Uncontaining Horror: 20th Century Spanish Women’s Meshes of Fear

Barbara Zecchi (University of Massachusetts Amherst)

This video essay engages with two theoretical concepts in horror cinema— Eugenie Brinkema’s In their study of 21st-century Spanish horror cinema (2024), Vicente Rodríguez Ortega and Rubén Romero Santos identify Náufragos (María Lidón, 2001) as the first horror film directed by a woman in Spain. The scholars emphasize the film’s distinctiveness, noting its challenge to mainstream horror clichés—its “new poetics of horror” in Pisters’ terms (2020)— and observe that this departure from traditional genre conventions becomes a significant trend in subsequent films directed by Spanish women. While Rodríguez Ortega and Romero Santos project their analysis forward i“genrelessness” (2015) and Jane Gaines’s “uncontainment” (2012)—to reframe 13 films by 20th-century Spanish women filmmakers that have not been classified as horror, using a “deformative” approach. I will discuss this method in more detail shortly. For now, it is important to note that through this deformative lens, I aim to reveal, on one hand, how these films produce affects that transcend conventional genre classifications, and on the other, how the concept of horror itself can be expanded.

Into the 21st century, my video essay adopts a retrospective approach. I argue that some of the characteristics they identify in contemporary horror films by women were already present in 20th-century productions, despite the absence of these films from the horror genre canon. As I have previously articulated in my books Desenfocadas (2014) and La pantalla sexuada (2015) no films by women from the 20th century are classified as horror; instead, 60% are categorized as drama, 20% as comedy, 13% as thriller, and 7% as documentary.

By combining clips from 13 films in 20th-century women’s filmography —spanning drama, thriller, and even comedy— my video essay generates a disturbing affective intensity that underscores Brinkema’s observation: “texts not acknowledged as horrific in classical genre treatments do produce moments of disturbing affective intensity—disgust, loathing, revulsion, dread, terror, anxiety, and fear (3)”. The manipulation of the clips’ soundtrack further amplifies such an emotional resonance.  In this context, disgust, loathing, revulsion, dread, terror, anxiety, and fear are redefined through a less male-centric lens: Gothic spaces are recast as haunted by patriarchal power structures, rather than ghosts; the sexualization of women’s bodies after death highlights issues of consent rather than necrophilia; “abject” aspects of the female body are depicted with a sense of familiarity; gender-based violence is exposed as systemic rather than private; and women’s agency is highlighted through women’s connection with the more-than-human.

The images for my video essay are organized within what I have called a “feminist grid” (2024)  —a stratagem that I have consistently employed in my videographic work to evoke an imaginary of enclosure (the bars of a heteropatriarchal prison), connection (a net that brings together disparate images to generate new meanings), and uncontainment (a mesh, an elastic framework capable of movement and expansion). In their project “Ways of Doing”, Lucy Fife Donaldson, Colleen Laird, Dayna McLeod, and Alison Peirse have interpreted it as a way to “dis/re/orienting cinematic language” (2023). The purpose of my feminist grid serves as a tool for executing a deformative approach: images (and sounds) are disrupted “in controlled or chaotic ways,” as Kevin Ferguson (2017) describes, and rendered “strange,” in Jason Mittell’s (2021) terms. I decelerate the images, allowing for close examination of expressions of fear, isolate unsettling moments, focus on details, and employ repetitions. Through this process, the grid metaphorically opens, enabling the images to transcend their confines and mirror the release of pent-up emotions. In this context, chaos and strangeness signify a break from established genre conventions.

Through an outward movement of the grid, I underscore Gaines’s argument that we have observed “a shift from genre as ‘containing’ the possibilities of production and interpretation to genre as expansively generative, productive of more works.” This outward movement enables the images and sounds to become uncontained—allowing them to emerge and overflow—thus permitting them to transcend their traditional boundaries.

Note

This video essay has been made within Research Project +I+D+i “Cine y televisión en España en la era digital (2008–22): nuevos agentes y espacios de intercambio en el panorama audiovisual” financed by Agencia Estatal de Investigación (PID2022-140102NB-I00/AEI/10.13039/501100011033).

Bibliography:

 Brinkema, E. (2015). Introduction: A genreless horror. Journal of Visual Culture, 14(3), 263–266.
Donaldson, L. F., Laird, C., McLeod, D., & Peirse, A. (2023). Dis/re/orienting cinematic language: Barbara Zecchi’s feminist mechanisms. Ways of Doing. Retrieved from https://waysofdoing.com/feminist-citational-exercises/dis-re-orienting-cinematic-language-barbara-zecchis-feminist-mechanisms/

Ferguson, K. L. (2017). Digital surrealism: Visualizing Walt Disney Animation Studios. Digital Humanities Quarterly, 11(1). Retrieved from http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/11/1/000276/000276.html

Gaines, J. (2012). The genius of genre and the ingenuity of women. In Gender meets genre in postwar cinemas (pp. 15–28).

Mittell, J. (2021). Deformin’ in the rain: How (and why) to break a classic film. Digital Humanities Quarterly, 15(1). Retrieved from http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/15/1/000521/000521.html

Peirse, A., ed. (2020) Women Make Horror: Filmmaking, Feminism, Genre. Rutgers University Press

Pisters, P. (2020). New blood in contemporary cinema: Women directors and the poetics of horror. Edinburgh University Press.

Rodríguez Ortega, V., & Romero Santos, R. (2024). Spanish horror film and television in the 21st century. Routledge.

Wisker, G. (2001). Women’s horror as erotic transgression. Femspec, 3(1).

Zecchi, B. (2014). Desenfocadas: Cineastas españolas y discursos de género. Icaria.

Zecchi, B. (2015). La pantalla sexuada. Ediciones Cátedra.

Zecchi, B. (forthcoming 2024). ‘The problem is the system’: Luis Rubiales, Jenni Hermoso and the sound of sealed lips. European Journal of Cultural Studies.

Filmography (in order of appearance in the video essay):

Another Me, Isabel Coixet, 2013
El crimen de Cuenca, Pilar Miró, 1981

La gata, Margarita Alexandre, 1956

Brumal, Cristina Andreu, 1990

La noche del Dr. Valdés, Cecilia Bartolomé, 1964

La Moños, Mireia Ros, 1997

Vera, un cuento cruel, Josefina Molina, 1973

Esquilache, Josefina Molina, 1989

El gato montés, Rosario Pi Brujas, 1935

El pájaro de la felicidad, Pilar Miró, 1993

El palo, Eva Lesmes, 2000

La petición, Pilar Miró, 1976

Flores de otro mundo, Icíar Bollaín, 1999

El puzzle, Juana Macías, 1999

Tu nombre envenena mis sueños, Pilar Miró, 1996