Introduction
The Medusa, Medea, Bloody Mary, Baba Yaga, Aswang, Circe, Sheela-Na-Gig, and the Sirens –– throughout recorded time, all human societies have developed a concept of the monstrous-feminine, of what it is about woman that truly shocks and horrifies. Ancient myths and legends from all cultures focus on her terrifying capacities, particularly those associated with her sexual and reproductive powers. We too have developed our own versions, many unique to the contemporary era, in visual media – film, television, video games, and art. Think of the famous fictional figures of Carrie, Furiosa, Jennifer, Offred, American Mary, The Bride, Alexia, Villanelle, Emma Frost, and the abject female monsters in the artworks of Cindy Sherman and Bonnie Lucas. These film texts focus on her revolt, a dangerous journey into abjection, her appetite for justice and her powers of transformation.
In the twenty-first century, women from around the world, have begun to direct, script and produce an amazing number of impressive and innovative films with a clear focus on horror in which the female protagonist––the monstrous-feminine––speaks from a new perspective, and in her own voice. She is powerful and terrifying, yet also a liberating figure. These films have received critical acclaim, won prestigious prizes and have been drawing in larger and larger audiences. They are creative, experimental, explore new generic forms and almost all denounce patriarchal norms and values through the figure of their monstrous heroine.
Part 1: Return of the. Monstrous-Feminine
In Return of the Monstrous-Feminine: Feminist New Wave Cinema (2022), I argue that these films constitute what is best described as ‘a new wave’ of feminist filmmaking. In discussing her film, Titane (2021), Julia Ducournau states that monstrosity is an empowering concept. This is certainly true of the monstrous-feminine of this Feminist New Wave. In contrast to the figure, I explored in The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis –– first edition, (1993) she is on a different journey, and she occupies a different relationship to the abject. One consistent factor is that the monstrous-feminine offers arresting yet horrifying displays of female powers - sometimes of her body, sometimes of her violent actions. While she has the power to shock––particularly male viewers––she also the power to delight female spectators.
The films discussed in Return of the Monstrous-Feminine explore horror in different contexts – supernatural horror, psychological and the horror of the everyday. The latter is an important, often overlooked form, which clearly demonstrates that quotidian horror is every bit as violent as horror created in monstrous, supernatural worlds. These texts explore female cannibalism, desire, terrorism, vampirism, revenge, motherhood, infanticide, lesbianism, alien worlds and artificial life-forms. They also investigate male violence, rape, patriarchal oppression of minorities, racial prejudice, and social conformism. Films include Ginger Snaps (John Fawcett, 2000 – script Karen Walton), Jennifer’s Body (Karyn Kusama 2009), The Babadook (Jennifer Kent, 2014), A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (Ana Lily Amirpour, 2014), Evolution (Lucile Hadžihalilović, 2015), Carol (Tod Haynes, 2015 – novel Patricia Highsmith), Atlantics (Mati Diop, 2019), Promising Young Woman (Emerald Fennell, 2020), Titane (Julia Ducournau 2021), Saint Omer (Alice Diop, 2022), and Pearl (Ti West – script Mia Goth, 2022). I have also included the television series The Handmaid’s Tale (2017-2024) and the 1990 film, directed by Volker Schlondorff, based on Margaret Atwood’s iconic novel of the same name. I argue that series of The Handmaid’s Tale is exemplary of this new wave.
The horror film has always engaged in social critique but this has become more marked in turn-of-the century horror largely because of the emergence of a number of powerful fine-de-siecle social/theoretical movements: third and fourth wave feminism, the #MeToo movement, Black Lives Matter, queer theory, race theory, critical animals studies and nonhuman theory. All of the above have influenced the horror film in new and exciting ways. As a result, much Feminist New Wave horror has become a medium of social and political protest with a strong appeal to female directors. In these Feminist New Wave films, the monstrous-feminine undertakes a personal journey that signals a revolt against the patriarchal symbolic order. Directed primarily by women (but also some by men) Feminist New Wave films tell stories about women who are in revolt against male violence and destructive patriarchal beliefs and values including sexism, racism, homophobia, and most recently, anthropocentrism. Revolt is central. In contrast to the monstrous-feminine discussed in the first volume, she is now the agent of her own destiny – often an ominous figure motivated by rage.
What is distinctive about these texts is that the female protagonists (human and nonhuman) who have suffered great injustices––psychological and/or physical––embark on a journey into the dark night of abjection, where they seek to undermine, and destroy the patriarchal order of law and language. Their revolt is personal and involves coming to terms with their own dark desires. ‘Their journey is feminist in that they have the courage to revolt and enter into that dark place in order to see for themselves the corruption at the heart of the symbolic order . . . These filmmakers do not speak in ‘one’ voice, but in many. To these women, the aggressive and/or violent male, along with the patriarchal system he represents, is a figure of abjection’. (Creed, 2022, 2)
The monstrous-feminine of Feminist New Wave films has a different relationship to abjection. Those aspects of women’s lives and bodies––pubescence, menstruation, pregnancy, birth, sexual desire––that were once abjected as a source of horror in films such as Carrie (Brian de Palma, 1976), The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973) and The Brood (David Cronenberg, 1979) are no longer represented as abject in a negative sense, designed to repulse and horrify. Instead, they seek justice. The feminist vampire of A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night glides through the dark, cloaked in a chador, singling out violent misogynistic men as her victims. It is clear her violence relates to the oppression of women in extremist religious theocracies as well as women in patriarchal secular democracies such as Australia where one (sometimes more) women are murdered every week by a violent male, almost always known to her. The retired engineer of Spoor (Agnieszka Holland, 2017) who the locals dismiss as some kind of witch, methodically murders a group of abject male hunters whose cruelty to animals almost destroys her. The deadly alien femme fatale of Under the Skin (Jonathan Glazer, 2013) who eviscerates sexually promiscuous men in her death pool reminds us that the human male is simply flesh and blood and eminently suitable as meat –– as we all are. The human becomes indistinguishable from the nonhuman in a matter of seconds. Female reviewers in particular applaud the ingenuity, and liberating sense of female strength that these powerful women command.
The power of the female protagonists in the films I have been discussing is derived from her abject monstrousness––once demonised–– which she now weaponizes, in an act of radical abjection, in order to attack the patriarchal symbolic order which Jacques Derrida (1991, p. 113) sees as structured by ‘phallogocentrism’, that is, the privileging of the phallus in the formation of society, that has led to her oppression. The monstrous-feminine has no fear of the phallus and all that it represents. It is a mark of her success that her bad behaviour is perversely satisfying.
Return of the Monstrous-Feminine argues that the woman who journeys into abjection has become the subject of her own revolt, not just in supernatural horror films, but also films which explore the horror of the everyday –– films such as Carol, Promising Young Woman and Woman at War (Benedikt Erlingsson, 2018). These films offer pleasure in her rage, and her assault on the male symbolic order of law and language. Kristeva defines abjection as that which: ‘disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite.’ (Kristeva, 1982, 4) The monstrous-feminine sets out to disturb, ‘identity, system, order’. She has no time for ‘borders, position, rules’. She is on an intimate, personal journey that in Kristeva’s words involves ‘a questioning of one’s own being’. She collapses boundaries between inside and outside to create a different concept of revolt. In rebelling against her former self; once constrained by the dictates of patriarchal ideology, she is now free to explore her own anger, her own darkness, and her own fury. She enters what Margaret Atwood in her speech, ‘Spotty-Handed Villainesses’ (1994) describes as her ‘subterranean depths’ which Atwood sees as completely necessary if the arts are to represent women as ‘fully dimensional human beings’. Kristeva argues that literature offers one of the most productive areas in which to explore the abject. I argue that film, and other forms of visual media, also offers a fruitful terrain, particularly in relation to radical abjection and the changed relationship of the monstrous-feminine to abjection.
The female protagonists of Feminist New Wave cinema––human and nonhuman–– embark on a perilous journey with the aim of undermining the phallocentric and anthropocentric symbolic order. In so doing the monstrous-feminine engages in what Kristeva describes as ‘intimate revolt’ that is a personal revolt which, in many texts, leads her to a changed understanding of her own psyche and ethics, as I will discuss. She signifies more than the human as she engages with the nonhuman, that is, with animal, vegetal, and elemental entities, such as water discussed shortly.
An important characteristic of almost all Feminist New Wave films are their inter-generic structures. The directors of a number of these texts discuss why they are drawn to the idea of intertextuality. Agnieszka Holland says of her award-winning, Spoor, in which a retired female engineer murders a group of male hunters, that Spoor invokes horror as it is a revenge story. She explains that she was interested in the revenge genre, because its boundaries are fluid, giving her a greater degree of freedom to make her argument. ‘You cannot really tell if it is a thriller, a dark comedy, some kind of ecological manifesto, an artistic drama, or perhaps a fairy tale. It’s a mix of reality and fantasy, and the main character is some kind of witch from my generation who just cannot accept the cruelty and the injustice of this male-driven hunting chorus’. (Holland, 2018)
The Medusa, Medea, Bloody Mary, Baba Yaga, Aswang, Circe, Sheela-Na-Gig, and the Sirens –– throughout recorded time, all human societies have developed a concept of the monstrous-feminine, of what it is about woman that truly shocks and horrifies. Ancient myths and legends from all cultures focus on her terrifying capacities, particularly those associated with her sexual and reproductive powers. We too have developed our own versions, many unique to the contemporary era, in visual media – film, television, video games, and art. Think of the famous fictional figures of Carrie, Furiosa, Jennifer, Offred, American Mary, The Bride, Alexia, Villanelle, Emma Frost, and the abject female monsters in the artworks of Cindy Sherman and Bonnie Lucas. These film texts focus on her revolt, a dangerous journey into abjection, her appetite for justice and her powers of transformation.
In the twenty-first century, women from around the world, have begun to direct, script and produce an amazing number of impressive and innovative films with a clear focus on horror in which the female protagonist––the monstrous-feminine––speaks from a new perspective, and in her own voice. She is powerful and terrifying, yet also a liberating figure. These films have received critical acclaim, won prestigious prizes and have been drawing in larger and larger audiences. They are creative, experimental, explore new generic forms and almost all denounce patriarchal norms and values through the figure of their monstrous heroine.
Part 1: Return of the. Monstrous-Feminine
In Return of the Monstrous-Feminine: Feminist New Wave Cinema (2022), I argue that these films constitute what is best described as ‘a new wave’ of feminist filmmaking. In discussing her film, Titane (2021), Julia Ducournau states that monstrosity is an empowering concept. This is certainly true of the monstrous-feminine of this Feminist New Wave. In contrast to the figure, I explored in The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis –– first edition, (1993) she is on a different journey, and she occupies a different relationship to the abject. One consistent factor is that the monstrous-feminine offers arresting yet horrifying displays of female powers - sometimes of her body, sometimes of her violent actions. While she has the power to shock––particularly male viewers––she also the power to delight female spectators.
The films discussed in Return of the Monstrous-Feminine explore horror in different contexts – supernatural horror, psychological and the horror of the everyday. The latter is an important, often overlooked form, which clearly demonstrates that quotidian horror is every bit as violent as horror created in monstrous, supernatural worlds. These texts explore female cannibalism, desire, terrorism, vampirism, revenge, motherhood, infanticide, lesbianism, alien worlds and artificial life-forms. They also investigate male violence, rape, patriarchal oppression of minorities, racial prejudice, and social conformism. Films include Ginger Snaps (John Fawcett, 2000 – script Karen Walton), Jennifer’s Body (Karyn Kusama 2009), The Babadook (Jennifer Kent, 2014), A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (Ana Lily Amirpour, 2014), Evolution (Lucile Hadžihalilović, 2015), Carol (Tod Haynes, 2015 – novel Patricia Highsmith), Atlantics (Mati Diop, 2019), Promising Young Woman (Emerald Fennell, 2020), Titane (Julia Ducournau 2021), Saint Omer (Alice Diop, 2022), and Pearl (Ti West – script Mia Goth, 2022). I have also included the television series The Handmaid’s Tale (2017-2024) and the 1990 film, directed by Volker Schlondorff, based on Margaret Atwood’s iconic novel of the same name. I argue that series of The Handmaid’s Tale is exemplary of this new wave.
The horror film has always engaged in social critique but this has become more marked in turn-of-the century horror largely because of the emergence of a number of powerful fine-de-siecle social/theoretical movements: third and fourth wave feminism, the #MeToo movement, Black Lives Matter, queer theory, race theory, critical animals studies and nonhuman theory. All of the above have influenced the horror film in new and exciting ways. As a result, much Feminist New Wave horror has become a medium of social and political protest with a strong appeal to female directors. In these Feminist New Wave films, the monstrous-feminine undertakes a personal journey that signals a revolt against the patriarchal symbolic order. Directed primarily by women (but also some by men) Feminist New Wave films tell stories about women who are in revolt against male violence and destructive patriarchal beliefs and values including sexism, racism, homophobia, and most recently, anthropocentrism. Revolt is central. In contrast to the monstrous-feminine discussed in the first volume, she is now the agent of her own destiny – often an ominous figure motivated by rage.
What is distinctive about these texts is that the female protagonists (human and nonhuman) who have suffered great injustices––psychological and/or physical––embark on a journey into the dark night of abjection, where they seek to undermine, and destroy the patriarchal order of law and language. Their revolt is personal and involves coming to terms with their own dark desires. ‘Their journey is feminist in that they have the courage to revolt and enter into that dark place in order to see for themselves the corruption at the heart of the symbolic order . . . These filmmakers do not speak in ‘one’ voice, but in many. To these women, the aggressive and/or violent male, along with the patriarchal system he represents, is a figure of abjection’. (Creed, 2022, 2)
The monstrous-feminine of Feminist New Wave films has a different relationship to abjection. Those aspects of women’s lives and bodies––pubescence, menstruation, pregnancy, birth, sexual desire––that were once abjected as a source of horror in films such as Carrie (Brian de Palma, 1976), The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973) and The Brood (David Cronenberg, 1979) are no longer represented as abject in a negative sense, designed to repulse and horrify. Instead, they seek justice. The feminist vampire of A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night glides through the dark, cloaked in a chador, singling out violent misogynistic men as her victims. It is clear her violence relates to the oppression of women in extremist religious theocracies as well as women in patriarchal secular democracies such as Australia where one (sometimes more) women are murdered every week by a violent male, almost always known to her. The retired engineer of Spoor (Agnieszka Holland, 2017) who the locals dismiss as some kind of witch, methodically murders a group of abject male hunters whose cruelty to animals almost destroys her. The deadly alien femme fatale of Under the Skin (Jonathan Glazer, 2013) who eviscerates sexually promiscuous men in her death pool reminds us that the human male is simply flesh and blood and eminently suitable as meat –– as we all are. The human becomes indistinguishable from the nonhuman in a matter of seconds. Female reviewers in particular applaud the ingenuity, and liberating sense of female strength that these powerful women command.
The power of the female protagonists in the films I have been discussing is derived from her abject monstrousness––once demonised–– which she now weaponizes, in an act of radical abjection, in order to attack the patriarchal symbolic order which Jacques Derrida (1991, p. 113) sees as structured by ‘phallogocentrism’, that is, the privileging of the phallus in the formation of society, that has led to her oppression. The monstrous-feminine has no fear of the phallus and all that it represents. It is a mark of her success that her bad behaviour is perversely satisfying.
Return of the Monstrous-Feminine argues that the woman who journeys into abjection has become the subject of her own revolt, not just in supernatural horror films, but also films which explore the horror of the everyday –– films such as Carol, Promising Young Woman and Woman at War (Benedikt Erlingsson, 2018). These films offer pleasure in her rage, and her assault on the male symbolic order of law and language. Kristeva defines abjection as that which: ‘disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite.’ (Kristeva, 1982, 4) The monstrous-feminine sets out to disturb, ‘identity, system, order’. She has no time for ‘borders, position, rules’. She is on an intimate, personal journey that in Kristeva’s words involves ‘a questioning of one’s own being’. She collapses boundaries between inside and outside to create a different concept of revolt. In rebelling against her former self; once constrained by the dictates of patriarchal ideology, she is now free to explore her own anger, her own darkness, and her own fury. She enters what Margaret Atwood in her speech, ‘Spotty-Handed Villainesses’ (1994) describes as her ‘subterranean depths’ which Atwood sees as completely necessary if the arts are to represent women as ‘fully dimensional human beings’. Kristeva argues that literature offers one of the most productive areas in which to explore the abject. I argue that film, and other forms of visual media, also offers a fruitful terrain, particularly in relation to radical abjection and the changed relationship of the monstrous-feminine to abjection.
The female protagonists of Feminist New Wave cinema––human and nonhuman–– embark on a perilous journey with the aim of undermining the phallocentric and anthropocentric symbolic order. In so doing the monstrous-feminine engages in what Kristeva describes as ‘intimate revolt’ that is a personal revolt which, in many texts, leads her to a changed understanding of her own psyche and ethics, as I will discuss. She signifies more than the human as she engages with the nonhuman, that is, with animal, vegetal, and elemental entities, such as water discussed shortly.
An important characteristic of almost all Feminist New Wave films are their inter-generic structures. The directors of a number of these texts discuss why they are drawn to the idea of intertextuality. Agnieszka Holland says of her award-winning, Spoor, in which a retired female engineer murders a group of male hunters, that Spoor invokes horror as it is a revenge story. She explains that she was interested in the revenge genre, because its boundaries are fluid, giving her a greater degree of freedom to make her argument. ‘You cannot really tell if it is a thriller, a dark comedy, some kind of ecological manifesto, an artistic drama, or perhaps a fairy tale. It’s a mix of reality and fantasy, and the main character is some kind of witch from my generation who just cannot accept the cruelty and the injustice of this male-driven hunting chorus’. (Holland, 2018)
Feminist New Wave films explore social justice issues through the journey of the female protagonist. Mixing of generic forms is central to this exploration. Coralie Fargeat (2021) who directed the rape-revolt film Revenge (2017), said that she wanted to utilise the ‘phantasmagoric’ so that she could liberate herself from the rules of the genre to focus on the heroine’s cathartic release of ‘fury and anger’. She discussed the freedom that working with genres brings. ‘With genre films, you’re going places you can’t go in real life.’ Emerald Fennell (2021) director of Promising Young Woman aimed to create a ‘subversion of the revenge genre’. She did not want to depict a woman attaining revenge through murder but one ‘exacting revenge—if that’s what this is—in a particularly female way’. She argues that the character, Cassie ‘is violent … but the violence she commits, the maiming that she does, is completely psychological’. What all films share is a focus on rage––woman’s rage––which I will discuss shortly.
Radical Abjection and Horror
Dominant patriarchal ideology defines certain states of being and processes as abject –– particularly those that might threaten its power. The abject also represents that which is taboo. As with all taboo states, the abject can fascinate desire, and entice the subject to its borders but it must ultimately be expelled, so that the individual can return safely to society. It is those who chose to remain at the border––the outsider, rebel and stray––who offer a continuing threat.
Patriarchal societies deem women’s physical difference, her sexual and reproductive powers as abject because her pregnant body causes fluids to flow from orifices –blood, afterbirth, breast milk. The birth-giving female body––its very existence––threatens the integrity of the image of the male body as whole and stable. It reminds the male that his own body is also vulnerable, capable of being penetrated, raped, and ‘opened out’. It may also shed blood, becoming feminised, as happens in the violent and bloody conclusion of Coralie Fargeat’s Revenge. Abjection is also relative. Women for instance find aspects of the male body abject in certain contexts (such as the brutal fist and erect penis) because they can be used to attack and violently penetrate women’s bodies––and their boundaries–– as vividly demonstrated in the revolt/revenge subgenre. In Return of the Monstrous-Feminine, I named this ‘aggressive phallicity’ (p.10). Kristeva states that abject individuals include the ‘shameless rapist’: ‘The traitor, the liar, the criminal with a good conscience, the shameless rapist, the killer who claims he is a savior. . .. Any crime, because it draws attention to the fragility of the law, is abject’. (1982, p. 4)
In Feminist New Wave films, it is the male rapist, the violent aggressor whose behaviour ‘draws attention to the fragility’ of the law and life ––whether human or nonhuman––who is abject. Male violence is central to many Feminist New Wave films: The Nightingale, The Handmaid’s Tale, Promising Young Woman, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, Under the Skin, Mad Max: Fury Road (George Miller 2015), Revenge (Coralie Fargeat, 2017), Spoor (Agnieszka, Holland, 2018), Teeth (Mitchell Lichtenstein 2007), and The Dark (Justin P. Lange, 2018).
Revolt, however, is not necessarily abject. Kristeva states: ‘He who denies morality is not abject; there can be grandeur in amorality and even in crime that flaunts its disrespect for the law—rebellious, liberating, and suicidal crime’. (1982, p. 4) Kristeva has written (albeit briefly) about revolt in Powers of Horror. ‘In abjection, revolt is completely within being . . . the subject of abjection is eminently productive of culture’. (1982, p. 45) Kristeva sees such revolt as bound up with the collapse of boundaries between inside and outside. ‘There looms, within abjection, one of those violent, dark revolts of being, directed against a threat that seems to emanate from an exorbitant outside or inside’. (1982, p. 1) In Feminist New Wave horror, the monstrous-feminine has become a figure of radical abjection whose ultimate goal is to undermine the male symbolic order, in order to create a new language of her own. ‘Radical abjection is on the side of disruption, difference and heterogeneity’. (Creed. 2024. p.191)
I am using a new concept –– radical abjection –– to describe this challenge. Radical abjection signifies what takes place when woman realizes that her so-called abjection, which patriarchal ideology attaches to her feminine, sexual, and reproductive roles, is a myth, and she turns these roles around in an act of defiance and revolt. . . . Radical abjection in the horror films discussed here describes her desire to transgress boundaries, to weaponize her nonhuman identity, to defy the law. She is human and nonhuman, alien and other, familiar, and unfamiliar. (Creed, 2024. p 189)
Rage in Feminist New Wave Horror
Various directors speak of the importance of woman’s rage in narratives of horror. In discussing The Nightingale, Jennifer Kent states how crucial it is to feel one’s rage: ‘And I think a lot of rage comes from disrespect of the power of the feminine … We’re incredibly powerful beings. Don’t mess with us’. (2019)
Coralie Fargeat says of Revenge, that she wanted to focus on the heroine’s ‘transformation scene’ and her cathartic release of ‘fury and anger’ (2021). The Babadook examines the nature of maternal rage against the conformist, judgemental society in which the mother lives with her young son. The Handmaid’s Tale (season 4) depicts the women, whose subjugation and brutalisation is transformed into rage, as they fall on the Commander, and beat him to death. In Trouble Every Day, the rage of the female cannibal is violently released when she attacks her male victims in a fruitless desire to quench her appetite for blood. In discussing her films, Claire Denis (2013) says in an article entitled ‘Anger is Part of My Relation to the World’ that she is not always aware of her anger, but she knows it relates to the fact that ‘We’re in a world that is hard and violent.’ Holland sees Spoor as ‘a revenge story, and Duszejko is an avenger’. ‘This is the story of the anger growing in those who are voiceless and powerless, which is quite a universal story today actually’ (Holland, 2018). Furiosa from the Mad Max films, is, as her name indicates, one of the ‘Furies’, who in ancient myth were the three chthonic/underworld goddesses of vengeance who punished men for crimes against the natural order.
Directors link the rage of the monstrous-feminine to her subjugation in a patriarchal world. They see the expression of rage as a legitimate way of finding their voice. They move through Kristeva’s perilous regions––loss, anguish, horror––in their revolt and desire for change and transformation. In some films, the monstrous-feminine desires to destroy everything. As the eponymous heroine of Ginger Snaps, who is becoming a lyncathrope, says: ‘I’ve got this ache. I thought it was for sex, but what I really want is to tear everything to fucking pieces.’ In films such as these, the monstrous-feminine is essentially a terrorist. In discussing Titane, whose heroine is driven by rage, Ducournau (2021a) explains that audiences often find it uncomfortable when a woman expresses rage and that this needs to change. In many films, the heroine’s rage is closely aligned to radical abjection, that is, a form of abjection that leads to revolt and transformation. This is particularly pronounced in films in which the monstrous-feminine is nonhuman. ‘She is not a passive figure to whom monstrous things happen but an active terrifying rebel who draws on her nonhumanness to assist her in her revenge against a misogynistic patriarchal order. . . . [She] embraces abjection through the power of the nonhuman, in an act of radical abjection, expressed through the protagonist’s uncanny human-animal body’. (Creed 2024 p. 201)
Part 2: The Nonhuman Turn in Feminist New Wave Horror
In his edited volume, The Nonhuman Turn (2015), Richard Grusin argues––along with others before him––that ‘we have never been human’. In other words the ‘human’ is a fiction designed to define us as an exceptional species that has nothing in common with other species, which are seen as inferior or lower forms of life. Haraway, a biologist, also uses the phrase, ‘we have never been human’, in a biological context: ‘I love the fact that the human genomes can be found in only about 10 percent of all the cells that occupy the mundane space I call my body; the other 90 percent of the cells are filled with the genomes of bacteria, fungi, protists, and such . . . ’ (2008, pp. 3-4). Grusin states that the aim of nonhuman theory, is to decenter the human, to undermine anthropocentrism, and to question exactly what it is to be ‘human’. ‘The nonhuman turn more generally, is engaged in decentering the human in favour of a turn towards and concern for the nonhuman, understood variously in terms of animals, affectivity, bodies, organic and geophysical systems, materiality, or technologies’. (Grusin, 2015, p. vii)
He states that ‘the human has always coevolved, coexisted, or collaborated with the nonhuman–and that the human is characterized precisely by this indistinction from the nonhuman.’ (pp. ix-x) Anthropocentric discourse refutes this interrelationship. Feminist New Wave filmmakers and script writers accentuate this connection, this ‘indistinction’ between human and nonhuman. Grusin argues that the ‘nonhuman turn’ is motivated by a belief that the major crises of the twenty-first century––global warming, diminishing food supplies, species extinction––‘entails engagements with nonhumans’ (ibid., vii) but the latter are not considered in these crises because they are not ‘subjects’, not regarded as being able to have a dialogue of any kind with the so-called superior ‘human’. It is the unsustainable belief that the human species is exceptional, in relation to all others, that is the issue, Grusin states. Arguably, anthropocentric ways of thinking and being are central to the current crises the planet faces. Ian James (2019) states that we need to rethink all human relations with the nonhuman and start again; this is what he terms ‘the nonhuman demand’. At one point in Ginger Snaps, the eponymous heroine who is both human and nonhuman, neither fully one nor the other, demands to know what she is. Her cry ‘But what am I?’ is resonates throughout the narrative.
Films which feature nonhuman protagonists and/or focus on nonhuman issues include Ginger Snaps (John Fawcett, 2000), Teeth (Mitchell Lichtenstein 2007), The Lure (Agnieszka Smoczyńska, 2014), Evolution (Lucile Hadžihalilović, 2015), The Girl with All the Gifts (Colm McCarthy, 2016), Little Joe (Jessica Hausner, 2019), Atlantics (Mati Diop, 2019) which won the Cannes Grand Prix in 2019, and Titane (Julia Ducournau, 2021), which won the prestigious Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2021. These films all draw upon the power of radical abjection –– made more powerful because of the nonhuman nature of the main protagonist.
The monstrous-feminine as nonhuman asks the spectator to identify with her otherness in films that explore the meaning of the nonhuman in an anthropocentric world. She undermines the anthropocentric view that man is a discrete, self-sustaining being who does not exist in a relationship of interdependence with others and with the nonhuman. Woman-wolf, vampire, zombie, demon, mermaid, dentata, human/animal hybrid, troll, chimera –– the monstrous-feminine assumes an exciting range of nonhuman faces in Feminist New Wave cinema: Nonhuman forms also open up narrative forms to experimentation and new directions.
The nonhuman body offers endless possibilities. As Margaret Shildrick explains: ‘. . . the confused and essentially fluid corporeality of monsters, makes them an ideal location for an enquiry into the closure of both subjects and bodies that characterizes modernist philosophical discourse. As I have suggested elsewhere the issue ‘is one of leaky boundaries, wherein the leakiness of the logos . . . is mirrored by the collapse of the human itself as a bounded being’. (Shildrick, 2020, p. 303)
In horror, the monstrous-feminine as nonhuman decentres the human through her hybrid body and the blurring of bodily boundaries. Bodies with indistinct ‘leaky boundaries’ can undermine notions of fixed, coherent, bodily forms that are basic to patriarchal ways of thinking and seeing. In drawing upon woman’s body, already condemned as abject because of its unstable nature, contemporary horror raises questions in relation to ‘the leakiness of the logos’––and the meaning of the ‘human’ in phallocentric discourse. These films question the representation of woman’s body in classical horror (Carrie, The Exorcist, The Brood) as abject, in a misogynistic sense, and hence monstrous, by opening up the relationship between the abject, revolt and social and cultural change.
Abjection and the 'The. Vitality of Matter'
A number of films explore the power of nonhuman forces, or what Jane Bennett calls ‘the vitality of matter’ (Bennett, p. 120). Atlantics focuses on the ocean, Border on the forest and its myriad of creatures, Evolution on the restless sea, Titane on shiny eroticised cars, Little Joe on a laboratory-created happy plant, The Girl with All the Gifts on a tower of seed pods, Annihilation on an alien force called ‘the shimmer’ and Under the Skin on a man-eating pool, watery depths and otherness. The protagonists of these films are depicted as living ‘no longer above or outside a nonhuman “environment”’ (Bennett, p. 120). Rather, they interact with that environment which also defines them. The nonhuman turn in horror explores, through the monstrous-feminine, the way in which, through ‘the vitality of matter’, a range of life-forms encounter each other, the way they connect and interconnect. A close reading of these films reveals that elements and related constituents such as water (rivers, seas, oceans), earth (forests, mountains, caves, plains, deserts) air (atmosphere, gases, vapour), and fire (heat, flames, smoke) play key parts in a range of films, connecting the monstrous-feminine to the nonhuman environment as she enters on her journey into abjection.
A vital material element shared by many films is water; its symbolism suggests fluidity, unpredictability and volatility. Water of course also signifies the unconscious as a subterranean state where horrific apparitions might suddenly emerge –– water brings to life Bennett’s ‘vitality of matter’. The female protagonist’s journey into abjection is not unlike a journey into the depths of the unconscious. Many forms of the monstrous-feminine are associated with water, lakes, seas and oceans. The eponymous supernatural lesbian of Thelma commits patricide by telekinetically causing her murderous father to self-combust as he sits in his boat on the lake from her childhood in which her baby brother drowned, trapped beneath the frozen ice; by the end when Thelma is finally free the lake is brimming with life. The monstrous protagonist of Teeth castrates a sexually aggressive male with her hidden vagina dentata when he assault her at an isolated swimming lake. The eponymous heroine of Jennifer’s Body is murdered by a boy band in a sacrificial ritual at Devil’s Kettle, a mysterious waterfall with two streams one of which disappears into the rocks. Because Jennifer is not the virgin the boys believed she was, she returns as a cannibalistic demon to wreak revenge on the male population–– becoming the monstrous-feminine of Devil’s Kettle! The Alien femme fatale of Under the Skin (Jonathan Glazer 2013) eviscerates her male victims in an eerie black pool which could be in her mind or in a surreal dimension which she has created. The men blindly follow her into the viscous fluid as if under a spell where naked, they hang suspended like human puppets awaiting their inevitable fate.
Seas which are smaller than an ocean form where the ocean meets the land. Oceans are vast bodies of water which suggest the infinite. The ocean is a particularly powerful force, signifying both tumultuousness and calmness, a boundless space, a symbol of endlessness and the possibility of hope for new life and a better future. It is central to the narrative of several key films in which the monstrous-feminine seeks change and rebirth. Drawing on a number of generic forms, The Lure (Agnieszka Smoczyńska, 2015) is a surreal horror musical about monstrous mermaids called Silver and Gold. The cannibalistic mermaids, sisters, swim from sea to land transforming from nonhuman to human, and back again, when water is poured over their tails and/or legs. Their tails are long and heavy and sport a line of sharp spines. Once on shore the mermaids find work singing and dancing in a popular local nightclub where they search out male victims. Atlantics (Mati Diop, 2019) recounts a story of young men who set out to cross the Atlantic ocean, looking for a better life, and who are drowned and reborn as radicalised female zombies––in the bodies of their female partners–– seeking revenge on their exploitative employer who withholds their wages. Repeated scenes of the restless oceanic waters create the ocean itself as a key force, an actant in her own right. In Evolution (Lucile Hadžihalilović, 2015), which merges science fiction with horror and the surreal, a group of monstrous fish-women experiment with the creation of new life forms which they grow in the stomachs of young boys –– ostensibly their own sons although it is possible they have been kidnapped. The boys are kept in tanks during their ordeal, with babies floating beside them. The women who have a line of suckers running down their backs engage in strange rituals at night by the sea-shore. Evolution explores different connections between female monstrosity, the sea, birth, death and evolution.
Water offers a potentially powerful form of abjection because it threatens the foundations and formation of the symbolic order; it is in constant movement, erasing boundaries, rising and falling, flowing, eroding banks, surging over coastal embankments, sucking rocks, shifting sand, causing people to lose their footing. Like the sirens and lorelei of classical myth, the monstrous-feminine is perfectly at home in/near water, rivers, oceans. Her journey into abjection is symbolised by the presence of watery depths, creating a visible reference to the unconscious and its powers to erode invisible boundaries and borders. Water is an essential element in her transformational journey into abjection, and her undermining of the patriarchal symbolic order. Lakes, oceans and seas reinforce her quest for change, growth, and a new life. They also signify the death of the old order.
The passage of the monstrous-feminine into nonhumanness, into deep waters, forests and deserts, into spaces characterised by Shildrick’s ‘leaky boundaries’, invites the spectator to question the very basis of anthropocentrism and the formation of patriarchal law and language. It also, most importantly, asks us to consider seriously the proposition: ‘We have never been human’. This perspective helps to explain the power of the scene in Splice in which Dren, the human/nonhuman creature is depicted as a modern-day sphinx – an ancient figure of the monstrous-feminine who posed a riddle about the nature of the human. Dren similarly possesses wings, a tail, animal feet and the face of a woman. Her mystery is not a question about what it means to be human, but a more ancient riddle, one which we ignore at our peril. Dren a modern Sphinx, asks: Have we ever been human?
Coming of Age: The Montrous-Feminine as Virginal Denata
In a number of coming-of-age horror films (see the second edition, pp 201-212) the female protagonist transforms into something monstrous and nonhuman. I have used the term ‘virginal dentata’ to describe these protagonists on the brink of womanhood because their dominant desire is literally to tear holes in the fabric of patriarchal society. In each film, her weapon is a set of deadly teeth. The eponymous heroine of Ginger Snaps (John Fawcett, script Karen Walton 2000) who is rebelling against her female destiny in small-town America, transforms into a lycanthrope with a hunger for male flesh; Dawn from Teeth (Mitchell Lichtenstein, advisor Camille Paglia 2007), is a devoted member of her local chastity club when she discovers she has a mythical ‘vagina dentata’ or ‘toothed vagina’ with which she castrates sexual predators when they cross the threshold uninvited; and the eponymous heroine of Jennifer’s Body after being murdered by members of a hippie boy band, in a sexualised ritual, transforms into a cannibalistic man-eating demon seeking revenge on all men. The monstrous-feminine figures of Ginger Snaps and Jennifer’s Body both express rage at the misogynistic, male dominated world in which they are forced to live. The heroine of Teeth appears initially to adopt a more measured view of male sexual predators until we see that she is actually motivated by a cold fury that inspires her to take up a new role as a female vigilante, embarking on an actual journey, hunting unsuspecting violent men on the road. The coming of age, horror film becomes a road movie tinged with dark comedy.
What forms of pleasure do these Feminist New Wave horror films extend to the viewer? Female critics report how agreeable it is to identify with a powerful––even alien–– woman who is happy to use violence on sexual predators. Nonhumanness, it seems, adds to her appeal. Kjerstin Johnson (2014) explains in her analysis of Under the Skin that she experiences the deadly female Alien’s move into becoming a ‘human woman [as] uncomfortably familiar’ but her embodiment of a human femme fatale as ‘deliciously powerful’. The female alien of Under the Skin is doubly nonhuman; she is both nonhuman (an alien) and a femme fatale traditionally described in the literature as a predatory, animalistic, monstrous creature.
Each of these nonhuman forms of the monstrous-feminine possesses a strange, uncanny human/nonhuman body that destabilised the myth of ‘human’ bodily integrity. She no longer possesses a ‘mutilated’ body, that invokes the male monster’s ‘freakish difference’–– as Linda Williams (1984) argued in relation to classic horror films; she is her own monster, a figure of radical abjection in control of her own image as the monstrous other of horror. Her new role fills her with pleasure. Horror has always drawn on the figure of the (usually) male monster to ask philosophical questions about what it means to be human but Feminist New Wave films explore this question outside philosophy or ‘abstract reasoning’. They question from the inside, from the unconscious, from the depths of the body of the monstrous-feminine, from an intimate position of becoming, of becoming ‘something else’.
The Montrous-Feminine as Uncanny Creatrix
The uncanny power of the monstrous-feminine to birth strange new forms of life is central to many Feminist New Wave films (see second edition, pp 214-225). Directors such as Jessica Hausner (Little Joe), Julia Ducournau (Titane) and Vincenzo Natali (Splice) speak of their films as reworkings of the Frankensteinian story, of the female protagonist as a female Frankenstein, but with a difference. The latter is particularly central to Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things (2023). The heroine Bella (Emma Stone) attacks her husband, who is planning to give her a clitoridectomy, and re-births him as a goat. Played by Emma Stone, Bella is ‘created’ by Godwin Baxter, a Frankensteinian figure, who comes across a pregnant suicide victim and reanimates her with the brain of her foetus. Bella, who must learn to become an adult woman, as she travels through Europe, makes a fool of all the men she meets. When Godwin dies, she takes his place –– a female Frankenstein with a wicked creative flair, endowing her nasty, misogynistic husband with a goat’s brain who is left to graze happily in Bella’s Garden of Eden.
These films about the monstrous-feminine construct new narratives of origin. She gives creates/births uncanny life-forms which include a zombie plant, baby troll, giant egg, human-plant sculptures, car baby and flash drive in Scarlett Johansson’s Lucy (Besson, 2014). These strange nonhuman beings question the idea of what constitutes a ‘normal’ birth. The monstrous-feminine as creatrix engages directly with her nonhumanness, her radical abjection to undermine phallocentric beliefs as to what constitutes motherhood. These films include Splice, Evolution, Little Joe, Titane, Prevenge (Alice Lowe, 2016), Lamb (Valdimar Jóhannsson, 2022); and Hatching (Hanna Bergholm, 2022). Feminist New Wave horror offers a perfect form with which to explore the monstrous-feminine as creatrix––a mythical being determined to challenge patriarchal beliefs and norms.
Female rage and appetite are central to Julia Ducournau’s Titane, which won the prestigious Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2021. Titane explores the horrors of family life, childhood, sexual desire, pregnancy and birth. It draws on classical myth, and several interconnected genres: body horror, science fiction, the sexual thriller and family drama. The psychopathic heroine, Alexia (Agathe Rousselle), is unstoppable, a serial-killer on the run. She appears human yet nonhuman, an uncanny monster in that as a child, after an accident in the family car, she had a titanium prosthetic section attached to her head which she accentuates by shaving her hair. Her preferred weapon is a long shiny sharp hairpin she tucks into the back of her hair. She murders her victims without a second thought. When her parent’s house catches fire, she locks them in their bedroom and leaves. Her violence is so casual and excessive, she seems inhuman in a moral sense –– yet female spectators love her. Her target is everything that is a ‘human’ construct: ethics, gender boundaries, normality.
As an adult Alexia becomes an erotic dancer at luxury car shows, dancing and writhing on top of the glossy bonnet, while all the time controlling the gaze of the male spectators. Relatively uninterested in human sex, she prefers the nonhuman ––flesh on metal. Her fascination with cars is surreal and fetishistic.. One night she has a highly eroticised sexual encounter with one of the cars, a Cadillac, decorated with yellow licking flames, with which she shares titanium body parts. She becomes pregnant and bleeds sump oil from her vagina and breasts. A monstrous mother, she doesn’t want this ‘infant’ and tries to bring on a miscarriage, tearing at her skin to discover a titanium uterus. She gives birth to a titanium car-baby (of no fixed sex) which is human and nonhuman. Her pregnancy is monstrous in that she experiences everything negative about pregnancies–– an unwanted conception, an alien inside, excruciating pain. But she will endure the nightmare just the same.
Alexia is filled with rage. She is angry, vengeful, and violent. She does what she wants, untrammelled by restrictions imposed by human morality, or ethics. After engaging in a bloody but comic killing spree at the house party, she is forced to flee the city, initiating a new chapter in her strange life. When she decides to disguise herself as a boy to avoid detection, she takes her body, batters, and re-shapes it –– taping down her breasts and even breaking her nose in a particularly gruesome scene. She is taken in by Vincent Legrand, an ageing fire chief, who is haunted by the disappearance of his son, Adrien, a decade ago. Convinced Alexia is his long-lost son, Vincent cares for her as if she were his own, even giving her a position in his firefighting team of young men. Ducournau includes arresting panoramic scenes of the firemen at work, scenes which transform the earth into a burning hell which match Alexia’s emotional state. A strong bond develops between her and the fire chief. When Vincent invertedly sees her breasts, he nonetheless remains committed to his delusion. Offering her unconditional love, he says, ‘Whoever you are, you are my son!’.
As in David Cronenberg’s oeuvre, flesh and metal become one. When Alexia is about to give birth, she entreats Vincent to help. Vincent assists with the monstrous birth, taking the newborn––also part flesh and part titanium––in his arms and repeatedly saying: ‘I’m here’. Alexia dies when with her final attempt to push out the infant, killing her, as the baby emerges. Alexia’s journey into abjection is uniquely female –– a journey from conception to pregnancy and birth but an abject monstrous journey in which her body is in full revolt losing any semblance of coherent form.
Titane of course is not meant to be interpreted literally; rather it offers a new mythology for a new age in which human and nonhuman merge to create a new form of life for a planet which resembles hell. Ducournau explains: ‘The idea was to create a new humanity that is strong because it’s monstrous — and not the other way around. Monstrosity, for me, is always positive. It’s about debunking all the normative ways of society and social life’.(Ducournau 2021b). Alexia’s journey into a dark underworld of pregnancy and birth––Atwood’s ‘subterranean depths’––is personal and intimate; it is one from which she does not return.
Ducournau is focused on classical myths. Ancient gods frequently gave birth to future gods and goddesses. Immortal Zeus gave birth to Athena, from his head, which was split open for the birth; she emerged fully grown wearing a full suit of armour. Gaia and Uranus gave birth the Titans and Cyclopes. Leda who mated with Zeus disguised as a swan gave birth to two eggs from which hatched Helen (the beautiful ‘Helen of Troy’), Clytemnestra and Castor and Pollux. The birth of Ducournau’s car baby, born from her copulation with an exotic Cadillac, and inheriting its mother’s blend of flesh and titanium, is befitting of the ancient tales of the birth of gods and goddesses. In the Christian tradition, birth is also an unusual affair; the Virgin Mary is asexually impregnated by the Holy Spirit and she gives birth to the son of God who is later sacrificed to save humanity. Although giving birth, Mary remained a virgin, her hymen intact. She ascends into the clouds where she becomes the Queen of Heaven, a sky goddess, robed in blue.
Ducournau is particularly interested in the Titans who were the children of Gaea (Earth) and Uranus (Heaven). There were 12 original Titans. According to Ducournau (2021d) the Titans did not reproduce in the normal way and possessed ‘blurred’ genders. Alexia is not intended as a ‘human’ figure. She represents a new female god for a new age. In an interview, Ducournau explains: ‘My character is not real, you realize that? … All this is logical in the narrative and in the world I created. I mean, we are talking about someone who’s impregnated by a car’. (Ducournau 2021 c)
Ducournau states that the baby could be of any sex. Ducournau believes that female filmmakers express violence differently from men. She argues that male directors represent violence as ‘something that comes from the outside which attacks you’. ‘I think there is a violence that is very specific to female filmmakers, as far as horror is concerned – a violence that is inside, not a violence you have to fight, a violence you have to handle within yourself. This inside-outside thing makes the whole difference’. (Ducournau 2021a)
In other words, her revolt, her experience of abjection is an inner, personal one. ‘Radical abjection works against anthropocentrism as it exposes the nonhumanness of the human––never more so than in Ducournau’s strange mythical world where a titanium baby of no fixed gender heralds a new generation. In tracing Alexia’s journey, Ducournau has created a violent face of the monstrous-feminine and questioned a series of entrenched patriarchal norms – masculine car culture, the naturalness of gender, human exceptionalism and the myths of pregnant bliss and romantic love’. (Creed, 2024, 239) Alexia, as with all the female protagonists of these Feminist New Wave films is a transformational figure. She rejects patriarchal myths of heterosexual romance and motherhood as ‘normal’, preferring to create her own journey. The film’s queerness is stylistic and expressed through Alexia’s strange union with her car, her darkly comic killing spree, and erotic dance sequences. Ducournau asks what it means to be a woman in a patriarchal world, and to be nonhuman in a ‘human’ world. Central to Alexia’s violent journey into abjection are her repeated attempts to destroy meaning by attacking, battering and destroying her own culturally feminised body. True to the Titans of myth and legend, Alexia transforms her femininity into something more sexually ambiguous and nonhuman. It is significant that Ducournau’s film explores new myths for a new age and that she chooses the figure of the monstrous-feminine to represent the future.
With her appetite for justice and blood, the monstrous-feminine of Feminist New Wave cinema tears though all traditional myths about desire, love and relationships creating a new narrative of her own. By accepting the mantle of monstrousness she has inherited from her female forebears, she discovers she has nothing to lose. In a waning patriarchal world, marked by radical abjection where boundaries dissolve, definitions are emptied of meaning, and flesh and metal become one, anything is possible.
The above paper is an edited (and slightly longer) version of the keynote address I presented, at the Cine-Excess Conference (2023), on abjection and the monstrous-feminine in Feminist New Wave horror. The goal of this talk was to explain the thesis of my new books: Return of the Monstrous-Feminine: Feminist New Wave Cinema (Routledge, 2022) and the new section of the 2nd edition of The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (Routledge 2024) which explores current debates on the nonhuman, posing the crucial question: Have we ever been human?
References
Atwood, M. (1994) “Spotty-Handed Villainesses” Speech. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jUfa2A4qUyI
Bennett, J. (2010) Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke University Press.
Creed, B. (2022) Return of the Monstrous-Feminine: Feminist New Wave Cinema. London and New York: Routledge.
Creed, B. (2024) The Monstrous-Feminine: Film Feminism, Psychoanalysis. 2nd ed. London and New York: Routledge.
Denis, C. (2013) ‘“Anger is part of my relation to the world”: An Interview with Claire Denis.’ Interview by Kiva Reardon. Cleo: a journal of film and feminism. November 28, 2013. https://cleojournal.com/2013/11/28/anger-is-part-of-my-relation-to-the-world-an-interview-with-claire-denis/.
Derrida, J. (1991) ‘“Eating Well,” or the Calculation of the Subject: An Interview with Jacques Derrida.’ In: Cadava, E. Connor, P. and Nancy J-L. (eds)., Who Comes After the Subject? New York: Routledge. 96-119.
Ducournau, J. (2021a) ‘Film-Maker Julia Ducournau: “Women kicked serious ass this year.”’ Interview by Jonathan Romney. The Guardian, November 22, 2021. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2021/nov/21/julia-ducournau-titane-interview-raw
Ducournau, J. (2021b) ‘Titane.’ Interview by Eric Kohn. IndieWire, July 17, 2021. https://www.indiewire.com/2021/07/julia-ducournau-interview-palme-dor-titane-1234652010/
Ducournau, J. (2021c) ‘Titane director reveals how she made a ‘monstrous’ metal car baby via car sex.’ Interview by Joey Nolfi. Entertainment. October 8, 2021.
https://ca.movies.yahoo.com/news/titane-director-reveals-she-made-130000042.html
Ducournau, J. (2021d) ‘Julia Ducournau: “I didn’t see anyone faint or throw up.”’ Interview by David Mouriquand. Xberliner, October 7, 2021. https://www.exberliner.com/film/julia-ducournau-interview-titane/
Fargeat, C. (2021) ‘“I Wanted To Use Violence in Excess”: How Women Filmmakers Reclaimed the Revenge Movie.’ Interview by Annabel Nugent. Independent, April 27 2021. https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/features/revenge-films-promising-young-woman-b1836483.html.
Fennell, E. (2021) ‘Promising Young Woman Grabs Rape Culture by the Balls.’ Interview by Jessica Baxter. Hammer to Nail, March 14, 2021. https://www.hammertonail.com/interviews/promising-young-woman-zoom/.
Grusin, R. (2015) ‘Introduction’, In: Grusin R. ed., The Nonhuman Turn. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, vii-xxix.
Haraway, Donna J. (2008) When Species Meet. Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota.
Holland, A. (2018) ‘An Interview with Spoor Director Agnieszka Holland.’ Interview by
Cynthia Biret. Riot Material, January 16, 2018. https://www.riotmaterial.com/interview-with-spoor-director-agnieszka-holland/.
James, I. (2019) ‘The Nonhuman Demand’, Paragraph 42.1: 6-21
Johnson, K. (2014) ‘The Two Halves of “Under the Skin.”’ Bitch Media, June 9, 2014. https://www.bitchmedia.org/post/under-the-skin-review-feminism-scarlett-johansson.
Kent, J. (2019) ‘Jennifer Kent Doesn't Think The Nightingale is a Rape-Revenge Story.’ Interview by Rachel Handler. Vulture, August 1, 2019. https://www.vulture.com/2019/08/the-babadooks-jennifer-kent-on-the-nightingale.html.
Kristeva, J. (1982) Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press.
Shildrick, M. (2020) ‘The Self’s Clean and Proper Body’, In: Weinstock, J.A., (ed)., The Monster Theory Reader, Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 303-329.
Williams, L. (1984) ‘When the Woman Looks’, in Re-Vision, Los Angeles: University Publications of America, 67-82.
References
Atwood, M. (1994) “Spotty-Handed Villainesses” Speech. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jUfa2A4qUyI
Bennett, J. (2010) Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke University Press.
Creed, B. (2022) Return of the Monstrous-Feminine: Feminist New Wave Cinema. London and New York: Routledge.
Creed, B. (2024) The Monstrous-Feminine: Film Feminism, Psychoanalysis. 2nd ed. London and New York: Routledge.
Denis, C. (2013) ‘“Anger is part of my relation to the world”: An Interview with Claire Denis.’ Interview by Kiva Reardon. Cleo: a journal of film and feminism. November 28, 2013. https://cleojournal.com/2013/11/28/anger-is-part-of-my-relation-to-the-world-an-interview-with-claire-denis/.
Derrida, J. (1991) ‘“Eating Well,” or the Calculation of the Subject: An Interview with Jacques Derrida.’ In: Cadava, E. Connor, P. and Nancy J-L. (eds)., Who Comes After the Subject? New York: Routledge. 96-119.
Ducournau, J. (2021a) ‘Film-Maker Julia Ducournau: “Women kicked serious ass this year.”’ Interview by Jonathan Romney. The Guardian, November 22, 2021. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2021/nov/21/julia-ducournau-titane-interview-raw
Ducournau, J. (2021b) ‘Titane.’ Interview by Eric Kohn. IndieWire, July 17, 2021. https://www.indiewire.com/2021/07/julia-ducournau-interview-palme-dor-titane-1234652010/
Ducournau, J. (2021c) ‘Titane director reveals how she made a ‘monstrous’ metal car baby via car sex.’ Interview by Joey Nolfi. Entertainment. October 8, 2021.
https://ca.movies.yahoo.com/news/titane-director-reveals-she-made-130000042.html
Ducournau, J. (2021d) ‘Julia Ducournau: “I didn’t see anyone faint or throw up.”’ Interview by David Mouriquand. Xberliner, October 7, 2021. https://www.exberliner.com/film/julia-ducournau-interview-titane/
Fargeat, C. (2021) ‘“I Wanted To Use Violence in Excess”: How Women Filmmakers Reclaimed the Revenge Movie.’ Interview by Annabel Nugent. Independent, April 27 2021. https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/features/revenge-films-promising-young-woman-b1836483.html.
Fennell, E. (2021) ‘Promising Young Woman Grabs Rape Culture by the Balls.’ Interview by Jessica Baxter. Hammer to Nail, March 14, 2021. https://www.hammertonail.com/interviews/promising-young-woman-zoom/.
Grusin, R. (2015) ‘Introduction’, In: Grusin R. ed., The Nonhuman Turn. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, vii-xxix.
Haraway, Donna J. (2008) When Species Meet. Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota.
Holland, A. (2018) ‘An Interview with Spoor Director Agnieszka Holland.’ Interview by
Cynthia Biret. Riot Material, January 16, 2018. https://www.riotmaterial.com/interview-with-spoor-director-agnieszka-holland/.
James, I. (2019) ‘The Nonhuman Demand’, Paragraph 42.1: 6-21
Johnson, K. (2014) ‘The Two Halves of “Under the Skin.”’ Bitch Media, June 9, 2014. https://www.bitchmedia.org/post/under-the-skin-review-feminism-scarlett-johansson.
Kent, J. (2019) ‘Jennifer Kent Doesn't Think The Nightingale is a Rape-Revenge Story.’ Interview by Rachel Handler. Vulture, August 1, 2019. https://www.vulture.com/2019/08/the-babadooks-jennifer-kent-on-the-nightingale.html.
Kristeva, J. (1982) Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press.
Shildrick, M. (2020) ‘The Self’s Clean and Proper Body’, In: Weinstock, J.A., (ed)., The Monster Theory Reader, Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 303-329.
Williams, L. (1984) ‘When the Woman Looks’, in Re-Vision, Los Angeles: University Publications of America, 67-82.