ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a framework that considers the role and function of the menopausal and post-menopausal woman in horror that connects her to other abject expressions of infertile reproductive horror – the figure of the menstruating woman, whose abject seepage is a visual and corporeal reminder of fecundity during a time when the body has a very low chance of becoming pregnant. Horror's psychobiddies, grande dames and harridans certainly articulate, with melodramatic and gothic theatricality, some of the worst, most conservative attitudes towards women and ageing, especially as they sit in seeming opposition to the explosion of power that is associated with menarche. The notion of the abject barren connects reproductive female bodies across different stages of their lives in ways that other gynaehorrific expressions, such as the monstrous-maternal, are not necessarily able to do. Each of Jessica Lange's storylines draw from the themes, narratives and aethetics of hagsploitation and play with the registers of the abject barren body.
