The Image of the Blood-Soaked Woman
The blood-covered woman endures as an indomitable image. We might precipitously yoke this picture with repulsion and horror and anger, perhaps born of respective knee-jerk associations with menstruation, mania, and even violence against women. Perhaps that’s where some of the image’s powerful potentialities come from. But the image needn’t be connected to any of the above to wield its evocative power. Rather, the woman sopping with blood, whether others’ or her own, is emblematic of strength, ferocity, and persistence. In a narrative capacity, the blood-soaked woman marks transformation of the most potent variety.
Carrie present’s the most obvious example — not so much Stephen King’s Carrie but rather Brian De Palma’s. Some may claim the definitive image in De Palma’s 1979 film is that of the hand punching up through the grave, but it is more obviously the grisly showpiece of Carrie White drenched in pig’s blood after her more popular (upper middle-)classmates play a cruel prank on her at the prom. Indeed, this image has been immortalized on the movie’s posters and home-video box art for decades. Of course, the image bears menstrual resonances, given Carrie’s experiences with menarche that set the plot in motion. But we must remind ourselves that the blood is not hers. Here, the animal blood unleashes Carrie’s primal rage. Being bathed in this most basal vital fluid allows her to articulate her preternatural powers. It empowers her to exact her revenge on her antagonizers. And while that revenge expresses itself chaotically, “exact” is the consummate verb, because the heretofore repressed Carrie can brandish her power in focused fashion, putting her tormentors to a variety of gruesome deaths. Being soaked in blood has brought out Carrie’s strength.
For certain, the image of the blood-sodden woman has persisted beyond the film Carrie, even making it as far as the world of professional wrestling. While women’s professional wrestling amounted to little more than a puerile diversion as recently as 20 years ago (the nadir being WWE’s “Bra-and-Panties” matches), it has recently ascended to main-event status thanks to the efforts of new and unrelenting competitors, perhaps none more so than Britt Baker. When Baker debuted in the fledgling All Elite Wrestling (AEW) promotion in 2019, she played the wide-eyed good-girl, and in rather banal fashion. She had the well-scrubbed, empty keenness of a health-sciences type, and fittingly so, as Baker is a legitimate dentist in her non-wrestling life. Something lacked in Baker, and it wasn’t just her rather milquetoast in-ring skills. She gave every impression of being the “girl just glad to be there,” a description Baker would later apply to herself. Then, her character became an increasingly cunning heel (or antagonist, for the non-wrestling fan), garnering some fan attention. Was her newfound ruthlessness authentic? This question was answered in a no-holds-barred grudge match between Baker and her rival Thunder Rosa on March 17, 2021. The two women resorted to savagery within minutes, brutalizing one other with tables, chairs, and thumbtacks, items usually reserved for men’s matches in mainstream North American pro wrestling. Nearing the conclusion, blood ran in rivulets down Baker’s face, and she grinned dementedly all the while. She continued to battle on through the blood loss, only to be driven through a table by Thunder Rosa and then pinned. But the lasting image of that encounter was Baker’s crimson mask, which would be immortalized on an iconic t-shirt that sold wildly. Though she had lost that bloody match, Baker would go on to become AEW Women’s Champion and one of the most popular performers, male or female or non-binaire, in professional wrestling. Being soaked in blood brought out Britt Baker’s ferocity.
The image of the blood-soaked woman has returned to popular culture in recent weeks with the release of Evil Dead Rise. Without spoiling too much of the plot, this film tells the story of Beth, played by Lily Sullivan, a woman in an unsettled, rock-and-roll lifestyle who winds up at her sister’s apartment. Here, Beth seeks guidance for what we’ll call a belly-borne difficulty. For Beth’s sister, herself a single mother, this kind of lower abdominal issue testifies to Beth’s interminable “groupie” status. As can be expected in an Evil Dead film, multiple Kandarian demon possessions ensue. Beth has to assume the Bruce Campbell role and face down the demons. While the film as a whole doesn’t show us too much that’s truly new, it does hearken back to the classically evocative image of the ensanguined woman, and with a refreshing twist to boot. After a series of gory battles with the deadites, Beth is drenched in blood, as is her niece, played by Nell Fisher. We have, then, two females, one full-grown and one a child, bathed in liquid crimson, the vivid red interrupted only by the whites of their eyes and their bared teeth. They are determined to survive, and, with chainsaw at the ready, Beth will lead the charge to save the child(ren). Putting on the gore and wearing it has unleashed a capacity for protection of self and others that neither Beth nor the audience may have known she possessed at the start of the film. Being soaked in blood has brought out Beth’s relentlessness.
What we see in the blood-soaked female is a girl or a woman metamorphosed. For both Carrie White and Dr. Britt Baker, DMD, we have witnessed deliverance into maturity. For Carrie, this happened in the sense of pubescence, then soon exploded into superhuman ability. For Britt Baker, she changed from a self-described “girl” into the face of the AEW women’s division, her bloody visage worthy of the proverbial Mount Rushmore of women’s wrestling as a whole. Meanwhile, for Evil Dead’s Beth (mild spoiler alert), she has made her choice in the affirmative regarding her belly-borne problem and is at film’s end primed for any horror single-parenthood can throw at her. Her niece, too, is likely ready for anything she’ll ever face. Altogether, these blood-soaked females have arrived at a new phase in life. They have burst through to a new scene professionally, personally, and/or psychically (in the most literal sense for Carrie). And so, to be a woman soaked in blood is to have been transformed. This transformation happens by burrowing down into the self — and into the flesh — and drawing on the reservoir of some heretofore dormant virtue: strength, ferocity, relentlessness . . . the list could go on and on for these characters and more blood-soaked female characters to come. Survive the bloodbath and you’re inviolable, sister.
All told, the woman soaked in blood has had something violently excavated from her. She has unlocked some capacity either she herself and/or others never thought she had. But because that capacity comes as a surprise to some, either among the cast of characters or in the audience, the imagery of the blood-soaked woman should not be passed off as merely menstrual. Rather, it is about a female learning how far she can go and all that she can do when she gets there. The torrential rain of blood is about potential and its sudden arrival. As such, the blood-soaked woman is necessarily a feminist image. She spurns the male gaze and the presumed limits of female functionality embedded therein.
