A powerful critique of America's purity culture, Teeth is also an incisor-sharp commentary on male entitlement, consent, and sexual violence. The poster that the distribution company settled on is styled according to more conventional horror tropes: Dawn reclines in a stark white bathtub, her face erased of any emotion.
In her anger, her vagina bites off his penis, and she leaves him to call his mother for help. Written and directed by Mitchell Lichtenstein, the son of famed pop artist Roy Lichtenstein, the film follows high school student Dawn O'Keefe, an evangelist for the purity movement. I don't mean so-bad-it's-good, I mean good. Everywhere she turns, Dawn the dental damsel-in-distress is surrounded by temptation. In high school, while her biology class studies evolution, she realizes she may have a hidden curse, an "adaptation." Movies. But nobody ever said it was going to be easy. You get the shots that will make you cringe--the filmmakers don't skimp on the juicy stuff--but nothing outrageous. Dawn is chewing her lip with a knowing look, a wry expression on her face. He licks his lips as if to ask for a sexual favor to release her; Dawn hesitates, and then looks towards the camera — and the old man — with a seductive smile. Unsurprisingly, this metaphor for consent was somewhat lost on the (mostly) male critics reviewing the film. The following morning they have sex again, but mid-coitus, Ryan's friend calls.
In fact, this movie is very good and very fun.
Ever the hustler, Pierpoline isn't about to give up. Every film studio—even European ones that Lichenstein and Pierpoline thought might be more liberal about vaginas—turned it down. Mutations ensue. "Just because you're making a movie about the monstrous feminine, doesn't give you a free pass into the feminist horror film canon," she writes in an email to Broadly. Ryan smugly boasts that he and the friend had bet on whether he could score with Dawn. Photo courtesy of Joyce Pierpoline. Writer-director Mitchell Lichtenstein's low-budget horror film is...more satirical than scary...however, he ultimately delivers the gory goods. A local film commissioner happily took them to a number of potential locations. He wants what he knows he can't have: Dawn. She's always kind of known she had something ... unusual in the vicinity of her privates, something that confused and frightened her, but she tried not to think about it.
for disturbing sequences involving sexuality and violence, language and some drug use, "Teeth" sinks its incisors into a cross-cultural myth known as, Or, as Juno might call it, "Vaggie D." Depending on who you ask (not that you should bring it up in polite intercourse), it is said to represent the male fear of castration and of feminine sexuality in general. Dawn O'Keefe (Jess Weixler) is a teenage spokesperson for a Christian abstinence group called the Promise. (Or, as the movie puts it, "the dark crucible that hatched him. It's a radically different poster from the one the distribution company eventually settled on. Dawn meets her stepfather and Melanie at the hospital after her mother has died, and seeing her stepfather hurt and hearing from Melanie how Brad told her to ignore her mother's cries for help earlier, she becomes emboldened by her power and goes back home to seek revenge. She practically glows as she tells me about distributing Teeth posters at a screening to an adoring audience of young girls: "It was a really nice feeling. Meanwhile, back at home, her ill mother, Kim O'Keefe (Vivienne Benesch), collapses. The film stars Jess Weixler and was produced by Lichtenstein on a budget of $2 million. "The movie industry is still run by men, I guess, and they don't like the idea of seeing dicks get cut off. As a result, Teeth was put together entirely with private equity. Foundation artistic director at the Sundance Film Festival Mystelle Brabbée claimed it was "one of the most talked-about films at th… "Either the studio didn't get it, or it was misogyny. "Teeth" sinks its incisors into a cross-cultural myth known as vagina dentata. One afternoon after giving a speech to her group about the purity ring worn by members of the group, she is introduced to Tobey (Hale Appleman), whom she finds attractive. Tobey: "You don't have to do anything." Although Dawn can, and does, castrate men—bloodied dicks thud to the ground with pleasing regularity throughout the movie— Teeth doesn't make Dawn a monster. The 1950s sci-fi premise would be that Dawn is the unfortunate victim of radioactivity, but there's something else in the air (and maybe the water) here. Like Emerson, movie executives didn't understand, or want to understand, Teeth. Dammit.
Dawn fights back and inadvertently bites off his penis with her vagina. "If Lionsgate had done a different marketing campaign and spent more money and gone wider, that would really have helped the film," she says. Pierpoline, a dark-haired woman in chunky silver jewelry and fluffy sneakers, grows animated. Teeth (2007) Synopsis: Dawn grows up in the shadow of a nuclear power plant. The camp sensibility, however, is fully self-aware, not unlike certain Todd Haynes' movies: the Barbie-doll biopic "Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story," or the black-and-white venereal horror/sci-fi segment of "Poison." (Dawn: "Get off." The film received mostly positive reviews from critics on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, which reported that 80% of critics gave the film positive reviews, based on 69 reviews—with the consensus "Smart, original, and horrifically funny, Teeth puts a fresh feminist spin on horror movie tropes."
"Teeth is a great concept for a film, but the final product feels less concerned about women and their bodies than it does about what women's bodies can do to men." "I had a manager at the time who said, 'Don't show it [the Teeth script] to anyone,'" Lichenstein tells me over Skype from his home in Maine.
[4] Jess Weixler won the Special Jury Prize for Dramatic Performance (and tied with Tamara Podemski from the film Four Sheets to the Wind). When I mention this to Pierpoline, her eyes fractionally darken and she flinches in irritation. When she tries to get out, he repeatedly locks the doors. Dawn's mother is taken to the hospital. Teeth follows O'Keefe's travails as she struggles to maintain her purity vows in a sex-obsessed culture while escaping the unwelcome advances of her abusive stepbrother and rapist classmates. Believing that one's virginity is "the most precious gift of all," she encourages her fellow Promise Ring members to remain chaste until marriage. I'm talking to the producer of 2007 cult horror-comedy Teeth in London's British Academy of Film and Television. Brad attempts to molest her and ends up with a bleeding finger. Teeth is a 2007 American horror comedy film written and directed by Mitchell Lichtenstein. She lives with her mom, step-father, and hard-edged step-brother.
On a limited theatrical release on January 18, 2008, Teeth barely recouped its $2 million budget. Stop! As he shakes Dawn she smacks her head on the ground and, while she is dazed, Tobey takes the opportunity to begin raping her. Like Sissy Spacek's Carrie, Dawn is going through that awkward adolescent stage. (Or, as the movie puts it, "the dark crucible that hatched him."). At the time Teeth came out, studios were trying to replicate the success of torture-porn slasher franchises like Saw; Saw 3 came out a year before Teeth's Sundance premiere. Dawn goes to Ryan seeking help, hysterical about her encounter with the doctor and her mother. ", Dawn O'Keefe, played by Jess Weixler. Dawn goes back to the swimming hole and she screams in horror when she sees a freshwater crab crawling on Tobey's penis. She then researches "vagina dentata" and realizes that she may have it. As we watch Dawn struggle against her attacker, we're clearly watching a violent sexual assault—but Emerson minimizes Tobey's rape as "young-romantic" ardor, and reimagines him, not Dawn, as the "victim.". One prominent feminist critic I emailed for comment declined to speak about Teeth, on account of it being a male-written, male-directed film. Or, as Juno might call it, "Vaggie D." Depending on who you ask (not that you should bring it up in polite intercourse), it is said to represent the male fear of castration and of feminine sexuality in general. Undeterred, the close-knit crew (they wore matching promise rings throughout the shoot—Pierpoline still has hers) pushed on and found alternative locations in the city. Dawn's stepfather Bill (Lenny Von Dohlen) attempts to throw Brad out, but Brad sets his dog on Bill, during which Brad confesses his love for Dawn. Soon after, they give in and meet at a local swimming hole. I lean towards it being misogyny," Lichenstein says. Yet she is committed to maintaining her purity. The alternative poster for "Teeth." For More Stories Like This, Sign Up for Our Newsletter, I was a teenager when Teeth was released, and I remember swerving the film because the poster made it look scary. In honor of the tenth anniversary of the film, its producer and director explain how the vagina dentata-themed movie overcame a bungled studio release to find cult acclaim among young women. The scene Emerson describes takes place at a waterfall, where a consensual kiss between Dawn and her classmate Tobey turns into attempted rape. Pre-shoot, him and Pierpoline went down to Austin to scout locations. She releases it on the ground and Brad's dog eats it, spitting out the genital pierced glans. "We wanted her to have this cute kind of look," she explains, pausing over a publicity poster she and Lichenstein designed. "I'm like, why not?" In the midst of the act, Brad recalls that, while still kids, Dawn bit his finger, but it was not her mouth that bit him. Why? If the overt message of Teeth is that jerks get their dicks—genital piercings and all—eaten by dogs, the secondary message is that men will try and obstruct your vagina dentata film at every turn, from the pitching stage to production and post-production. Now Brad has (under-)developed into a tattooed monkey-boy who spends all of his time in his thrash-metal cave of a bedroom with his Rottweiler, a bong and some skinny girl who is not his girlfriend. She visits a gynecologist, Dr. Godfrey (Josh Pais), in an attempt to find out what is happening to her. She gets a lift from an old man (Doyle Carter), but falls asleep and rides for several hours, waking up after nightfall at a gas station. People were hesitant to face it head on.". "It's original. It's a word of mouth thing, and that's a more genuine way of people discovering it. "So I'll hear from you," she says firmly. Still, when Dawn's first full-frontal victim looks down to find he's not even half the man he used to be, he seems genuinely hurt -- by the rejection as much as the castration. It's still a TV show about vaginas.
Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, who devoted a chapter to Teeth in her 2010 book Rape-Revenge Films: A Critical Study, feels similarly.
A powerful critique of America's purity culture, Teeth is also an incisor-sharp commentary on male entitlement, consent, and sexual violence. The poster that the distribution company settled on is styled according to more conventional horror tropes: Dawn reclines in a stark white bathtub, her face erased of any emotion.
In her anger, her vagina bites off his penis, and she leaves him to call his mother for help. Written and directed by Mitchell Lichtenstein, the son of famed pop artist Roy Lichtenstein, the film follows high school student Dawn O'Keefe, an evangelist for the purity movement. I don't mean so-bad-it's-good, I mean good. Everywhere she turns, Dawn the dental damsel-in-distress is surrounded by temptation. In high school, while her biology class studies evolution, she realizes she may have a hidden curse, an "adaptation." Movies. But nobody ever said it was going to be easy. You get the shots that will make you cringe--the filmmakers don't skimp on the juicy stuff--but nothing outrageous. Dawn is chewing her lip with a knowing look, a wry expression on her face. He licks his lips as if to ask for a sexual favor to release her; Dawn hesitates, and then looks towards the camera — and the old man — with a seductive smile. Unsurprisingly, this metaphor for consent was somewhat lost on the (mostly) male critics reviewing the film. The following morning they have sex again, but mid-coitus, Ryan's friend calls.
In fact, this movie is very good and very fun.
Ever the hustler, Pierpoline isn't about to give up. Every film studio—even European ones that Lichenstein and Pierpoline thought might be more liberal about vaginas—turned it down. Mutations ensue. "Just because you're making a movie about the monstrous feminine, doesn't give you a free pass into the feminist horror film canon," she writes in an email to Broadly. Ryan smugly boasts that he and the friend had bet on whether he could score with Dawn. Photo courtesy of Joyce Pierpoline. Writer-director Mitchell Lichtenstein's low-budget horror film is...more satirical than scary...however, he ultimately delivers the gory goods. A local film commissioner happily took them to a number of potential locations. He wants what he knows he can't have: Dawn. She's always kind of known she had something ... unusual in the vicinity of her privates, something that confused and frightened her, but she tried not to think about it.
for disturbing sequences involving sexuality and violence, language and some drug use, "Teeth" sinks its incisors into a cross-cultural myth known as, Or, as Juno might call it, "Vaggie D." Depending on who you ask (not that you should bring it up in polite intercourse), it is said to represent the male fear of castration and of feminine sexuality in general. Dawn O'Keefe (Jess Weixler) is a teenage spokesperson for a Christian abstinence group called the Promise. (Or, as the movie puts it, "the dark crucible that hatched him. It's a radically different poster from the one the distribution company eventually settled on. Dawn meets her stepfather and Melanie at the hospital after her mother has died, and seeing her stepfather hurt and hearing from Melanie how Brad told her to ignore her mother's cries for help earlier, she becomes emboldened by her power and goes back home to seek revenge. She practically glows as she tells me about distributing Teeth posters at a screening to an adoring audience of young girls: "It was a really nice feeling. Meanwhile, back at home, her ill mother, Kim O'Keefe (Vivienne Benesch), collapses. The film stars Jess Weixler and was produced by Lichtenstein on a budget of $2 million. "The movie industry is still run by men, I guess, and they don't like the idea of seeing dicks get cut off. As a result, Teeth was put together entirely with private equity. Foundation artistic director at the Sundance Film Festival Mystelle Brabbée claimed it was "one of the most talked-about films at th… "Either the studio didn't get it, or it was misogyny. "Teeth" sinks its incisors into a cross-cultural myth known as vagina dentata. One afternoon after giving a speech to her group about the purity ring worn by members of the group, she is introduced to Tobey (Hale Appleman), whom she finds attractive. Tobey: "You don't have to do anything." Although Dawn can, and does, castrate men—bloodied dicks thud to the ground with pleasing regularity throughout the movie— Teeth doesn't make Dawn a monster. The 1950s sci-fi premise would be that Dawn is the unfortunate victim of radioactivity, but there's something else in the air (and maybe the water) here. Like Emerson, movie executives didn't understand, or want to understand, Teeth. Dammit.
Dawn fights back and inadvertently bites off his penis with her vagina. "If Lionsgate had done a different marketing campaign and spent more money and gone wider, that would really have helped the film," she says. Pierpoline, a dark-haired woman in chunky silver jewelry and fluffy sneakers, grows animated. Teeth (2007) Synopsis: Dawn grows up in the shadow of a nuclear power plant. The camp sensibility, however, is fully self-aware, not unlike certain Todd Haynes' movies: the Barbie-doll biopic "Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story," or the black-and-white venereal horror/sci-fi segment of "Poison." (Dawn: "Get off." The film received mostly positive reviews from critics on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, which reported that 80% of critics gave the film positive reviews, based on 69 reviews—with the consensus "Smart, original, and horrifically funny, Teeth puts a fresh feminist spin on horror movie tropes."
"Teeth is a great concept for a film, but the final product feels less concerned about women and their bodies than it does about what women's bodies can do to men." "I had a manager at the time who said, 'Don't show it [the Teeth script] to anyone,'" Lichenstein tells me over Skype from his home in Maine.
[4] Jess Weixler won the Special Jury Prize for Dramatic Performance (and tied with Tamara Podemski from the film Four Sheets to the Wind). When I mention this to Pierpoline, her eyes fractionally darken and she flinches in irritation. When she tries to get out, he repeatedly locks the doors. Dawn's mother is taken to the hospital. Teeth follows O'Keefe's travails as she struggles to maintain her purity vows in a sex-obsessed culture while escaping the unwelcome advances of her abusive stepbrother and rapist classmates. Believing that one's virginity is "the most precious gift of all," she encourages her fellow Promise Ring members to remain chaste until marriage. I'm talking to the producer of 2007 cult horror-comedy Teeth in London's British Academy of Film and Television. Brad attempts to molest her and ends up with a bleeding finger. Teeth is a 2007 American horror comedy film written and directed by Mitchell Lichtenstein. She lives with her mom, step-father, and hard-edged step-brother.
On a limited theatrical release on January 18, 2008, Teeth barely recouped its $2 million budget. Stop! As he shakes Dawn she smacks her head on the ground and, while she is dazed, Tobey takes the opportunity to begin raping her. Like Sissy Spacek's Carrie, Dawn is going through that awkward adolescent stage. (Or, as the movie puts it, "the dark crucible that hatched him."). At the time Teeth came out, studios were trying to replicate the success of torture-porn slasher franchises like Saw; Saw 3 came out a year before Teeth's Sundance premiere. Dawn goes to Ryan seeking help, hysterical about her encounter with the doctor and her mother. ", Dawn O'Keefe, played by Jess Weixler. Dawn goes back to the swimming hole and she screams in horror when she sees a freshwater crab crawling on Tobey's penis. She then researches "vagina dentata" and realizes that she may have it. As we watch Dawn struggle against her attacker, we're clearly watching a violent sexual assault—but Emerson minimizes Tobey's rape as "young-romantic" ardor, and reimagines him, not Dawn, as the "victim.". One prominent feminist critic I emailed for comment declined to speak about Teeth, on account of it being a male-written, male-directed film. Or, as Juno might call it, "Vaggie D." Depending on who you ask (not that you should bring it up in polite intercourse), it is said to represent the male fear of castration and of feminine sexuality in general. Undeterred, the close-knit crew (they wore matching promise rings throughout the shoot—Pierpoline still has hers) pushed on and found alternative locations in the city. Dawn's stepfather Bill (Lenny Von Dohlen) attempts to throw Brad out, but Brad sets his dog on Bill, during which Brad confesses his love for Dawn. Soon after, they give in and meet at a local swimming hole. I lean towards it being misogyny," Lichenstein says. Yet she is committed to maintaining her purity. The alternative poster for "Teeth." For More Stories Like This, Sign Up for Our Newsletter, I was a teenager when Teeth was released, and I remember swerving the film because the poster made it look scary. In honor of the tenth anniversary of the film, its producer and director explain how the vagina dentata-themed movie overcame a bungled studio release to find cult acclaim among young women. The scene Emerson describes takes place at a waterfall, where a consensual kiss between Dawn and her classmate Tobey turns into attempted rape. Pre-shoot, him and Pierpoline went down to Austin to scout locations. She releases it on the ground and Brad's dog eats it, spitting out the genital pierced glans. "We wanted her to have this cute kind of look," she explains, pausing over a publicity poster she and Lichenstein designed. "I'm like, why not?" In the midst of the act, Brad recalls that, while still kids, Dawn bit his finger, but it was not her mouth that bit him. Why? If the overt message of Teeth is that jerks get their dicks—genital piercings and all—eaten by dogs, the secondary message is that men will try and obstruct your vagina dentata film at every turn, from the pitching stage to production and post-production. Now Brad has (under-)developed into a tattooed monkey-boy who spends all of his time in his thrash-metal cave of a bedroom with his Rottweiler, a bong and some skinny girl who is not his girlfriend. She visits a gynecologist, Dr. Godfrey (Josh Pais), in an attempt to find out what is happening to her. She gets a lift from an old man (Doyle Carter), but falls asleep and rides for several hours, waking up after nightfall at a gas station. People were hesitant to face it head on.". "It's original. It's a word of mouth thing, and that's a more genuine way of people discovering it. "So I'll hear from you," she says firmly. Still, when Dawn's first full-frontal victim looks down to find he's not even half the man he used to be, he seems genuinely hurt -- by the rejection as much as the castration. It's still a TV show about vaginas.
Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, who devoted a chapter to Teeth in her 2010 book Rape-Revenge Films: A Critical Study, feels similarly.
A powerful critique of America's purity culture, Teeth is also an incisor-sharp commentary on male entitlement, consent, and sexual violence. Maybe one day, Dawn O'Keefe will live to bite off another dick. It's fun. Most of the time his balance is just right. Lichtenstein and Pierpoline's poster features a tousled-looking, relatable heroine. More distressingly, it was outperformed at the box office by Katherine Heigl vehicle 27 Dresses, an asinine rom-com clunker about a perennial bridesmaid.
My friends and I love that film!"
A powerful critique of America's purity culture, Teeth is also an incisor-sharp commentary on male entitlement, consent, and sexual violence. The poster that the distribution company settled on is styled according to more conventional horror tropes: Dawn reclines in a stark white bathtub, her face erased of any emotion.
In her anger, her vagina bites off his penis, and she leaves him to call his mother for help. Written and directed by Mitchell Lichtenstein, the son of famed pop artist Roy Lichtenstein, the film follows high school student Dawn O'Keefe, an evangelist for the purity movement. I don't mean so-bad-it's-good, I mean good. Everywhere she turns, Dawn the dental damsel-in-distress is surrounded by temptation. In high school, while her biology class studies evolution, she realizes she may have a hidden curse, an "adaptation." Movies. But nobody ever said it was going to be easy. You get the shots that will make you cringe--the filmmakers don't skimp on the juicy stuff--but nothing outrageous. Dawn is chewing her lip with a knowing look, a wry expression on her face. He licks his lips as if to ask for a sexual favor to release her; Dawn hesitates, and then looks towards the camera — and the old man — with a seductive smile. Unsurprisingly, this metaphor for consent was somewhat lost on the (mostly) male critics reviewing the film. The following morning they have sex again, but mid-coitus, Ryan's friend calls.
In fact, this movie is very good and very fun.
Ever the hustler, Pierpoline isn't about to give up. Every film studio—even European ones that Lichenstein and Pierpoline thought might be more liberal about vaginas—turned it down. Mutations ensue. "Just because you're making a movie about the monstrous feminine, doesn't give you a free pass into the feminist horror film canon," she writes in an email to Broadly. Ryan smugly boasts that he and the friend had bet on whether he could score with Dawn. Photo courtesy of Joyce Pierpoline. Writer-director Mitchell Lichtenstein's low-budget horror film is...more satirical than scary...however, he ultimately delivers the gory goods. A local film commissioner happily took them to a number of potential locations. He wants what he knows he can't have: Dawn. She's always kind of known she had something ... unusual in the vicinity of her privates, something that confused and frightened her, but she tried not to think about it.
for disturbing sequences involving sexuality and violence, language and some drug use, "Teeth" sinks its incisors into a cross-cultural myth known as, Or, as Juno might call it, "Vaggie D." Depending on who you ask (not that you should bring it up in polite intercourse), it is said to represent the male fear of castration and of feminine sexuality in general. Dawn O'Keefe (Jess Weixler) is a teenage spokesperson for a Christian abstinence group called the Promise. (Or, as the movie puts it, "the dark crucible that hatched him. It's a radically different poster from the one the distribution company eventually settled on. Dawn meets her stepfather and Melanie at the hospital after her mother has died, and seeing her stepfather hurt and hearing from Melanie how Brad told her to ignore her mother's cries for help earlier, she becomes emboldened by her power and goes back home to seek revenge. She practically glows as she tells me about distributing Teeth posters at a screening to an adoring audience of young girls: "It was a really nice feeling. Meanwhile, back at home, her ill mother, Kim O'Keefe (Vivienne Benesch), collapses. The film stars Jess Weixler and was produced by Lichtenstein on a budget of $2 million. "The movie industry is still run by men, I guess, and they don't like the idea of seeing dicks get cut off. As a result, Teeth was put together entirely with private equity. Foundation artistic director at the Sundance Film Festival Mystelle Brabbée claimed it was "one of the most talked-about films at th… "Either the studio didn't get it, or it was misogyny. "Teeth" sinks its incisors into a cross-cultural myth known as vagina dentata. One afternoon after giving a speech to her group about the purity ring worn by members of the group, she is introduced to Tobey (Hale Appleman), whom she finds attractive. Tobey: "You don't have to do anything." Although Dawn can, and does, castrate men—bloodied dicks thud to the ground with pleasing regularity throughout the movie— Teeth doesn't make Dawn a monster. The 1950s sci-fi premise would be that Dawn is the unfortunate victim of radioactivity, but there's something else in the air (and maybe the water) here. Like Emerson, movie executives didn't understand, or want to understand, Teeth. Dammit.
Dawn fights back and inadvertently bites off his penis with her vagina. "If Lionsgate had done a different marketing campaign and spent more money and gone wider, that would really have helped the film," she says. Pierpoline, a dark-haired woman in chunky silver jewelry and fluffy sneakers, grows animated. Teeth (2007) Synopsis: Dawn grows up in the shadow of a nuclear power plant. The camp sensibility, however, is fully self-aware, not unlike certain Todd Haynes' movies: the Barbie-doll biopic "Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story," or the black-and-white venereal horror/sci-fi segment of "Poison." (Dawn: "Get off." The film received mostly positive reviews from critics on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, which reported that 80% of critics gave the film positive reviews, based on 69 reviews—with the consensus "Smart, original, and horrifically funny, Teeth puts a fresh feminist spin on horror movie tropes."
"Teeth is a great concept for a film, but the final product feels less concerned about women and their bodies than it does about what women's bodies can do to men." "I had a manager at the time who said, 'Don't show it [the Teeth script] to anyone,'" Lichenstein tells me over Skype from his home in Maine.
[4] Jess Weixler won the Special Jury Prize for Dramatic Performance (and tied with Tamara Podemski from the film Four Sheets to the Wind). When I mention this to Pierpoline, her eyes fractionally darken and she flinches in irritation. When she tries to get out, he repeatedly locks the doors. Dawn's mother is taken to the hospital. Teeth follows O'Keefe's travails as she struggles to maintain her purity vows in a sex-obsessed culture while escaping the unwelcome advances of her abusive stepbrother and rapist classmates. Believing that one's virginity is "the most precious gift of all," she encourages her fellow Promise Ring members to remain chaste until marriage. I'm talking to the producer of 2007 cult horror-comedy Teeth in London's British Academy of Film and Television. Brad attempts to molest her and ends up with a bleeding finger. Teeth is a 2007 American horror comedy film written and directed by Mitchell Lichtenstein. She lives with her mom, step-father, and hard-edged step-brother.
On a limited theatrical release on January 18, 2008, Teeth barely recouped its $2 million budget. Stop! As he shakes Dawn she smacks her head on the ground and, while she is dazed, Tobey takes the opportunity to begin raping her. Like Sissy Spacek's Carrie, Dawn is going through that awkward adolescent stage. (Or, as the movie puts it, "the dark crucible that hatched him."). At the time Teeth came out, studios were trying to replicate the success of torture-porn slasher franchises like Saw; Saw 3 came out a year before Teeth's Sundance premiere. Dawn goes to Ryan seeking help, hysterical about her encounter with the doctor and her mother. ", Dawn O'Keefe, played by Jess Weixler. Dawn goes back to the swimming hole and she screams in horror when she sees a freshwater crab crawling on Tobey's penis. She then researches "vagina dentata" and realizes that she may have it. As we watch Dawn struggle against her attacker, we're clearly watching a violent sexual assault—but Emerson minimizes Tobey's rape as "young-romantic" ardor, and reimagines him, not Dawn, as the "victim.". One prominent feminist critic I emailed for comment declined to speak about Teeth, on account of it being a male-written, male-directed film. Or, as Juno might call it, "Vaggie D." Depending on who you ask (not that you should bring it up in polite intercourse), it is said to represent the male fear of castration and of feminine sexuality in general. Undeterred, the close-knit crew (they wore matching promise rings throughout the shoot—Pierpoline still has hers) pushed on and found alternative locations in the city. Dawn's stepfather Bill (Lenny Von Dohlen) attempts to throw Brad out, but Brad sets his dog on Bill, during which Brad confesses his love for Dawn. Soon after, they give in and meet at a local swimming hole. I lean towards it being misogyny," Lichenstein says. Yet she is committed to maintaining her purity. The alternative poster for "Teeth." For More Stories Like This, Sign Up for Our Newsletter, I was a teenager when Teeth was released, and I remember swerving the film because the poster made it look scary. In honor of the tenth anniversary of the film, its producer and director explain how the vagina dentata-themed movie overcame a bungled studio release to find cult acclaim among young women. The scene Emerson describes takes place at a waterfall, where a consensual kiss between Dawn and her classmate Tobey turns into attempted rape. Pre-shoot, him and Pierpoline went down to Austin to scout locations. She releases it on the ground and Brad's dog eats it, spitting out the genital pierced glans. "We wanted her to have this cute kind of look," she explains, pausing over a publicity poster she and Lichenstein designed. "I'm like, why not?" In the midst of the act, Brad recalls that, while still kids, Dawn bit his finger, but it was not her mouth that bit him. Why? If the overt message of Teeth is that jerks get their dicks—genital piercings and all—eaten by dogs, the secondary message is that men will try and obstruct your vagina dentata film at every turn, from the pitching stage to production and post-production. Now Brad has (under-)developed into a tattooed monkey-boy who spends all of his time in his thrash-metal cave of a bedroom with his Rottweiler, a bong and some skinny girl who is not his girlfriend. She visits a gynecologist, Dr. Godfrey (Josh Pais), in an attempt to find out what is happening to her. She gets a lift from an old man (Doyle Carter), but falls asleep and rides for several hours, waking up after nightfall at a gas station. People were hesitant to face it head on.". "It's original. It's a word of mouth thing, and that's a more genuine way of people discovering it. "So I'll hear from you," she says firmly. Still, when Dawn's first full-frontal victim looks down to find he's not even half the man he used to be, he seems genuinely hurt -- by the rejection as much as the castration. It's still a TV show about vaginas.
Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, who devoted a chapter to Teeth in her 2010 book Rape-Revenge Films: A Critical Study, feels similarly.
