I have a hard time reading when I’m having a bad anxiety day and usually end up watching movies instead. My go to is Crazy Rich Asians. Does anyone else have movie recs for when the world and your brain seem like a ticking bomb?

Hi everyone! I thought that I’d make this post highlighting some Monstrous Feminine Resources for Readers & Writers for anyone who wants to become more well-read or well-written on the subgenre beyond this list of fiction works!

My plan is to make this an ongoing series with one post every month or two (when I have the time to make them), highlighting upcoming or timely opportunities, talks, classes etc, with this post collating each of those monthly posts alongside resources that are not time-sensitive e.g. books, articles, podcasts.

I’ll also note that my listing of these resources is not a personal endorsement of every point made in these works or by these thinkers. I’m curating resources that I feel could be helpful in generating conversation and opening a dialogue around womanhood, horror, and othering.

So, without further ado…

NON-FICTION BOOKS AND LONG-FORM READING

• The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis and Return of the Monstrous-Feminine: Feminist New Wave Cinema by Barbara Creed. Self-explanatory!
• Women And Other Monsters by Jess Zimmerman. A modern analysis of Greek mythological monsters. Huge thanks to @nadiiia for initially recommending this!
• Periodic Bitch by Emma Hardy. A ‘memoir of menstruation, madness and monsters’, exploring PMDD and the myths, taboos and horrors around menstruation.
• Men, Women, And Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film by Carol J. Clover. Coined the term ‘final girl’; one of the most noted explorations of gender in horror.
• House Of Psychotic Women: An Autobiographical Topography of Female Neurosis in Horror and Exploitation Films by Kier-La Janisse. The title probably says it best!
• Monster, She Wrote: The Women Who Pioneered Horror and Speculative Fiction by Lisa B. Kröger and Melanie R. Anderson. Once again, the title tells you what you need to know!
• Unquiet Spirits: Essays by Asian Women in Horror edited by Lee Murray and Angela Kuriko Smith. Dispatches from 21 Asian women in the horror community.
• Women Make Horror: Filmmaking, Feminism, Genre, edited by Alison Peirse. 18 essays on women horror directors.
• It Came from the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror, edited by Joe Vallesse. Features essays on the reciprocity between queerness and horror.
• Uncanny Valley Girls: Essays on Horror, Survival, And Love by Zefyr Lisowski. Part memoir, part film analysis, looking at trans identity, disability, and horror.
• Dinner on Monster Island: Essays by Tania De Rozario. Blends memoir with history and horror analysis from a queer, brown, fat lens.
• In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado. A memoir that uses horror devices and structures to explore queer abuse dynamics.
• Unlikeable Female Characters by Anna Bogutskaya. An exploration of the women in film, TV, and wider pop culture that have liberated women from having to be nice.

PODCASTS AND LONG-FORM AUDIO ESSAY

• The Monstrous Feminine podcast. Ran from 2020-2025, covering horror film. The archive is available on Spotify, YouTube, and Tumblr.
• The Final Girls: A Horror Film Podcast. Discusses horror cinema, featuring guests from Julia Ducournau to Jamie Lee Curtis.

NEWSLETTERS, ESSAYS, AND SHORT-FORM READING

• FLESH WORLD by Jessica DeFino. A Substack newsletter on the beauty industry, questioning and covering our relationship to beauty and ugliness.
• Frankenstein is actually about being a woman, an essay by Cricket Guest
• sisters to witches: a feminist horror curriculum by Bree Beauregard
• Nobody wants a monster girl, an essay on monster fuckers by Sithara Ranasinghe
• I am nothing if not Grotesque, an essay on the regulation and dysregulation of women in art by Maria Gracia Jiminez
• The Resurgence of the Monstrous Feminine by Hannah Williams
• The Pale Horse, a horror Substack newsletter with a focus on women in horror.

LITERARY MAGAZINES, JOURNALS, AND ANTHOLOGIES

• Bloodletter Magazine. A literary journal spotlighting women and non-binary horror writers. They have a special anthology for trans voices in horror, and an upcoming anthology spotlighting migrant voices in horror. And if you dig, you’ll find some of my writing too!
• PHANTASMAG. An indie queer horror magazine.
• The Nottingham Horror Collective. An indie horror film zine publisher.
• s(crawl). A new literary magazine aiming to amplify under-represented and marginalised voices in horror.

Please feel free to comment any resources you think could be useful, and I’ll vet and add them when I get the chance. Stay filthy!