Demi Moore and the (Not) Ageing Body

The horror genre has always used the female body as a vehicle to explore and represent social and cultural tensions, projecting collective anxieties and fears onto it. Women are not only portrayed as passive victims of violence and oppression, but also as actively disturbing figures, as threatening entities capable of subverting the codes of the patriarchal symbolic order. As Barbara Creed1 has clearly illustrated, archetypal figures such as the ‘witch’, the ‘archaic mother’ and the ‘possessed monster’ — all linked in a more or less explicit way to the reproductive and maternal function of women — have been used to embody the deepest anxieties of patriarchy, linked to the female body and its transformations, as well as its progressive detachment from traditional norms of desirability, sexuality, and motherhood.