(Credits: Far Out / Roadside Attractions)
Vagina dentata – or toothed vagina. It’s a traditional warning found often in folklore, as the character of Dawn O’Keefe learns in the 2007 horror film Teeth as she navigates coming of age with the affliction. However, while writer and director Mitchell Lichtenstein packed the movie with plenty of gory violence, it lacked pardoning the pun, the cautionary bite it needed, and the bite that a female director could give it.
The story goes like this. Dawn O’Keefe is a do-good student who gives talks advocating for abstinence. She believes sex is sacred and that even masturbation is sinful. Painting her out to be the typical hyper-conservative American girl, Lichtenstein immediately gets the gags in as he encourages his audience to have a good giggle. However, the key factor to Dawn’s origin story comes before this in the film’s prologue. When the protagonist is only a child, her stepbrother sexually assaults her and recoils, screaming at the blood and teeth marks.
It’s this that Lichtenstein not only doesn’t do justice to but handles it in a completely obtuse way. Vagina dentata in folklore is used to warn men and discourage rape. It is a largely metaphorical example of immediate consequence and vengeance, one that is unavoidable and understandable. It warns men that if they attack women, the woman might just attack them right back during the assault. While gruesome, it’s a pretty empowering image and idea for women, this vision of natural and instant vengeance and the idea that our bodies could turn on an attacker to protect them. It would make the plot of an incredible feminist folk horror flick. But rather than exploring that, Lichtenstein turns the whole moving into a strange, almost slapstick comedy where Dawn is often the butt of the joke.
Watching the film today, it’s kind of sickening. Across the 94-minute run time, the audience sees the protagonist get assaulted and used several times: first by her brother, then by the first romantic interest she decides to trust, a doctor who is supposed to help her, a classmate she thinks is saving her and so on. For women watching, what Dawn is going through is a nightmare, layering trauma upon trauma not just at the hands of these men but as she fears her own body too.
But while Lichtenstein punctuates every assault with a bloody montage as Dawn’s body gets revenge, he doesn’t explore, in any way, the emotional weight of it. Every assault ends with a gory gag and the shot of an amputated penis or some man doing an overexaggerated scream, expecting his audience to revel in the gruesome outcome and ignore what led up to it. I’m sure some viewers could, and there is certainly a kick to get out of it, but with so much weight to Dawn’s experience, both as a woman and as a character in the lineage of the vagina dentata tradition – Lichtenstein simply wasn’t the person to handle it well enough.
Imagine Emerald Fennell taking on this story. Combining the vengeful and gothic violence of Saltburn with the more considered social message of Promising Young Woman. She could keep the humorous elements of Dawn’s tale, but no doubt the director would dive deeper into the plot, highlighting the fact that the protagonist only attacks when she is attacked, challenging the true story of assault and violence against women head-on. Or imagine it in the hands of The Substance director Coralie Fargeat, turning the movie into a true body horror with more shock to the story rather than cheap bloody gags.
Imagine it directed by Julia Ducournau, handling it with the aesthetic beauty and horror of Raw, the unfaltering lens of a woman directing a film about women’s bodies and even the lens of a woman literally raised by a gynaecologist, turning the scenes of the field into a horror flick. Even with no specific name attached, simply imagine this story, directed by a woman, actually designed to empower or even just align with women while also scaring men – just as the traditional cautionary tale intended.
Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of times where men have handled feminist or female-focused stories well. But combine the 2007 pre #MeToo signs of the times visible in Teeth with Lichtenstein’s oddly comedic approach to a tale about sexual assault, and it becomes a crime that a story this good and packed with this much powerful potential was wasted in his hands.
Especially at a moment in time in which violence against women is at a high, with one in three women worldwide having experienced physical or sexual abuse and threat levels in the UK now being on par with that of terrorism, there has really never been a better time for a distinctly feminist horror film, using one of folk’s sharpest images for a true cinematic bite at men. In 2007, that was not something Lichtenstein could or seemed to want to deliver. So now, in 2025, it’s time for a woman to have another go.
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