​Beginners' guide to boiling bunnies

A beginners guide to boiling bunnies

Step one: get your bunny, your pot, and your water.

Kidding. Only a true and irredeemable monster would boil a cute, innocent bunny. But the “bunny boiler” trope is surprisingly common in horror and thriller media. Bunny boilers are women, usually young and attractive, who inflict pain upon (usually male) protagonists. Examples include Medea of the Greek myth of Jason and the Argonauts (though she predates the term “bunny boiler”), Cassie Thomas from Emerald Fennell’s Promising Young Woman, and Alex Forest, the literal bunny boiler, from Fatal Attraction. These women illustrate the politics of gender, especially in terms of violence and justice, due to their subversions of gender roles and typical notions of violence and revenge.  

Effective horror is rooted in the perversion, or rejection of the normal. For instance, Pet Cemetery is effective because one is used to domestic animals being companions, so seeing them be anything but is frightening. Along the same lines, women in horror are frightening, because they break out of normal roles for women in storytelling. Humans love to sort ourselves, especially women, into categories or “archetypes”. From Freud’s Madonna and the whore, to Buzzfeed’s What Disney Princess are You? there is no shortage of boxes to sort women into, and each box has its own set of character traits. Thus, women are especially effective in horror, because of how many prescribed notions exist about how various women “should” be.

Medea is one of the first women in a story intended to be frightening, and also represents one of the purest examples of the inversion of tropes. Medea begins as a helper maiden—an archetype in mythology—which is a young, beautiful, useful woman who helps the protagonist (in this case, Jason and the Argonauts). She is later the mother to Jason’s children. However, in a horrific (literally) turn of events, Jason leaves her to marry King Creon’s daughter. Scorned, Medea poisons King Creon and his daughter, Jason’s new wife; Medea also kills her and Jason’s children. Objectively, Medea has done the exact opposite of what her archetype is “meant” to do. As a helper, she is meant to help, instead, she hurts. As a mother, she is meant to nurture her children, instead, she murders them. Additionally to see a wife attempt to hurt her husband was atypical and threatening to the very foundations any patriarchal society stands on. Thus, the scary story becomes scary.

Alexandra “Alex” Forrest, the iconic bunny boiler from Fatal Attraction, is a perversion of the typical “other woman” or “seductress”. She has an affair with the married protagonist of the film, then proceeds to stalk and terrorize him and his family. Typically, the seductress’ most effective weapon is her sexuality and manipulation. However, Alex breaks the typical mold: her sensuality is one of the least dangerous things about her. She graduates to brutal violence, becoming a true slasher, thriller antagonist. Typically, the violence Alex accesses is only available to male antagonists (think Jason or Freddy Kreuger). The fright factor of Fatal Attraction comes from Alex’s divergence from the seductress archetype, as well as the relative strangeness of watching women brutalize men, instead of the other way around.

Emerald Fennell’s Promising Young Woman is a more modern take on the bunny boiler trope. Cassie, the main character, is simultaneously the protagonist and the slasher. She also represents the ingénue, or the “Damsel in Distress” and the seductress, like her predecessor. She pretends to be a drunk, vulnerable, “distressed” woman to coax men into taking advantage of them, before revealing her sobriety and humiliating them. The duality of the seductress and the innocent, as well as the duality of villain and protagonist, leaves the audience unsettled. Promising Young Woman also shows women as the perpetrators of violence, another subversion of the audience’s usual notions of violence.

However, even in the realm of horror, the idea of women truly getting true justice is too scary. Medea, strangely, is one of the most progressive and comes the closest to being able to exact revenge on those who wronged her and continue to live her life happily. However, Medea’s revenge is not exactly “justice”. She does not get to enact revenge on the person who actually wronged her, Jason. Instead, she kills his new bride, playing into the stereotype of “catfights” and “women just hate each other”. In killing Jason’s children, she’s also killing her own children, hurting herself as well. It’s also worth noting that Medea was not well-liked in her time. She had a host of negative female traits that would make her disliked by audiences. She’s also not a normal woman, deliberately blurring lines between masculinity and femineity. 

In the case of Alex and Cassie, arguably more “normal” women, justice is not served. In Fatal Attraction, Alex dies and the protagonist, Dan, is forgiven by his wife gets to return to his normal life. There are no consequences for his role in the inciting affair. One could see the story as a story of revenge from Beth, Dan’s wife’s, perspective, as she gets to deal the final blow on Alex. However, she still gets no revenge on her cheating husband. Beth killing Alex was not the original ending— which Attraction depicted Alex killing herself and framing Dan for her murder, resulting in Dan’s arrest— was changed because test audiences did not view it as cathartic. The ending was changed against Glenn Close’s, the actress who played Alex, wishes. She thought the new ending portrayed her character as a relentless psychopath, rather than an emotionally fragile but ultimately sympathetic character. In a sense: the ending didn’t do her justice. Promising Young Woman, despite its marketing as a feminist revenge piece also denies women justice. While the man who assaulted her is eventually arrested, Cassie still doesn’t get what Dan from Fatal Attraction gets; to get revenge, she has to die. Even in stories centered on women, violence, horror, and revenge, audiences do not want to see women get full revenge, or see men get what they deserve.  

The portrayal of women in horror haunts real life. The fright of seeing women break pre-determined roles indicates that our society has not moved past antiquated gender roles. Women play the same role today as they did in the ’70s or in ancient Greece, and we still squirm when we see those notions subverted. Additionally, the lack of on-screen justice for women in slashers and horror films mirrors a society that will not punish perpetrators of sexual assault and seeks to make it the fault of the woman, allowing the public to take comfort in the notion that “she deserved it”. While one might hope the portrayal of justice in horror would be a perversion of our notions of justice, the treatment of many women in horror is uncomfortably close to the treatment of real women by the justice system.

Form Medea to modern media, our conceptions of justice and violence are rooted in misogyny. The existence of the bunny boiler trope reveals a patriarchal society that still perceives violence against women as the status quo. Deviations from said status quo are, simply put, frightening.

 

 
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