Horror film has been no exception to this tradition in its widespread linking of the female body-its apparent uncontrollability signaled through its points of leakage and perforation-with the oozing, amorphous, unreliable body of the monster. The monster's bodily volatility, fascinating yet dangerous, has been particularly associated with the feminine, as expressed in the cultural pairing of women and monster that, according to Rosa Braidotti, 'goes as far back as Aristotle' and has produced over time an ongoing 'horror of the female body' (62-63). In horror Alms, monsters thus 'challenge the presumed homogeneity of human identity by confusing or transgressing boundaries between the human and the nonhuman' so that 'the monster introduces a threatening heterogeneity into the category of the human' (Lindsey 283), producing an understanding of the human body as divergent and complex. Horror film emerges from a long tradition of monstrous exhibition which has used monsters to mark the gap between 'properly' self-contained human bodies and the intriguing volatility of the compromised, and therefore monstrous, human form. Like other forms of cultural spectacle, horror film is often deeply enmeshed in the paradoxically doubled effect of discomfort and desire that emerges in the voyeuristic viewing of the monster. We may 'distrust and loathe the monster,' but our fear, says Cohen, is also a kind of desire (17). The monster may function as a 'dialectical Other,' suggests Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, but at the same time it 'can seldom be contained in a simple, binary dialectic' (7, 17). In this complex of reactions can be detected the complexity of the monster's ambiguous relationship to the familiar and the normative. As a literal embodiment of difference, the monster on display is potentially disruptive, evoking wonder, fascination, and attraction even as it generates suspicion, aversion, and repulsion. Living, dead, or imagined, on stages and museum shelves, in carnivals, sideshows, anatomical textbooks and the illustrations of fantastical travel tales, the distinctive bodies of so-called monsters have circulated for centuries as prized articles of entertainment or edification. Its meaning at once static and shifting, the monstrous body has possessed a peculiar plasticity: it has been shaped and re-shaped to articulate, in its unsettling deficiencies, the anxieties of its time.

Emblem and exemplar of troubled boundaries, the figure of the monster both challenges and reinforces the borders of the human.

The body of the monster offers a particularly complex metaphor, one that has, over time, congealed in fascinating and suggestive ways. The body is 'a congealed metaphor,' observes Katherine Hayles as an organism at once physical and social, it is a 'structure whose constraints and possibilities' have been formed by history and shaped by cultural delimitations of 'body boundaries' (284, 107).

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