ABSTRACT
This chapter starts as an autobiographical account of the author’s encounter and long-lasting embrace with Creed’s work. The author comes from Slovenia, a country with a long-standing tradition of film-making and film criticism, yet also a country where the first feature film directed by a woman was only made in 2002, where the national film school has never had any female professors, and where a comprehensive feminist analysis of the local film culture is still lacking. Hence, the first part of the chapter recounts the obvious: how inspiring and empowering it was in the late 1990s for the author to read Creed’s work. The chapter then shifts into a different register to provide evidence of the continued relevance of Creed’s work in contexts that by far exceed its initial frame of reference. Taking cue from Creed’s psychoanalytic corrective to conventional approaches to the study of women in horror films and their narrow focus on women’s victimhood, and combining it with the notion of border as employed in contemporary sociology and anthropology, the author performs a similar gesture in the context of contemporary Slovenian cinema, demonstrating how women’s marginalised positions in Slovenian cinema need not be seen as necessarily disempowering.
