Rated M for Maternal: An Allegorical Exploration of Domestic Horror and the Female Body in P.T.

Women’s bodies have long served as a source for abject horror. Throughout horror books, movies, and games, images of menstrual blood, childbirth, pregnancy, and the womb abound. Recently, scholars including Julia Kristeva and Barbara Creed have investigated the psychoanalytic and feminist implications of female bodies in horror through their work on abjection and the monstrous-feminine. In my research, I investigate the interplay of female body horror and symbolic representations of domestic violence in P.T., a video game hailed by critics and players for its intense psychological horror. Drawing on theoretical work in the realms of allegory and the monstrous-feminine, my research interrogates P.T. as a mediated experience which allegorically critiques domestic violence yet capitalizes upon the female victim, using her body as a source of shock-factor horror. In my research, I theorize that P.T. engages in a problematic tradition of horror media exploiting domestic violence and its victims as sources for horror, therein contributing to a cultural narrative which, rather than engaging critically with domestic violence, relegates real-world trauma to the realm of fantasy and monsters