ALL OF THEM WITCHES @themonstrousfeminine - Tumblr Blog

animusrox

Wouldst thou like to see the world? The Witch: A New-England Folktale (2015) dir. Robert Eggers

horroredits

52 Horror Films by Women

21/52: A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014) dir. Ana Lily Amirpour

mesogeios

“Body Horror,” as an official designation, is a term that comes from horror cinema but its literary origins can be traced back as far as Frankenstein. It is a trope that springs from primal fears—from the knowledge of oneself as a physical object and the consciousness of pain—and its roots wind through the Gothic, to the fin de siècle and the birth of science fiction. As a sub-genre, it broadly encompasses the concept of bodily violation, whether that be via mutilation, zombification, possession, or disease, but arguably one of its most pervasive themes is that of transformation. From Ovid to Cronenberg, transformation occupies an anxious corner in so much of film and literature that it more or less forms a tradition all its own. Folklore and myth are littered with metamorphosis—Daphne twisting into a bay tree, Alice in Wonderland with her Eat Me’s and Drink Me’s—and its impact is frequently an unsettling one. It is a fairy-tale punishment, a warning to naughty children, a reminder of the body’s unreliability.

[…] I think that writing about women goes hand in hand with horror writing. The female body is a nexus of pain almost by design, but it is also potentially monstrous—an object traditionally subjugated, both for its presumed weakness and its perceived threat. The mutations and transformations of horror writing are uniquely qualified to evoke this: the difficulty and unreliability of the female body, its duality as an object both to be feared for and to fear.

When Daphne transforms into a bay tree, the moment is one of both horror and deliverance. She is no longer what she once was, but the metamorphosis frees her from the unwanted attention of Apollo. This duality of horror and emancipation sits, I think, at the core of female transformation. Within the horror genre (and arguably everywhere else), bodies read as female are always subject to pain, and to the threat of violation. Becoming something else—a tree, a freak, a monster—preempts this pain and reduces the risk of harm. It may even, if the transformation is the right one, allow you to cause harm in return.

— Julia Armfield, “On Body Horror and the Female Body”

uspiria

Martyrs (2008) dir. Pascal Laugier

andruillus

quarantine of touching-up abandoned wips, this time one of us (2019) 💖

kuutamosonaatti

The Blackcoat’s Daughter (2015) | dir. Oz Perkins

#interesting #must locate and view

arcaneimages

marypickfords

Possession (Andrzej Żuławski, 1981)

wholesome90stv

X-Files Season 6 behind the scenes

bossymarmalade

they make the best aliens because little girls are fucking bizarre, nobody else can match that energy

froginakettle

In an interview he said that the boys always ended up breaking their costumes bc they would fight each other, but the girls Got. Into. Character. and were amazing creepy little aliens.

gorgonapologist

When bodies spill out of their boundaries, or when parts are severed from the whole, they become something unsettlingly other. That forces viewers to renegotiate the borderlands between inside and outside, between themselves and the source of their disquiet.

Why Contemporary Women Artists Are Obsessed with the Grotesque, Tess Thackara

imthelesbian-archive-deactivate

that-twink-over-there

Me

hembrista

“[…] the point of the Byronic romance, I think, is not to excuse male violence, but to make a fetish out of female ambivalence, portraying masculinity as simultaneously attractive and and scary and attractive because it is scary. Like BDSM, the convention of the Byronic hero takes the edge off sexual violence by reducing it to a set of roles and tropes, allowing participants to get a handle on their fear by turning it into a game. It’s not for nothing that Fifty Shades of Grey began as vampire fan fiction.”

— Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers, Sady Doyle