror Story’s Coven season, Queenie incites less discourse amongst the witches on the politics of racial difference (something which occurred on several occasions in Coven) and she is, in general, given less to do in Apocalypse. Queenie is killed by Michael and only returns at the end because of her allegiance to the white witches.

8. One unusual exception to this is Veronica, the Black heroine fighting back against the horrors of a modern-day slave plantation in Antebellum (2020).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kyle Christensen

Kyle Christensen (Ph.D., University of Memphis) is an Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at Huntingdon College.