The matter of misogyny in horror films

Linda Williams’s (1983) claim regarding women’s identification with the monster via a shared sense of being a social ‘outcast’, is similarly pursued in Barbara Creed’s The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (1993). Creed engages with an exploration of horror cinema from a psychological perspective, with particular reference to “mothering functions” and female monsters. Her core argument proposes that when the ‘feminine’ is constructed as monstrous it is frequently done in conjunction with the woman's reproductive body, which she divides in seven categories. The seven faces of the monstrous-feminine are: the archaic mother, the monstrous womb, the vampire, the witch, the possessed body, the monstrous mother and the castrator or female castratice. Creed’s discussion of sexual differences attacks Freudian explanations of the human physique (based on the centrality of the Oedipus complex) which present the woman as the sexual other of the man and often cast the woman as the victim. While Freud suggests that a woman terrifies because she is a castrated human being, Creed counters this by proposing that women are primarily terrifying because they might castrate. She inverts and dismantles Freud’s assumptions about the human mind framework by claiming that the monstrous-feminine is the manifestation of men’s fear of the woman as the “castrating other”. According to Creed, the woman is whole without a penis and this, along with her reproductive body, is what inspires fear in men. The vagina dentata is the image she uses to illustrate the masculine fear of castration and to challenge a patriarchal worldview. Her study of horror films draws largely on the literary concept of “abject”, proposed by French feminist psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva (1982). The idea of social otherness which underpins both Williams’ and Creed’s work is illuminating; however, their women-as-the-monster claims can be challenged with the argument that the majority of monsters and serial-killers are in fact male, not female (Neale 1980: 61).