The Monstrous Feminine in The Haunting of Hill House, Part Two

Happy New Year! Let’s get into it!

Barbara Creed is a scholar who wrote a book called The Monstrous Feminine in 1993, and the second edition came out in 2023. In these books, she outlines archetypes of The Monstrous Feminine as they appear in horror films. For my PhD, I’m connecting her archetypes to the princess in Sleeping Beauty, as she appears in similar tales across many centuries. For this newsletter, I’m connecting her archetypes to the women monsters in The Haunting of Hill House (the TV show).

Given that I don’t want to write something horrendously long, I’ll try to do this as concisely as I can. I’ll outline the relevant archetypes first, and then I’ll say which characters inhabit which archetypes.

Sentient Zombie—an archetype added in the second edition—“Living, yet dead, and possessing an unnerving sense of right and wrong, the uncanny figure of the female zombie stands in stark contrast to the living human subjects, inviting us to re-think the meaning of the ‘human’” (213).

Vampire—“The female vampire is a figure who came to prominence in vampire films of the 1970s. During this period, the vampire film began to explore openly the explicit relationship between sex, violence and death” (58).

Witch—“She is usually depicted as a monstrous figure with supernatural powers and a desire for evil…She is thought to be dangerous and wily, capable of drawing on her evil powers to wreak destruction on the community. The witch sets out to unsettled boundaries between the rational and irrational, symbolic and imaginary. Her evil powers are seen as part of her ‘feminine’ nature” (75).

Possessed Monster—This one is hard to capture in just one quote. The idea of possession, especially demonic possession, is easy to grasp, from its appearance in the 14th century, when witches were conspiring with the devil, all the way up to present day, with shows like Jujutsu Kaisen, where Yuji Itadori is a vessel for the King of Curses, Ryomen Sukuna. But the monstrous feminine’s interaction with the possessed monster needs a bit more disentangling.