The Monstrous-Feminine

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The Devil Inside - I Will Possess Your Heart Barbara Creed is an active member of the horror film genre - being a viewer of films as well as a speaker and writer. She’s the author of a certain book called, “The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis.” Barbara Creed argues that horror films generally when creating a possession film, the filmmaker generally puts the woman in the position of victim. She says that when a female is considered “monstrous” it generally has to do with her reproductive/mothering functions. For example, in the movie The Fly, Seth Brundle is birthed into a fly, in the sense that he is reproduced and combined with the fly’s traits (just as a baby would between a boy and a girl). Creed uses the word ‘monstrous feminine’ instead of ‘female monster’, claiming that the conception would oppose the idea of having a ‘male monster’. Her thought behind this being that this may begin a conversation on the gender of the monster. When defining the term “Female Monstrosity”, there are seven important…show more content…
She brings up people such as Medusa and her gaze, which caused men to grow “stiff” with horror. She says that Medusa was so terrifying that she often makes men “wet and shit themselves” (looping back to Kristeva and the bodily fluids). Creed also argues that The Bible is a primal source of horror. Claiming that old “Western Tradition from Greece” is not referred to in the book, and would be immensely useful when discussing an exorcism. Kristeva once defined abject as “the place where meaning collapses.” Monstrosity occurs when someone has a hard time grasping the concept of something (be it a language or a religion). When this collapses, monstrosity appears - the images in horror movies that we see are an attempt at representing the monstrosity that cannot be made sense of to explain, but can only be demonstrated by
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