New Blood in Contemporary Cinema
Women Directors and the Poetics of Horror
- Revisits themes and concerns of the horror genre, from the perspective of women directors
- Includes case studies of important female directed films, including Raw, Evolution and Atlantics
- Revisits feminist themes such as female agency, gender and race relations and affect by returning to the work of feminist directors of the 1970s and 1980s (not necessarily considered as generic horror films), in comparison to contemporary women directors
- Includes women of colour as well as white women directors, thus acknowledges both differences of the specific ethnic and social political contexts and shared concerns
Since the turn of the millennium, a growing number of female filmmakers have appropriated the aesthetics of horror for their films. In this book, Patricia Pisters investigates contemporary women directors such as Ngozi Onwurah, Claire Denis, Lucile Hadžihalilović and Ana Lily Amirpour, who put ‘a poetics of horror’ to new use in their work, expanding the range of gendered and racialized perspectives in the horror genre.
AcknowledgementsIntroduction: Virginia’s Unruly Daughters and Carrie’s Crimson Sisters
1. Violence and Female Agency - Murderess, Her Body, Her Mind2. Growing Pains - Breasts, Blood and Fangs 3. Longing and Lust, ‘Red Light’ on a ‘Dark Continent’4. Growing Bellies, Failing Mothers, Scary Off-spring5. Political Gutting, Crushed Life and Poetic Justice
Conclusion: Bloody Red – Poetics, Patterns, PoliticsNotesIllustrationsFilmography of Women Directors and the Poetics of HorrorBibliographyIndex
In her skillful examination of these films, Pisters succeeds in walking a fine line between critical commentary steeped in film theory and accessible analysis of plot and scenes.
New Blood in Contemporary Cinema is an exciting and ground-breaking book. Pisters asks us to rethink the history and poetics of the horror film in relation to the significant contribution of women directors from a range of backgrounds and political perspectives. Drawing on the metaphor of ‘new blood’, Pisters explores the relationship between gender and aesthetics in a series of horror formats and inter-generic contexts. She presents her argument through a collection of beautifully nuanced analyses of a wide range of films told from the perspective of women – both behind and in front of the camera. Her focus is on poetic opacity, difference and complexity. Impressive in its scope and originality, New Blood offers a much-needed addition to the growing literature on the major role women have played in the history of the cinema. It is essential reading for lovers of the cinema, horror and the aesthetics of film.
Revisiting the foundational question of feminist critique—what difference does difference make?—this expansive study of female-directed horror films considers not just what feminist readings offer to a poetics of horror, but what the poetics of horror can offer to feminist thinking, expanding its understanding of materiality, embodiment, affect, violence, desire, form, and relationality itself.
