ABSTRACT
In each of the low-budget Science Fiction (SF)-horror films scared middle-aged women are transformed into rejuvenated but scary women-this not through cosmetic surgery but through fantastical means, makeup, and special effects. These low-budget films observe that middle-aged women-as much before as after their transformations and attitude adjustments are pretty scary. The conjunction of aging women, cinema, and surgery is also the conjunction of aesthetics and ethics, foregrounding not merely cultural criteria of beauty and desirability but also their very real as well as representational consequences. The alternative to cosmetic surgery in what passes for the verisimilitude of cinematic realism is a change in genre, a transformation of sensibility that takes us from the 'real' world that demonizes middle-aged women to the world of 'irreal' female demons: horror, science fiction, and fantasy. The cosmetic surgery and the special effects of the cinema converge are perceived as phenomenologically reversible in what has become the current morphological imagination.
