UC Santa Cruz

“Spectacular Flesh: Erotic Horror as Feminist Praxis in Women’s Literature & Film” asks, “What happens when women take horror to heart?” The query that inevitably follows—why would they want to? —is perhaps even more provocative. In order to answer these questions, I look back to what I identify as a genealogy of women writers whose work serves as literary precedents for the viability of erotic horror as a feminist tool, beginning with Rachilde at the fin-de-siècle and ending with Angela Carter’s postmodern fantasies in the 1970s. Three film directors are then presented as case studies. I begin with Jesús “Jess” Franco because his films are a useful baseline for low-budget erotic horror and offer a compelling example of the genre’s interest in feminine performance. With Franco’s work as a touchstone, I turn to horror films directed by women, including the robust and groundbreaking filmography of Roberta Findlay, whose work throughout the 1970s and 80s combines horror and pornography in productive and surprising ways, and Anna Biller’s The Love Witch (2016), a contemporary feminist horror film that is in many ways indistinguishable from 70s erotic horror. “Spectacular Flesh,” by articulating the links between erotic horror film and an antecedent genealogy of women’s literature, crafts meaningful connections between feminist film studies and scholarship on women’s literature. The literary foundations laid in Chapters One through Three supply evidence for a longstanding interest on the part of women writers in the horror genre as a site for feminist praxis. Taking psychoanalysis as its main theoretical approach, the project grapples with established readings of novels and films that are generally assumed to be “bad” or, possibly worse, complicit in patriarchal misogyny. Ultimately, this project identifies horror as the key for negotiating a more egalitarian theory of gendered gazing and an opportunity for thinking about women’s phenomenological experience in our contemporary moment, which many would argue is itself a kind of horror film.