In her 1993 study The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis, Barbara Creed examined ways in which female monsters are often depicted as monstrous for reasons relating to their bodies, gender and sexuality – and proposed a new term to explore this phenomenon. When you rent one of our On Demand events, you will be able to watch it right away and stream the video anytime during the specified rental period. The _ga cookie, installed by Google Analytics, calculates visitor, session and campaign data and also keeps track of site usage for the site's analytics report.

Creed's ideology of the woman's reproductive system is similarly analyzed within the works of Kristeva. 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. This is a timely update of a seminal text which re-interprets key films of the horror genre, including Carrie, The Exorcist, The Brood and Psycho. Another prominent monstrous figure that Creed discusses in her work is Greek mythology's Medusa and her severed head.Barbara Creed’s classic remains as relevant as ever and this edition will be of interest to academics and students of feminist theory, nonhuman theory, critical animal studies, race, and queer theory. Creed's The Monstrous-Feminine [4] was published in 1993 and clearly draws inspiration from her earlier work on Kristeva.

Point by point, Barbara Creed has shown that the faces of the Monstrous Feminine as seen in the horror film, are based in the actual psychology of the developing child in the early experiences of childhood and infancy.

This book is sometimes hard to read, and the concepts of psychoanlaysis that she draws on are often dubious. In this new edition Creed expands and updates the filmography to include horror films created by women to augment the ways in which the monstrous-feminine functions deliciously as patriarchy’s retribution. In this new edition, Creed does it again, recontextualizing the conception of the monstrous-feminine to track many of the evolutions in the horror genre and this revised edition will continue to shape our understanding of the horror genre in the new millennium.