The horror genre has always concerned gender issues. These range from the typical ‘damsel in distress’ captured by the male monster in classical horror to the ‘abject monstrous-feminine’ and ‘final girl’ in the modern horror film of the 1970s and 1980s, as analyzed by Barbara Creed and Carol Clover in their seminal feminist studies of the genre. However, it is only since the new millennium that female directors have started to actively appropriate horror aesthetics in significant ways in their own films. In her lecture “A Trail of Blood. Women Directors and the Poetics of Horror” Patricia Pisters (University of Amsterdam) investigates contemporary women filmmakers who put ‘a poetics of horror’ to new use in their work, thus opening a range of different perspectives on the themes of the horror genre. Afterwards, ÉVOLUTION (Lucile Hadzihalilovic, FR/ES/BE 2015) will be screened. The Cinepoetics Lectures are organized by Cinepoetics—Center for Advanced Film Studies at Freie Universität Berlin. (mu) (25.11.)
