A Feminist Guide to Horror

An archive dedicated to feminist horror aesthetics in film, video games, and art

[aarontaylorjohnson]

THE WITCH (2015) dir. Robert Eggers

[vanessacarlysle]

Hail Satan!

[zacksnyder]

It doesn’t think. It doesn’t feel. It doesn’t give up.

[areax]

I admire its purity. A survivor… unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality.

Alien (1979) dir. Ridley Scott

[night-dawn-day]

“This is Ripley, last survivor of the Nostromo, signing off.”

[monstermonstre]

Teeth (2007) dir. Mitchell Lichtenstein

[animusrox]

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2015) dir. Ana Lily Amirpour

[wrightedgar]

دختری در شب تنها به خانه می‌رود‎ (A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night) 2014 dir. Ana Lily Amirpour

[feministhorrorarchive]

In The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, Elaine Scarry argues that pain is the absolute definition of reality. For people in pain, there is no reality besides the pain they have to endure. Scarry writes extensively on the subject of torture within this context. The reality of a person who is being tortured is reduced to an awareness of pain, while the torturer’s world remains fully present.

[feministhorrorarchive]

Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection examines the subject of abjection, in which Kristeva draws on the theories of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan to examine horror, marginalization, castration, the phallic signifier, and other concepts that pertain to feminist criticism and queer theory in the context of the horror genre.

[feministhorrorarchive]

Barbara Creed’s The Monstrous-Feminine challenges other critical writings on horror films that conceptualize women as victims through feminist psychoanalytic critique. She analyses the seven “faces'' of the monstrous-feminine: the archaic mother, monstrous womb, vampire, witch, possessed body, monstrous mother and castrator.

[feministhorrorarchive]

Carol J. Clover’s book, Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, is a cultural critique of gender in slasher and rape-revenge films from a feminist perspective. Although many believe that these genres are meant to offer sadistic pleasure to their audiences, Clover argues that these films are designed to align spectators with female victims, who she refers to as the "final girls," rather than male spectators, especially when they ultimately defeat their oppressors.

[feministhorrorarchive]

Laura Mulvey's influential text, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," has been the object of study and criticism in the last few years. In her article, Mulvey explores the position of both male and female spectators in classical cinema, exposing the tendency of classical texts to deny woman a place from which to identify with the characters and experience pleasure in the viewing process.

[stand-alonechimp]

“Tomie”, Junji Ito

[junji-info]

Watercolor covers for the “Junji Ito Masterpiece Collection”, volumes one through nine, published by Asahi Comics. 

[bconker]

Francis Bacon, Three Studies for a Portrait, 1976. 

[artfilmfan]

Dogtooth (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2009)

cinematography: Thimios Bakatakis