ABSTRACT
Julia Kristeva's Powers of Horror provides us with a preliminary hypothesis for an analysis of the representation of woman as monstrous in the horror film. One of Kristeva's aims in Powers of Horror is to present a rewriting of many of the ideas and beliefs put forward by the College of Sociology, specifically those associated with the nature of femininity, abjection and the sacred. Viewing the horror film signifies a desire not only for perverse pleasure (confronting sickening, horrific images/being filled with terror/desire for the undifferentiated) but also a desire, once having been filled with perversity, taken pleasure in perversity, to throw up, throw out, and eject the abject. Kristeva's theory of abjection provides us with an important theoretical framework for analysing, in the horror film, the representation of the monstrous-feminine, in relation to woman's reproductive and mothering functions. However, abjection by its very nature is ambiguous; it both repels and attracts.
