In 1993, Barbara Creed, a cinema studies professor at the University of Melbourne, published a seminal and enduring text dissecting the current state of female villains: The Monstrous Feminine: Film, Feminism and Psychoanalysis. The monograph served as an eye-opening insight into Hollywood’s regressive practices in neglecting to portray women in horror appropriately. Simply put, in the 90’s and early 2000’s women were not ever truly portrayed as victims but rather as archaic matriarchs, grotesque temptresses, possessed villains or femme castrators.
Creed recognised how the natural feminine body had been turned into a grotesque misrepresentation whereby any femininity was portrayed as immoral and disgusting.
For instance:
The Facehuggers in Alien (1979) are inherently phallic and their vaginal designs alongside their allegorical rape of humankind with the egg impregnation is all encoded in imagery surrounding birth and female reproduction. This is furthered in the sequel through the queen Xenomorph who works alongside the Facehuggers to represent the dangers of femininity and female reproduction, disguised in grotesque alien imagery.
Rosemary carrying the devil’s baby in Rosemary’s Baby is another example. As well as Regan’s possession in The Exorcist which forces her to perform un-girly acts and Catherine Tramell’s weaponisation of her sexuality in Basic Instinct. There are endless examples that can be used to affirm Creed’s theory in how the female reproductive system and femininity was used as the de facto horror monster in that time period.
This idea strongly defined the 1990’s horror landscape and even continued briefly into the early 2000’s, but the turn of the century saw a shift away from female reproduction and autonomy as the epitome of horror. This new shift in the genre did not undo Creed’s work in The Monstrous Feminine but rather saw it take a new modern, misogynistic way to portray femininity as horrific. This was the era of the aging woman as the epitome of grotesqueness within the horror genre. To most, female autonomy and birth are no longer considered horrific, but sagging skin and grey hair has become the new, misogynistic definer of the modern era of the genre.
The work of Zach Cregger particularly has become a lightning rod in this conversation as both his directorial efforts; Barbarian and Weapons, rely upon the horror of aging to jumpscare or unsettle. The horror of Barbarian (2022) yes, comes from the cruelty of how Justin Long is towards others, and the men in the story using women, but in reality, the horror icon of The Mother, with her naked frame and gargantuan body is used for cheap tricks to scare the audience. This deformed woman, a product of rape and incest, is made out to be entirely disgusting, Cregger weaponizing traits of motherhood to make her feel even more gross and aged.
Yet, the character, in theory, is not horrific, but through her breastfeeding from her deformed breast or trying to cradle her captors, with her lumbering frame and aged, disfigured face, she is made to seem repulsive. This draws stark parallels between Creed’s work in the 90’s and Barbarian: it is not reproduction or childbirth that is horrific, but that this woman is so aged and deformed that she cannot be a fit mother figure, that is what is disturbing to the audience.
This trend continued in the recently released and critically lauded, Weapons (2025), whereby the central antagonistic force, Gladys’, whole reason for abducting the children in the middle of the night is predicated by her need to stay young. The now iconic character design is not just unsettling because of how it seems so archaic in a modern setting, but because it shows the desperation of an older woman trying to seem younger and more relevant than she is. This confirms that women who are ‘outdated’ or ‘past the sell buy date’ that the patriarchy has given for them is the new standard for what is considered horrific within the genre.
Though in such regressive and misogynistic genre practices, it has been female directors and auteurs who have taken the initiative to comment upon and critique this new genre staple. In particular, Coralie Fargeat’s seminal, Oscar-winning, second feature, The Substance, served as a critique and take-down of the patriarchal systems that have created this new standard of aging as horrific. In the movie, Demi Moore’s central protagonist, Elisabeth Sparkle, undergoes a body altering treatment in pursuit of youth. The older body of Elisabeth Sparkle is traded with a younger version, Sue, seemingly an upgrade, but as the movie progresses the standards become blurred.
Demi Moore looks radiant throughout the whole movie, but the character is made to feel ugly because of the men in her life controlling her. In that regard, Fargeat comments upon how, no matter what age, no matter how you look, patriarchal order will always find a way to suppress and vilify women. Aging is not a horrific practice at all, it’s a beautiful part of the human experience, and men are never made to feel like they should seek to stay young or beautiful for longer. As such, Fargeat and The Substance marked a cultural turning-point in which we should stop monster-ifying women getting older as it is not only harmful to older women, but a detriment to younger women who feel there is a ticking time clock strapped to their youth.
Fargeat’s work therefore feels responsive to Cregger’s films and like an update to Barbara Creed’s theories on the female body as monstrous. Whereas the 1970’s and 1980’s were defined entirely by the horror of female fertility and life, the 2020’s are being defined by the horror of female infertility and death. Despite being polar opposite ideals, there is a commonality in that both weaponise the female body and portray it as grotesque, whether too fertile and promiscuous, or too barren and a waste in the global population, they are both commenting upon the war upon the female body. The monstrous feminine theory therefore has not disappeared or been erased with the rise of female directors in cinema, it has simply evolved into a more complex, yet equally misogynistic condemnation on the female body.
In all of this discussion, it must be noted that horror is not a vacuum, but often a mirror of the cultural fears of the times. In an era defined by likes and views, often based on attractiveness and youth, these fears are distilled by men who make aging for women seem horrific, and filmmakers like Cregger add to that fear through his depiction of Gladys and The Mother. Regardless of intent, the effect is still the recycling of the female body as horror currency.
— Darragh Evans