In Men, Women and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, Carol Clover advances the idea that the primary pleasure for male viewers of the genre is a masochistic rather than a sadistic one, but her concern with gender is strictly limited to male viewers. In The Monstrous Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis, Barbara Creed, who turns her attention to female monstrosity, maintains that the monstrous-feminine in the horror film speaks to men about their fear of women, but she has little to say about how it might speak to women about female power. Both books center the male viewer and neglect the question of female audience pleasure in the horror film. This question has by now become a structuring absence of horror film criticism. 

My discussion of the horror film is motivated by a desire to disrupt the facile assumption that the genre does not speak to women but only about them, and that it does this in a degrading manner. The postmodern horror film's routine staging of the spectacle of the ruined body, particularly the female body, calls for a feminist analysis. Moreover, the historical conjunction between the emergence of the postmodern horror film and the advent of the second wave American feminist movement in the early seventies begs the question: How have feminist protest and antifeminist backlash informed the character of the contemporary horror film?  

[...]

Although I agree that it matters what representations of women abound in culture, the tendency to see the horror film as monolithically destructive of female subjectivity overlooks the contradictory dynamics within the genre as well as the complexity with which audiences respond to it. The antihorror discourse sees only how the genre has been formed by antifeminist backlash but overlooks how feminism has informed the genre. The horror film is a contradictory form that must be understood in all its complexity lest we misinterpret popular culture or underestimate its subversive potential.

Isabel Cristina Pinedo, Recreational Terror: Women and the Pleasures of Horror Film Viewing

'Look for the girls also in the toilets at night, and you will find them kneeling in that great secret confessional crying between tongues, the terrible excommunication:

'"May you be damned to hell! May you die standing upright! May you be damned upward! May this be damned, terrible and damned spot! May it wither into the grin of the dead, may this draw back, low riding mouth in an empty snarl of the groin! May this be your torment, may this be your damnation! God damned me before you, and after me you shall be damned, kneeling and standing away till we vanish! For what do you know of me, man's meat? I'm an angel on all fours, with a child's feet behind me, seeking my people that have never been made, going down face foremost, drinking the waters of night at the water hole of the damned, and I go into the waters, up to my heart, the terrible waters! What do you know of me? May you pass from me, damned girl! Damned and betraying!"

Djuna Barnes, Nightwood 

'I left Paris. I went through the streets of Marseilles, the waterfront of Tangier, the basso porto of Naples. In the narrow streets of Naples, ivies and flowers were growing over the broken-down walls. Under enormous staircases, rising open to the streets, beggars lay sleeping beside images of St. Gennaro; girls going into the churches to pray were calling out to boys in the squares. In open door-ways night-lights were burning all day before gaudy prints of the Virgin. In one room that lay open to the alley, before a bed covered with a cheap heavy satin comforter, in the semi-darkness, a young girl sat on a chair, leaning over its back, one arm across it, the other hanging at her side, as if half of her slept; and half of her suffered. When she saw me she laughed, as children do, in embarrassment. Looking from her to the Madonna behind the candles, I knew that the image, to her, was what I had been to Robin, not a saint at all, but a fixed dismay, the space between the human and the holy head, the arena of the "indecent" eternal. At that moment I stood in the centre of eroticism and death, death that makes the dead smaller, as a lover we are beginning to forget dwindles and wastes; for love and life are a bulk of which the body and heart can be drained, and I knew in that bed Robin should have put me down. In that bed we would have forgotten our lives in the extremity of memory, moulted our parts, as figures in the wax works are moulted down to their story, so we would have broken-down to our love.'

Djuna Barnes, Nightwood 

She began to walk again. 'I have been loved', she said, 'by something strange, and it has forgotten me.' Her eyes were fixed and she seemed to be talking to herself. 'It was me made her hair stand on end, because I loved her. She turned bitter because I made her fate colossal. She wanted darkness in her mind—to throw a shadow over what she was powerless to alter—her dissolute life, her life at night; and I, I dashed it down. We will never have it out now,' Nora said. 'It's too late. There is no last reckoning for those who have loved too long, so for me there is no end. Only I can't, I can't wait for ever!' she said frantically. 'I can't live without my heart! 

'In the beginning, after Robin went away with Jenny to America, I searched for her in the ports. Not literally, in another way. Suffering is the decay of the heart; all that we have loved becomes the "forbidden", when we have not understood it all, as the pauper is the rudiment of a city, knowing something of the city, which the city, for its own destiny, wants to forget. So the lover must go against nature to find love. 

Djuna Barnes, Nightwood

"You went about the house like someone sunken under lightness. you wer ruined and you kept striking your hands together, laughing crazily and singing a little and putting your hands over your face. Stage-tricks have been taken from life, so finding yourself employing them you were confused with a sense of shame. When you went out looking for someone to go mad with, they said, 'For god's sake, look at Nora!' For the demolishing of a great ruin is always a fine and terrifying spectacle. Why is it that you want to talk to me? Because I'm the other woman that God forgot."

"There's nothing to go by, Michael," she said. "you do not know which way to go. A man is another person--a woman is yourself, caught as you turn in panic; on her mouth you kiss your own. If she is taken you cry that you have been robbed of yourself. God laughs at me, but his laughter is my love."

Djuna Barnes, Nightwood