In Arnie’s empathy, Christine and Arnie become one and the same – two figures on the margins of American society.Ĭhristine enacts what a rebellious teenager craves: the frontier experience away from the parents’ home. Arnie is perhaps attracted to Christine because he witnesses the same liminality in her as an obsolete artefact that society sees in him as a teenager. Christine’s trajectory mirrors this identification of otherness, because the figure of the teenager can also be linked to liminality: not quite a child but not quite an adult, a figure on the borders.

In Linda Williams’ essay When the Woman Looks, she argues that in horror films, women identify with monsters because they recognise the same ‘otherness’ within themselves. The teenagers of 1980s America were particularly novel and unrecognisable to the older generation of Americans because of their new-found greaser sub-cultures, anti-establishment attitudes, and a renewed love of rock’n’roll music. In this respect, Christine is comparable to the teenage condition: being necessarily and naturally liminal, on the brink of adulthood, and characterised by experimentation and revolution. This naturally renders Christine“other”: as a creature from a bygone time, she is presented as unnatural and unrecognisable to characters in the film. Mary Findley claims in Stephen King’s Vintage Ghost-Cars: A Modern Haunting, that Christine functions temporally and narratively as a ghost – an entity from the past (the 1950s) that has returned to haunt Arnie’s world in the present (the 1970s).

Teenagers were not properly understood, adults could no longer relate to this new generation of outsiders and rebels, just like Christine is alienated as an outsider. Carpenter imbues Christine with many of the same vices as the 80s teenage delinquent, that American society actively categorised. Right-wing conservatives held ambivalent attitudes towards teenagers of the 80s often linking them to a rise in drug taking, renewed love of rock n roll and rising AIDS and HIV rates. Although on the surface Christine seems to be about a car that is evil, could the vehicle also symbolise the teenage delinquency of the 1980s? Christine is a product of the society it was produced within and one in which teenage behaviour was seen as a cause for moral panic. This scene-captivating and disturbing-represents the destruction of both the film’s protagonist and its supposed antagonist.

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