Living Deliciously? The Borderless Horror of Female Empowerment

This chapter explores the legacy of Me Too and #metoo in international horror film. It does so by analyzing three films where women, the power they wield, and the bonds they form emerge as sites of terror. Emanuele de Feudis’s Il Legame (The Binding, 2020), Ángel Gómez Hernández’s Voces (Voices, 2020), and Robert Eggers’s The Witch (2015) capitalize on culturally specific traditions of misogyny and present female bodies as repository of ancestral horror. In Il Legame, the desperate ghost of a physically and spiritually abused woman haunts a family and their house in rural Italy. In Robert Eggers’s The Witch (2015), a Puritan family of five falls under the unwelcome spell of a witch, until they become convinced that the witch is one of them. Voces mines the legacy of the Spanish Inquisition and its crimes for horror motifs, but evil resides in the ghost of an assertive woman. All three films mobilize but mostly do not subvert their own cultural traditions of gender violence. They do question but nonetheless do not resist the temptation to capitalize on representations of the subversive woman as monstrous, which emerges as a resilient site of fear, especially, as I argue, in a post-MeToo world.