Patricia Pisters

New Blood in Contemporary Cinema: Women Directors and the Poetics of Horror

Discusses how contemporary women directors have appropriated horror aesthetics, enlarging its generic scope and expanding its emotional spectrum

• Revisits themes and concerns of the horror genre, from the perspective of women directors
• Includes case studies of important female directed films, including A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, Evolution, Raw 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.

Exploring themes such as rage, trauma, sexuality, family ties and politics, New Blood in Contemporary Cinema takes on avenging women, bloody vampires, lustful witches, scary mothers, terrifying offspring and female Frankensteins. By following a red trail of blood, the book illuminates a new generation of women directors who have enlarged the general scope and stretched the emotional spectrum of the genre. The book has appeared in 2020 with Edinburgh University Press.

See here for some online presentations of the book. The booklaunch in EYE Filmmuseum can be seen here (in Dutch). An online lecture for the University of Southhampton about the book can be watched here (in English).