‘What Were We-Idiots?': Re-evaluating Female Spectatorship and the New Horror Heroine with Catherine Hardwicke’s Twilight

Abstract

Fazekas and Vena evaluate the impact of Catherine Hardwicke’s Twilight in light of the ongoing cultural assumption that women do not engage with horror. Contextualizing the film against a contemporary wave of women-directed horror, the chapter analyzes how Hardwicke’s Twilight uses its central heroine, Bella, to re-prioritize female expressions of desire and pleasure within the genre. Although male fans and horror critics have dismissed the film, the breadth of female-authored fan fiction testifies to its importance. Looking at the fan fiction trope of ‘the Mary Sue, ' the authors show how female horror fans derive pleasure from the text, and how this engagement prompts a re-negotiation of horror’s boundaries, affects and audience.