Carol J. Clover, Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film; Barbara Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism and Psychoanalysis

Screen ◽  
1995 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-78 ◽  
Author(s):  
L. Francke
Keyword(s):  
Horror Film ◽  
Monstrous Feminine

scholarly journals Víctima, monstruo o ser humano en pantalla: Agencia femenina, diversidad funcional y el derecho a ser un monstruo en “Hush”=Victim, monster or human being on screen: female agency, functional diversity and the right to be a monster in Hush

2021 ◽  
pp. 144
Author(s):  
Ana Patricia Ponce Castañeda
Keyword(s):  
Functional Diversity ◽  
Feminist Studies ◽  
Horror Film ◽  
Female Agency ◽  
Body Studies ◽  
Body Representations ◽  
Audiovisual Media ◽  
Monstrous Feminine ◽  
Female Stereotypes ◽  
The Right

<p align="left"><strong>Resumen</strong></p><p>Este artículo pretende explorar las implicaciones de la agencia femenina dibujadas en la cinta de horror de 2016 <em>Hush</em>, dirigida por Mike Flanagan y escrita por él mismo junto a Kate Siegel, protagonista del filme. Para este fin se realizará una revisión teórica desde los estudios del cuerpo y los estudios feministas sobre la agencia corporal femenina, la diversidad funcional, lo monstruoso femenino y las representaciones corporales en los medios audiovisuales. Así, se abordarán conceptos y figuras de teóricas como De Lauretis, Mulvey, Creed, Garland-Thomson y Blackman ente otras/os, con el objetivo de analizar y problematizar los motivos presentes en el filme, desde las nociones de la subversión de los estereotipos femeninos y la reivindicación crítica de la abyección.</p><p align="left"><strong>Abstract</strong></p><p>This article aims to explore the implications of female agency drawn in the 2016 horror film <em>Hush</em>, directed by Mike Flanagan and co-written with Kate Siegel, the film's protagonist. For this purpose, a theoretical review will be carried out from body studies and feminist studies on female bodily agency, functional diversity, the monstrous feminine and body representations in audiovisual media. Thus, concepts and figures of theorists such as De Lauretis, Mulvey, Creed, Garland-Thomson and Blackman, among others, will be addressed in order to analyze and problematize the motifs present in the film, from the notions of the subversion of female stereotypes and the critical vindication of abjection.</p>

Ruined Abjection and Allegory in Deadgirl

Screen Bodies ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 4-24
Author(s):  
Sol Neely
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Representation ◽  
The Other ◽  
Horror Film ◽  
Film Festival ◽  
Cultural Artifact ◽  
Monstrous Feminine ◽  
Sex Slave

Deadgirl (2008) is a horror film that gained notoriety on the film festival circuit for its disturbing premise: when a group of teenage social outcasts discover a naked female zombie strapped to a gurney in the basement of an abandoned asylum, they decide “to keep her” as a sex slave. Accordingly, two sites of monstrosity are staged—one with the monstrous-feminine and the other with monstrous masculinities. Insofar as the film explicitly exploits images of abjection to engender its perverse pleasures, it would seem to invite “abject criticism” in the tradition of Barbara Creed, Carol Clover, and colleagues. However, in light of recent critical appraisals about the limitations of “abjection criticism,” this article reads Deadgirl as a cultural artifact that demands we reassess how abjection is critically referenced, arguing that—instead of reading abjection in terms of tropes and themes—we should read it in diachronic, allegorical ways, which do not reify into cultural representation.

Haunted Fascination: Horror, Cinephilia and Barbara Steele

Film Studies ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-29
Author(s):  
Ian Olney
Keyword(s):  
Horror Films ◽  
Horror Film ◽  
Monstrous Feminine ◽  
Bona Fide ◽  
Basic Level

Regarded by fans and critics alike as the Queen of Horror, Barbara Steele stands as one of the few bona fide cult icons of the genre, whose ability to project an uncanny blend of deathliness and eroticism imbues her characters with a kind of necrophiliac appeal. Horror film scholars have tended to read Steele‘s films in feminist terms, as texts that play to our fascination with the monstrous-feminine. This article approaches them from a different standpoint – that of cinephilia studies. Steele‘s cult horror films are at their most basic level horror movies about cinephilia, presenting her as the very embodiment of the ghostly medium that cinephiles cherish. In so doing, they convert Steele into a necrophiliac fetish-object, an intoxicating fusion of death and desire. Considering Steele‘s work from this perspective reveals the fluidity of the boundary between horror and cinephilia, demonstrating that horror has something important to teach us about cinephilia and cinephilia has something important to teach us about horror.

The Enduring Cult of The Bride with White Hair: Chivalry and the Monstrous Other in the Hong Kong Fantasy-Horror

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Martin
Keyword(s):  
Hong Kong ◽  
International Marketing ◽  
Conjoined Twins ◽  
White Hair ◽  
Horror Film ◽  
Love Affair

The Bride with White Hair (Ronny Yu, 1993) tells the tale of a heroic swordsman’s ill-fated love affair with a woman transformed by hatred into a white-haired killer, elevated the figure of the frosty-follicled executioner into one of the most enduring icons of the Hong Kong horror film. The timelessness and mysticism of the story lends itself to a highly hybridized type of horror, offering wuxia (swordplay), magical fantasy, romance and erotic scintillation alongside bloody fights, savage violence, and a monstrous depiction of malevolent conjoined twins. This chapter examines this film as emblematic of a particular cultural moment in the development of the Hong Kong fantasy-horror, appealing to a global fanbase for its supposedly transgressive and erotic content, and analyses the film in terms of its generic hybridity, its depictions of disability and morality, as well as in the context of the international marketing and reception of cult Hong Kong horror of the 1990s.

Un/re/production of Old Age inThe Taking of Deborah Logan

Somatechnics ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 178-194
Author(s):  
Agnieszka Kotwasińska
Keyword(s):  
Alzheimer’S Disease ◽  
Old Age ◽  
Horror Film ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Loss Of Control ◽  
Found Footage ◽  
Progressive Loss ◽  
The Face ◽  
Female Embodiment ◽  
Main Protagonist

The article offers a re-examination of abjected femininity and old age through a close reading of The Taking of Deborah Logan (2015), a found footage horror movie centered on spectral possession. While to a large extent the movie replicates an infamous monstrous old woman trope, it also effectively questions typical Alzheimer's disease (AD) narratives, which tend to portray life with AD as a story of unmitigated loss and debility. In The Taking of Deborah Logan, potentially destabilizing moments occur when in the face of progressive loss of control, memory, and bodily functions, the main protagonist is momentarily experienced as resisting the dehumanisation and loss of agency conventionally associated with AD and possession alike. The aim of this article is thus three-fold. The first part sketches the processes through which possession narratives generate a highly ambivalent space for aging femininity in horror film, and how aging, disability, and AD intersect both in popular understanding and in film. In the second part, the author examines how The Taking of Deborah Logan, as a found footage horror, shapes a discussion about selfhood, agency, and monstrous embodiment. Finally, the author argues that it is through the concept of transaging that one can find ways to destabilise traditional understandings of old age, female embodiment, and AD, and offer new narratives that highlight monstrous, if ambivalent, agency.

Nightmare and the Horror Film: The Symbolic Biology of Fantastic Beings

1981 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 16-25 ◽  
Author(s):  
Noel Carroll
Keyword(s):  
Horror Film

Horror and Death: Rethinking Coco's Border Politics

2020 ◽  
Vol 73 (4) ◽  
pp. 41-49
Author(s):  
Orquidea Morales
Keyword(s):  
The United States ◽  
Horror Film ◽  
Walt Disney Company ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Walt Disney ◽  
Day Of The Dead ◽  
Animated Film ◽  
Border Politics ◽  
The Dead ◽  
The U.S

In 2013, the Walt Disney Company submitted an application to trademark “Día de los muertos” (Day of the Dead) as they prepared to launch a holiday themed movie. Almost immediately after this became public Disney faced such strong criticism and backlash they withdrew their petition. By October of 2017 Disney/Pixar released the animated film Coco. Audiences in Mexico and the U.S. praised it's accurate and authentic representation of the celebration of Day of the Dead. In this essay, I argue that despite its generic framing, Coco mobilizes many elements of horror in its account of Miguel's trespassing into the forbidden space of the dead and his transformation into a liminal figure, both dead and alive. Specifically, with its horror so deftly deployed through tropes and images of borders, whether between life and death or the United States and Mexico, Coco falls within a new genre, the border horror film.

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