We’ll explore the monstrous-feminine through six folkloric examples: the mother, the witch, the mermaid, the werewolf, the vampire and the undead bride. Creed uses the expression "monstrous feminine" because it accentuates the significance of gender in relation to the construction of monstrosity.

These cookies help provide information on metrics the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc. Creed refrains from using the term "female monster" as it suggests a mere "role reversal of the ‘male monster". In Phallic Panic: Film, Horror and the Primal Uncanny, [5] Barbara Creed reflects on the representation of men in the horror genre, with a specific focus on how they are portrayed in comparison to women. She includes a definition of "Matrix" in the book's introduction, which she describes as a, " womb; place in which thing is developed", which closely relates to her discussion of the monstrous feminine.This book is sometimes hard to read, and the concepts of psychoanlaysis that she draws on are often dubious.

The Monstrous-Feminine is a brilliant book and I would definitely recommend to anyone interested in a unique portrayal of gender in horror film. In her profoundly original analysis of horror films, Creed upended a concept emanating from psychoanalysis, traditionally perceived as scaffolding supporting patriarchy, to demonstrate how women could be seen as the agents of abjection rather than as its passive victims.This opening session traces the history of monstrous women, through the gorgons and sirens of Greek mythology to Early Modern witch hunts and 21st-century media narratives, before turning to two enduring archetypes: the witch and the mother. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. The idea of castration is derived from Freud's concepts of sexual difference, believing that women are substantially different from men, and that all women desire to be a man or masculine-like, suffering from a penis-envy.

Her argument that man fears woman as castrator , rather than as castrated , questions not only Freudian theories of sexual difference but existing theories of spectatorship and fetishism, providing a provocative re-reading of classical and contemporary film and theoretical texts. Creed asserts that there are a variety of different appearances of the monstrous feminine which all reflect female sexuality: archaic mother, monstrous womb, vampire, possessed monster, witch, and castrating mother. Barbara Creed's ‘ Media Matrix: Sexing the New Reality’ [15] explores the impact of media and technology on subjects such as the self, identity, sexuality and representation in the public sphere. Sigmund Freud's works on psychoanalysis theorizes that women once had penises, and are themselves castrated, resulting in the formation of female genitalia, and due to this "penis envy", seek to castrate men of their penises to make them as lacking as women.Barbara Creed's The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (1993) [4] investigates the types of monsters that women are portrayed as in horror films, particularly examining archaic mothers, and mythological adaption's of characters. Creed’s argument contests Freudian and Lacanian theories of sexual difference to offer a provocative rereading of classical and contemporary horror.

Primarily, Barbara Creed's works focus on the horror genre, and the impact of patriarchal ideologies upon the genre. In this final session, we stay with the maiden on the cusp of marriage, as betrayed brides and possessed women seek out supernatural revenge. Creed argues that the monstrous feminine horrifies her audience through her sexuality, as she is either constructed as a virgin or a whore.

Women in horror films have been consistently represented and portrayed as weak, submissive, and highly sexualized. The ‘primal uncanny’, as Creed looks at, was firstly discussed in Freud's work as just the ‘uncanny’ that linked to ideas of psychoanalysis and castration.