scream queen

"Cinema is full of neurotic personalities, but few things are more transfixing than a woman losing her mind onscreen." (Kier-La Janisse, 'House of Psychotic Women')

Out of all types of horror films, I most love those depicting 1. Women losing their minds, and 2. Girls turning into monsters.

As a woman (especially as a gay woman) who often feels she is losing her shit while the world slips further into insanity with people talking about bitcoin as the earth literally burns, I take comfort in films that allow women's destructive emotions out to play. It's nice to know other women are silently wondering "...am I the psychotic one, or...?"

And I have always loved how the girlhood-to-monstress trope explains that girls will become the monster that the world makes them out to be.

"In a culture where we're trained to protect children and loathe women, the border zone [of puberty] is the subject of intense superstition and terror... Every woman is a girl who fell from grace, a monster who once was human. Puberty marks the point where girls stop being people and start being women." (Sady Doyle, 'Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers')

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books, essays, classics, etc.