Stigma and stigmata: Demon possession and sexual violence in post-recession American horror cinema

This thesis is a contemporaneous analysis of the subgenre of demon-possession film in post-recession American horror. Demonic possession horror operates under generic codes and conventions that are explicitly gendered. In her foundational work on horror cinema, Barbara Creed (1993) argues that the spectacle of the possessed female body could have subversive potential. However, in general she notes that the presence of monstrous feminine bodies in horror serves the political purpose of expressing reactionary and masculinist fears rather than feminist desires for subjectivity. The project explores how the demon-possession subgenre re-emerged as a popular and profitable subgenre in American horror cinema in the post-recession era when feminism experienced a renewed popularity in mainstream media and popular culture. My research explores the relationship between demon possession films of this time and popular feminist discourse and reactionary, “popular” misogyny. Sarah Banet-Weiser (2016) describes popular misogyny as a contemporary iteration of anti-feminism that is expressed and disseminated through technology and social media, circulating sexually violent public discourse and rhetorically normalizing violence against women. In this thesis I analyse demon-possession horror films that include textual references to sexual violence such as Anneliese: The Exorcist Tapes (Prest, 2011); Darling (Keating, 2015); and Lovely Molly (Sanchez, 2011). Through the lens of Sara Ahmed’s conceptualisation of affect, whereby negative emotions “stick” to marginalised subject positions (2004), I argue that the emotions of disgust, hate and fear become attached to the women who experience sexual violence in these films in Chapter Two. In Chapter Three, these films are contrasted with demon-possession films featuring possessed men, as male-possession narratives tend to feature sexual and gender-based violence by possessed male bodies against women. In the final chapter, I discuss films influenced by the #MeToo movement that perform feminist and epistemic interventions to the more reactionary depictions of sexual violence