Marguerite Baker is my favourite ever portrayal of womanhood in horror and I’ve never quite been able to put my finger on just what about her is so compelling to me, but I think a huge part of it is that nothing about Marguerite and what happens to her is ever expected to be pretty. What often bothers me about a lot of modern explorations of the horror of womanhood, of having a female body, of being seen as a woman, is that it usually centres around young, skinny and usually white conventionally attractive women. There’s an expectation of attractiveness still on the women at the centre of the horror. Of course, there are exceptions to this, but they’re few and far between, and I’ve grown so tired of sanitised horror about the grotesque parts of having a female body.
Marguerite Baker is in her 50s she looks it. She’s got wrinkles and back pain, her hair is grey, she’s not super thin. She has two adult children and an equally aged husband. She’s a woman past her middle age and you can tell. And yet, her horror is entirely focused on her body, her physical form being twisted and turned against her. The infection that makes Jack inhumanly strong and able to regenerate from even shooting himself in the head has made her a walking bug hive, constantly birthing insects, perpetually pregnant, and eventually her own reproductive organs rip through her body. Before the infection Marguerite had no real identity beyond being a wife and a mother, and though she seemed to like that life it has been just as warped as her body has become. Her husband has become incredibly physically violent and directs that abuse at both of their children as well as her, the meals she provides them are made of the meat of their victims, and all the while there are bugs crawling inside her womb until she lays their hives, a process that we hear causing her agony.
There is never a moment where what is happening to Marguerite is expected to be palatable, let alone attractive. She’s a gross older woman who eats people and has a centipede that’s crawls up her throat, she kills people, she’s a cannibal, she spends most of her time in a filthy flooded house full of bugs that is falling apart, she gives birth to insects, and it is treated as disgustingly as it is. So much of what makes her an effective threat and a frightening character to be around is the fact that she is so completely unappealing from a sense of attractiveness. There is nothing pretty about what has happened to her, and the game doesn’t try to make it anything else.
Marguerite’s horror is such a unique exploration of the typical monstrous feminine that I have seen in recent memory, and even though the game is from 2017 she is still my favourite example of it. It is done so well and so frighteningly that I don’t think anybody is forgetting it any time soon
