This week on the Scary Women list, we will be discussing child fiends and continuing our discussion of aging women. Anyone who wishes to join the list is encouraged to visit our web site: www.cinema.ucla.edu/women/ If you do not have access to the web and would like to join the discussion, please e-mail me at [log in to unmask] In the subject line, please write "Request to join scary women." And in the body of your e-mail, please let me know whether or not you can receive attachments through your e-mail account. Descriptions of the papers by Barbara Creed and Vivian Sobchack, which are on the web, follow: "Baby Bitches from Hell: Monstrous Little Women in Film" by Barbara Creed Creed examines the figure of the monstrous little girl in films ranging from CURSE OF THE CAT PEOPLE (1944) and THE BAD SEED (1956) to THE EXORCIST (1973) AND CARRIE (1976). Drawing on Julia Kristeva's notion of the abject as that which threatens to breach the symbolic boundaries erected by civilized society, Creed argues that Hollywood's monstrous children inhabit the borders "between human and animal, male and female, living and dead, clean and unclean, natural and supernatural, innocence and evil, adult and child." As a consequence, they are both horrifying and appealing. Dividing her essay into three thematic categories - the mystical child, the possessed girl, and the monstrous daughter - Creed explores the horrifying appeal of images of corrupted innocence that proliferate on the Hollywood screen. "THE LEECH WOMAN's Revenge: On the Dread of Aging in a Low-Budget Horror Film by Vivian Sobchack Sobchack recalls the monstrously aging women in horror films she saw as a child in the 1950s as she meditates on the anxieties that attend middle age. Such low-budget horror films as ATTACK OF THE 50 FOOT WOMAN (1958), THE WASP WOMAN (1959), and THE LEECH WOMAN (1960) are morally charged stories that represent the aging woman as both scary and scared, as frightening to others as she is to herself. Excessive by virtue of her age and gender, and doubly monstrous in that she experiences desire even while she is no longer perceived as desirable, the aging woman offers an alternative to the monstrous women that feminist theory has described: her scariness has "less to do with sexual desire and castration anxiety than with abjection and death." Sobchack weaves together her own perception of aging with accounts of abject middle-aged women from popular psychology, high theory, and Hollywood horror film to unravel our culture's complicated response to aging women. Kristen Hatch UCLA Film and Television Archive Research and Study Center ---- Online resources for film/TV studies may be found at ScreenSite http://www.sa.ua.edu/screensite