Who’s Afraid of Little Girls?: Gendered Horror in Two Versions of The Beguiled

sometimes i write papers for school, and i am so proud of them that they must be shared as blogposts on my personal site. behold! ~2200 words of me comparing the two versions of THE BEGUILED. i actually really love both of these movies and had a blast picking them apart. hope you enjoy me pretending to be an academic!!

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I was barely pubescent when I first stumbled upon Don Siegel’s 1971 Southern gothic psychological thriller The Beguiled. I didn’t know what I was in for when I landed on it while flipping through channels, but I was quickly engrossed in its maddening atmosphere and twisted narrative, complete with a psychosexual dream sequence and disorienting subjective camera movements. The film follows Colonel John McBurney, a wounded Union soldier who is taken in by a Southern school for girls during the peak of the Civil War. While they nurse him back to health, several of the girls and women become romantically involved with him, culminating in erotic trysts, violence, and murder. I was too young at the time to understand that I was watching a cinematic product of Vietnam-era masculinist anxieties, a paranoid reaction to feminism’s Second Wave and the sexual revolution. Helmed by Clint Eastwood, the all-American “monolith” of masculinity himself, The Beguiled’s portrayal of women and girls “reveals an inner darkness concerning men's fear of women, and portrays masculinity as a facade for insecurity about authority and power in a changing world.” (Bingham 179, 195) Although this was not historical context I had as a pre-teen, there was something about the way The Beguiled attempts to tell a story of female rage, sexuality, and revenge that bothered me. Despite my discomfort, the movie stayed on my mind for years as an object of fascination.

American director and matron saint of the cinematic feminine Sofia Coppola describes a similar experience with the 1971 film, stating in an interview, “I watched it and it just stayed in my head – because it was so weird.” She continues, “It was such a guy's point of view of this group of women, the way that they were dealing with their desire.” (Taylor) Her amusement with the male gaze employed by the film led her to direct her own version in 2017. In Coppola’s own words, she sought to “flip [the narrative]: to tell the same story but from the women’s point of view.” (Taylor)  By re-framing the narrative through the female gaze, Sofia Coppola’s 2017 remake of The Beguiled transforms Don Siegel’s 1971 melodrama from a sensationalist, male-gaze-driven fantasy into a quiet study of repression, complicity, and abject femininity. Coppola rejects the original’s voyeuristic hysteria in favor of a more ambiguous, atmospheric exploration of the horrors of girlhood and the rituals of femininity.

The Female Gaze and Abject Femininity 

Understanding the difference between Coppola’s and Siegel’s versions requires a grounding in the concepts of the female gaze and abject femininity. The concept of the “male gaze,” first theorized by Laura Mulvey, refers to the distinctly masculine and heteronormative lens through which female characters are portrayed in most narrative media. She theorizes that this lens is a result of orienting the work around an assumed male viewer, and in this framework, women are objectified, othered, or positioned as passive subjects to be consumed rather than active agents in the story. In horror, or a psychological thriller like Siegel’s The Beguiled, the “othering” of women often manifests as depictions of femininity as manipulative, dangerous, or even evil. It is the male gaze that gives us tropes such as the femme fatale or the nymphet. A woman is meant to be gazed upon and desired, not to have desires herself. It is for that reason that the male gaze depicts the sexualized woman as dangerous.

Emerging as an inevitability when it was “invoked via exclusion” by Mulvey’s essay on the male gaze, the female gaze is much harder to define. (Benson-Allot 65) Even Joey Soloway, one of the leading pioneers of the concept, admits that “there’s no such thing, not yet.” (qtd. in Benson-Allot 65) Soloway attempts to define the female gaze as “a way of feeling and seeing” that prioritizes interiority and subjectivity. (TIFF Talks) Rather than merely “flipping the script” by objectifying or othering male characters, the female gaze seeks to reframe visual storytelling to emphasize empathy, emotional subjectivity, and mutual recognition rather than domination or voyeurism. (TIFF Talks) Filmmakers working within this mode often resist objectifying portrayals and instead prioritize the emotionality of shared experiences. While many mainstream horror and thriller films fetishize violence against women, genre works employing the female gaze may attempt to portray this violence in a more realistic light. Alternatively, they may entirely reject the notion that horror for women is always rooted in sex.

Another crucial theoretical lens for understanding The Beguiled is the concept of the abject feminine, most famously articulated by Barbara Creed. In her work The Monstrous-Feminine, Creed draws from Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection to argue that horror films often construct femininity as a site of revulsion, fear, and disorder. The abject refers to what society deems impure or taboo—things that blur boundaries or defy categorization, such as bodily fluids, decay, or the maternal body. In this framework, female characters are not just feared because they are sexualized, but because of their Otherness as constructed by the male gaze. The abject feminine, in the context of horror on screen, is the place where femininity is rendered as grotesque, inhuman, or even violent. This theoretical grounding helps illuminate how Siegel’s The Beguiled frames its female characters through a lens of monstrosity. Meanwhile, Coppola’s version subverts-- and sometimes even plays with-- this abjection by affording empathy to her female characters, even as they become grotesque.

Siegel’s Masculine Excess vs Coppola’s Feminine Restraint

With our understanding of the male gaze in mind, we can clearly see that Don Siegel’s original version of The Beguiled is a melodrama steeped in male paranoia, sexual hysteria, and voyeuristic excess. Stylistically, the film is defined by its chaotic structure—mixing “inner monologue” voice-over, contradictory flashbacks, and erotic fantasy sequences that blur reality and desire. As critic Vincent Canby noted at the time of its release, it feels “like the kind of fantasies commonly enjoyed—according to literary convention—by hashish smokers, sailors and sex-starved spinsters,” and centers on women “suffering to a greater or lesser degree from the need for a man.” These fragmented, often feverish narrative techniques uphold the male gaze by reducing the women to a series of fantasies projected onto them by both the camera and the protagonist. While some reviewers attempted to read the film as a subversive portrait of female self-sufficiency—highlighting the women’s ability to “farm their own land” and “fend off intruders” (Kass 86-87)—the film’s tone ultimately betrays this interpretation. Siegel’s vision is driven less by empowerment than by fear and suspicion of women’s autonomy, rendering The Beguiled “a sensational, misogynistic nightmare” (Canby) in which feminine desire is monstrous, deceptive, and ultimately deadly.

Sofia Coppola’s 2017 reinterpretation, by contrast, trades in hysteria for restraint, refocusing the narrative through a quiet, haunting female gaze. Coppola’s stylistic trademarks—soft color palettes, listless pacing, ambient soundscapes, and emotional minimalism—imbue the film with a “dreamy, wistful yearning” that critic Yunuen Lewis identifies as a kind of “romantic ennui” (Marston 161-162). But beneath this surface of elegance lies something far more unsettling. Her characters are often suspended in a state of watchful quietude, their emotional lives repressed but palpable, rendered through glances, silence, and unspoken tensions. As Marston writes, the Coppola heroine is “painfully visible… under an intense public scrutiny,” a figure both iconic and powerless—trapped by social expectations yet distanced enough to observe them critically (164-165). In The Beguiled, this aesthetic is not merely visual but political. The film is, as Taylor puts it, “feminised” in both form and content: filtered through a female gaze, lit by candlelight, and dusted in pale tones, yet quietly “haunted by suggestions of abuse and oppression.” Coppola’s South is an exaggerated feminine world of manners and constraint, whose rituals become increasingly sinister in the absence of male oversight. Each frame “suffused with female desire” (Taylor), her version rejects spectacle for suggestion, asking the viewer to sit with the ambiguities and unspoken horrors of girlhood.

Scene 1: The Rescue - Whose Story Is This?

When looking at both films, the opening rescue scene marks a fundamental divergence in perspective: where Siegel centers McBurney through voyeuristic fantasy, Coppola destabilizes desire by diffusing authority and emphasizing collective unease. In Siegel’s version, we are introduced almost immediately to his “inner monologue” voice-over motif. Amy, the youngest student at the Farnsworth School for Girls, discovers a burnt and bloody McBurney while picking mushrooms in the forest. As she takes in the gory sight, we hear her thoughts: My daddy died that way… She chooses to save McBurney out of an allegiance she feels to her absent father, our first indication that these girls will be primarily motivated by their feelings toward men. On a sunny day in a lush green forest, Amy helps the half-dead colonel to safety. 

This version of the scene is composed almost entirely of handheld point-of-view shots, putting the viewer quite literally in McBurney’s perspective and forcing us to identify with his position. We see the girls looking down on him as they carry his body to the school, as if he is a powerless specimen. One of the girls slyly suggests they “take off his pants” to “see if he has a tail,” a rather clumsy innuendo meant to establish the girls as sexual beings early on. The camera is disorienting, whipping around as McBurney takes in the setting, and using erratic zooms to focus on particular actions. After being carried by the girls across the yard, he is delivered into Miss Martha’s arms. She cradles him against her chest as they discuss his fate, an early sign of the possessiveness that will soon infect our cast of characters.

In contrast, Coppola’s version of the scene is slow, objective, and shrouded in shadow. Coppola swaps Siegel’s lush green day for a gloomy dusk. The forest is darker, less saturated, and wider shots make our characters appear more isolated in the wilderness. While Siegel’s version of Amy was dressed in dark earth tones, Coppola dresses her in all white. Indeed, all the girls are dressed in pure, starched gowns (with no sign of the red costuming motifs used by Siegel to indicate which of the girls are meant to be “sexy.”) There is no inner monologue when Amy meets McBurney. Interestingly, Coppola chooses to omit a moment in which Siegel’s McBurney kisses Amy on the mouth immediately after learning that she is only twelve.

When Amy and McBurney reach the school, we are not forced into any one character’s perspective. The camera remains distant, objective, hesitant. The scene is much slower, less frantic. Instead of the extended point-of-view sequence, we get group shots that portray the girls working together as a domestic unit. Even the blocking is different, with the women making much less physical contact with McBurney. Instead of cradling him possessively, Miss Martha stands over him. She is less angry here, more keen to help. These girls are certainly not the sexualized, ravenous predators of Siegel’s film.

Scene 2: Soldiers at the Gate - Predator or Prey?

While Siegel depicts the women as feral and driven by desire, Coppola presents them as collectively vulnerable. The next scene which exemplifies these two different approaches comes after the women have decided to let McBurney stay with them until his injuries are healed. Confederate soldiers stop at the gate, and Miss Martha chooses to lie to them to protect McBurney. True to Siegel’s “show everything” style, we see this interaction between Miss Martha and the soldiers play out onscreen. We hear the exact dialogue and get close coverage of the soldiers’ faces. Meanwhile, the girls watch this interaction play out from the high limbs of a tree. Each girl is placed on her own separate branch, either crouched or hanging on like an animal. Indeed, there is a real fear of girlhood behind this portrayal. Siegel himself admitted to this view, stating in a 1972 interview that “Behind that mask of innocence lurks evil…Any young girl, who looks perfectly harmless, is capable of murder.” (Kass 190)

And yet, even as the girls are portrayed as dangerous, we are reminded of their sexual vulnerability. This is not the last time passing soldiers will intrude upon the space of the film, and at each of these beats, we experience their presence actively. The soldiers are depicted as potential threats as well as potential saviors, always nearby, who could invade the women’s space at any time. There is tension and disagreement amongst the girls over whether the soldiers can be trusted, and as such we get constant dialogue from the girls about how they could best make the soldiers happy. 

In Coppola’s version, the conversation between Miss Martha and the soldiers happens largely offscreen, so far away that we can’t see or hear anything specific-- another way that Coppola employs ambiguity and silence. There’s no closeness that the viewers get to feel with the soldiers, who may or may not be there to protect the girls. (In both versions of the scene, Miss Martha tells the girls she doesn’t want the soldiers to see them.) Instead of the tree used in Siegel’s film, Coppola has the girls observe from a bedroom window. They inhabit this domestic space together as a unit, instead of being portrayed as individualistic and feral on their separate tree branches. These girls huddle together like frightened prey, instead of observing from above like predators. By changing how they interact with the space and each other, Coppola presents a more ambiguous depiction of girlhood. Additionally, this simple change in setting suggests domestic entrapment, a theme that is missing entirely from Siegel’s version of the story. 

Interestingly, this moment is the only time an outsider enters Coppola’s version of the story. From here on out, it’s McBurney and the women alone, surrounded by that shadowy wilderness. There is both a helplessness and a sense of liberation in the fact that there is no one who can come to stop what’s happening inside these walls. Who will save the girls if McBurney is a predator? Who will stop the girls if they are the predators? What will happen with all that repressed desire and rage if there’s no outside threat to police the girls’ behavior? McBurney and the women are both free from consequences without involvement from the outside world.

Scene 3: McBurney’s Downfall - From Erotic Hysteria to Repressed Horror

While each film’s climactic sequence hits the same story beats, Coppola’s film strips away the leering spectacle of Siegel’s violent nightmare, replacing it with an emotionally muted, visually coded ritual that embodies the abject horror of femininity under constraint. In both films, the schoolteacher Edwina (who believes that McBurney wants to marry her) finds the soldier in bed with the seductive oldest student at the school-- Carol in Siegel’s film, Alicia in Coppola’s. In the shock of the discovery, Edwina throws McBurney down the stairs, further injuring his leg and knocking him unconscious. To avoid the onset of gangrene, in both films, Miss Martha decides McBurney’s leg must be amputated.

Once again, in Siegel’s version, everything is extremely explicit and happens onscreen. Leading up to Edwina’s discovery, we’ve seen multiple scenes of McBurney kissing or otherwise seducing each key female character in the cast. By the time he actually beds Carol, there have been multiple instances of onscreen escalation between McBurney and Edwina, McBurney and Carol, McBurney and Miss Martha, and even McBurney and Amy. Along the way, we’ve heard each female character’s explicit thoughts-- fantasizing about him, pining for the other long-gone men in their lives, and judging each other’s performances of femininity. These fantasies, though belonging to female characters, are especially emblematic of the male gaze. In the absence of McBurney himself’s private thoughts (in fact, he’s the only named character in the movie to never get an inner monologue voice-over), it’s almost as if these women’s thoughts are actually McBurney’s. Truly, the women’s “secret desires” in this film are actually the male writer’s fantasies about a woman’s “secret desires.” Immediately before Edwina’s discovery of Carol and McBurney, we get an extended erotic dream sequence during which Edwina and Miss Martha both make love to McBurney. The dream is presented as Miss Martha’s, yet it is McBurney’s desires that are truly driving the narrative.

When Edwina confronts McBurney, she goes into a fit of hysteria. She is intentional and violent when she throws him down the stairs, wailing I hope you’re dead! repeatedly. She’s in a total state of emotion and dissociation. Meanwhile, the earlier onscreen events have made it clear that young Carol wanted the fully adult McBurney in her bed. We see her invite him upstairs, so when she claims that he coerced her, we’re meant to understand that she is lying. It was Carol who seduced McBurney, and that seduction is explicit and damning. 

The amputation itself is equally explicit, and those involved are equally as damned. The surgery happens in painstaking detail onscreen as each of our key female characters react in excess to the fetishized violence. Miss Martha cruelly slaps McBurney, Amy weeps, and Edwina looks on the verge of puking. Edwina and Miss Martha in particular are sweaty, sexy, and irrational, but never gory. They somehow remain untouched by copious amounts of bright red blood seen onscreen. Free from the constraints of formality, they embody Creed’s “monstrous feminine”-- each with their hair down. They touch McBurney tenderly, intimately, as they drug and mutilate him. Later dialogue will attempt to argue that there was a moral ambiguity to the decision to amputate, but this erotic, sensually lit display of grotesque violence makes it clear that this Miss Martha enjoyed doing it.

Coppola’s version of this sequence is significantly shorter, and arguably more sterile. In her version of events, what exactly leads up to McBurney in Alicia’s room is left largely for interpretation. McBurney and Alicia get far less screen time together than McBurney and Carol did, so the escalation of their relationship is unclear. We do see Alicia sneak into McBurney’s room and kiss him, essentially making the first move, but there is no further onscreen interaction between their first encounter and this nighttime tryst. As a result, when Alicia claims that she was coerced, the viewer is left to decide for themselves whether she’s telling the truth. After all, she wanted him, but later events make it clear that she is also frightened of him. The lack of onscreen action is not the only way Coppola keeps viewers “in the dark.” She also does so literally, as her version of the film also makes much more use of shadows and darkness in its lighting design. While the 1971 film makes use of lanterns that fill entire rooms with warm, romantic light, the characters in the 2017 film navigate with dim candlesticks. These women are not on display for McBurney. No, they are hidden in the shadows, where their desires can be quietly repressed, kept as secrets. The climactic confrontation between McBurney, Edwina, and Alicia is perhaps the darkest, most-encased-in-shadow sequence of the film. The sexual desire here is hidden behind shame and secrecy. The dark events that are about to transpire are not meant to be seen. (After all, little girls are only meant to be seen when they’re being good and pretty, right?)

What transpires after Edwina’s discovery of McBurney’s betrayal is not the melodramatic display of histrionics and gore that we got in Siegel’s film. Instead, this Edwina is in an almost silent state of shock when she pushes McBurney down the stairs. Even as Miss Martha and the other girls rush out to see what’s happened, the scene is uncomfortably quiet. The tension, the fear, the anxieties all exist in what isn’t being said. Characters stare at each other as they struggle with words, all the while shrouded in shadow. In contrast to the sexy, sweaty Miss Martha of the 1971 film, Coppola’s Miss Martha makes the decision to amputate McBurney’s leg with her hair pulled back, her matronly white gown made gory by his blood. Her clothes are dirtied, but Miss Martha remains reasonable and calm. Instead of caressing and cradling McBurney as they prepare for the amputation, Miss Martha and Edwina stand over him, opposite each other but equal in power.

We don’t see the amputation happen onscreen. We cut straight from the decision to amputate to the morning after. And, yet, even without this nauseating gory display, it is somehow Coppola’s versions of the female characters that are fully allowed to be gross-- to embrace that abject feminine. As described by Boucher, Coppola accomplishes this by leaning into the full spectrum of bodily abjection, not just relying on the spectacle of bright red blood. Stylistically, Coppola aligns herself with other  neo-Victorian films of the twenty-first century, which make use of “blood, sweat, and spittle” to “reintegrate the filth and corporeality that was successfully expunged from many glossy mid-twentieth-century adaptations and works,” such as Siegel’s original film (Boucher 1-3). Instead of providing spectacle now, while emotions are high, the movie has been giving us slow, visual pieces of foreshadowing throughout the runtime that now allow us to imagine what is happening behind closed doors. Throughout the film, we see quiet moments of the girls sewing, cutting, and doing laundry. We can put two and two together, imagining how those skills transfer to what must be done to save McBurney’s life. In an earlier scene, we even see McBurney sawing through a log in a manner similar to the onscreen amputation we see in the 1971 film. We never see Miss Martha with a saw, but we do see McBurney with one. By foreshadowing it early on, the film is saying that this amputation was always going to happen. By putting the saw in McBurney’s hand, we see that if his downfall is anyone’s fault, it’s his. The women were there to dress his wounds, clean up his blood, and sew him back together. But the sawing, the destruction itself, was set in motion by McBurney’s decision to manipulate and betray the women, his belief that they were objects to be controlled.

Conclusion

Sofia Coppola’s The Beguiled is more than just a remake—it is a reclamation. By rejecting the male gaze for her authentically female gaze, Coppola offers a brilliantly nuanced counter to the misogynistic spectacle of Siegel’s original, allowing the full impact of her character’s feminine rage to be felt and enjoyed. Her film strips away the voyeuristic excess and eroticized violence that so often defines depictions of women in thrillers, replacing them with quiet, sometimes unnerving meditation, reflecting on the distinctly feminine experiences of repression and constraint, all while the desire to break free and become monstrous simmers underneath. In doing so, The Beguiled becomes part of a broader cultural conversation about women’s bodies and their passions-- a conversation about who gets to enjoy them. These women scorned are liberated by their decision to inflict violence back upon the force of masculinity that manipulated and made them grotesque in the first place. For Coppola, horror is not a monstrous woman with desire, but the stifling rituals and threats of violence that pressure-cook women into monsters. Passions can only be repressed so long before bubbling over with a vengeance.

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Works Cited

Benson-Allott, Caetlin. “NO SUCH THING NOT YET: QUESTIONING TELEVISION’S FEMALE GAZE.” Film Quarterly, vol. 71, no. 2, 2017, pp. 65–71. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/26413865. Accessed 17 Aug. 2025.

Bingham, Dennis. Acting Male: Masculinities in the Films of James Stewart, Jack Nicholson,     and Clint Eastwood. New Brunswick. Rutgers University Press. 199.

Boucher, Abigail and Daniel Jenkin-Smith. “Victorian Bodily Fluids Forum: An Introduction.”     Victorian Review, vol. 45, no. 1, 2019, pp. 1–3. JSTOR,     https://www.jstor.org/stable/26876534. Accessed 18 Aug. 2025.

Canby, Vincent. “Clint Eastwood Is Star of Siegel’s “the Beguiled.”” The New York Times, 1 Apr. 1971, www.nytimes.com/1971/04/01/archives/clint-eastwood-is-star-of-siegels-the- beguiled.html. Accessed 17 Aug. 2025.

Creed, Barbara. The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. London, Routledge, 1993.

Kass, Judith M.  Don Siegel: The Hollywood Professionals, Volume 4 (1975 ed.). New     York: Tanvity Press. 1975.  p. 207. ISBN 0-498-01665-X.

Marston, Kendra. “Sofia Coppola’s Melancholic Aesthetic: Vanishing Femininity in an Object-Oriented World.” Postfeminist Whiteness: Problematising Melancholic Burden in Contemporary Hollywood, by Kendra Marston, Edinburgh University Press, 2018, pp. 162–190, https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctt1pwt3hk.11. Accessed 17 Aug. 2025.

Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen, vol. 16, no. 3, 1 Oct. 1975, pp. 6–18, https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/16.3.6.

Taylor, Trey. “Revisited: Sofia Coppola - Interview Magazine.” Interview Magazine, 26 Oct. 2017, www.interviewmagazine.com/film/revisited-sofia-coppola-the-beguiled. Accessed 17 Aug. 2025.

TIFF Talks. “Joey Soloway on the Female Gaze | MASTER CLASS | TIFF 2016.” YouTube, 11 Sept. 2016, www.youtube.com/watch?v=pnBvppooD9I.