Published in 2012 (first published 1993)
217 pages
Barbara Creed is Professor of Cinema Studies and Head of the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. She is author of the acclaimed The Monstrous-feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis, Media Matrix: Sexing the New Reality, Phallic Panic: Film, Horror & the Primal Uncanny and Darwin’s Screens: Evolutionary Aesthetics, Time and Sexual Display in the Cinema. She is also a well-known film critic and media commentator, and her writings on cinema have been translated into many languages for a range of international journals and anthologies.
What is this book about?
In almost all critical writings on the horror film, woman is conceptualised only as victim. In The Monstrous-Feminine Barbara Creed challenges this patriarchal view by arguing that the prototype of all definitions of the monstrous is the female reproductive body.
With close reference to a number of classic horror films including the Alien trilogy, The Exorcist and Psycho, Creed analyses the seven `faces’ of the monstrous-feminine: archaic mother, monstrous womb, vampire, witch, possessed body, monstrous mother and castrator. Her argument that man fears woman as castrator, rather than as castrated, questions not only Freudian theories of sexual difference but existing theories of spectatorship and fetishism, providing a provocative re-reading of classical and contemporary film and theoretical texts.
