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Misfit Sisters: Screen Horror as Female Rites of Passage.

Article Excerpt
Misfit Sisters: Screen Horror as Female Rites of Passage. By Sue Short. New

York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. xi + 196 pp., bibliography, filmography, index.

In Misfit Sisters, Sue Short argues that contemporary horror films share several elements with fairy tales, most notably fear, fantasy, and initiation rites. She suggests that "contemporary horror can be best understood as a means of revisiting, and at times refuting, many of the assumptions contained in fairy tales" (6). Short's study focuses on contemporary horror films with female protagonists in coming-of-age stories. The female protagonists discussed are noteworthy because like Little Red Riding Hood, one of Short's primary fairy-tale references (the other being Cinderella), they "stray from the path," which allows them to "assume narrative agency and learn valuable lessons in self-reliance" (ix). Short's focus is on the development of agency, what must happen to achieve agency, and the ramifications of that agency. Aligning contemporary horror films to fairy tales that follow the maturation of an adolescent heroine, Short sets out to demonstrate "how many female protagonists ... are forced to prove themselves in horror; evaluating what risks they take, what roles they play, and what such stories tell us about changing gender roles...

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