Anna Bogutskaya

The Women Pop Culture Wants You to Hate

Unlikeable Female Characters

Zombies want brains. Vampires want blood. Cannibals want human flesh. All monsters need feeding.
Horror has been embraced by mainstream pop culture more than ever before, with horror characters and aesthetics infecting TV, music videos and even TikTok trends. Yet even with the commercial and critical success of The Babadook, Hereditary, Get Out, The Haunting of Hill House, Yellowjackets and countless other horror films and TV series over the last few years, loving the genre still prompts the question: what’s wrong with you? Implying, of course, that there is something not quite right about the people who make and consume it. In Feeding the Monster, Anna Bogutskaya dispels this notion once and for all by examining how horror responds to and fuels our feelings of fear, anxiety, pain, hunger and power.

Feeding the Monster: Why Horror Has a Hold on Us

"A fresh feminist appraisal of the pop culture canon." —Publishers Weekly How bitches, trainwrecks, shrews, and crazy women have taken over pop culture and liberated women from having to be nice. Female characters throughout history have been burdened by the moral trap that is likeability. Any woman who dares to reveal her messy side has been treated as a cautionary tale. Today, unlikeable female characters are everywhere in film, TV, and wider pop culture. For the first time ever, they are being accepted by audiences and even showered with industry awards. We are finally accepting that women are—gasp—fully fledged human beings. How did we get to this point? Unlikeable Female Characters traces the evolution of highly memorable female characters, examining what exactly makes them popular, how audiences have reacted to them, and the ways in which pop culture is finally allowing us to celebrate the complexities of being a woman. Anna Bogutskaya, film programmer, broadcaster, and co-founder of the horror film collective and podcast The Final Girls, takes us on a journey through popular film, TV, and music, looking at the nuances of womanhood on and off-screen to reveal whether pop culture—and society—is finally ready to embrace complicated women. Praise for Unlikeable Female Characters: "Fascinating, insightful, and kick-ass." —Emma Jane Unsworth, internationally bestselling author of Grown Ups and Animals "Beautifully written." —Chelsea G. Summers, author of A Certain Hunger "Part-cultural exposé, part-Taylor Swift album." —Clarisse Loughrey, Chief Film Critic at The Independent "Brilliant masterpiece breaking down the tired tropes of TV and beyond." —Aparna Shewakramani, author of She's Unlikeable and star of Indian Matchmaking

Anna Bogutskaya

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