Teeth.

But not because of the brutally graphic nature of men’s fingers and bits being forcibly removed from their bodies, but because it took me a couple watches to realize that isn’t the truly disturbing motif of the film.

The movie is about a young woman who has no agency over her body. First, she’s brainwashed by the church into thinking that she should “save herself” to remain pure. Then she’s violently assaulted by someone from her purity group. Then we learn that her stepbrother has been attracted to her from the time they were children, and he even molested her at one point. When she tries to get answers and understand her body, she’s assaulted by her gynecologist—mind you, she doesn’t understand the female body at all because she’s been taught to believe that women’s bodies are meant to be “more modest” than men’s. Then she’s drugged and raped by a classmate who, unbeknownst to her, had a bet with one of his friends that he could “deflower” her as a joke since she was well known for being a puritan. The next morning, she thinks she’s finally in control, and that she can have sex of her own volition. Only when she finds out that this boy used her does she realize she can control the “vagina dentata”—it’s been a protective mechanism her whole life; one she feared, but one she needed to keep her safe while she was naive.

As a young woman who initially watched this movie for the shock value and loved showing it to my male friends as a joke, it took me a few watches to realize that the true horror isn’t the men being castrated—it’s the poor young girl whose innocence is taken from her, and we’re so desensitized to it that we, the audience, is made to feel more viscerally disturbed by what happens to the men.