From the Female Grotesque to the Crone: Beware of the Older Woman in The Taking of Deborah Logan (2014)

Given the unprecedented rise of the aging population in the last decades, the effects of growing older have become a cause of concern in Western society. According to critics like Cynthia Miller and A. Bowdoin van Riper (Elder Horror: Essays on Film’s Frightening Images of Aging. McFarland, Jefferson, North Carolina, 2019), many contemporary horror movies revolve around the fears of old age, casting elders in the roles of victims and villains, hence underscoring prevailing ambivalent attitudes towards old age. Theorists like Sally Chivers (The Silvering Screen: Old Age and Disability in Cinema. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013) argue that, although old age has acquired centrality in contemporary cinema, movies still tend to portray old age mainly as a stage of decline, particularly for women. Adam Robitel’s The Taking of Deborah Logan (2014) laid the foundations of contemporary horror cinema addressing the fears of female aging, as this movie graphically portrays the symptoms of the degenerative illness affecting its female protagonist in coalescence with a case of demonic possession. This article aims to approach the ambivalent discourses of age and gender in Robitel’s movie, insofar as it associates female aging with the grotesque—since it emphasizes the abject traits of the aging female body, together with the uncanny features characterizing the aging self, thus complying with Barbara Creed’s notion of the monstrous-feminine (1993)—but it also suggests the correlation of the older woman with the ancestral figure of the crone, which theorists like Barbara Walker (The Crone: Woman of Age, Wisdom, and Power. Harper One, New York, 1985) have rediscovered as a source of female empowerment in patriarchal societies.