Horror has long been understood as a ‘bad object’ in relation to its audiences. More specifically, this presumed relationship is a gendered one, so that men are positioned as the genre’s natural audience, while women’s engagement with horror is presented as more fractious. However, those horror films framed as feminist require a reorientation of these relations. This article foregrounds the critical reception of a ‘conspicuously feminist’ horror film in order to explore what happens to the bad object of horror within an opinion economy that works to diagnose the feminism or its absence in popular culture. Reviews of Teeth (2007), a ‘feminist horror film’ about vagina dentata, illustrate the push and pull of gendered power attached to feminist media, where empowerment is often understood in binary terms in relation to its gendered audiences. The assumed disempowerment of male audiences takes precedence in many reviews, while other narratives emerge in which Teeth becomes an educational tool that might change gendered behaviours, which directly empowers female audiences or which dupes women into believing they have been empowered. Finally, Teeth’s reviews expose a language of desire and fantasy around vagina dentata as an automated solution to the embodied experiences of women in contemporary culture. Teeth’s reviews, I argue, offer a valuable case study for interrogating the tensions in discourse when the bad object of horror is put to work for feminism.

Over the last ten years, Karyn Kusama has made a significant contribution to cinematic horror. Her two horror features, Jennifer’s Body (2009), a teen comedy about what happens when your best friend starts eating boys, and The Invitation (2015), a slow-burning paranoia film about a Hollywood Hills dinner party haunted by loss, social anxiety and cults, represent very different engagements with genre hybridity and the terrifying nature of everyday social relations. Most recently the short, “Her Only Living Son,” the final segment of the female-directed horror anthology film XX (2017), asked what raising a demonic son might tell us about masculinity and contemporary culture. Her film work and interviews reveal a filmmaker fascinated by the potential of genre to tell meaningful, intimate stories, as well as one who, frustrated by the limits of both studio and independent productions, takes a creatively pragmatic approach to her work.

What is the value of the book review today? Is reviewing a form of critique and conversation particularly well-suited to feminist theory and practice? And what strategies might editors looking to feature more feminist scholarship consider in their work? In this Q&A, we speak to Katherine Farrimond about her role as book reviews editor of the journal Feminist Theory.

In this week’s blog, Katherine Farrimond writes from a very contemporary perspective on the enduring cinematic figure of the femme fatale. Further to the publication of her monograph, she considers how recent examples in film and television create different dialogues between past and present.

The femme fatale occupies a precarious yet highly visible space in contemporary cinema. From sci-fi alien women to teenage bad girls, filmmakers continue to draw on the notion of the sexy deadly woman in ways which traverse boundaries of genre and narrative. This book charts the articulations of the femme fatale in American cinema of the past twenty years, and contends that, despite her problematic relationship with feminism, she offers a vital means for reading the connections between mainstream cinema and representations of female agency. The films discussed raise questions about the limits and potential of positioning women who meet highly normative standards of beauty as powerful icons of female agency. They point towards the constant shifting between patriarchal appropriation and feminist recuperation that inevitably accompanies such representations within mainstream media contexts.

Gothic fictions have long held a fascination with virgins, virginity and its loss. Gothic genres, especially horror, are riddled with satanic virginal sacrifices, metaphorical explorations of the loss of innocence, and, of course, the much-discussed final girl' of the slasher film. The Tamar Jeffers McDonald's conception of virginity underpins, as the conflicts set into motion by the gothic bodies in author's examples demonic and angelic possession, vampiric bodily rejuvenation, and the supernaturally restored body all prompt an exploration and interrogation of the concept of virginity itself. Virginity is a complex topic with multiple meanings, definitions, and implications, the way that it is addressed in much mainstream popular culture remains highly normative in terms of gender and sexuality, and it's most common definitions are firmly embedded in very limited and limiting understandings of sex and relationships.

Within the huge proliferation of femme fatale figures in Western cinema of the past two decades, one of the most striking patterns is the frequency of femme fatale characters who seduce women as well as men; indeed, a large proportion of recent films featuring bisexually active women cast such characters as sexy, deadly, femme fatale types. Drawing on recent theoretical work on the bisexual body, this article explores the implications of the femme fatale's bisexual behavior for a critical understanding of embodied bisexuality in relation to narrative film. The author extends her interrogation of the bisexual femme fatale beyond the current critical discourse that views the bisexual behavior of this figure simply as a means of demonstrating an assumed universal availability. Taking Femme Fatale (2002), Bound (1996), Basic Instinct (1992) and Mulholland Drive (2001) as her examples, the author argues that these films engage with wider narratives and anxieties about the correlation between bodily actions, desires and identities. In this article, the author argues that the behaviorally bisexual femme fatale's refusal of a conflation of current object choice with sexual orientation provides vital space for a bisexual feminist questioning of sexuality and desire as attributes that are written on the body.