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Tim Snelson, Phantom Ladies : Hollywood Horror and the Home Front

At the crossroads between women’s studies, media history, and monster theory, Tim Snelson’s Phantom Ladies : Hollywood Horror and the Home Front examines the changes that occurred in Hollywood’s film production during World War II. Spotlighting a significant shift in the gendering of the spectatorship– men were in Europe fighting against the Axis – Snelson offers his readership a compelling and thorough study of the cultural mutations American cinema underwent on and off screen. While challenging the traditional view that women were too sensitive to enjoy watching horror movies at the time, Snelson unearths a circular « politics of tastes » (p. 2). As a matter of fact, the new American female workers of the 1940s found in the horror movies of the era « new and invigorating ways » (p. 163) to reflect on their socio-professional situation and their bodies. Accordingly, studios endeavored, one after the other, to mirror these women’s experiences through movies revolving around (profitable) female monsters. Exploring the meanders of this simultaneously exhilarating and anxiety-inducing liberation, the author articulately deciphers the stakes of the artistic transposition of the wartime home-front ladies onto the cinematic screen. Snelson dedicates the bulk of his first chapter to the innovative « female Gothic » and monster movie, Cat People (1942), produced by Val Lewton for RKO Pictures, one of the giants of the Hollywood Golden Age, and directed by Jacques Tourneur. At this stage, the author brings out the main traits that will characterize the rest of the female monster film cycle : a relocation of the horror narrative to contemporary urban America, a triangular sexual dynamic (two women vying for the romantic attention of one man), and a heroine situated at the crossroads of victimhood and monstrosity. For Snelson, this specific ambiguity of the female protagonist resonates with the complexities of women’s lives on the home front : Irena, a