Women occupy a privileged place in horror film. Horror is a space of entertainment and excitement, of terror and dread, and one that relishes the complexities that arise when boundaries – of taste, of bodies, of reason – are blurred and dismantled. It is also a site of expression and exploration that leverages the narrative and aesthetic horrors of the reproductive, the maternal and the sexual to expose the underpinnings of the social, political and philosophical othering of women.
This book offers an in-depth analysis of women in horror films through an exploration of ‘gynaehorror’: films concerned with all aspects of female reproductive horror, from reproductive and sexual organs, to virginity, pregnancy, birth, motherhood and finally to menopause. Some of the themes explored include: the intersection of horror, monstrosity and sexual difference; the relationships between normative female (hetero)sexuality and the twin figures of the chaste virgin and the voracious vagina dentata; embodiment and subjectivity in horror films about pregnancy and abortion; reproductive technologies, monstrosity and ‘mad science’; the discursive construction and interrogation of monstrous motherhood; and the relationships between menopause, menstruation, hagsploitation and ‘abject barren’ bodies in horror.
The book not only offers a feminist interrogation of gynaehorror, but also a counter-reading of the gynaehorrific, that both accounts for and opens up new spaces of productive, radical and subversive monstrosity within a mode of representation and expression that has often been accused of being misogynistic. It therefore makes a unique contribution to the study of women in horror film specifically, while also providing new insights in the broader area of popular culture, gender and film philosophy.
Introduction: mapping the gynaehorrific imaginary
Defining gynaehorror
Gynaehorror from virginity to menopause
Gynaehorror in context
Gynaehorror as convention and challenge
1. Roses and thorns: virgins, vagina dentata, and the monstrosity of female sexuality
Defining virginity
Virginity in horror film
The virgin’s other: vagina dentata
Imag(in)ing the vagina
Vagina dentata in horror
A different sort of Teeth: reframing vagina dentata
Heteronormative horrors
2. The lady vanishes: pregnancy, abortion and subjectivity
Framing pregnant subjectivity
Keeping house: female corporeality in horror
Home invasions
Vessels and environments
Foetal visibility and the dissolution of the female subject
Inside: competing subjects
Abortion and taboo
‘Pro-life’ and Pro-life
3. Not of woman born: mad science, reproductive technology and the reconfiguration of the subject
Science, culture and masculinity
‘Mad science’ and men making life
Fearing science
Mad scientists and madwomen
Re-gendering mad science in Splice
Brave new worlds: cyborg futures and female subjectivity
4. The monstrous-maternal: negotiating discourses of motherhood
Psychoanalytic discourses of motherhood
The legacy of Mrs Bates: Norma, Thelma and Nola
Essential and ideal motherhood
Motherhood as instinct and imperative
The legal implications of transgressive motherhood
Millennial mothering and the horror of the single mother
States of Grace: competing discourses of motherhood
Monstrous motherhood
5. Living deaths, menstrual monsters and hagsploitation: horror and/of the abject barren body
The abject barren body
Menstrual horror
The horror of menopause
Ageing women in cinema
Psychobiddies, grande dames and horrific harridans
The ageing woman as (American) horror story
Afterword: monstrous miscarriages and uncanny births
Biography
Erin Harrington is Lecturer in English and Cultural Studies at The University of Canterbury, New Zealand.
“it’s a fascinating and feminist look at gynaehorror, and one that’s highly recommended”
Octavia Cade, Strange Horizons
