feministfilm:

For readings on the correlation in horror between puberty and the monstrous, see:

• Barbara Creed’s The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism and Psychoanalysis (specifically, the chapter called “Woman As Possessed Monster”)
• Aviva Briefel’s “Monster Pains: Masochism, Menstruation, and Identification in Horror Film”
• “‘The Hair That Wasn’t There Before’: Demystifying Monstrosity and Menstruation in Ginger Snaps and Ginger Snaps Unleashed”
• Bianca Nielson’s “Something’s Wrong, Like More Than You Being Female”: Transgressive Sexuality and Discourses of Reproduction in Ginger Snaps”
• Shelley Stamp Lindsey’s “Horror, Femininity, and Carrie’s Monstrous Puberty”

I will add Carol Clover’s Men, Women, and Chain Saws here, although she’s concerned more with identification, monstrous-feminine as men’s horror, and the maternal aspects of possession tales (including a section on possession as oral penetration). Although both Creed and Clover are important feminist horror theorists who work in Psychoanalytical lenses, Barbara Creed talks more about transformation than Carol Clover does. And transformation is key to horror movies about how women are terrifying.

For variations on a theme, watch Ginger Snaps, Carrie, and Teeth together.

(Bonus: here is Kristeva’s Powers of Horror: an Essay on Abjection for free online)

“Just because we can say the room represents the womb and Jane’s fear of Uncle Reed’s ghost “penetrating” the room is her obvious fear of male genitals and some other Freudian mumbo-jumbo doesn’t mean we should.” —Jayson Greene, “Sorry, Feminism,” Eyresses

(Source: erikawithac)