the monstrous feminine
7 titles
Horror films about monstrous women, read through Julia Kristeva's idea of the abject and Barbara Creed's 1993 book The Monstrous-Feminine. Kristeva's Powers of Horror (1980) describes the abject as whatever disturbs identity, system and order, and says we have to cast out the maternal to build an identity. Creed took the idea into horror and argued that female monsters come from male anxiety about sexual difference and castration.
She preferred the term monstrous-feminine to female monster, and sorted the figures into types: the archaic mother, the monstrous womb, the possessed monster, the vampire, the witch and the castrating mother. Two of her own examples are on this shelf. She files Psycho (1960) under the castrating mother, and she reads Alien (1979) as an archaic mother story, where the ship's computer is named Mother and the crew finds a chamber of eggs on a distant planet.
The other five came after her book. Four have since been read through Kristeva or Creed, and one has not. In Audition (2000), Asami answers a sham audition held so a widower can meet women. Faye Effard of the BFI wrote in October 2024 that she challenges the idea that calculated violence is inherently unfeminine. Bianca Nielsen applied Creed and Kristeva to Ginger Snaps (2000) in 2004 and read Ginger, bitten by a werewolf on the night of her first period, as abject because her body blurs the line between human and animal and between child and adult. Evolution (2016), set on an island of women and boys, is the one film here with no Kristeva or Creed reading we found. Its director, Lucile Hadžihalilović, told Film Comment the threat comes from women. A Scalar project hosted at USC, by Sofia Sears and Eli Cohen, has a 2020 entry that reads Justine's cannibalism in Raw (2017) through Kristeva and builds on Creed. H. Krupa's 2025 article in sinecine is titled "The Monstrous Feminine Re-imagined: The Substance", and the film (2024) is the one in which a woman uses a drug to make a younger copy of herself. Start with Psycho and Alien, the two Creed wrote about.
