Barbara Creed

Barbara Creed FAHA (born 30 September 1943) is a professor of cinema studies in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne.

[1] Creed is a graduate of Monash and La Trobe universities[2] where she completed doctoral research using the framework of psychoanalysis and feminist theory to examine horror films.

[4] On the other hand, women depicted as villains are portrayed as innately evil, and their monstrosity is connected to their reproductive bodily functions.

[4] In her 1987 paper, "From Here to Modernity: Feminism and Postmodernism", Creed's approach to understanding the monstrous male figure also draws on Kristeva's notion of abjection.

[4] Creed challenges this masculine viewpoint by arguing that when the feminine is fabricated as monstrous, it is commonly achieved through association with [female] reproductive bodily functions, or through matriarchal traits and tasks.

[4] She explains that concepts of the monstrous feminine within horror arose from male concerns regarding female sexual difference and castration.

[4] Creed analyses women as monstrous through their roles in horror movies playing witches, vampires, archaic mothers, possessed monsters and mythical creatures, such as Medusa.

[4] In her discussion of the many "faces of the monstrous-feminine", she draws on Kristeva's concept of abjection[9] to describe how patriarchal society separates the human from the non-human, and rejects the "partially formed subject".

[4] Barbara Creed examines Carrie and The Exorcist, and critiques the way in which they represent adolescent young women as ‘possessed’ or ‘demonised’ during puberty and menstruation.

Medusa is a mythological creature whose stare can turn people to stone, particularly men, and who has a head covered in snakes, which Creed argues is a deadly symbol of the vagina dentata.

Creed places emphasis on this idea of the monstrous-womb, as the maternal body has been considered a source of anxiety to the male gaze.

[4] Creed argues that a woman's deep connection to natural events such as reproduction and birth is considered ‘quintessentially grotesque’.

[15] She includes a definition of "Matrix" in the book's introduction, which she describes as a, "womb; place in which thing is developed", which closely relates to her discussion of the monstrous feminine.

[15] Creed defines this "crisis TV", wherein news reporters focus on disasters to provoke anxiety and immediacy, and bring the abject into reality.

[5] This piece offers a feminist analysis on sex difference in the horror genre, as well as the order in which male monsters innate masculinity and is "caught between the opposing forces of culture and nature, the civilized and primitive".

Yet, Freud only really considered death and the feeling of horror in relation to male monsters and didn't examine the role of women, nature and animals.

Psychoanalysis (1993), Media Matrix: Sexing the New Reality (2003), Phallic Panic: Film, Horror & the Primal Uncanny (2005) and Darwin's Screens: Evolutionary Aesthetics, Time and Sexual Display in the Cinema (2009).