Editorials

In ‘Perpetrator,’ Empathy Is a Gift—And a Weapon

Uterus Horror is a subgenre of films that focuses on the experience of growing up with a female gender expression. These films capture the act of becoming an adult and coming into your sexuality, using horror to emphasize and/or act as a metaphor for those experiences. Columnist Molly Henery, who named and defined the subgenre, tackles a new film each month and analyzes how it fits into this bloody new corner of horror.

February 27th, 2024 | By Molly Henery

While this column primarily focuses on horror films that are at least a few years old, every once in a while, a new film comes out that I just can’t wait to discuss. In the case of writer and director Jennifer Reeder’s latest film, Perpetrator, I managed to wait a whole six months. Released as a Shudder exclusive in September of 2023, Perpetrator tells the story of a delinquent 17-year-old girl named Jonny (Kiah McKirnan). One week before her 18^th birthday, her father, Gene (Tim Hopper), sends her to live with her Great Aunt Hildie (Alicia Silverstone). Little does Jonny know that this marks the beginning of her journey of transformation, self-discovery, and empowerment.

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The first hint that Jonny and her family are different comes when Jonny gets a bloody nose and bleeds profusely onto the sidewalk. As she walks on, the audience sees her blood move as if alive. When she gets home and gives her dad his medication, Gene hides in the bathroom. As he looks in the mirror, his face seems to ripple, and his features change before returning to normal. Jonny and Gene clearly have a strained relationship, unable to have an honest conversation together. Jonny resents not knowing anything about her mother, and this leads to Gene contacting Hildie for help. When Jonny arrives at Hildie’s house, her aunt is not what she expected. Hildie dresses and speaks as if she comes from a different time. What’s more, Hildie continues the familial trend of being different. As the two women have dinner together, Hildie makes a bite motion, and Jonny mysteriously bites her own tongue, drawing blood. 

For Jonny’s 18^th birthday, Hildie bakes her a very special cake from an old family recipe. She also makes a wish for Jonny instead of letting her make her own birthday wish, which is a family tradition. At first, Jonny refuses the cake, but she sneaks a slice in the middle of the night. The instant Jonny swallows her first bite, something strange happens. Jonny runs to the bathroom and vomits blood into the toilet until it overflows. She screams and writhes before running away in a panic. She vomits more blood into the street and notices her blood moving on its own. When Jonny touches the small pool of blood, her fingers slide in as though it’s much deeper than it appears. She’s able to fit her entire hand in as she hears the voice of a girl crying out in pain, seemingly from miles away. 

When Jonny returns home, Hildie finally tells her the truth. They both come from a long line of women with a unique ability called “forevering” that is unlocked on their 18^th birthday. At its core, this ability is a profound and powerful form of empathy, with the specific abilities being a little different for each woman. Hildie’s special cake helped to unlock Jonny’s abilities and can be used to gift the power to other women, but Jonny’s transformation would have happened regardless. For Jonny, forevering means she can feel others’ emotions, especially women, to the point where a sort of reverse possession occurs and she can completely embody the other person, even changing her voice and facial features. 

The film’s mythology is fascinating and unique, especially in how it relates to Uterus Horror. The most obvious way Perpetrator embodies the subgenre is the blood. While there is an emphasis on period blood, we see that the blood from Jonny’s other wounds is powerful as well. Her blood is both a physical manifestation of her abilities, which explains why it appears to be a living entity, and it enhances her powers. Touching it allows her to feel the emotions of women far away, when normally her empathic abilities are confined to those nearest her. The pools of blood, no matter how small, are also as vast as the ocean, and those with this ability can travel through the pools into that ocean of blood. The emphasis of blood, Jonny being on her period when she undergoes her transformation, and this change occurring on her 18^th birthday perfectly aligns with what we have come to expect from Uterus Horror. 

Forevering being an empathy-based power is something that feels uniquely feminine. In a masculine, patriarchal society, emotions are often seen as a weakness. Listen to any conservative male politician, and they have likely said some variation of “women can’t lead because they’re too emotional.” In Perpetrator, the opposite is true. Jonny uses it as a superpower. At her new school, many girls have gone missing. When she sees a missing poster at school, Jonny’s face starts to change into that missing girl, and she speaks in the girl’s voice. When other students see Jonny immediately after, they even notice that Jonny smells like the missing girl. Later, when she goes to a high school party, as Jonny walks through the crowd, we see her body language and emotions change to match the partygoers she passes. She can feel if someone is happy, sad, scared, in pain, angry, and even if they’re lying.

As part of Jonny’s journey of learning about herself and her abilities, she decides to use forevering to solve the case of the missing girls. Talking to her new friend, Elektra (Ireon Roach), they realize that not only has every girl been taken shortly after being with a popular boy, Kirk (Sasha Kuznetsov), but they also realize Elektra herself was almost taken after leaving his house one night. After confronting Kirk, Jonny knows he has nothing to do with the disappearances, and he feels terrible, especially after one of the missing girls is found mutilated and murdered. The trio devise a plan to pretend Jonny and Kirk are dating, hoping to lure the killer. It works a little too well, and Jonny is taken. 

Jonny wakes to find herself in a torture chamber with a masked man. The man has created an open wound on Jonny’s chest with a tube protruding from it. The killer then connects this tube to a matching wound on his own chest, taking her blood into himself. The man throws her into a locked room with a bed. Jonny discovers the other missing girls hiding under the bed, injured and terrified. They reveal their captor kidnaps them to essentially strip them for parts, as if they were cars rather than human beings, taking what he wants most before discarding them. Determined to save the girls, Jonny bleeds a pool of her own blood onto the bed. When the man comes to investigate and touches the blood, Jonny is waiting inside and pulls the man in. She attacks the wound on his chest, then leaves him behind as Jonny leaves to escape with the other girls. 

As the girls flee, Gene’s van pulls up in front, but it’s being driven by an unfamiliar woman. Jonny learns that Gene, her father, is actually Jean (Melanie Liburd), her mother. Jean used her forevering to transform into a man to hide from Jonny’s real father, an evil man who would have harmed and likely killed them both. At a school assembly honoring the survivors, Principal Burke (Christopher Lowell) begins to bleed from the very spot Jonny injured the killer, which in turn makes Jonny bleed from her wound. In rapid succession, we discover not only is Burke the deranged killer, but he’s also Jonny’s father. A final showdown between Jonny and Burke shows his bleeding wound, which now bears a close resemblance to a vagina. Jonny reaches into that wound and rips out Burke’s still-beating heart. 

Much of Reeder’s work takes a dream-like, surrealistic, and even, at times, satirical tone. Once Burke’s role in the murders and kidnappings is revealed, things that originally seemed strange begin to make sense. When Jonny started at the school, one of the questions the nurse asked during her enrollment was if she was popular and, “on a scale of ‘no one would miss you if you disappeared’ to, ‘everyone would do anything to be you even for just one day’?” Burke describes the female students as “young, vulnerable pets” without any real cares or concerns. Even the self-defense classes he offers his students promote passivity; they are told not to run, not to scream, to stay silent, and even to act as if paralyzed. This was Burke’s way of grooming these girls to be his victims. 

Jonny’s Uterus Horror journey throughout Perpetrator is in many ways similar to what we’ve seen in other films in this subgenre. She’s always had her forevering powers, at least to a certain extent, but they aren’t fully unlocked until her 18^th birthday. For many, the 18^th birthday is the day a girl becomes a woman, so one could argue Jonny came into her power when she officially became a woman. Blood, especially menstrual blood, is an important factor in her power. In a short amount of time, Jonny grows from a troubled teen who robs houses for a bit of extra cash, to a strong woman set on helping and protecting other women. 

Forevering being a power based on empathy is an important choice made by Reeder. Emotion and empathy are so often considered feminine traits, and negative ones at that. Early in the film, we even hear how desensitized many of these girls are, saying things like “girls disappear all the time” as if it’s no big deal. After Jonny defeats Burke, she understands the importance of empathy. Not only did empathy help her understand the fear and pain the kidnapped girls experienced, ultimately helping her to find and free them, but it was also an important tool that allowed her to discern if someone wanted to do her harm.

The last scene of Perpetrator shows the survivors – Jonny, Hildie, Jean, and Elektra – together at Hildie’s to celebrate Elektra’s birthday. The birthday cake is none other than Hildie’s special family cake that will imbue the other girls with the forevering. After the hell these girls went through, they will have the power to protect not only themselves but other women as well. It’s an effective end to this Uterus Horror film and an important message of sisterhood and empowerment, ensuring all women have the tools to survive and thrive in a world that wants them to fail.