Phallic Panic

’Phallic Panic is not only an impressive and elegant work of scholarship; it breathes new life into debates around the horror film, illuminating the genre’s eerie and unsettling power. Like her groundbreaking The Monstrous-Feminine, Creed’s new book is destined to become a standard text in the field.’
Pam Cook, Professor of European Film and Media, University of Southampton

’Barbara Creed asks the question ＂what does man want?＂ and takes us on an exhilarating trip through the Freudian uncanny and horror cinema to provide the answers. This is a lucid and compelling account of male monstrosity which exhumes the uncanny and makes it come to life all over again as something ＂primal＂, perverse and chillingly subversive.’
Ken Gelder, author of Reading The Vampire and The Horror Reader

Vampires, werewolves, cannibals and slashers-why do audiences find monsters in movies so terrifying? In Phallic Panic, Barbara Creed ranges widely across film, literature and myth, throwing new light on this haunted territory.
Looking at classic horror films such as Frankenstein, The Shining and Jack the Ripper, Creed provocatively questions the anxieties, fears and the subversive thrills behind some of the most celebrated monsters.
This follow-up to her influential book The Monstrous-Feminine is an important and enjoyable read for scholars and students of film, cultural studies, psychoanalysis and the visual arts.

Barbara Creed is a graduate of Monash and La Trobe Universities. Her doctoral thesis was on the cinema of horror, feminism and psychoanalysis, and was published as The Monstrous-Feminine (1993) by Routledge. Her areas of research include contemporary film, surrealism, feminist and psychoanalytic theory--areas in which she has widely published.

She has recently published Media Matrix: Sexing the New Reality and Pandora’s Box: Essays in Film Theory. She is currently writing a new book entitled The Darwinian Screen: the evolution of film theory. She has also co-edited the anthologies Body Trade: captivity, cannibalism and colonialism in the Pacific (Pluto Press & Routledge, 2001, with Jeanette Hoorn), The Sexual Subject: A Screen Reader in Sexuality (Routledge, 1992) and Don’t Shoot Darling: Women’s Independent Filmmaking in Australia (1987, with Annette Blonski and Freda Freiberg). Barbara is also an active figure in the film community as a reviewer, speaker and writer.