Masked Erinys: When Being a Woman is the Best Tool for Revenge

Abstract

The thriller genre maintains the all-too-common tendency to represent female characters as passive objects. The expectation is that women who do not fulfill the femme fatale archetype are naturally harmless. Thus, it arises the possibility of instrumentalizing this apparente passivity by hiding the true female agency until the moment of anagnorisis when the true revenging identity is revealed. This paper studies two audiovisual examples, Oriol Paulo's films, The Body (2012) and The Invisible Guest (2016). Both cases show a woman executing her revenge by hiding her identity and going unnoticed by the rest of the characters and the audience.