Tag: halloween

wormwatson:

The Horror of Growing-Up Female: Top 10 Female-led Films to Watch during Halloween

“Barbara Creed starts her groundbreaking book The Monstrous-Feminine by quoting Freud: “All human societies have a conception of the monstrous-feminine, of what it is about woman that is shocking, terrifying, horrific, abject.” The core of her research lies in unveiling the details of what makes a woman monstrous and the underlying fears that structure them, and discovers that the central male fear is that of being castrated, emasculated by a more powerful woman. The horror genre has, throughout its history, explored the construction of the monstrous-feminine, particularly through those characters who teeter between girlhood and womanhood. There is a notion of chaos and uncontrollability attached to female adolescence; with it comes a feeling of being untethered and set adrift. This is a list of films concerned, in one way or another, with the experience of growing up female–the horror of not knowing your own body, of losing control, of being objectified–and the ways some women struggle with the newness of these experiences through often monstrous transformations. But at the heart of these films there’s also a masked fear of what these young women can and might do, a fear of their unknowability–a fear that if, for once, they possess the power that patriarchal expectations have wielded over them, they might just destroy everything.”