Horror by Brigid Cherry

Author:Brigid Cherry [Cherry, Brigid]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Film & Video, Performing Arts, History & Criticism, Humanities
ISBN: 9780203882184
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2009-02-09T06:23:19+00:00

If, as she suggests here, the horror film’s confrontation with the abject serves the purpose of cleansing the ‘symbolic order’, the pleasures of viewing these representations of abjection falls into the category of the ‘pleasure of restoration’ (Hills 2004:57). Horror films are rhythmic and repetitive. Just as theyallow the repressed to return before repression is itself restored, they also allow the abject monstrous-feminine to emerge before it too is cleansed. However, Matt Hills (2004:59) suggests that ‘the abject can connote pleasurable self-transcendence and/or painful self-annihilation, dependingon how this is mappedacross mind/bodyor soul/bodybinaries’.

Abjection might, then, in some horror films be transcendent. Hills offers Graham Ward’s analysis of Stigmata as an example of this, but other examples might include Nightbreed and Candyman which both end with the heroine welcoming her monstrosity. It is interesting that these films are popular with female horror fans (Cherry 1999) and Andrea Kuhn (2000) offers a feminist reading of Candyman which concludes that:

[W]hile the film seems to cater to conventional genre expectations by transforming the female subject of the narrative into the object of the monster’s abject desire, it undercuts these expectations by offering a fresh perspective on the old story, in which the woman establishes herself as subject by using the Candyman, now object of her desire, to rewrite the story and to make herself hero. In this case, her association with the world of the archaic mother, whose source she certainly seems to be, does not simply result in her punishment, but rather helps us to see through the patriarchal construct of the female martyr who discovers the power and lure of a femininity unleashed from Oedipal restraints that scares all the Trevors to death.

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