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. This chapter proposes to draw mainly on Kristeva’s discussion of the construction of abjection in the human subject in relation to her notion of the ‘border’, the mother–child relationship and the feminine body. Kristeva argues that, historically, it has been the function of religion to purify the abject, but with the disintegration of these ‘historical forms’ of religion, the work of purification now rests solely with ‘that catharsis par excellence called art’.
