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From Carrie and Heathers to Mean Girls and Jennifer's Body to Wednesday and Euphoria and beyond, the Scary Teen Girl trope has a long history in film and TV. For spooky season, we've compiled...
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00:00There are certain characters who are iconic villains and monsters.
00:03The Wicked Witch, the Vampire, the Boogeyman.
00:06But one scary figure in pop culture doesn't outwardly appear
00:09so terrifying at all.
00:11She's vengeful and ruthless, cold and cunning.
00:13She has the tactical prowess of a political mastermind
00:16and the calculating mind of a killer.
00:18And she does it all from behind a sweet, innocent facade.
00:22The teenage girl is at the heart of so many shows,
00:25and she's only getting scarier.
00:27So when did Hollywood turn her so terrifying?
00:30And what's driving the shift?
00:32In this three-part series, we're going to take you on a trip
00:34into the history of the terrifying teen girl on screen.
00:38Girls, watch out for those weirdos.
00:41We are the weirdos, mister.
00:43While many of our favorite iconic scary teen girls
00:46began popping up on screen in the 80s and 90s,
00:49the seed for the trope was planted much earlier.
00:52According to gender studies professor Ilana Nash,
00:54the author of American Sweethearts, Teenage Girls in 20th Century Popular Culture,
00:59historically, teen girls on screen could be one of two things.
01:03Either they were angelic and sweet, almost absurdly well-behaved,
01:07or else they were agents of chaos, challenging the status quo.
01:11Whichever she was, Nash says,
01:13The teenage girl unfailingly appears either more or less than human,
01:17never simply a whole person with her own three-dimensional subjectivity.
01:21Instead, she becomes a type, an iconic abstraction representing dominant culture's desires,
01:27or nightmares.
01:28Nash also says that for decades, the teenage girl was imagined in pop culture as a non-person,
01:34usually simply a foil for adult men.
01:36Maybe this erasure of the teenager as she really was is in part,
01:40because in the first half of the 20th century,
01:43teenagers as a group were starting to frighten adults.
01:46In the 1940s, for example, juvenile delinquency became a big preoccupation.
01:53Juvenile delinquency now is recognized as a major problem
01:56by the top law enforcement officials of the land.
01:59So it makes sense that on-screen teens would be used to preach morality
02:04in an attempt to counteract this.
02:06What also makes sense is that this fear of teenagers
02:09stems from adults' inability to understand them.
02:12You don't know anything about the wonderful world of teenage girls.
02:15They're all crazy.
02:17In lieu of picking apart individual teen character psychology,
02:20earlier writers and directors often simply cast teen girls to type,
02:24in pretty one-dimensional stereotypical roles,
02:27like the girl-next-door love interest,
02:29until they eventually realized that she might present fertile ground for creativity.
02:34While they usually continued to be slotted into pretty well-defined tropes,
02:38teen girl characters were allowed to be more multifaceted,
02:41and to feel more like real people with their own thoughts and ideas.
02:45What's more, many of the teen girl characters who emerged in the 80s and 90s
02:49seemed to act as a way of the adults writing them,
02:52working through what it means to be a teenager in that time.
02:55So as teen pregnancy, drug use, and self-destruction escalated in real life,
03:00they also appeared more regularly in the teen characters that emerged on screen.
03:05The disconnect between adults and teenagers forms the basis
03:08of many beloved 80s and 90s shows and films.
03:11I'm 16 years old. I'm not a child.
03:14Don't you take that tone of voice with me, young lady!
03:16And there's a subgenre of this trope, where the teenage girl embodies the anxieties
03:21of the adults, coming to represent their loss of control over their children.
03:25For example, in the original two seasons of Twin Peaks,
03:28teen Laura Palmer's eerily beautiful body is found wrapped in a tarp,
03:33and the mystery of who killed her begins to unfold.
03:36While it has hallmarks of the morality tales of 1940s,
03:3950s and 60s stories about teenagers,
03:41Twin Peaks actually exposes a great parental fear
03:45that their children might secretly be doing things that would horrify them.
03:49In fact, Laura had a sweet tooth for nose candy.
03:52As Laura's secret life unfolds and we get closer to finding her killer,
03:56it becomes apparent that the town of Twin Peaks is teeming with lies.
04:00None of the parents know what their supposedly model student kids are doing,
04:04despite the fact that there are a concerning number of horrible crossovers
04:08between the parallel worlds of adults and teenagers.
04:11Mrs. Palmer, there are things dark and heinous in this world.
04:16Things too horrible to tell our children.
04:18And Laura's corpse is like a diary,
04:21so it's not enough that she's dead.
04:22Her body tells the story of where she was and what happened to her.
04:26He's also determined the bites and marks on her shoulders
04:29were made by a parrot or a minor bird.
04:31This idea of the teen girl's body having secrets
04:34is something that's explored in everything from chick flicks to horror films,
04:38and in this instance may be linked to the genuine fear-mongering
04:42that was happening at the time the show was airing.
04:44During the 80s and 90s, teen pregnancy and drug use were on the rise,
04:48leading President Bill Clinton's government to attempt to intervene.
04:52Teen pregnancy, because it is a moral problem and a personal problem and a challenge
04:59that individual young people should face,
05:01and because it has reached such proportions that it is a very significant economic and social
05:08problem for the United States.
05:09So in Twin Peaks, Laura's body is a site of tension for everyone in the town
05:14who has no idea what their kids are getting up to after dark.
05:17An early example of the teen girl who takes charge with terrifying consequences
05:22is the 1976 adaptation of Stephen King's Carrie.
05:26Carrie as a character is belittled and bullied her entire high school experience,
05:30but her torturers don't know that she has the power of telekinesis.
05:34What makes the film so horrific is the other teenager's treatment of Carrie throughout.
05:42It's no wonder she snaps at the end, sending most of the student body to their grisly deaths.
05:46And this is a pattern that repeats to this day in films about teenagers.
05:51Sometimes the scariest aspects aren't violent acts,
05:54but the psychological trauma inflicted by some teenagers on others.
05:58Just like Carrie, many movies and shows from the 80s,
06:0090s and beyond are set in high school.
06:03Script writers inflate the tension of the place where teenagers spend most of their time
06:07to create a backdrop that buzzes with drama.
06:10And the teen characters themselves are terrifying because of what's going on inside them.
06:14Their raging hormones, their poor impulse control,
06:16their inability to think ahead to the consequences of their actions.
06:20In Heathers, for example, teenagers Veronica and JD murder their classmates
06:25and cover their tracks by making it look like the students took their own lives.
06:29Coincidentally, or perhaps not, at the time Heathers was released,
06:34teen suicide rates had been steadily rising since the 1950s and were about to peak.
06:39So when you put it into that context, what could be a more perfect setup
06:43for two budding serial killers than high school?
06:46In the 1980s, Teen Witch showed how much easier navigating high school
06:50would be for teenage girls if they had an edge over everyone else.
06:54For Louise Miller, high school was a living hell.
06:57Everything gets better for Louise when she turns 16 and receives magical powers.
07:02She can make the boy she likes fall in love with her,
07:05become the most popular girl in school, and help her friends along the way.
07:08Classic 90s show Sabrina the Teenage Witch,
07:11based on the 1960s comic of the same name, fleshed out this premise.
07:15It's centered on a family of quirky, immortal witches,
07:18Zelda and Hilda Spellman, who are both hundreds of years old
07:21and their teenage niece, Sabrina.
07:23Sabrina quickly dispels all notions of wicked witches and evil magic,
07:27and exposes high school as the true horror story,
07:30recasting the witch as the good guy,
07:32and the popular cheerleader as the villain.
07:34Libby's not popular, she's powerful.
07:37Well, how did she get the power?
07:38She seized it, and as long as there are people backing her up,
07:41she'll keep it. It's all very Stalin.
07:43But when it came to teen witches on screen in the 80s and 90s,
07:46Sabrina and Louise were the tip of the iceberg.
07:49Journalist Kelsey Stoller writes that the uptick in witches on screen in the 90s
07:54was directly linked to the fight for female autonomy.
07:57She says that when women's resistance is at a fever pitch,
08:00as it was in the 60s and the 90s and women are seeking empowering stories
08:05that allow them to control their own narratives,
08:07stories about witchcraft seem to become more popularized.
08:11But the teenage witch was a particularly 90s phenomenon,
08:14perhaps because with all of the other anxieties that the teen girl elicits,
08:18communing with spirits and performing magic made her even more terrifying.
08:22There are some standout examples of teen witches from the 1990s.
08:26Perhaps most memorable of all is Nancy from The Craft.
08:29When the film begins, she's sinister, an outcast and a bully rolled into one.
08:34But as it progresses, she becomes outright petrifying.
08:37In the old days, if a witch betrayed her coven, they would kill her.
08:45And what makes her all the more compelling is that everything about her,
08:48from her makeup and costume choices to her open sexuality and sharp tongue,
08:52is quintessentially 90s.
08:54To audiences at the time, and audiences that continue to watch the movie today,
08:58Nancy is recognizable.
09:00She could be a girl at any school, which makes the movie all the more unsettling.
09:04This battle for autonomy also played out in more positive ways,
09:08with girls who harnessed their sometimes terrifying powers to save themselves,
09:13and even the world.
09:14You need a hand?
09:16No thanks.
09:21I'm good.
09:21Buffy Summers had to navigate all of the pain and drama of high school,
09:25while also constantly being under attack from literal demons and monsters.
09:29Feeling like you've got the weight of the world on your shoulders,
09:31while simultaneously always being underestimated by those around you,
09:36is something that most teen girls could relate to,
09:38even if they didn't live on a literal hellmouth.
09:40And of course, many of those creepy creatures Buffy had to fend off
09:44represented parents' fears of the new and plentiful dangers
09:47that might be coming for their own teens as the new millennium approached.
09:51The liminal space that teen girls occupy between childhood and adulthood
09:55is often explored in movies of the era, too.
09:58Beetlejuice is a great example.
09:59Main character Lydia Dietz is constantly miserable,
10:02and feels that no one quite understands her,
10:04which is fairly typical for a teenage girl.
10:07But then she discovers her ability to see and speak to dead people,
10:10meeting Adam and Barbara, who are also in a liminal place,
10:14between being alive and passing on to the afterlife.
10:17God, you guys really are dead.
10:20In this way, it makes perfect sense that the person to speak to the ghosts
10:24is a teenage girl, someone who feels like life isn't worth living.
10:27I want to be dead, too.
10:29No.
10:29Being dead really doesn't make things any easier.
10:33And who isn't understood, or even really noticed,
10:36by the people who are meant to care about her.
10:38In Roger Ebert's review of Heathers, he wrote that,
10:41"...adulthood could be defined as the process of learning to be shocked
10:44by things that do not shock teenagers."
10:47That gap between what shocks grown-ups and doesn't shock teenage girls
10:51was fully realized in 80s and 90s TV and film,
10:54as teenage girl characters became fuller and more satisfying portrayals.
10:59And as they did so, they started a trend,
11:01where the true terrifying nature of teenage girlhood
11:04began to be exposed on-screen.
11:06The teen girl had become a rather terrifying force
11:09in movies and TVs at the end of the 20th century.
11:12Adults just couldn't understand what was going on with these teens,
11:16and so this fearful outsider perspective informed on-screen portrayals.
11:21But as the 2000s and 2010s rolled around, the terrifying teen girl on-screen
11:26began to enter a new, more powerful phase.
11:29These stories actually grappled with the harsh, conflicting realities
11:33that teen girls have to deal with.
11:35And many felt much more real, because now they were actually written by
11:40people who had, you know, actually experienced being a teen girl,
11:44instead of just outside observers.
11:46From lack of control to over-sexualization to the intricacies of war in girl world,
11:52these teens were constantly being pushed to the edge.
11:55But they were always up for the challenge.
11:57Hell is a teenage girl.
11:59Like the movies of the 80s and 90s,
12:01the teen girl in the 2000s and 2010s continued to terrify her parents
12:06with the potency and possibility of her body.
12:09No bra, no panties. No bra, no panties. Stop it.
12:16But Juno, a definitive teen pregnancy movie,
12:19is a great example of how the way scriptwriters told this story was shifting.
12:23While Juno's parents are initially horrified by her pregnancy,
12:27Did you see that coming when she sat us down here?
12:29Yeah, but I was hoping she was expelled or into her drugs.
12:32That was my first instinct, too.
12:34Her DWI and anything but this.
12:36They come around and support her admirably.
12:39It's a film where this story of the teen girl's sexuality
12:42as a ticking time bomb changes and her agency is finally explored.
12:47After writing Juno, a film about a teenager who gets pregnant,
12:50Diablo Cody wrote Jennifer's Body.
12:52Cody said that,
12:53"...the friendships that I had as an adolescent had this unparalleled intensity.
12:58I wanted to show how almost horrific that devotion can be.
13:01It's almost parasitic."
13:03I just know that I woke up and I found my way back to you.
13:08I couldn't bring myself to hurt you.
13:10The teen girl's intensity is explored a lot in the movies of the 2000s and 2010s.
13:15And like the movies that came before in the 80s and 90s,
13:18high school provided the perfect backdrop for this intensity to take on a sinister edge.
13:24By this stage, it was accepted that high school girls were cruel.
13:28But the movies of the 2000s and 2010s solidified this,
13:31and began to toy with it further,
13:33picking apart the intensity of high school friendships and politics
13:37to create even deeper comments on that cruelty and,
13:40most importantly, what was really behind it.
13:43I just think you should be honest about your feelings,
13:46otherwise it starts coming out in passive-aggressive ways.
13:48Jennifer's Body, for example, features a supernaturally
13:51beautiful Megan Fox as a demonically-possessed teenager.
13:55No, I mean, she's actually evil, not high school evil.
13:59I've been to the occult section at the library five times.
14:03Mean Girls, on the other hand, explores the way that high school
14:06can function as a dictatorship, with Regina George
14:09acting as an unelected despotic leader.
14:12She's the queen bee, the star.
14:14Those other two are just her little workers.
14:15And in John Tucker Must Die, three beautiful high schoolers,
14:19all powerful in their own ways, band together with another girl
14:22to destroy the eponymous John Tucker
14:25after he cheats on them with one another.
14:27So, what are you girls up to?
14:28Destroying a man.
14:29One film that revolutionized the portrayal of teenage girls
14:32in the early 2000s was Thirteen,
14:35which was co-written by Nikki Reed,
14:37who was actually a teenager at the time.
14:39It chronicles a relatively short period of time
14:42in two teen girls' lives, where they meet and form
14:45an intoxicatingly close friendship that centers on sex and drugs.
14:48The unbridled intensity of Tracy and Evie
14:54and the real, raw way their story was showcased
14:57was shocking to audiences, particularly because
15:00unlike many other movies which featured older actresses
15:03playing teens and even tweens,
15:05these characters were portrayed by Reed and Evan Rachel Wood,
15:08both young teenagers themselves.
15:10The movie's gritty realism becomes even more stark,
15:17and the characters become even more frightening to adult viewers,
15:20when we're reminded towards the end that the girls are only in seventh grade.
15:25Adding to the intensity of the teen girl's life,
15:27social media starts to make an appearance in the teen-focused horror movies
15:31of the 2000s and 2010s, in films such as Friend Request and Unfriended.
15:36The pervasive, seemingly inescapable nature of social media in teen girls'
15:41relationships is explored in these films,
15:44the way that teen girls no longer have to be together in person
15:47to experience those intense, suffocating relationships with one another.
15:51When Blair Lilly bullies her childhood friend Laura to end her life,
15:55Laura's vengeful spirit returns through social networking sites,
15:59determined to torture her former friends just as badly.
16:02The intensity of the drama and rage at play might feel a bit over the top,
16:14and indeed in most cases it was ratcheted up to a wild degree for horror,
16:19or comedy, or both.
16:20Even when we were little, you used to steal my toys,
16:24and pour lemonade on my bed, and now I'm meeting your boyfriend.
16:27See? At least I'm consistent.
16:30But underneath it all was something that felt very real.
16:33And this was in large part thanks to the fact that the scripts were coming
16:37not from men who had just been brought in by a studio to write about some teen girls,
16:41but by people like Cody and Mean Girls writer Tina Fey,
16:44who had actually lived it and were using their scripts to unpack their own experiences.
16:49The teen girl was no longer just a cardboard stereotype or a vector for adult fears.
16:54She was becoming respected as a full, complex, and dangerous person in her own right.
16:59In the whole, Liz, a private school student, is willing to brutally sacrifice
17:04several of her classmates by trapping them in an underground bunker,
17:07all in the name of getting closer to the boy she likes.
17:10Have you ever loved someone so much that you didn't care what happened to yourself?
17:19You just had to be with them?
17:21And this intensity around relationships with boys and men
17:24is one that repeats across films of this era,
17:27which often cast the teenage girl as a seductress.
17:30Like, for example, in Midsommar with the character of Maja,
17:33who seduces Christian into impregnating her.
17:36She's 15, but within the cult, she plays a powerful role as a newly fertile woman.
17:41Or Jennifer, who starts out as a regular high school hot girl
17:45and becomes a literal succubus.
17:48These are like smart bumps, okay?
17:51You point them in the right direction and shit gets real.
17:54Throughout the 1980s and 90s, though she may not have been legal,
17:58the teen girl was presented as sexually aware and manipulative with it.
18:03Are you sure you're only 14?
18:06Almost 15.
18:07Looking back on this time, academics, like in Essay Collection's
18:10screening hashtag MeToo rape culture in Hollywood,
18:13have argued that with this positioning,
18:16framing teen girls as being the ones in power in all of their relationships,
18:20particularly with older men,
18:22Hollywood contributed to society's larger rape culture problem in a major way.
18:27While things did start to change in the 2000s and 2010s,
18:31this factor of the scary teen girl didn't totally go away.
18:35Take Swimfan, which vilifies Madison,
18:37a one-dimensional teenage stalker who is hell-bent on ruining
18:41a promising swimmer's life after a one-night stand.
18:44Madison, uh,
18:48I think that you're misunderstanding our relationship
18:51in a very fundamental way.
18:52There's even the long-running morality trope in horror films
18:55where the most promiscuous teens get killed off first.
18:59There are certain rules that one must abide by
19:02in order to successfully survive a horror movie.
19:04For instance, number one, you can never have sex.
19:08It's a way for those films to exploit her sexuality
19:11while also making sure to punish her dearly for it.
19:15My heart was pounding knowing that any second
19:16someone was going to jump out and grab me.
19:19Uh, I didn't know whether I was going to have a heart attack
19:23or an orgasm.
19:24But other stories explore what might happen
19:26if a teenage girl got to fight back,
19:29if she got to take control of the body that had for so long
19:32been oppressed by other people.
19:34That's when we start to see.
19:36Often these movies depict the teenage girl as functioning
19:39under barely contained, simmering rage.
19:42Hard Candy, for example, directly calls out the heart of a major issue,
19:46that young women and girls are lower in the social hierarchy
19:50than powerful men, and that thanks to the culture
19:53that these men have orchestrated, there's very little recourse
19:56for them when they're wronged by these men.
19:58It'll ruin my career, it'll ruin my life.
20:00Why didn't Roman Polanski just win an Oscar?
20:02So the main character turns to violence,
20:05torturing a photographer who she's convinced
20:07murdered another teenage girl.
20:09I am every little girl you ever watched,
20:13touched, hurt, screwed, killed.
20:18In comedy horror Teeth, on the other hand,
20:21lead character Dawn has a mythical condition
20:23known as Vagina Dentata.
20:25And as she comes up against a series of men who want to hurt her,
20:28she is able to brutally injure them while they are vulnerable.
20:32The myth springs from a primitive masculine dread
20:35of the mysteries of women and sexual union.
20:38It is a nightmare image of the power and horror of female sexuality.
20:43In these narratives, the teen girl is able to claw back some of her agency.
20:48She shows the men who desire her that although she may be beautiful,
20:52she's also powerful.
20:53And that's terrifying.
20:55I am going to eat your soul.
20:59And shit, it's out of us, Nikki!
21:03Ma shows the consequences of teen bullying.
21:06The character of Sue Ann is so traumatized by the sexual assault
21:09she experienced at the hands of the popular kids in school,
21:12that she exhibits dangerous, coercive behavior herself in adulthood.
21:16She has remained stunted in her emotional development
21:18at the point in time where this happened,
21:20making her a terrifying teen girl in an adult's body.
21:24Please do it.
21:26I was just a kid.
21:28So was I.
21:29Mean Girls analyzes how this rage is simmering within every girl,
21:33for one reason or another,
21:35because she's held back by a society that won't let her reach her full potential,
21:39because she was wronged,
21:40because she feels trapped,
21:41because she's lost herself.
21:43And how this all becomes a high school powder keg that can blow at any minute.
21:47Whatever.
21:48Those rules aren't real.
21:49They were real that day I wore a vest.
21:51Because that vest was disgusting.
21:53You can't sit with us!
21:54They're all vicious in their attacks on one another
21:57because of how they've been molded by the harsh world they inhabit,
22:00and this becomes their key revelation in the end.
22:02They don't really want revenge on each other,
22:05but to break down the society that had harmed them all.
22:08In the 2000s, the Teenage Witch wasn't explored as thoroughly
22:12as she had been in the 80s and 90s,
22:14but she returned with a vengeance in the 2010s,
22:17thanks in part to the Me Too movement,
22:19and an uptick in female anger.
22:21Women and their allies were being accused of witch hunts,
22:24constantly in the media,
22:25as increasingly they found the strength to come forward
22:28and name powerful male abusers.
22:30This is not a witch hunt.
22:32It's a reckoning, and I want him out.
22:35So it was high time for a teen witch renaissance.
22:38This time, she'd been reincarnated and was no longer solely the domain of cisgender white girls.
22:44English lecturer Miranda Cochran writes that by this point,
22:47works produced by writers of color have moved the witch away from her heteronormative,
22:52Eurocentric roots.
22:54So in the 2010s, we get black characters like American Horror Story's Queenie,
22:59Stop it, you bitch!
23:00Stop what?
23:01I don't feel nothing.
23:02I'm a human voodoo doll.
23:04and Prudence from Chilling Adventures of Sabrina.
23:06So you're going to tell us how to stop it?
23:09All my next needle goes in through your ear.
23:13And these teen witches were often out for vengeance,
23:16against abusers and the powerful structures that enable them.
23:20In The Witch, for example, downtrodden eldest daughter Thomason
23:24has experienced sexualization by her brother and abuse from her parents.
23:28She's lived in a Puritan household, blamed for her family's misfortunes
23:32and without enough to eat.
23:33So when she's offered something more at the end of the movie,
23:36she seizes the opportunity.
23:38Wouldst thou like to live deliciously?
23:42Yes.
23:43Wouldst thou like to see the world?
23:47Writer Rodem Rusak sees Thomason's deference to witchcraft as an allegory for queerness,
23:52that she's finally found her chosen family at the end of the movie,
23:56when she goes to levitate with the coven.
23:58As the 2010s closed, it became apparent that the teenage witch had a new lease of life
24:03and that she was scarier than ever because she was completely self-aware
24:07and turning all her energy against the forces that had previously suppressed her.
24:12In the 2000s and 2010s, the onscreen teen girl found her voice in earnest
24:17and unluckily for the people who got in her way, she was angry.
24:21In many movies and shows of the era, her behavior became even more extreme
24:25and while this shocked audiences, it wasn't necessarily fictitious.
24:29In real life, teen girls were angry too and they were using their voices to shout for change.
24:35These girls paved the way for the terrifying onscreen teen girls of the 2020s,
24:40who we'll meet in the next take.
24:42The terrifying teen girl reached new heights as the 2010s came to a close.
24:46She seemed to be mindlessly violent and unbothered by consequences.
24:50Ama from Sharp Objects exemplifies this.
24:52A highly privileged teenage girl from an abusive family,
24:55she's both spoiled and crumbling under the weight of her mom's obsession.
25:00And all this pressure, and the rage it inspires, drives her to become a true terror.
25:05In the 2020s, there's been a bit of a shift.
25:07While scriptwriters have dwelled on the terrifying teen girl as a tyrant
25:11and continue to frame her as a pin-up for all of her parents' fears,
25:14there are other patterns emerging too.
25:16We've begun to see some more sensitive portrayals of a lost generation of teens
25:20who have had to become fearsome in the face of a frightening world.
25:24Gen Z, today's teenagers and young adults, face a future of precarity.
25:28In 2020, Nora Molote, a policy analyst at the European Parliament's think tank wrote,
25:33They are the generation most at risk of poverty, and worst affected by the lack of intergenerational
25:38earning mobility. The jobs they thought they'd have are being eroded by tech and AI.
25:43Companies believe that GPT-3, Google AI, IBM Watson, and Microsoft Azure are on track
25:51to be the next generation of scientists, doctors, writers, and designers. Not my peers, not Generation Z.
25:58The planet they should have inherited is increasingly becoming uninhabitable.
26:02Scientists expect that by the middle of the century, only in a couple of decades,
26:06you will not be able to go outside, you will not be able to work outside, especially
26:10without risking heatstroke and possibly death.
26:13According to Psychology Today, the generation is in a collective psychological crisis,
26:18and it makes a lot of sense that, when dealing with all of this uncertainty,
26:22they're feeling, well, lost.
26:24And as Molote went on to say, the well-being, educational success, and labor market integration
26:29of this generation have a major impact on the general well-being of society,
26:34as well as on productivity growth, and thus on the entire economy now and in the future.
26:39Basically, if Gen Z is lost, there isn't much hope for the rest of us, either.
26:43In the rising chaos of the 2020s, three shows emerged in quick succession
26:47that allowed almost entirely female cast to embody that feeling.
26:51The Wilds, Yellowjackets, and K-drama Castaway Diva all center on castaway narratives,
26:56where the teenage girl characters are stranded,
26:58missing, without the ability to return to their lives.
27:02The feeling of being left behind is especially strong in the Wilds.
27:05In flashback scenes from Episode 1, we see a disturbing relationship between an older writer,
27:10Jeffrey, and teenager Leah.
27:12Leah's infatuation with Jeffrey is so intense that she's willing to risk the survival of all of the
27:17girls when she finds a mobile phone after the crash and calls him, and he rejects her.
27:22Even after the harrowing ordeal of being stranded,
27:24all Leah is preoccupied with is whether or not Jeffrey was worried about her.
27:28Did he reach out after the news broke?
27:31Did he call anyone to say he'd heard from me?
27:35When the group is rescued, she tells her interviewers that,
27:38yes, the girls are messed up, but that it wasn't their time on the island that did it.
27:42There is no crazy. There's only damage. And when you go looking for what caused it,
27:49don't waste your time on that island.
27:52And more disturbingly,
27:54Jeffrey isn't the only adult who is inappropriately involved with the girls.
27:58As the show progresses, we realize they're part of an experiment,
28:01headed up by another adult who's pulling all the strings.
28:04Audrey, I've made a decision.
28:09I know it will be controversial.
28:12The way the Wilds portrays things happening to these teenage girls against their will
28:16could be seen as an allegory for the lack of control that their generation is experiencing
28:20in the real world.
28:21Yellow Jackets, on the other hand, is split between two timelines.
28:25The teen soccer team is stranded after their plane goes down in the 1990s,
28:28but we also get to meet them as adults in the present day,
28:31and see how damaged their time in the wilderness has left them.
28:35So they're not technically Gen Z teens,
28:37but the parallel storylines allow us to see the trends that transcend time,
28:41and how their trauma in their teen years has gone on to affect how they interact with the
28:46teens in their own lives as adults.
28:48On the surface, it's a classic castaway survivor narrative,
28:51but because the ensemble cast is overwhelmingly female,
28:54we get to see new dynamics at play within the tried and tested interactions this trope
28:58usually throws up, and that can be shocking.
29:01You're not like the rest of these girls.
29:04Actually, I'm worse.
29:05How can you say that?
29:06I let him die in my place.
29:09It was supposed to be me.
29:10It simultaneously shows us several things.
29:12That teenage girls can be resourceful to the point of brutality.
29:16That the teenage girl's survival instinct is second to none.
29:19And that the teenage years are a vital time to be supported and nurtured.
29:23And if we renege on the responsibility to give the teenage generation that care,
29:28we could be creating a bleak future for everyone.
29:31Many of the 2020's teen girl characters are terrifying because of how confronting they are.
29:36They force us to look at the way we treat their generation,
29:39or they make us see what we don't like about ourselves.
29:42Through the lens of these characters,
29:44we can examine the impossible standards we set for them.
29:47I know being informed, smart, hardworking, and curious are all very important qualities,
29:52but imagine having all of those qualities and also being hot.
29:57In the character of Cassie from Euphoria, for example,
29:59we see the way society simultaneously infantilizes and sexualizes teenage girls.
30:05And it wasn't just her body that changed, but the rest of the world too.
30:08Instead of just shaming Cassie for her behavior or blaming her for the reactions of others,
30:13the show instead gives us the opportunity to dig into her psyche
30:17and begin to understand the complex, complicated person inside.
30:21And Cassie's fragility in the face of this intense adult pressure is really tough to watch.
30:26We feel complicit in her spiraling mental health issues.
30:29This is especially confronting in the face of a slew of stories
30:33about real girls Cassie's age being abused by powerful men.
30:36Other teen girl characters force us to look at our own neuroses and insecurities.
30:41Olivia and Paula from The White Lotus are so powerful in their convictions
30:45that they're able to reduce grown women to nervous wrecks.
30:48In this brief scene, the pair brutally question newlywed journalist Rachel.
30:53The power imbalance between the two teenagers and Rachel feels deeply uncomfortable.
30:58And it's also a little disturbing.
31:00These wealthy teens aren't playing by normal social rules.
31:03They don't approach this fairly standard interaction with a stranger politely or evenly.
31:08Instead, they're openly hostile and seem to be trying to win something.
31:12On paper, they're all at this resort together as equals.
31:15But the way Olivia specifically behaves towards Rachel implies that she has more power,
31:20and knows it.
31:21Perhaps because she's there as a teen, and Rachel is an adult who married in to this sort of wealth.
31:27Something that Olivia makes sure to remind her of.
31:29Won't he pay off your loans?
31:33Shane?
31:33I bet he could.
31:36It makes us wonder what kind of cruelties Olivia might be capable of as she grows up.
31:40And indeed, as the show progresses, we're exposed to more facets of her manipulative nature,
31:46and the ways she feels comfortable using her white privilege and wealth to get what she wants.
31:50Olivia is like a poster girl for what older generations think Gen Z is like.
31:55Cold, calculating, crushing. And there's very little redeeming about her.
31:59But really, there's a lot more to Gen Z girls than some writers give them credit for.
32:04In the late 2010s and 2020s, yet another type of teen girl is finding her power on screen.
32:09And while she's previously been the problem, this time around, it seems like she's arrived to save
32:14us. In a marked shift from being terrifying, these teen girls are up against what's terrifying.
32:19It seems that in the 2020s, the on-screen teen is beginning to harness her terrifying talents
32:24for the greater good. Take Eleven from Stranger Things, who appears to be the only one who can save
32:30the world from the mysterious dark forces that a group of unethical scientists have unleashed.
32:35Or Ellie from The Last of Us, the only hope in the fight against the zombie apocalypse.
32:40But you know, I think what really impressed them was the fact that I didn't turn into a
32:44monster.
32:44And there's something else that unites this new type of teenage girl character,
32:48aside from adults thinking they're scary. They're willing to stand up, not just for themselves,
32:53but also for everyone around them. And that willingness to defend others and find ways to
32:57work as a group to become even more powerful, in turn, makes them even scarier to the adults around
33:03them. Like Wednesday Addams, who's gone from a scary side character in the Addams Family show and
33:08movies, to a seriously badass teenager and headline act. At her new boarding school,
33:12she uncovers a plot against outcasts like her, and has to fight to protect them.
33:17Sometimes the monsters we suspect are the most dangerous. They hide in the shadows until no one
33:23is looking. But I'm looking now, and I won't stop until I find the truth.
33:28And in their bravery in the face of what's really scary, these characters mirror what real teens are
33:33doing. Standing up for their generation against politics that pose a danger to them, and calling
33:38out adults for their decisions and actions that actively threaten the future for young people.
33:43You all come to us young people, for hope. How dare you? You have stolen my dreams,
33:50and my childhood, with your empty words.
33:52The teens who exist today have a tough future ahead, and they're rising to it. Showing us that
33:57there is a better way, no matter how uncomfortable it might be to get there. They're inspirational,
34:03not just to viewers, but to writers too. So expect to see a whole lot more terrifying
34:07teen girls on screen in the years to come. Turns out, they represent exactly what the world needs.
34:14That's the take! Click here to watch the video we think you'll love, or here to check out a whole
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