The Neon Demon · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

The Neon Demon makes beauty itself the monster. Refn and cinematographer Natasha Braier organize the film around the gaze as a mechanism of horror: Jesse is framed in strict bilateral symmetry, her face lit with the primary-color gel lighting Refn borrowed directly from Dario Argento's Suspiria (1977) — the same technique that turned Argento's all-female academy into a spectacle of pure aesthetic terror meant to be watched rather than fled. Where Mulvey's gaze promises pleasure, here it promises consumption; the camera's devouring stare and the fashion industry's valuation are a single continuous act, and Jesse's beauty is not a trait but a resource to be metabolized. Braier's hypnotic stillness and geometric compositions push Jesse deep into affection-image territory — the close-up face becomes not a character marker but a pure luminous surface, sensation hovering before it can resolve into action or agency, which is precisely what renders her prey. When Gigi and Sarah finally consume her, the film has already collapsed the distinction between looking and eating. Underneath all this runs impulse-image: the Buñuelian degraded world in which civilization thins until only atavistic drive remains — Ruby's necrophilia and the final cannibalism don't land as shocks so much as logical conclusions of a milieu where desire was always predatory, always surgical. The neon that makes Los Angeles so seductive is also what illuminates the killing floor.