mothy.t

“More recently, feminist film theorists have turned to the work of one of Lacan’s successors, the French feminist psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva. Kristeva’s book Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection focuses on literature and not film, but her views have been adapted to the study of visual horror by Barbara Creed, in a 1986 Screen article about Alien, and in her more recent book The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. Kristeva locates the sources and origins of horror not in castration anxiety, but in the preoedipal stage of the infant’s ambivalence toward the mother as it struggles to create boundaries and forge its own ego identity. The mother is ‘horrific’ in the sense of being all-engulfing, primitive, and impure or defiled by bodily fluids—particularly breast milk and flowing menstrual blood. Kristeva uses the term ‘abjection’ to designate the psychic condition inspired by this image of the horrific mother. For Kristeva, horror is fundamentally about boundaries—about the threat of transgressing them, and about the need to do so. Hence she emphasizes the duality of our attraction/repulsion to the horrific.”