Abstract
This paper investigates an aesthetic trend in the representation of female monsters in recent popular horror cinema through the lens of Barbara Creed’s The Monstrous-Feminine (1993). Barbarian (Zach Cregger, 2022), Smile (Parker Finn, 2022), IT Chapter 2 (Andy Muschietti, 2019), Blair Witch (Adam Wingard, 2016), and [REC] (Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza, 2007) all feature violent female monsters that are presented consistently as old, naked, ugly, filthy, decaying, tall and remarkably strong. This paper suggests that their horror lies not only in their aggression, but also in their ugliness, symbolised infertility, and violation of female gender roles, particularly motherhood. This paper takes up Creed’s claim that ‘when woman is represented as monstrous it is almost always in relation to her mothering and reproductive functions’ (1993: 7). But while Creed discusses figures made monstrous through their excessive motherhood, this paper investigates characters coded as monstrous either through their failed maternity, or by the complete violation of the mothering role: the anti-mother. The monstrous-feminine is often a positive site of feminist identification due to her subversive nature, but positive identification with the anti-mother may be challenging due to her lack of voice and status as antagonist. This paper therefore concludes by questioning the possibility of positive feminist identification with the figure of the anti-mother.
Keywords: Monstrous-feminine, abjection, feminism, Feminist New Wave, Barbarian
Two Waves of the Monstrous-Feminine
It has been over 30 years since the publication of Barbara Creed’s hugely influential The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, and Psychoanalysis (1993). Where previous analyses focused on the role of the woman as victim in horror cinema, Creed investigates the female monster instead. Specifically, she analyses figures whose monstrosity is linked inextricably to their femininity, naming them ‘monstrous-feminine’ to distinguish them from mere female versions of male monsters. Creed introduces the monstrous-feminine through Kristeva’s theory of abjection, the abject being ‘that which does not “respect borders, positions, rules”, that which “disturbs identity, system, order’’’ (Kristeva qtd in Creed 1993: 8). The monstrous-feminine is frightening because she threatens physical and symbolic boundaries. She is ‘terrifying yet subversive—feminist viewers often found her empowering’ (2022: 4). Creed acknowledges the woman and the monster’s shared ‘power in difference’ as described by Linda Williams: ‘a sense in which the woman's look at the monster [...] is also a recognition of their similar status as potent threats to vulnerable male power’ (Williams qtd in Creed 1993: 6). In Misfit Sisters, Sue Short observes that ‘horror offers female audiences the pleasure of seeing another female both acting up and stating a sense of discontentment’ (2006: 8), emphasising how witches and female werewolves express emotions normally forbidden to women such as ‘power, lust, and rage’ (2006: 37). Even when these monsters are eventually punished for their transgressions, they nevertheless provide ‘an exhilarating alternative to conventional female characterisation, extolling an image of latent strength that audiences might draw upon, with transgressions we may all delight in’ (2006: 21). Amanda Howell and Lucy Baker concur that for female viewers ‘horror offers both a way of acknowledging, and giving space to, negative emotions like anger, also a way of recreating the self through this monstrous rage’ (2022: 14), adding that the monstrous-feminine provides catharsis by freely expressing ‘her outrage—especially at the gendered limits of her world’ (2022: 8).
Readings of the monstrous-feminine as ‘empowering’ have sometimes been challenging. At the time of writing The Monstrous-Feminine, the figure existed predominantly as a male nightmare, ‘a misogynistic fantasy’, and a ‘construct of patriarchal ideology’ (Creed 2022: 4). The monstrous-feminine featured in movies directed by men, where she was usually the antagonist or villain. Here, Creed identifies the continuation of a long storytelling tradition going back to Medusa and the Sphinx of portraying women as monsters: ‘stories the patriarchy tells itself about sexual difference’ (Howell & Baker 2022: 2). When Creed first coined the term, the monstrous-feminine was largely an expression of male anxieties, not a subject with desires of her own. Despite the shift in focus away from woman-as-victim, therefore, Creed asserts that she is ‘not arguing that simply because the monstrous-feminine is constructed as an active rather than passive figure that this image is “feminist” or “liberated”. The presence of the monstrous-feminine in the popular horror film speaks to us more about male fears than about female desire or feminine subjectivity’ (1993: 7).
In 2022, however, Creed revisited the subject with Return of the Monstrous-Feminine: Feminist New Wave Cinema. In this, she argues that contemporary horror films, increasingly directed by women, now begin to feature heroic monstrous-feminine protagonists, giving examples such as the queer cannibalistic mermaids of The Lure (Agnieszka Smoczynska, 2015), or the Iranian vampire avenger of A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (Ana Lily Amirpour, 2014). These characters are empowered by their abjection, which ‘points to the frailty of the patriarchal order’ (2022: 4). Howell and Baker make similar observations, describing how the ‘abject spectacle’ of the monstrous-feminine has recently taken on subjectivity, becoming the protagonist in stories which ‘problematize the monstrous-feminine as a patriarchal stereotype while engaging with the subversive, transformative and often frankly pleasurable possibilities of her abject otherness’ (2022: 2). Positive identification with this new monstrous-feminine is easier, not only because they are more frequently protagonists, but also potentially because their monstrosity is less physical and more behavioural: in many cases, they are simply women who undermine gendered expectations. Creed points out that even ‘an ordinary woman can be seen as monstrous when she behaves in what is seen to be an unnatural manner by abandoning her proper feminine role’ (2022: 68), drawing on Dianna Taylor to argue that the violation of gender norms is enough to render a woman monstrous under patriarchy even if she is not physically violent. Expanding the definition to include women ‘regarded as monstrous by those she opposes, critiques, angers, and unsettles’ allows Creed to address more human monstrous-feminine characters from beyond horror, including lesbians in Carol (Todd Haynes, 2015), independent older women in Nomadland (Chloé Zhao, 2020), rebellious wives, widows, and those acting against rape culture. Sympathetic identification with these monstrous-feminine figures is aided by the fact that they are frequently victims of patriarchy, and their monstrosity is a revolt against injustices they have suffered.
This paper interrogates a current trend in the representation of the monstrous-feminine through these lenses of the first and second wave monstrous-feminine. Barbarian (Zach Cregger, 2022), Smile (Parker Finn, 2022), IT Chapter 2 (Andy Muschietti, 2019), Blair Witch (Adam Wingard, 2016), and [REC] (Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza, 2007) all feature violent female monsters that are presented consistently as old, naked, hideous, filthy, decaying, yet huge and remarkably strong. All feature signs of emaciation and decay, often through wasted angular limbs, rotting teeth, and thinning hair, and yet all are impressively strong, fast, aggressive, and resilient. They appear in glimpses, and we frequently only see them for mere frames at a time. These antagonists share a distinct and consistent visual appearance, but they are also all connected meaningfully to the ideal of motherhood, which they fail, pervert, and violate. This article will argue that the primary horror of these anti-mothers is not their violence, but their undesirable bodies, which signify infertility. This is exaggerated by their violence toward children or child-figures. If the woman who defies gendered expectations may be read as abject for exposing the frailty and artifice of the patriarchal culture which sets those expectations, the anti-mothers of this paper consistently enact abjection, either by failing miserably to fulfil standards of maternity, or rejecting them outright. Can these monstrous antagonists then represent sites of positive identification for feminist audiences? Or do they remain ‘a misogynistic fantasy’ (Creed 2022: 4)?
The Monstrous Mother
The monstrous mother is one of several significant archetypes of monstrous-feminine Creed outlines in The Monstrous-Feminine. The monstrous mother takes multiple forms: the archaic mother or ‘amoral primeval mother’, the ‘monstrous womb’, and ‘the castrating mother’ (1993: 1). The former are more relevant for conceptualising the anti-mother, as they fall under Part I of The Monstrous-Feminine, addressing the ‘monstrous-feminine in relation to Julia Kristeva's theory of the abject and the maternal’ and claiming ‘when woman is represented as monstrous it is almost always in relation to her mothering and reproductive functions’ (1993: 7). Part II is dedicated to ‘the representation of woman as monstrous in relation to Freud's theory of castration [..] Here woman's monstrousness is linked more directly to questions of sexual desire than to the area of reproduction’ (ibid.), making it less appropriate for discussions of the anti-mother. This article will therefore only engage with the monstrous womb and archaic mother in more detail.
The monstrous womb has to do with physical abjection, that which threatens the imaginary sense of the human body as a sealed whole object with a clear demarcation between inside and outside. That which disrupts our sense of these bodily boundaries is abject, such as excrement, vomit, blood, hair, and dismembered body parts. The womb, Creed argues, is ‘the utmost in abjection for it contains a new life form which will pass from inside to outside bringing with it traces of its contamination - blood, afterbirth, faeces’ (1993: 49). The archaic mother threatens more symbolic boundaries, and Creed describes her as ‘the mother as primordial abyss, the point of origin and of end’ (1993: 17). She is an
This paper investigates an aesthetic trend in the representation of female monsters in recent popular horror cinema through the lens of Barbara Creed’s The Monstrous-Feminine (1993). Barbarian (Zach Cregger, 2022), Smile (Parker Finn, 2022), IT Chapter 2 (Andy Muschietti, 2019), Blair Witch (Adam Wingard, 2016), and [REC] (Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza, 2007) all feature violent female monsters that are presented consistently as old, naked, ugly, filthy, decaying, tall and remarkably strong. This paper suggests that their horror lies not only in their aggression, but also in their ugliness, symbolised infertility, and violation of female gender roles, particularly motherhood. This paper takes up Creed’s claim that ‘when woman is represented as monstrous it is almost always in relation to her mothering and reproductive functions’ (1993: 7). But while Creed discusses figures made monstrous through their excessive motherhood, this paper investigates characters coded as monstrous either through their failed maternity, or by the complete violation of the mothering role: the anti-mother. The monstrous-feminine is often a positive site of feminist identification due to her subversive nature, but positive identification with the anti-mother may be challenging due to her lack of voice and status as antagonist. This paper therefore concludes by questioning the possibility of positive feminist identification with the figure of the anti-mother.
Keywords: Monstrous-feminine, abjection, feminism, Feminist New Wave, Barbarian
Two Waves of the Monstrous-Feminine
It has been over 30 years since the publication of Barbara Creed’s hugely influential The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, and Psychoanalysis (1993). Where previous analyses focused on the role of the woman as victim in horror cinema, Creed investigates the female monster instead. Specifically, she analyses figures whose monstrosity is linked inextricably to their femininity, naming them ‘monstrous-feminine’ to distinguish them from mere female versions of male monsters. Creed introduces the monstrous-feminine through Kristeva’s theory of abjection, the abject being ‘that which does not “respect borders, positions, rules”, that which “disturbs identity, system, order’’’ (Kristeva qtd in Creed 1993: 8). The monstrous-feminine is frightening because she threatens physical and symbolic boundaries. She is ‘terrifying yet subversive—feminist viewers often found her empowering’ (2022: 4). Creed acknowledges the woman and the monster’s shared ‘power in difference’ as described by Linda Williams: ‘a sense in which the woman's look at the monster [...] is also a recognition of their similar status as potent threats to vulnerable male power’ (Williams qtd in Creed 1993: 6). In Misfit Sisters, Sue Short observes that ‘horror offers female audiences the pleasure of seeing another female both acting up and stating a sense of discontentment’ (2006: 8), emphasising how witches and female werewolves express emotions normally forbidden to women such as ‘power, lust, and rage’ (2006: 37). Even when these monsters are eventually punished for their transgressions, they nevertheless provide ‘an exhilarating alternative to conventional female characterisation, extolling an image of latent strength that audiences might draw upon, with transgressions we may all delight in’ (2006: 21). Amanda Howell and Lucy Baker concur that for female viewers ‘horror offers both a way of acknowledging, and giving space to, negative emotions like anger, also a way of recreating the self through this monstrous rage’ (2022: 14), adding that the monstrous-feminine provides catharsis by freely expressing ‘her outrage—especially at the gendered limits of her world’ (2022: 8).
Readings of the monstrous-feminine as ‘empowering’ have sometimes been challenging. At the time of writing The Monstrous-Feminine, the figure existed predominantly as a male nightmare, ‘a misogynistic fantasy’, and a ‘construct of patriarchal ideology’ (Creed 2022: 4). The monstrous-feminine featured in movies directed by men, where she was usually the antagonist or villain. Here, Creed identifies the continuation of a long storytelling tradition going back to Medusa and the Sphinx of portraying women as monsters: ‘stories the patriarchy tells itself about sexual difference’ (Howell & Baker 2022: 2). When Creed first coined the term, the monstrous-feminine was largely an expression of male anxieties, not a subject with desires of her own. Despite the shift in focus away from woman-as-victim, therefore, Creed asserts that she is ‘not arguing that simply because the monstrous-feminine is constructed as an active rather than passive figure that this image is “feminist” or “liberated”. The presence of the monstrous-feminine in the popular horror film speaks to us more about male fears than about female desire or feminine subjectivity’ (1993: 7).
In 2022, however, Creed revisited the subject with Return of the Monstrous-Feminine: Feminist New Wave Cinema. In this, she argues that contemporary horror films, increasingly directed by women, now begin to feature heroic monstrous-feminine protagonists, giving examples such as the queer cannibalistic mermaids of The Lure (Agnieszka Smoczynska, 2015), or the Iranian vampire avenger of A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (Ana Lily Amirpour, 2014). These characters are empowered by their abjection, which ‘points to the frailty of the patriarchal order’ (2022: 4). Howell and Baker make similar observations, describing how the ‘abject spectacle’ of the monstrous-feminine has recently taken on subjectivity, becoming the protagonist in stories which ‘problematize the monstrous-feminine as a patriarchal stereotype while engaging with the subversive, transformative and often frankly pleasurable possibilities of her abject otherness’ (2022: 2). Positive identification with this new monstrous-feminine is easier, not only because they are more frequently protagonists, but also potentially because their monstrosity is less physical and more behavioural: in many cases, they are simply women who undermine gendered expectations. Creed points out that even ‘an ordinary woman can be seen as monstrous when she behaves in what is seen to be an unnatural manner by abandoning her proper feminine role’ (2022: 68), drawing on Dianna Taylor to argue that the violation of gender norms is enough to render a woman monstrous under patriarchy even if she is not physically violent. Expanding the definition to include women ‘regarded as monstrous by those she opposes, critiques, angers, and unsettles’ allows Creed to address more human monstrous-feminine characters from beyond horror, including lesbians in Carol (Todd Haynes, 2015), independent older women in Nomadland (Chloé Zhao, 2020), rebellious wives, widows, and those acting against rape culture. Sympathetic identification with these monstrous-feminine figures is aided by the fact that they are frequently victims of patriarchy, and their monstrosity is a revolt against injustices they have suffered.
This paper interrogates a current trend in the representation of the monstrous-feminine through these lenses of the first and second wave monstrous-feminine. Barbarian (Zach Cregger, 2022), Smile (Parker Finn, 2022), IT Chapter 2 (Andy Muschietti, 2019), Blair Witch (Adam Wingard, 2016), and [REC] (Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza, 2007) all feature violent female monsters that are presented consistently as old, naked, hideous, filthy, decaying, yet huge and remarkably strong. All feature signs of emaciation and decay, often through wasted angular limbs, rotting teeth, and thinning hair, and yet all are impressively strong, fast, aggressive, and resilient. They appear in glimpses, and we frequently only see them for mere frames at a time. These antagonists share a distinct and consistent visual appearance, but they are also all connected meaningfully to the ideal of motherhood, which they fail, pervert, and violate. This article will argue that the primary horror of these anti-mothers is not their violence, but their undesirable bodies, which signify infertility. This is exaggerated by their violence toward children or child-figures. If the woman who defies gendered expectations may be read as abject for exposing the frailty and artifice of the patriarchal culture which sets those expectations, the anti-mothers of this paper consistently enact abjection, either by failing miserably to fulfil standards of maternity, or rejecting them outright. Can these monstrous antagonists then represent sites of positive identification for feminist audiences? Or do they remain ‘a misogynistic fantasy’ (Creed 2022: 4)?
The Monstrous Mother
The monstrous mother is one of several significant archetypes of monstrous-feminine Creed outlines in The Monstrous-Feminine. The monstrous mother takes multiple forms: the archaic mother or ‘amoral primeval mother’, the ‘monstrous womb’, and ‘the castrating mother’ (1993: 1). The former are more relevant for conceptualising the anti-mother, as they fall under Part I of The Monstrous-Feminine, addressing the ‘monstrous-feminine in relation to Julia Kristeva's theory of the abject and the maternal’ and claiming ‘when woman is represented as monstrous it is almost always in relation to her mothering and reproductive functions’ (1993: 7). Part II is dedicated to ‘the representation of woman as monstrous in relation to Freud's theory of castration [..] Here woman's monstrousness is linked more directly to questions of sexual desire than to the area of reproduction’ (ibid.), making it less appropriate for discussions of the anti-mother. This article will therefore only engage with the monstrous womb and archaic mother in more detail.
The monstrous womb has to do with physical abjection, that which threatens the imaginary sense of the human body as a sealed whole object with a clear demarcation between inside and outside. That which disrupts our sense of these bodily boundaries is abject, such as excrement, vomit, blood, hair, and dismembered body parts. The womb, Creed argues, is ‘the utmost in abjection for it contains a new life form which will pass from inside to outside bringing with it traces of its contamination - blood, afterbirth, faeces’ (1993: 49). The archaic mother threatens more symbolic boundaries, and Creed describes her as ‘the mother as primordial abyss, the point of origin and of end’ (1993: 17). She is an
[A]ncient archaic figure who gives birth to all living things. She exists in the mythology of all human cultures as the Mother-Goddess who alone created the heavens and earth. In China she was known as Nu Kwa, in Mexico as Coatlicue, in Greece as Gaia (literally meaning 'earth') and in Sumer as Nammu. (1993: 22)
This figure is frighteningly powerful in her ability to create life without a male. Creed explains that the incredible force of her fertility also connotes death: the archaic mother is ‘a force that threatens to reincorporate what it once gave birth to [...] all pervasive, all encompassing’ (1993: 28). It inspires ‘the desire to return to the original oneness of things, to return to the mother/womb’ and therefore to symbolic death (ibid.): ‘Both the mother and death signify a monstrous obliteration of the self’ (1993: 30). The archaic mother smothers and suffocates the child, threatening its identity as subject. These monstrous mothers are threatening through extreme or excessive expressions of motherhood. This article deals with a very different monstrous-mother, one which is monstrous through a failed or subverted maternity: the anti-mother.
The anti-mother corresponds to, but is distinct from, a whole host of bad mothers and hag figures described in horror studies. For instance, Erin Harrington’s Gynaehorror, which ‘deals with all aspects of female reproductive horror’ (2018: 3), investigates ‘a variety of monstrous mothers, who range from the abusive to the psychotic to the vengeful’ (2018: 7). However, Harrington’s ‘monstrous-maternal’ is distinct from Creed’s ‘more archetypal identification of the way that reproductive functions and sexual otherness are framed as horrific and shocking’ (2018: 184). Rather, Harrington’s monstrous-maternal describes how the ideal of essential motherhood is itself monstrous and drives individuals to monstrosity. She gives the example of Serial Mom (John Waters, 1994), which features a human protagonist rather than a supernatural one, whose monstrosity is symbolic rather than physical: she is a murderer. My description of the anti-mother differs from this and is closer aligned with Creed’s ‘archetypal identification of the […] horrific and shocking’. Sarah Arnold also outlines the concept of The Bad Mother in horror cinema, drawing on Lacanian psychoanalysis as well as Ann E. Kaplan’s delineation of the Good and Bad Mother in the melodrama Stella Dallas (King Vidor, 1937). The Bad Mother, as Kaplan and Arnold describe, is one that is above all selfish. She does not conform to the Good Mother’s model of self-sacrifice and devotion and refuses to surrender her child to the symbolic Law of the Father. ‘Sadistic, hurtful, and jealous, she refuses the self-abnegating role, demanding her own life.’ (Kaplan qtd in Arnold 2013: 23). The Bad Mother is self-serving, narcissistic, or a burden on her children, but she is not outright evil. She is unmanageable, as in The Brood (David Cronenberg, 1980), absent, as in The Others (Alejandro Amenábar, 2001), or overbearing, as in Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960). But she usually cares for her children in some capacity, and ‘is rarely representative of evil, although she may be angry or violent’ (Arnold 2013: 99). Arnold claims that the mother in horror cinema
[E]mbodies an altogether different figure from either villain or victim. Neither a wholly evil or indifferent stalker/monster nor wholly damsel in distress, her maternity seems to situate her as always one step removed from either. As mother, her villainy is accompanied if not explained by a corresponding devotion to her children. Her monstrosity does not lie in her desire to annihilate the innocent, to kill randomly, rather she is driven by a desire to mother and to care, even if this is figured as corrupt or misguided. Even Mrs Voorhees of Friday the 13th (the mother most closely aligned with the stalker tradition) is motivated by the need to avenge her son’s death. (2013: 181)
This leaves little room for the anti-mother, who, it will become apparent, is not simply neglectful or selfish, but physically murderous and indisputably evil. She may desire to annihilate the innocent, very specifically in some cases, such as the anti-mothers of IT Chapter Two and Blair Witch who prefer child victims. She is not driven by a desire to mother or care. If the Bad Mother describes a mother who is failing, the anti-mother describes a mother who is failing so dramatically that she is no longer a mother at all: She is antithetical to motherhood. But prescriptive definitions are never perfect, and the film Barbarian may present a challenge to these neat divisions between Bad Mother and anti-mother.
Barbarian and the Anti-Mother
The antagonist of Zach Cregger’s Barbarian is a terrifying monster credited only as ‘The Mother’. The film begins as protagonist Tess arrives in Detroit for a job interview late at night, and is alarmed to find a strange man, Keith, already staying in her Airbnb. She must weigh up the dangers presented by this polite stranger and the inconvenience of finding somewhere else to stay. She stays, and while searching for toilet paper in the basement, Tess and Keith discover the terrifying underground lair of a serial kidnapper, rapist, and murderer named Frank. Frank is shown plotting his kidnappings in flashback and is eventually discovered in the underground tunnels now old and enfeebled. Tess and Keith also encounter the hulking form of The Mother, a victim and descendant of Frank’s, deformed and unsocialised as a result of generational abuse and inbreeding, which has also made her massively large and strong. The plot then abruptly jumps to another narrative and introduces AJ, an actor who is being sued for raping his co-star. AJ owns the Airbnb and is selling the property to pay his legal fees. While measuring the square footage of the basement he discovers the lair and encounters The Mother, as well as a trapped Tess, who has survived for weeks by successfully acting as The Mother’s baby. She tries to explain this to AJ: ‘Don’t you see? She just wants you to be her baby.’ The Mother’s one ambition is revealed to be for motherhood, because of a breastfeeding tape Frank perversely screens for his victims. The breastfeeding room, bathed in a pink glow from an old television, is presented as the one place of light, safety, and comfort available to The Mother in the tunnels. She aggressively attempts to mother Tess and AJ, caressing them, baby-talking, bottle feeding them, and attempting to breastfeed. But The Mother’s affection is portrayed as grotesque, and she abjects expectations of motherhood by behaving violently and eventually murderously towards her ‘children’. Remarkably, the physical threat of The Mother appears to be secondary to her undesirability and bodily abjection: her filth, her loss of hair and teeth, and her association with breastfeeding. Her naked body is consistently utilised for jump scares, and one of the most extended sequences of horror is one in which she attempts to forcibly breastfeed AJ. The camera lingers in horrified fascination as she forces her nipple into AJ’s mouth, employing multiple angles, an extreme close-up, and a tense string-based soundscape to emphasise discomfort. Comparably, other instances of The Mother’s violence are brief, perfunctory, and almost comedic in their excess and timing.
In her discussion of the hag in popular culture, Marina Warner connects the threat of the older ‘unattractive’ woman’s body directly to fertility: ‘Decrepitude enciphered ugliness, ugliness unloveliness, unloveliness unwomanliness, unwomanliness infertility: a state of being against nature’ (1995: 76). This ‘unwomanliness’ is compounded by the fact that The Mother is played by a male actor, Matthew Patrick Davis. The Mother’s infertility renders her deficient under patriarchy; this infertility is expressed as ugliness, and her failure as a productive female subject is underscored by her pathetic attempts to achieve motherhood through her adopted ‘children’. Harrington reads the ‘abject barren bodies’ (2018: 223) of post-menopausal women as monstrous, associated as they are with ‘lack, loss and decrepitude’ (2018: 242). However, she offers a more optimistic reading, suggesting that ‘horror films about abject barren bodies [can be] cinematic spaces of celebration, resistance and contestation’ (2018: 246). Her monstrous post-menopausal protagonists include those of Sunset Blvd. (Wilder, 1950) and psycho-biddy or hagsploitation films like Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (Aldrich, 1962)—main characters with voices and agency. And while Harrington does briefly mention ‘Witch-like crones, such as gypsy woman Mrs Ganush in Drag Me To Hell (2009) or even the coven of witches in Dario Argento’s Suspiria (1977)’, on the whole the films she discusses ‘centralise the importance of women, their experiences, their fears and their relationships at the centre of the story’ (2018: 255). Harrington’s reading of the hag figure in horror is therefore much more positive than the representation of The Mother in Barbarian, which, rather than centralising her experience, uses her as an object of disgust and shock value. Barbarian is ostensibly a film addressing sexual violence against women and the rape culture that perpetuates it, being inspired by a non-fiction book called The Gift of Fear (Gavin de Becker, 1997) which instructs women to trust their intuition and pay attention to warning signs of violence that arise in their day-to-day interactions with men. Cregger claims that this gave him an ‘epiphany’: ‘“I had this epiphany that I don’t ever have to think about that kind of a thing,’’ says Cregger. “I don’t have to consider that half the population might be somebody that means to do me harm for no reason. I just realized I occupy a completely different psychic landscape than most women do”’ (Fulcher 2022). This comment suggests an intention to expose and interrogate the dynamics of gendered violence, and the critical reception of Barbarian often frames it in relation to the #MeToo movement. IndieWire called the film a ‘#MeToo Horror’ (Bergeson), and in an article titled ‘Why Barbarian Is the Best MeToo Movie So Far’, Zoe Dumas claims ‘Barbarian should be recognized as a perfectly insightful look into everything #MeToo is about’ (2023). This praise overlooks the fact that Cregger’s investigation of gender-based violence is quickly abandoned after the first third of the film, upon descent to the basement. Benjamin Lee acknowledges the superficiality of Cregger’s feminist intentions, pointing out that the film ‘gains nothing from showcasing an awareness of the #MeToo reckoning [..] other than box-ticking’ (2022). Despite Cregger’s spoken desire to criticise sexual violence, the monster of Barbarian is not Frank, but the anonymous and pitiable Mother, presented as terrifying not because she has been abused, but because she is being a woman ‘wrong’.
At times, The Mother strays closer to Bad Motherhood than anti-motherhood, for instance by attempting to keep Tess and her other ‘children’ captive in the tunnels and refusing to relinquish her hold on them. In one moment she even achieves the maternal self-sacrifice so essential to Good Motherhood by throwing herself from a height to protect Tess. She is driven by a desire to care for her children, a motivation which, while certainly ‘corrupt or misguided’, renders her somewhat tragic and sympathetic. But while the Bad Mother may be rehabilitated, and often becomes the Good Mother by the end of films such as Stella Dallas, Barbarian never offers the possibility of reforming The Mother. The only appropriate response given to her monstrosity is to destroy her.
Other Anti-Mothers
The distinct visual appearance of The Mother is mirrored closely in several other contemporary horror films. Particularly comparable is the anti-mother of Smile, a film on the theme of generational trauma. Protagonist Dr Rose Cotter is a psychiatrist trying to solve the mystery of a demon that passes from person to person through the witnessing of its victim’s traumatic suicides. The climax involves Rose confronting the trauma of her own abusive mother’s death by overdose, an event she witnessed and for which she feels responsible, being too young, frightened and angry to notify the emergency services. The demon eventually manifests as Rose’s mother, credited as ‘Nightmare Mom’, taunting her and smiling maniacally. Again, she is frighteningly large, reaching the ceiling and towering over Rose. She is thin, semi-naked, and her face is contorted into a hideous grin, deathly pale with deeply sunken eyes ringed in black. Again her unfemininity is emphasised by the casting of a male actor (Kevin Keppy), and this is underscored by her un-maternity as she behaves violently towards Rose both in demon-form as well as in Rose’s memories. While the anti-mother of Barbarian abjects motherhood through failure, the ‘Nightmare Mom’ is abject by refusing to even attempt caring motherhood.
These anti-mother figures are not always obviously in the immediate context of motherhood and subvert expectations of maternity without having children of their own. The witch of Blair Witch, for instance, subverts the mothering role through violence against child figures more generally. Blair Witch is an instalment of The Blair Witch Project (1999-) franchise, which at the time of writing spans three feature-length films, three direct to television mockumentaries, and a website launched as part of a viral marketing campaign that accompanied the original film. The first film is a found-footage horror about a young documentary crew who venture into the woods to investigate the fictional folk legend of the Blair Witch. The film was made effective in part by its refusal to ever show the witch herself, a feature disrupted when the first sequel, Blair Witch, reveals a brief glimpse of her that mirrors the anti-mothers of Barbarian and Smile. The witch appears for less than two seconds, but we can see that again she is remarkably large. Like both ‘Nightmare Mom’ and ‘The Mother’ she reaches the ceiling and has elongated and emaciated angular limbs. She has a ferociously aggressive expression, is filthy, naked, and balding. She is hunting our protagonists, another group of young people who have gone in search of the original crew in a plot that mimics the first film. In this regard, the Blair Witch films have been likened to the fairy tale of Hansel and Gretel, wherein young innocents venture into the dangerous woods. Short claims ‘The Blair Witch Project (1999) places its three leads in “Hansel and Gretel” territory of being lost in strange woods, at the mercy of an evil witch they have rashly consigned to myth’ (2006: viii).
Again, the Witch is abject through her physical appearance as well as her unfemininity and violence towards children. Nestled in the rich worldbuilding surrounding the Blair Witch franchise is the context that the witch was known to the local population for stealing the blood of children (Curse of the Blair Witch, Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez, 1999). Accounts of children being attacked or disappearing are connected with the witch, including Robin Weaver’s disappearance in 1888, Eileen Treacle’s drowning in 1825, and the implied possession of a character named Rustin Parr who abducted and murdered seven children. It is interesting to note here that when Kaplan introduces ‘The Bad Mother’ in her analysis of Stella Dallas, she gives the full title as ‘The Bad Mother, or Witch’. In literature, popular belief, and indeed in horror cinema the witch is often antithetical to motherhood. In fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Europe, witches were often suspected of interfering with fertility due to their historical roles as midwives and herbal doctors who could source contraceptive and abortive medicines. Anxieties surrounding fertility manifested in beliefs that witches ‘kill infants both in the womb and at birth, and are even in the habit of stealing, vampire-like, into homes to drink the blood of children’, as well as roasting them at the Sabbat or grinding their bones for flying potions (Broedel 2003: 27). Creed argues that ‘the representation of the witch continues to foreground her essentially sexual nature’ (1993: 76), and importantly this is a non-reproductive sexuality. Creed quotes a description of witches in Argento’s Inferno (1980) as ‘wicked step-mothers, incapable of creating life’ (1993: 77). She further cites Eric Midelfort’s study of European witch burnings, which targeted women seen ‘as an “indigestible” element of patriarchal society and as such a powerful threat. These so-called witches were considered improper because they were unmarried, widowed, or lesbian. They lacked the moral guidance of a male authority figure’ (2022: 8). This absence of a male authority figure has allowed for empowering cinematic representations of witches, but the anti-mother of Blair Witch is more closely aligned to older, more frightening conceptions of witches constructed under patriarchal ideology. Her distinctly unmaternal relation to children, along with her physical appearance, aligns her with other anti-mothers.
Parallels with Hansel and Gretel are relevant to a fourth manifestation of the anti-mother, credited as ‘The Witch’ in IT Chapter Two. The IT franchise is based on the Stephen King novel of the same name (1986), and the antagonist, ‘It’, is an evil entity from an alternate dimension which exploits the fears of its victims to disguise itself while hunting children. In IT Chapter Two, one of our protagonists, Beverly, returns as an adult to her old family home to investigate the creature. There she encounters ‘Mrs Kersh’, who first appears to be a polite, if unusual, older woman. Briefly while she is fanning herself, it is revealed that Mrs Kersh has an open festering wound on her chest, a sign of decay mirrored in her dead, unblinking stare. Sweating and rotting, the boundary between her body has been literally broken, and she is abject. She excuses herself to fetch cookies before suddenly reappearing as a huge naked woman, the female actor Joan Gregson now replaced by male actor Javier Botet. She no longer politely tries to disguise the signs of her aged and decaying body. She rushes at Beverly, grinning maniacally, with elongated limbs and wild unfocused eyes. She no longer wears dentures and has only several peggy teeth. Like Nightmare Mom, The Mother, and Blair Witch she reaches the ceiling and must stoop to attack. Post transformation, she is both physically and symbolically abject: strong, hideous, and shameless, as well as decaying. That ‘It’ takes the form of a character’s worst fears is significant: Beverly is our only female protagonist, and ‘The Witch’ is how she risks being perceived if she does not conform to her gender role. Beverly does not have children. In fact, none of the protagonists do, and when they are reunited as adults in a Chinese restaurant, the first vision ‘It’ terrorises the group with is a monstrous wailing baby creature that emerges from a fortune cookie. In the novel, it is speculated that the group’s lack of children is a curse from ‘It’, and by the end of IT Chapter Two, after the creature is finally defeated, Beverly is in a happy relationship with another protagonist. The novel adds that they will eventually marry, and that Beverly is pregnant. The destruction of The Witch/‘It’ allows Beverly to take up a ‘normal’ maternal role in society.
In King’s novel, Mrs Kersh is linked directly to the witch of Hansel and Gretel, and Beverly’s childhood fear of the fairytale. The inconspicuous lady slowly becomes more abject as she transforms into the witch. Her initially white teeth suddenly become yellowed, as well as her eyes: ‘The corneas were now yellow, ancient, threaded with bleary stitches of red’ (1986: 564). Her skin turns ‘a sickly yellow’, and ‘the wrinkles in her skin now cut deep’ (1986: 565). Like the witch of Hansel and Gretel, she tempts Beverly with sweets, and gorges herself in a passage rich with abject description:
Her fingernails, long and dirty, dug into the sweets; crumbs tumbled down the bony slab of her chin. Her breath was the smell of long-dead things burst wide open by the gases of their own decay. Her laugh was now a dead cackle. Her hair was thinner. Scaly scalp showed in patches. (ibid.)
The old lady, now a ‘witch’, cackles as Beverly realises the furniture is made of fudge, the lights hard candy, and:
The wainscotting was caramel taffy. She looked down and saw that her shoes were leaving prints on the floorboards, which were not boards at all but slices of chocolate. The smell of candy was cloying. Oh God it's Hansel and Gretel it's the witch the one that always scared me the worst because she ate the children —’ (1986: 566)
Mrs Kersh’s aggression towards children is twofold, both as a fairytale witch and as the monster ‘It’ that feeds especially on children.
In [REC] the anti-mother is not an infertile woman, or a failed and violent mother. She is Tristana Medeiros, a young girl who has grown hugely strong and large as the result of a demonic possession. The film tells of a zombie outbreak in a Barcelona apartment building. A news crew, trapped inside, eventually discover the origins of the zombie virus in the penthouse. A tape recorder explains that the occupant was a Vatican priest charged with the task of isolating an enzyme carried by a young Portuguese girl named Tristana, who was demonically possessed. The enzyme mutated and became contagious: the zombie virus. After torturing Tristana with experiments attempting to isolate this enzyme, the priest sealed her in the apartment to die. A photo of Tristana uncovered in the penthouse shows her pre-possession, dressed in the puffy white First Holy Communion gown that symbolises innocence, virginity, future matrimony, subsequent motherhood, and adherence to the gender roles of Roman Catholicism. Jennifer Stith explains that ‘the Roman Catholic ritual of first communion may also initiate girls into patriarchal disempowerment under the veil of a celebration [..] appropriation of girls’ selfhood into the roles of “child bride” and “mother” is a critical component of the patriarchal religious construct’ (2015: 83). Stith compares the symbolic marriage of young girls making their communion not only to Christ, but to the ‘groom’ of ‘patriarchy itself’ (2015: 86). The only successful options for these girls ‘are either to become a good Catholic wife and mother or to become literally “a bride of Christ,” a woman religious, or nun’ (2015: 95). For a girl, their First Holy Communion is a ritual that ‘idealize[s] virginity, marriage, and motherhood’ (2015: 101). When the possessed Tristana is presented in person, she confounds these expectations, enacting a ‘wrong’ femininity by not appearing small, weak, youthful, or bearing the promise of future fecundity. She towers massively, played again by Javier Botet. Again she is nearly naked and shows signs of decay both through her emaciated elongated limbs, balding scalp, sagging jowls and breasts, and rotting teeth. Her torso displays an echo of Mrs Kersh’s chest wound, a patchily closed injury further underscoring her abjection. Instead of being ‘docile and accommodating’ as Catholicism expects from women, Tristana is an extremely dangerous cannibalistic monster who kills several people with a hammer and then eats them. Her abjection is clearly physical—cannibalism being especially abject as it erodes the bodily boundaries of both victim and aggressor—but Tristana’s monstrosity may also be attributed to her symbolic usurping of her assigned role of virginal Catholic bride and future mother.
A Misogynistic Fantasy?
The ongoing presence of these anti-mothers as undesirable/unsuitable women reveals interesting insights into a patriarchal culture which graphically and compulsively dramatises the instances of its failure. The consistent features of these anti-mothers include their supernatural size, power, and resilience. In Barbarian, for instance, The Mother bursts through a concrete wall, survives being crushed by a car, and withstands a massive fall from a water tower. This strength is read as unfeminine and becomes a decided element of the anti-mother’s horror, no less because of her age. The anti-mother is not only woman-yet-strong, she is also old-yet-strong, doubly confounding expectations of older women. This works against pre-existing depictions of naked older women in horror cinema, such as Harrington’s observation that in The Taking of Deborah Logan (Adam Robitel, 2014), ‘When we see Deborah’s naked body it highlights her fragility and her instability’ (2018: 257). All but one of the anti-mothers are played by male actors, highlighting that it is their non-conformity to reproductive femininity that makes them monstrous. The consistent nudity of these monsters confronts the viewer with a female body that is normatively undesirable: old, decaying, and infertile, their angular wasted limbs defying ‘feminine’ curves. Whereas portrayals of ‘excessive’ aging women Vivian Sobchack describes in 1950s and ’60s horror such as The Leech Woman (Edward Dein, 1960) ‘serve to alienate, denigrate and humiliate their ageing women’ (Harrington: 236), the anti-mother cannot be embarrassed: her shameless nudity attests to this. However, despite the fact that these monsters have lived in filth and darkness without human concepts of modesty, they nevertheless are often chastely depicted wearing underwear, and have no body hair. Granny Kersh is the supernatural nightmare manifestation of an interstellar spider-being that eats fear itself, but she still sports a neat pair of briefs. Tristana Medeiros is presumably presented as naked because her demonic growth spurt means none of her seven-year-old clothes fit her anymore; a logic which does not apply to her underclothes. The hesitation to portray the vulva, pubic hair, or any other body hair on these figures speaks less of the monsters’ own shame and more to an anxiety around the female body from these exclusively male directors. It is worth pointing out here that these movies also feature such scenes as a man being beaten to death with his own dismembered arm (Barbarian), a demon ripping its skin off to reveal four fleshy grinning skulls nested within each other (Smile), and a little girl cannibalising her own mother’s face ([REC]). The hairy female body is apparently less permissible than these horrors. Although these films ostensibly deal with themes such as trauma and sexual violence, when the filmmakers want to shock and horrify audiences most, the most despicable vision available to their imaginations is the body of the ‘wrong’ woman. And they cannot even bring themselves to depict this in its entirety. The directors of these films present the unsuitable female body as so cripplingly terrifying that it becomes actually unrepresentable.
In every instance, the anti-mother is the villain, or antagonist. Each anti-mother undermines the idea of motherhood as redemptive, loving, safe, and inevitable for women. It may be possible to read this subversion of gendered expectations as feminist. But ultimately their role as antagonists, their minimal screen time, and their general lack of names and voices makes positive identification with the anti-mother difficult at best. This lack of names corresponds to Harrington’s observation that monstrous mothers such as ‘Mother in the Troma film Mother’s Day (1980), Mother in the splattery comedy-horror Braindead (1992), and Norman Bates’ Mother in Psycho do not even need names of their own, only designations’ (255). Regarding voices, Granny Kersh is the only anti-mother who has a full line in monster form, and it is to encourage adherence to a violent patriarch. She screams at Beverly ‘Mustn’t lie to our father!’, a reference to Beverly’s abusive childhood. The emphasis on these monsters’ (un)reproductive bodies specifically as horrific and the consistency of their representation further suggests that it is their physical abjection as opposed to their symbolic abjection that remains dominant. This potentially undermines a feminist reading of the anti-mother. It is more likely and appropriate to consider the anti-mothers as monsters in the Latin sense, of monstrum and monere: to warn. These monsters are warnings from a patriarchal culture of how women may be perceived if we do not conform to gendered expectations. They are therefore closer to the ‘misogynistic fantasy’ of the original monstrous-feminine rather than the heroic second wave monstrous-feminine. The anti-mother represents the consequences of failure in a patriarchal culture that places huge store in women being desirable and reproductive.
While the anti-mother can safely be designated as first generation monstrous-feminine, this does not preclude her value to feminist audiences. To recall Creed’s assertion that feminist viewers have always found the first wave monstrous-feminine ‘empowering’, the anti-mother represents the possibility of women existing and being (at least physically) powerful outside the gendered role of motherhood. The anti-mother is big, strong, fast, old if not wise, powerful if not empowered, often undefeated, and utterly uncontrollable. While Kaplan’s Bad Mother is either reformed or ‘punished for her violation of the desired patriarchal ideal’, the anti-mother may triumph. In [REC], Blair Witch, and Smile the anti-mother escapes containment and lives to terrorise another day, frequently in sequels. In fact, the first generation monstrous-feminine may prove more escapist to the spectator who manages to identify with her than the new heroic one, because the first monstrous-feminine is more transgressive, more animalistic, more evil, more feral, more physically monstrous, and more radically disturbing. She is also unburdened with the task of confronting the patriarchy that the New Wave monstrous-feminine must bear. Choosing to identify with the powerful villain instead of the victim becomes easier when that villain is actively undermining gendered standards and expectations that the audience recognise as cruel and oppressive.
Retellings may further facilitate the determined audience member interpreting the anti-mother as a positive feminist point of identification. At the 2023 Cine-Excess conference, Emily Smith gave a paper titled ‘“The Witches are Back”: Reframing the Witch and Abjection from Hocus Pocus (1993) to Hocus Pocus 2 (2022)’. In this, she describes how the sequel reframes the Hocus Pocus witches as sympathetic, establishing a pitiable backstory for them and reframing them as victims instead of symbols of abjection. Similar re-readings through additional material are possible for several of the anti-mothers discussed above. Most clearly, Tristana’s character was expanded on in the 2012 [REC]: Historias Ineditas, a comic book consisting of five stories by different authors elaborating on various aspects of the franchise. Each is introduced by Tristana herself: she is now the protagonist of the narrative world. In a story titled ‘Tristana’ by Feliciano G. Zecchini, it is revealed that Tristana was raped and murdered by a group of priests in a convent where she worked as a cook. When she is found by a nun in the morning, she appears dead. But upon the performance of Tristana’s last rites, she suddenly awakes in a possessed rage, and kills the only male in the room. Much as in Hocus Pocus, this intertext introduces new information that reframes the monstrous-feminine as a victim, justifying her violence as vengeance against a sexist world that did not protect her. [REC]2 (Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza, 2009) adds that the Vatican priest keeping Tristana captive was also experimenting on local children, further emphasising the positioning of church as villain and Tristana as victim.
Similarly, the Blair Witch franchise offers an extremely dense and varied field of intertextual detail through the documentaries and website that expands on the origins of the Witch. Among this lore is a possible origin story for the witch as Elly Kedward, an immigrant woman who was labelled a witch and outcast from the town. Whether or not the accusation of witchcraft is canonically justified against Kedward, this detailing of her as an outsider rejected from society works towards repositioning her as a victim, as evidenced by sympathetic fanfiction such as ‘The Trial of Elly Kedward’. Rewriting the monstrous-feminine as victim is a complex process which makes the figure sympathetic, justifies their violence, and reframes them at the centre of their narratives, but also arguably robs them of some of their transgressive power. Sequels that reposition the animalistic first generation monstrous-feminine as avenging victim-hero of patriarchy makes these characters easier points of identification, but also risks making these monsters less strange, less dangerous, less mysterious, and certainly less evil.
In conclusion, despite a contemporary trend towards ‘elevated’ or politically conscious horror, and despite the dawn of a Feminist New Wave cinema championed by Creed, the original monstrous-feminine is alive and kicking, and her survival is evidenced in the figure of the anti-mother. While each anti-mother is symbolically abject by failing to conform to gendered expectations of maternity, ultimately, they are most clearly and consistently united in their appearance and physical behaviours: old, fast, strong, ugly, rotting, aggressive, uncivilised. It may be possible to read them as politically subversive for undermining gendered expectations, but their primary horror is unavoidably their bodies, especially for the majority of casual viewers who do not engage with intertexts such as the Historias. However, each of the anti-mothers discussed in this article represents a power-in-difference that is at least cathartic, if not actually feminist. In the anti-mother’s violent rejection of ‘proper’ femininity, the adventurous or determined feminist spectator can enjoy a gleeful moment of anarchic rebellion against the patriarchal order. This catharsis is perhaps best evidenced in the figure of Tristana – as a young girl brutalised by the agents of organized patriarchal religion, the demonic possession that physically empowers her to destroy her abusers seems especially subversive. If the abject is that which shows the cracks in the symbolic patriarchal order, exposing the system as artificial, fallible, and destructible, it is possible to interpret the monsters that reveals those cracks as feminist, even if they were originally sexist imaginings. The fact that the anti-mother is threatening also means that she is powerful, and the power to horrify is better than no power at all.
I would like to thank the anonymous reviewer at Cine-Excess whose comments made this paper much stronger. Thank you also to Dr Georgina Evans for her discussion and comments, and to Jessica Dolliver for proofreading this paper. Any remaining errors are my own. This work was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council through the Open-Oxford-Cambridge DTP [ref. AH/R012709/1].
References
Arnold, S. (2013) Maternal Horror Film: Melodrama and Motherhood. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan.
Bergeson, S. (2022) ‘Barbarian Director Almost Couldn’t Get #MeToo Horror Movie Made: “Nobody Wants to Follow a Rapist”’, Indiewire. 4 Oct. 2022 (Accessed 19 February 2024).
Broedel, H. P. (2003) The Malleus Maleficarum and the Construction of Witchcraft: Theology and Popular Belief. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Creed, B. (1993) The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. London: Routledge.
Creed, B. (2022) The Return of the Monstrous-Feminine. Abingdon: Routledge.
De Becker, G. (1997) The Gift of Fear. New York: Little, Brown and Company.
Dumas, Z. (2023) ‘Why Barbarian is the Best MeToo Movie So Far’, Movieweb. 25 Mar. 2023 (Accessed 19 February 2024).
Fulcher, A. (2022) ‘How a Self-Help Book Inspired the Horror Film Barbarian’, As the Bunny Hops. 30 Aug. 2022 (Accessed 19 February 2024).
G. Zecchini, F. (2012) ‘Tristana’, [REC]: Historias Ineditas. Barcelona: Editores de Tebeos.
Harrington, E. (2018) Women, Monstrosity and Horror Film: Gynaehorror. New York: Routledge.
Howell, A. and L. Baker. (2022) Monstrous Possibilities: The Female Monster in 21st Century Screen Horror. Cham: Springer International Publishing AG.
King, S. (1986) IT. New York: Hodder & Stoughton Ltd.
Lee, B. (2022) ‘Barbarian Review – Gory, Secretive Horror is all Bark, no Bite’, The Guardian. 7 Sep. 2022 (Accessed 19 February 2024).
Short, S. (2006) Misfit Sisters: Screen Horror as Female Rites of Passage. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Stith, J. (2015) ‘Child Brides to the Patriarchy: Unveiling the Appropriation of the Missing Girl Child’, Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, 31 (1), 83-102.
Warner, M. (1995) From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers. London: Vintage Books.
References
Arnold, S. (2013) Maternal Horror Film: Melodrama and Motherhood. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan.
Bergeson, S. (2022) ‘Barbarian Director Almost Couldn’t Get #MeToo Horror Movie Made: “Nobody Wants to Follow a Rapist”’, Indiewire. 4 Oct. 2022 (Accessed 19 February 2024).
Broedel, H. P. (2003) The Malleus Maleficarum and the Construction of Witchcraft: Theology and Popular Belief. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Creed, B. (1993) The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. London: Routledge.
Creed, B. (2022) The Return of the Monstrous-Feminine. Abingdon: Routledge.
De Becker, G. (1997) The Gift of Fear. New York: Little, Brown and Company.
Dumas, Z. (2023) ‘Why Barbarian is the Best MeToo Movie So Far’, Movieweb. 25 Mar. 2023 (Accessed 19 February 2024).
Fulcher, A. (2022) ‘How a Self-Help Book Inspired the Horror Film Barbarian’, As the Bunny Hops. 30 Aug. 2022 (Accessed 19 February 2024).
G. Zecchini, F. (2012) ‘Tristana’, [REC]: Historias Ineditas. Barcelona: Editores de Tebeos.
Harrington, E. (2018) Women, Monstrosity and Horror Film: Gynaehorror. New York: Routledge.
Howell, A. and L. Baker. (2022) Monstrous Possibilities: The Female Monster in 21st Century Screen Horror. Cham: Springer International Publishing AG.
King, S. (1986) IT. New York: Hodder & Stoughton Ltd.
Lee, B. (2022) ‘Barbarian Review – Gory, Secretive Horror is all Bark, no Bite’, The Guardian. 7 Sep. 2022 (Accessed 19 February 2024).
Short, S. (2006) Misfit Sisters: Screen Horror as Female Rites of Passage. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Stith, J. (2015) ‘Child Brides to the Patriarchy: Unveiling the Appropriation of the Missing Girl Child’, Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, 31 (1), 83-102.
Warner, M. (1995) From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers. London: Vintage Books.