Gothics and Grand Guignols: Violence and the Gendered Aesthetics of Cinematic Horror

This paper discusses a feminine aesthetic of cinematic horror informed by ethnographic study of the female horror film audience. In particular, this analysis of audience responses focuses on genre styles or cycles, as well as key horror films, that are privileged by female viewers. This aesthetic includes uncanny and atmospheric images of horror and monstrosity, and offers a range of emotional affects around these images that primarily involve the shiver sensation, but can also include revulsion and disgust. These styles draw on a wide range of literary, theatrical and art traditions which have often been recognised as having female audiences, these include the Gothic, the melodrama, fairy tales, film noir, and Grand Guignol theatre. This aesthetic is not, however, wholly uncanny or suggestive in its aesthetic mode, and blood, gore and violence, all of which the female audience responds positively to, is central. (Author's abstract