While biblical scholars have long been interested in the monsters of the Hebrew Bible, it is only in the last several decades that theoretical approaches to monsters have made their way into biblical studies. Originating in the fields of psychoanalysis and anthropology, monster theory looks at the construction of various monsters, arguing that the way a culture creates its monsters reveals the anxieties held by that culture. This article will explore the uses of monster theory in recent works of biblical scholarship, demonstrating that monster theory has been used to read the figure of the monster as a representation of chaos, identify monstrous imagery as a rhetoric of trauma, and explore how the boundaries between the monster and the self are shifting and unstable.

A brief overview of the film, the career of writer-director Robert Eggers, and the production history of the film.

As Simone de Beauvoir and many others have discussed, western society too often assumes that the single goal of a woman’s life should be motherhood. These assumptions can be very damaging for women who choose to pursue other avenues instead of or in addition to motherhood. This article will use the writings of Beauvoir, Sarah Hrdy and Élisabeth Badinter to demonstrate how the recent horror film À l’Intérieur/Inside (2007), by Bustillo and Maury, examines these ideas by portraying a conflict between differing ideals of motherhood, each embodied as one of the film’s main characters. The article will argue that Inside understands modern constructions of motherhood as being damaging to society and destructive to mothers themselves.

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