ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the figure of the femme fatale in speculative cinema, particularly a defined category of science fiction. The monstrous hybrid body of the woman is posited as a threat, a mystery to be opened up and explored. While all bodies are pre-discursively leaky, the female body in particular is constructed as distinctively leaky. These attributes mean that the female body is not only unpredictable, but also dangerous, and as requiring not only attention, but intervention and investigation. Signs of mutation or alien elements appear on — and in Sil's case, through — the skin, rendering it legible and denoting the body, disturbingly, as not entirely human. In the hybrid body of the monstrous woman, distinct lines are drawn between that which is woman and that which is other, meaning that power and femininity are placed in an oppositional relationship. One way that the films explicate the origins of monstrosity and power is through their emphasis on microscopic images.
