ABSTRACT
Regarding gendered violence, the horror genre has offered numerous representations of “the terrorized woman victim” (Williams 1991: 5), since “it has long been a dictum of the genre that women make the best victims” (ibid.). This is particularly central to slasher narratives, which are based on “the immensely generative story of a psycho-killer who slashes to death a string of mostly female victims, one by one, until he is himself subdued or killed” (Clover 1992: 21). This formula has been repeated within the Spanish context, following the success of the Hollywood postmodern slasher Scream (Craven, 1996). However, one of the latest Spanish approaches to this subgenre offers an interesting innovation: Sexy Killer (Martí, 2008) introduces Bárbara, a young, attractive and violent woman, who terrorises and kills (mainly) male victims, gender swapping the traditional formula. Unlike other Spanish psycho-killers, she does not need a motive for killing. She finds it pleasurable, offering a unique portrayal of a hyper-feminine, empowered, vicious female psycho-killer who embodies skills and activities traditionally gendered male. Thus, through the analysis of Sexy Killer’s Bárbara, the present study seeks to explore the figure of the female psycho-killer in contemporary Spanish horror film under a gender perspective, paying attention to how this persona compares to both the popular male psycho-killers constantly referenced within the text, and the archetypal portrayal of the woman victim within the self-aware conventions of the (Hollywood) slasher genre.
