Coming full circle from the maiden back to the mother, our examples include the Wilis, the chorus of thwarted ghost brides in the ballet Giselle, and the murderous pregnant woman in Alice Lowe’s 2016 film Prevenge. Barbara Creed’s The Monstrous-Feminine is one of the most influential books to emerge in the early 90s. One word of warning to potential readers is that the book, being a decade old, does not consider more recent horror films.

Creed reflects back to the Renaissance where the uterus is depicted in connotation with evil and the devil. 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 challenges this view with a feminist psychoanalytic critique, discussing films such as Alien, I Spit on Your Grave and Psycho. In this, "lack" signifies the female, wherein male monsters are identified as abject, lacking; ultimately feminine.She explains that concepts of the monstrous feminine within horror arose from male concerns regarding female sexual difference and castration. 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.

In an age at which anthropogenic and patriarchal harms threaten the very survival of the planet, embracing the nonhuman becomes a remedial, even liberating gesture. Other than that though, this is an indispensable read for anyone interested in the horror genre, or in film studies in general. 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. Creed also interrogates at the portrayal of desire and lesbianism in the horror film the Hunger (1983), arguing that when the two female vampires kiss there is an eruption of blood in the women's mouths, which represents how lesbian relations are deadly and consequential.

In Darwin's Screens: Evolutionary Aesthetics, Time and Sexual Display in the Cinema, Barbara Creed examines the uncanny through Charles Darwin's works regarding sexual selection and origins. Barbara Creed has published a multitude of material on gender and horror, including: The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism. This updated edition includes a new section examining contemporary feminist horror films in relation to nonhuman theory. With close reference to a number of classic horror films including the Alien trilogy, The Exorcist and Psycho , Creed analyses the seven `faces' of the monstrous-feminine: archaic mother, monstrous womb, vampire, witch, possessed body, monstrous mother and castrator.

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Medusa is a mythological creature whose stare can turn people to stone, particularly men, and who has a head covered in snakes, which Creed argues is a deadly symbol of the vagina dentata. These cookies help provide information on metrics the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc. Yet, Freud only really considered death and the feeling of horror in relation to male monsters and didn't examine the role of women, nature and animals.