Carrie’s Sisters: New Blood in Contemporary Female Horror Cinema

Since the new millennium, a striking number of women have started to adopt and adapt formal and thematic elements from horror cinema. In this essay I will look at some of interesting horror films directed by woman, asking how these films are indebted to Barbara Creed’s psychoanalytic concepts and investigating if and how they might open new perspectives on “female monstrosity” as abject or/and castrating. By returning to Creed’s work and to one of the bloodiest heroines of the 1970s horror cinema Brian De Palma’s Carrie (dir. 1976) and its remake by Kimberly Pierce in 2013, I will follow a common red thread of blood in the aesthetics (as form, affect and meaning) of contemporary horror cinema. I focus my arguments around Jane Campion’s In the Cut (dir. 2003) and Lucille Hadzihalilovic’s Evolution (dir. 2015) to argue that a female perspective and female agency in contemporary horror aesthetics opens up intimate, inner perspectives, and unconscious desires that merge with perceptions of the outer world, social violence, and connections to the environment