Barbara Creed

Barbara Creed (born 30 September 1943) is an Australian professor of cinema studies in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. She is the author of six books on gender, feminist film theory, and the horror genre. Creed is a graduate of Monash and La Trobe universities where she completed doctoral research using the framework of psychoanalysis and feminist theory to examine horror films. She is known for her cultural criticism.

Early life Barbara Creed is a well-known Australian commentator on film and media. She is a graduate of Monash and La Trobe University, completing her doctrinal thesis and research on the cinema of horror. Creed pursued the use of feminist theory and psychoanalysis in her examination of horror films. Creed's work relies on a number of theorists including Sigmund Freud, and Julia Kristeva.

Julia Kristeva is one of Creed's major feminist influencers, as she studied Kristeva in great depth, particularly with her examination of the abject. Creed wrote an essay on Kristeva and film in 1985 for the British Film Journal. Creed's The Monstrous-Feminine In this, "lack" signifies the female, wherein male monsters are identified as abject, lacking; ultimately feminine. Creed focuses on Freudian psychoanalysis and Julia Kristeva's work on semiotics. Creed's work using the psychoanalysis framework validates its usefulness in the feminist film theory field.

The Monstrous-Feminine

The Monstrous Feminine refers to the interpretation of horror films conceptualizing women, predominantly, as victims. to describe how patriarchal society separates the human from the non-human, and rejects the "partially formed subject".

Creed first considers women as Vampires in such films as Dracula (1992) and The Hunger (1983), wherein she discusses the image of the ‘archaic mother’ with the female vampire being ‘mother’ and her lover or victim as ‘child’ whom she promises eternal life to. Barbara Creed frequently mentions in her work that horror movies play on this fear of the vagina dentata and even include it visually in films, through enormous toothed monsters or aliens, to settings such as dark and narrow hallways, deadly traps and doors, and spaceships such as that in Alien.

Types of Monstrous-Femininity

Archaic mother in Alien (1979). Possessed Monster in The Exorcist (1973). Monstrous Womb in The Brood (1979). Vampire in The Hunger (1983). Witch in Carrie (1976). Femme Castratrice in I Spit on Your Grave (1978) and Sisters (1973). Castrating Mother in Psycho (1960).

The Monstrous Womb A woman's reproductive system has long been depicted as abhorrent and intimidating.

Creed places emphasis on this idea of the monstrous-womb, as the maternal body has been considered a source of anxiety to the male gaze. Sigmund Freud's works on psychoanalysis theorizes that women once had penises, and are themselves castrated, resulting in the formation of female genitalia, and due to this "penis envy", seek to castrate men of their penises to make them as lacking as women. Freud applies this theory to Medusa, as Creed explains that Freud's compares the female genitalia to Medusa as men fear castration from the sight of her. She includes a definition of "Matrix" in the book's introduction, which she describes as a, "womb; place in which thing is developed", which closely relates to her discussion of the monstrous feminine. This piece offers a feminist analysis on sex difference in the horror genre, as well as the order in which male monsters innate masculinity and is "caught between the opposing forces of culture and nature, the civilized and primitive". The ‘primal uncanny’, as Creed looks at, was firstly discussed in Freud's work as just the ‘uncanny’ that linked to ideas of psychoanalysis and castration. Yet, Freud only really considered death and the feeling of horror in relation to male monsters and didn't examine the role of women, nature and animals.

Awards and committees In 2006 Creed was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. She is on a variety of worldwide editorial panels.

At the University of Melbourne in 2013, Creed established the Human Rights and Animal Ethics Research Network.

Publications Barbara Creed has published a multitude of material on gender and horror, including: The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism. Psychoanalysis (1993), Media Matrix: Sexing the New Reality (2003), Phallic Panic: Film, Horror & the Primal Uncanny (2005) and Darwin's Screens: Evolutionary Aesthetics, Time and Sexual Display in the Cinema (2009).