Copyright 2021 by Gary L. Pullman
Describing horror movie images can suggest directions in which to take a story. A poster for Sweet Sixteen (1983) shows a young, topless woman hugging herself as she stands hip-deep in a dark body of water (most likely a lake), a night sky behind her. Rippling out from her, a shadow upon the surface of the water extends toward the bottom of the poster (and, seemingly, toward the viewer), transforming into the blade of a knife, the point of which is overlaid by the film's title and the production credits.
This poster suggests the transformation of woman into knife, of a naked (and, therefore, vulnerable) woman into a phallic weapon, of flesh into steel: the woman's upper body becomes the hilt of the knife, formed by the union of the woman's shadow with the blade into which her shadow transforms, just as darkness is transformed into the blood-red lettering of the movie's title and the credits. The female figure becomes a weapon. The image's suggestions create a series of contrasts: Woman, from whom life is born, becomes an instrument of death, just as darkness becomes blood, and nature points toward language, the medium of communication, a precursor to civilization.
Whatever metamorphosis the young woman is experiencing has to do with her coming of age, the title suggests. It is unlikely, though, that the red of the letters represents menstrual blood, because girls tend to experience the onset of menstruation at about twelve-and-a-half years of age, long before age sixteen. Therefore, the blood is likely to be associated with another coming-of-age experience, the loss of a girl's virginity, which is also an occasion marked by blood. This possibility is supported, perhaps, by the image of the teenager's nudity. Her innocence is gone; she is no longer “sweet” (that is, in this context, virginal) now that she has been deflowered. She owns the phallic knife that “pierced” her; in a sense, she has become one with it, a “phallic woman,” the Freudian notion referring “to the fantasmatic image of a woman (or mother) endowed with a phallus or a phallic attribute . . . . [and] to the fantasy of the woman (or the mother) retaining the phallus internally after coitus.”
The poster's tagline, an implied question that is concluded by the movie's title, “What terrors are unleashed when a girl turns . . . Sweet Sixteen[?],” suggests that the young woman's loss of virginity “unleashes” horrors.
My analysis of the poster's imagery seems quite plausible, but the movie's plot does not support it—at least, not entirely. A brief summary of the plot reads, “Teenager Melissa moves into a small town filled with racial prejudice and bullying, and each time she meets up with one of the boys in town, [he] end[s] up murdered—but who is the killer?”
A young woman, the virginal Melissa attracts boys. She is a seductress not because she intends to be, but because she, in the flower of young womanhood, attracts boys, as a blossom attracts bees. Her Aunt Tricia's attempt, in the guise of Joanna, to protect Melissa, due to Tricia's confusion of Melissa with her own dead sister Joanne, is Tricia's motive in killing Melissa's suitors. (Tricia killed her father to protect Joanne, but the patricide caused Tricia to go mad and she was institutionalized.) Tricia dispatches Melissa's pursuers with a knife, stabbing them to death. Therefore, it is Tricia who is the phallic woman. Her belief that her niece is her sister, whom she tries to protect from men, as she had tried to protect Joanne from their father, is the basis for her transformation not only into Joanne, but also into the phallic woman who stands up to men. Melissa transforms not herself, but Tricia, into a “knife,” but only because Tricia, in her mind, has first transformed Melissa into Joanne.
Although my own interpretation of the movie poster's imagery differs from the movie's plot, my interpretation is equally valid and could be the basis of a different plot that is also suggested by the poster's images. This possibility is not a surprising, because an image or set of images, like a situation, can be understood in several ways, each of which is both possible and feasible, which is why it is often said that a movie (or a novel) about the same situation or theme is apt to generate as many plots as there are writers. For this reason, the description of a horror movie's images can suggest not one, but several, viable directions in which to take a story, because there is not one, but many, valid interpretations of images and as many directions in which to develop a story's plot, as, for example, this Possession (1981) movie poster suggests: