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Culture Wars and
Horror Movies
Gender Debates in Post-2010’s
US Horror Cinema
Edited by Noelia Gregorio-Fernández
Carmen M. Méndez-García
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Culture Wars and Horror Movies
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Noelia Gregorio-Fernández
Carmen M. Méndez-García
Editors
Culture Wars and
Horror Movies
Gender Debates in Post–2010’s US Horror Cinema
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Contents
1 Introduction:
Culture Wars Revisited: Navigating Gender
Dynamics in Post-2010 Social Horror 1
Noelia Gregorio-Fernández and Carmen M. Méndez-García
References 7
Part I Female Bodies/Disposable Bodies 9
2 Woke
Gal Gone Bad: Populism and Gender Trouble in
Wrong Turn (2021) 11
Eduardo Valls Oyarzun
Culture Wars, Populism and “Unpolitics” 12
An “Unpolitical” Allegory 16
Populist Horrors in the Rural Slasher 19
Intersectional Suppression and Gender Invisibility. Conclusion 25
References 29
3 Living
Deliciously? The Borderless Horror of Female
Empowerment 33
Elena Furlanetto
Magic and the South: Il legame 39
The Voices Know Things About Us: Voces 44
Wouldst Thou Like to Live Deliciously? The Witch 47
v
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vi
Contents
Conclusion 51
References 52
4 The
Culture That “Can’t Anymore”: Ari Aster’s
Midsommar (2019) as Pilgrimage of a
Traumatized Society 55
Marta Brkljačić
References 75
Part II Female as Creation Force Revisited 77
5 Mother! Nature: Creation, Apocalypse, Climate
Skepticism, and Darren Aronofsky’s Mother! (2017) 79
Zachary Ingle
References 93
6 Monsters,
Women, and Magic: Intersecting Hierarchies of
Gender and Religion in The Witch (2015) 97
Cristina Casado Presa
References 112
7 Decay and Fear: Take Shelter (2011) as Social Horror115
Nisa Harika Güzel Köşker
Anxiety and Loss of Resources 118
Conclusion 131
References 133
Part III Gender(ed) Anxieties 135
8 Antebellum (2020): White Supremacist Masculinities and
Black Lives Matters in the Trump Era137
Juan José Arroyo Paniagua and Steven K. McClain
Senator Denton vs. Dr. Henley 143
Captain Jasper vs. Amara 150
Conclusion 156
References 157
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Contents vii
9 Gaslighting,
Captivity, and Trauma: Notes on MeToo
Horror Films161
Todd K. Platts
MeToo and the MeToo Horror Film 163
The Gaslighting Cycle 167
The Captive Woman Cycle 171
The Trauma Cycle 174
Conclusion 176
References 176
10 From
the Female Grotesque to the Crone:
Beware of the Older Woman in The Taking of Deborah
Logan (2014)183
Marta Miquel-Baldellou
Introduction 183
Abjection: Bodily Wastes, Border, Mother 187
Uncanniness: Others, Doubles, Mirrors 190
Under Constant Surveillance: From Pathologization to
Vilification 193
Demonizing the Older Woman: Horror Archetypes and the
Allegory of Possession 195
The Older Woman’s Gaze: From Spectacle to Spectator 198
Conclusion 199
References 201
11 Mutilation
and Dual Body in The Perfection (2018):
A Reading on Queer Horror205
Laura Blázquez Cruz
The Perfection: Contextualizing the Film and the Plot 205
The Boundaries, the Insane, the Queer 207
Mutilation as Control of One’s Own/the Other’s Body 211
Conclusion 217
References 218
Index221
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Notes on Contributors
Juan José Arroyo Paniagua graduated in English Studies at Complutense
University of Madrid, Spain, in 2018. He holds a Master’s Degree in
North American Studies from Complutense University of Madrid and the
Franklin Institute of University of Alcalá de Henares. He is also a specialist
in masculinities from University of Castilla-La Mancha. Arroyo is, at present, a Ph.D. candidate in Literary Studies at Complutense University. His
doctoral dissertation, currently titled “‘A man much for himself’:
Masculinities in the Works of Cormac McCarthy,” analyzes the representations of masculinity McCarthy portrays in some of his works. Arroyo’s
academic interests range from North American literature to film studies,
TV shows, video games, and the English language.
Laura Blázquez Cruz holds a Ph.D. in Languages and Cultures from
the University of Jaén (2023) and is a professor and researcher in the
Department of English Philology. Her research pivots around the study of
monstrosity from the psychological, ontological, and representative
spheres, covering different arts, and focuses on the body as a frame and
field where politics, biology, and technology converge. She has carried out
research stays at the University of Lisbon with a scholarship obtained in a
competitive process. Some of the papers she has written and presented in
conferences deal with the monstrosity of the androgynous body (University
of Salamanca), the transgender in the cinema (University of Athens), or
the relationship between post-memory and the ontological (Poland). In
addition, she has written articles about dystopia in cinematographic discourse, such as “Narrativas de la desmitificación y la distopía americana en
ix
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x
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Rob Zombie: La casa de los 1000 cadáveres (2002) y Los renegados del diablo
(2005)” (2022), and “Vigilancia y homogeneización visual: Pilares de la
construcción del bio-poder en La Naranja Mecánica (1962) de Anthony
Burgess” (2023).
Marta Brkljačić is a postgraduate doctoral student at the Faculty of
Humanities and Social Sciences, Zagreb, Croatia, enrolled in Doctoral
Studies in Literature, Performing Arts, Film and Culture (started in
October 2018). Having double majored in English Language and
Literature (2017) and Comparative Literature (2018), her current focus is
theater studies, dramaturgy, theatrical performance, visual arts, and adaptation in a broader artistic and cultural sense, with a special focus on the
adaptation of literary works into classical ballet. She is currently working
on her doctoral thesis on this specific field of adaptation. She is fluent in
English and a native speaker of Croatian.
Cristina Casado Presa is Associate Professor at Washington College,
Maryland, USA. Her teaching and research activities have primarily
focused on the field of gender studies and the study of non-traditional
female characters. In recent years, she has devoted her research to representations of the monstrous and the feminine, particularly focusing on the
figure of the witch. She has written articles and edited a volume on the
subject, and she is currently working on a monograph about the witch in
contemporary Spanish literature and culture.
Elena Furlanetto is Researcher in American Studies at the University of
Duisburg-Essen, Germany. She authored Towards Turkish American
Literature: Narratives of Multiculturalism in Post-Imperial Turkey (2017)
and co-edited two essay collections: A Poetics of Neurosis: Narratives of
Normalcy and Disorder in Cultural and Literary Texts (with Dietmar
Meinel, 2018) and Media Agoras: Islamophobia and Inter/Multimedial
Dissensus (with Frank Mehring, 2020). She has written articles and book
chapters on the influences of Islamic mystic poetry on American romanticism, on Islamophobia in film and media, and more recently on Creoleness
and early American literature. Her research and teaching interests also
include Orientalism, postcolonial literatures, comparative empire studies,
and poetry.
Noelia Gregorio-Fernández holds a Ph.D. in American Studies. She is
an Associate Professor in the School of Social Sciences and Humanities at
the International University of La Rioja, Spain. She has been a visiting
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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
xi
scholar at the Chicano Research Center (UCLA, 2014), JFK Institute of
North American Studies (Frëie Universitat of Berlin, 2015), and the
Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race (Columbia University of
New York, 2016). Her lines of research focus on the ethnic representations in media, Chicano cinema, and the transnational models in American
literature and culture. She has written about Latino ethnicity in contemporary U.S. cinema, American culture, and cultural identity and cinematic
representation in several publications such as Atlantis, Canadian Review
of Comparative Literature, Post Script, or Cinemas d’Amérique Latine.
Her second monographic work, Una mirada al cine chicano: Robert
Rodriguez en la era transnacional, was published in 2020 in the Benjamin
Franklin Library collection at the Editorial Universidad de Alcalá.
Nisa Harika Güzel Köşker is Assistant Professor in the Department of
American Culture and Literature at Ankara University, Turkey. She holds
a Ph.D. and M.A. from the same department and served as the department chair between 2017 and 2023. She is the recipient of the doctoral
research scholarship granted by The Council of Higher Education in
Turkey. She conducted research on nineteenth-century American women’s writing in the English Department, Rare and Manuscript Library at
the University of Pennsylvania, the Library Company of Philadelphia, and
the National Archives. She is the vice president of the American Studies
Association of Turkey and specializes in American women’s writing and
cultural studies.
Zachary Ingle holds a Ph.D. in Film and Media Studies from the
University of Kansas, USA. He is a Visiting Assistant Professor of
Communication at Hardin-Simmons University, Abilene, Texas. He coauthored The 100 Greatest Superhero Films and TV Shows (2022) and
edited four volumes: Robert Rodriguez: Interviews; Gender and Genre in
Sports Documentaries; Identity and Myth in Sports Documentaries; and Fan
Phenomena: The Big Lebowski. Ingle’s articles have appeared in Post Script,
Literature/Film Quarterly, and Journal of Sport History. His favorite horror films are Psycho and The Exorcist, and his favorite subjects to research
and teach include African American cinema, horror, and the intersection
of religion and film.
Steven K. McClain is a graduate of the University of Virginia’s College
of Arts and Sciences, USA. In 2019, he completed a Doctorate in Literary
Studies from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. His research
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xii
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
interests have included animal studies, pedagogy, and English- and
Spanish-language science fiction, fantasy, and horror. In 2021, he wrote
“Decolonizing the Novum, Queering the Cyborg in Octavia E. Butler’s
Wild Seed” in Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction. A
Professor of English Language and Literature in the Department of
Foreign Languages at the Universidad del Norte, Barranquilla, Colombia,
McClain is the author of The Monsters of Inkwhich Well: An Octosyllabic
Science Fiction (2022).
Carmen M. Méndez-García is Associate Professor of American
Literature in the Department of English Studies at the Universidad
Complutense de Madrid, Spain. Her doctoral dissertation, “The Rhetorics
of Schizophrenia in the Epigones of Modernism” (2003), was based on
her research as a visiting scholar at Harvard University in 2001 and 2002.
She was also a participant in the 2010 Study of the U.S. Institute on
Contemporary American Literature at the University of Louisville,
Kentucky, funded by the Spanish Fulbright program and the
U.S. Department of State. Current research and teaching interests include
twentieth- and twenty-first-century U.S. literature, postmodernism and
contemporary fiction, the countercultures in the United States, spatial
studies, gender studies, medical humanities, and minority studies (especially Chicana studies).
Marta Miquel-Baldellou is a postdoctoral researcher and a member of
the Dedal-Lit Research Group at the Centre of Literatures and Cultures in
English, University of Lleida, Catalonia, Spain. She is currently participating in a government-­funded research project which looks into the matrix of
aging studies and creativity in contemporary cultural manifestations. Her
research revolves around comparative literature, age studies, film theory,
and horror fiction. She has presented papers at different international conferences, and her articles have been published in volumes edited by international publishing houses, such as Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Peter
Lang, Brill/Rodopi, Routledge, and Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.
Todd K. Platts is Professor of Sociology at Piedmont Virginia
Community College, USA. The bulk of his scholarship has focused on
horror cinema, with his most recent research focusing on horror films in
the 2010s, including a box-office analysis of horror films at the North
American box office from 2006 to 2016, an analysis of film reviews of Get
Out, a postmortem of the post-9/11 zombie cycle, examinations of the
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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
xiii
Insidious and Purge franchises, an investigation of Blumhouse Productions’
curation of its franchises, and several assessments of commentary on horror cinema in the age of Trump. He has also written works on Italian and
American zombie cinema, slasher films, horror movies in the 1960s and
1970s, and the history of zombies in Western popular culture, to name a
few. He recently co-edited Blumhouse Productions: The New House of
Horror (2022) and edited an anthology on The Conjuring (under review
at Edinburgh University Press).
Eduardo Valls Oyarzun is Associate Professor of English and American
literature at Complutense University of Madrid, Spain. He specializes in
Victorian culture, gothic, and horror in fiction and film, with a keen interest in the ideological deconstruction of the genre. In addition, he has
researched extensively on the critical connections between philosophy, literature, and cinema. His most recent publications comprise the articles
“Deleuzian Time and the Elemental Rhythms of Nature in Joan Lindsay’s
Picnic at Hanging Rock (1967)” (English Studies 103.1, 2022), “A Matter
of Extreme Indelicacy: Neo-Victorian Critical Memory in Kind Hearts and
Coronets” (Nordic Journal of English Studies, 20.1, 2022), and “Chambers
of Consciousness and Houses of Life: Nietzschean Hermeneutics in Arthur
Machen’s The Great God Pan” (Neophilologus 107.2, 2023).
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CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Culture Wars Revisited:
Navigating Gender Dynamics in Post-2010
Social Horror
Noelia Gregorio-Fernández
and Carmen M. Méndez-García
Culture wars have ferociously exploded in the American political setting,
especially since the 2010s, by promoting confrontation as the final political practice. Twenty-first-century culture wars, encapsulated in a not-so-­
latent populism, have become a form of polarization and simplification of
social interests and political ideas, poised to accomplish the unity of the
people above and against its parts, and constituting a political mode where
N. Gregorio-Fernández (*)
Facultad de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades, Universidad Internacional de La
Rioja, Logroño (La Rioja), Spain
e-mail: noelia.gregorio@unir.net
C. M. Méndez-García
Departamento de Estudios Ingleses, Universidad Complutense de Madrid,
Madrid, Spain
e-mail: cmmendez@ucm.es
Switzerland AG 2024
N. Gregorio-Fernández, C. M. Méndez-García (eds.), Culture
Wars and Horror Movies,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-53278-8_1
1
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2
N. GREGORIO-FERNÁNDEZ AND C. M. MÉNDEZ-GARCÍA
war and politics form a seamless connection. New culture wars have constructed today’s United States public opinion in polarized terms, wrangling over issues of abortion, homosexuality, religion, feminism,
multiculturalism, popular culture, education, and what it means to be
American.
During the last decade, American culture wars have multiplied and
branched out, so much so that Helen Lewis recently declared in The
Atlantic that “the world is trapped in America’s culture war” (2020), suggesting that American culture wars have expanded in terms of ideological
and sociopolitical concerns beyond the country’s borders. However,
among these diverse polarized manifestations, culture wars have revealed a
strong emphasis on gender, specifically on women’s sexual assault, harassment, and related topics connected to prevailing cultural norms imposed
on women and the systems of power in the current US polarized society.
The horror genre has resurfaced in the second decade of the twenty-first
century as the perfect medium for (re)presenting polarized liberal and
conservative sociopolitical views about women, specifically under Donald
Trump’s presidency.
In this volume, we will be delving into the close-knit relationship
between the horror genre and the status of women in the context of cultural wars. The general dissatisfaction with how women are portrayed in
movies has become intertwined with numerous contemporary horror
films, particularly those made after 2010, which can be seen as instances of
a critical perspective seeking to grasp the societal gender divisions prevalent in present-day American society. Yet, even more expansively, it can be
claimed that culture wars feed off the bountiful terrain of women in horror, illustrating #MeToo and notions of consent, gender justice, aging,
physical and emotional abuse, women’s corporeality, misogyny, and queer
representation as central to their storytelling.
Whereas traditional readings of horror films have focused primarily on
the mistreatment of women, there have also been some moments of resistance and empowerment in past decades, as we can see, among others, in
Alien (Ridley Scott 1979), Friday the 13th (Sean S. Cunningham 1980),
and Scream (Wes Craven 1996), excellent examples of screen representations that shifted the perception of women in the genre and paved the way
to current, more progressive gender representations in horror movies.
During the last decade, the aesthetic, affective, and ethical dimensions of
the connection between the horror genre and the depiction of women
have turned into a sociopolitical exploration of the widespread discontent
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INTRODUCTION: CULTURE WARS REVISITED: NAVIGATING GENDER…
3
of women concerning trauma, violence, sexual harassment, and sexualized
forms of representation. It is not by chance that these culture wars-­
embedded movies overlapped with the awareness campaign against sexual
abuse and harassment known as #MeToo, a motto first used by Tarana
Burke back in 2006 but extended as a worldwide breakthrough thanks to
the The New York Times report against film producer Harvey Weinstein’s
acts in 2015 (Santora and Baker).
This volume explores the current partisan split in the United States
regarding gender and culture wars and its complex and timely commentary on twenty-first-century US sociopolitical relations. Within this context, the horror film genre in the second decade of the century has adapted
and repurposed existing and new gender identities in historical and political contexts. These identities have been reimagined as integral components of new cultural initiatives, even on a transnational scale, as will be
analyzed in some chapters of this volume. While performing in the foregoing capacities, gender in horror films deploys an inclusive range of narratives, variously and variably inspired by, and based on, sociopolitical
divisions in the contemporary United States. Moreover, it has come to
involve a diverse array of approaches to and patterns of revisiting, treating,
retelling, and rethinking women within the horror film genre that draw
meaning from culture wars.
This volume extends the literature from recent years that has explored
the emerging phenomena of gender debates and cultural conflicts in the
horror genre. Among others, we can find Victoria McCollum’s edited volume Make America Hate Again: Trump-Era Horror and the Politics of
Fear (Routledge, 2019), in which the horror genre adapts itself to the
transformation of contemporary American politics as a renewed potential
for political engagement in a climate of civil conflict; Samantha Holland
and Robert Shail’s Gender and Contemporary Horror in Film (Emerald,
2019), which studies how contemporary horror movies depict femininity,
sexuality, masculinity, the process of aging, and other pressing matters;
Adam Lowenstein’s Horror Film and Otherness (Columbia University
Press, 2022), which offers a new definition of horror and why it matters
for understanding social otherness and ongoing metamorphoses across
the “normal” self and the “monstrous” Other; Natalie Wilson’s Willful
Monstrosity: Gender and Race in twenty-first Century Horror (McFarland,
2020), an analysis around four primary monstrous figures—zombies,
vampires, witches, and monstrous women—, and Joe Vallese’s recent edition of It Came from the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror (Feminist
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N. GREGORIO-FERNÁNDEZ AND C. M. MÉNDEZ-GARCÍA
Press, 2022), a critical space open to the queer community’s subversive
readings of current horror US movies.
The contributions in this volume seek to examine different perspectives
of gender, queer, and women’s representation in horror films released in
the second decade of the twenty-first century. Drawing from a range of
portrayals that span from the #MeToo movement to women aging on
screen, along with ecocritical approaches and queer horror considerations,
the depiction of gender in horror movies is more than ever a reflection of
the uneasy relationship between a still predominant traditional social order
and the empowering representation of women and queer people associated with the culture wars. The moments of resistance that allow for strong
female and queer representation onscreen intersect with the conventions
of the horror genre through female protagonists who struggle against ideals of what their role in society should be.
The perceived crisis of moral values, the portrayal of aging women, and
religious and spiritual ecofeminist connections are used metaphorically in
terms of the conceptualization of female creation and the natural world
and its destruction and, subsequently, what emerges from its ruins. In
addition, the exploration of some of the alternatives offered by new or
unconventional forms of manhood and masculinities attempts to revisit
the horror genre from an ecocritical perspective in which female creativity
and nature are united. In the second decade of the twenty-first century,
the social horror genre has served as a protean but easily identifiable locus
for complex representations of the connection between women and ecological concerns, echoing or questioning the claims of second-wave and
third-wave feminisms, with a specific dark aesthetic and tone that foregrounds its socio-political dimension. Revitalizing both the interest in the
horror genre itself and the representation of ecofeminism, and questioning the idea that women are inherently closer to nature, culture wars and
their portrayal in social horror films revisit pivotal concepts such as the
abject and the monstrous-feminine as legitimized, empowered dualisms.
All in all, this edited volume (volume 2 of the “Culture Wars and
Horror Movies” project) includes contributions that seek to explore gender perspectives in contemporary horror movies by focusing on topics as
diverse as the mistreatment, stereotyping, and misrepresentation of female
disposable bodies; ecocritical approaches to religion and spirituality that
use the concept of female creation metaphorically; and new, contemporary
ways to represent gender anxieties within the current context of culture
wars. While the essays belonging to each one of these parts approach the
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INTRODUCTION: CULTURE WARS REVISITED: NAVIGATING GENDER…
5
subject matter from various angles, ranging from feminist and post-­
feminist theories to ecocritical views, this volume targets primarily the
ways and means by which women are stepping out of the shadows in the
context of culture wars, and how this particular momentum can be traced
in contemporary horror movies.
Part One, entitled “Female Bodies/Disposable Bodies,” focuses on traditional representations of women as a source of malice and impurity and
on how recent films have addressed such fears and transmuted women
from objects into agents, bringing fresh perspectives to the gender dynamics of earlier horror fiction and film. Eduardo Valls Oyarzun opens the
section with an examination of Wrong Turn (Mike P. Nelson 2021) as an
example of the counter-liberal stance on matters of gender in horror films.
By relocating the slasher trope of the “Final Girl” in a context of populist
discourses, Valls Oyarzun offers an analysis of the film as an endeavor to
change the established perspective of women’s corporeality and their portrayal as just disposable bodies in the horror film tradition. In the next
chapter of this section, Elena Furlanetto focuses on the universality and
global nature of current social horror films, offering a transnational perspective of cultural tradition(s) of gender violence in horror movies from
three different countries. Starting with the analysis of Italian and Spanish
films Il legame (The Binding, Emanuele de Feudis 2020) and Voces (Voices,
Ángel Gómez Hernández’, 2020), Furlanetto argues that The Witch
(Robert Eggers 2015) responds to a geographic and culturally specific
tradition of misogyny that presents female bodies as a repository of ancestral horror. Ending this section, Marta Brkljačić’s essay takes into consideration the phenomena of suicide and homicide in Midsommar (Ari Aster
2019) from the perspective of women’s bodily experience. Brkljačić examines the cultural phenomenon of justified female sacrifice and its socially
dictated oppressiveness on women’s corporeality, normalized as a cultural
phenomenon created and maintained by white men. Taking on a perspective beyond the male gaze, this chapter delves into the phenomena of
socially “justified” female sacrifice in the form of physical and emotional
disposability, while dealing with the horror of unsustainable human relationships and the social trauma of detachment.
In many ways connected to the above, Part Two of the volume, entitled
“Female as Creation Force Revisited,” continues to look at themes from
previous chapters, this time from the perspective of creation and/or theocentric environmental activism. Zachary Ingle analyzes Mother! (Darren
Aronofsky 2017) and its female protagonist as connected to the film’s
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N. GREGORIO-FERNÁNDEZ AND C. M. MÉNDEZ-GARCÍA
biblical and ecological motifs in the context of culture wars, especially in
how religious communities (particularly US evangelicals) and conservatives battle issues like climate change and “creation.” Cristina Casado
Presa focuses on The Witch (Robert Eggers 2015) as a collage of images
and stereotypes that conjure feminist and neo-pagan revisionist myths
about witchcraft by addressing the fears and anxieties regarding intersecting hierarchies of gender and religion in our days and the implications in
the current sociocultural landscape in the United States. Further investigating the connection between ecological consciousness and gender, Nisa
Harika Güzel Köşker reflects on Take Shelter (Jeff Nichols 2011) and its
blend of ecological and psychological horror, thus exploring the relation
between human damage and nature and the indifference to this destruction through the lens of the female protagonist. Güzel further explores the
contingent connection between the destruction of nature and social constructs such as gender or family as part of problems produced by capitalist
patriarchy in American society, combining the critical issues of ecological
deterioration and impositions posed on gender relations by patriarchy
with the film’s specific focus on a nuclear American family.
Part Three, entitled “Gender(ed) anxieties: New Perspectives,” brings
this volume to a close with four exploratory pieces, in which the re-­
elaboration of traditional representations of oppressive masculine power,
as well as socially gendered anxieties about physical and emotional abuse,
aging, and the evolution of queer representations, take center stage. Juan
José Arroyo Paniagua and Steven McClain’s chapter examines Antebellum
(Gerard Bush and Christopher Renz 2020) as a piece at the intersection of
neo-Confederate ideologies and the concept of “hegemonic masculinity,”
relating to depictions of cultural warfare in horror movies. By reflecting
upon depictions of neo-Confederate slavery and notions of masculinity,
this analysis considers white and black masculinities in relation to violence,
gender performance, and the male body. Social fears and anxieties generated from the ebbs and flows of the culture wars are also the central focus
of Todd K. Platts’s essay, which articulates the sociopolitical landscape that
helped to give birth to a number of #MeToo horror films, such as growing
demands to address sexual assault as a social issue, by providing a synoptic
overview of what he identifies as the gaslighting cycle, the captive women
cycle, and the trauma cycle in recent horror movies. Marta MiquelBaldellou analyzes the film The Taking of Deborah Logan (Adam Robitel
2014) as a space in which the fears of aging take horrific proportions, by
exploring the social anxieties and stereotypes that new conceptualizations
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1
INTRODUCTION: CULTURE WARS REVISITED: NAVIGATING GENDER…
7
of aging and gender have produced, especially in women. As MiquelBaldellou demonstrates, the representation of older women as disturbing
sources of cultural anxiety revisits the established association of the older
woman with a source of dread and uneasiness, thus conforming to Barbara
Creed’s notion of the monstrous-feminine. Laura Blázquez Cruz’s chapter closes this section and the volume by revisiting the queer representation in the horror genre. Within the current US polarized sociopolitical
environment, The Perfection (Richard Shepard 2018) serves as a representative work about political changes in gender policies under Donald
Trump’s presidency. Blázquez Cruz argues that part of this foundation lies
in the conception of purity amongst the most conservative and religious
communities, rejecting those queer situations or queer individuals that
transgress the most traditional social limits into the abject.
The ten essays in the volume, focused on current sociopolitical events
and their representation in horror film, underline the vibrancy and complexity that characterizes the study of issues of gender in the genre. As the
chapters evince, the current reformulation of traditionally stable ideas
about gender in the context of culture wars often leads to opposing, if not
contradictory, representations in film. While some of the approaches might
be more oriented toward questions of representation and stereotyping,
and others toward a revision of current activism, individually and taken as
a whole these ten essays remind us that the experience of horror films is
often that of a gestalt whereby gender and sociopolitical anxieties are
inseparable. What becomes evident is the lack of permanence that currently characterizes notions of gender, femaleness, and femininity, with
the analysis of films capturing all the subtle nuances that may emerge from
the stories and experiences represented.
References
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Aster, Ari, dir. 2019. Midsommar. A24.
Bush, Gerard, and Christopher Renz, dirs. 2020. Antebellum. Lionsgate.
Craven, Wes, dir. 1996. Scream. Dimension Films.
Cunningham, Sean S., dir. 1980. Friday the 13th. Paramount Pictures.
De Feudis, Domenico Emanuele, dir. 2020. Il legame. Netflix.
Eggers, Robert, dir. 2015. The Witch. A24.
Gómez Hernández, Ángel, dir. 2020. Voces. Entertainment One Films Spain.
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8
N. GREGORIO-FERNÁNDEZ AND C. M. MÉNDEZ-GARCÍA
Holland, Samantha, and Robert Shail. 2019. Gender and Contemporary Horror in
Film. Leeds: Emerald Publishing.
Lewis, Helen. 2020. The World Is Trapped in America’s Culture War. The Atlantic,
October 27. https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2020/10/
internet-­world-­trapped-­americas-­culture-­war/616799/
Lowenstein, Adam. 2022. Horror Film and Otherness. New York: Columbia
University Press.
McCollum, Victoria, ed. 2019. Make America Hate Again: Trump-Era Horror
and the Politics of Fear. New York: Routledge.
Nelson, Mike P., dir. 2021. Wrong Turn. Lionsgate Entertainment and
Constantin Films.
Nichols, Jeff, dir. 2011. Take Shelter. Sony Classic Pictures.
Robitel, Adam, dir. 2014. The Taking of Deborah Logan. Eagle Films.
Santora, Marc, and Al Baker. 2015. Police Question Film Producer After a Report
of a Groping. The New York Times, March 31. https://web.archive.org/
web/20171014233641/https://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/31/nyregion/har vey-­w einstein-­p roducer-­q uestioned-­b y-­n ew-­y ork-­p olice-­a fter-­
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Scott, Ridley, dir. 1979. Alien. 20th Century-Fox.
Shepard, Richard, dir. 2018. The Perfection. Netflix.
Vallese, Joe, ed. 2022. It Came from the Closet: Queer Reflection on Horror. New
York: Feminist Press.
Wilson, Natalie. 2020. Willful Monstrosity: Gender and Race in 21st Century
Horror. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland.
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PART I
Female Bodies/Disposable Bodies
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