Ithaca College

Alex Coburn delivered her paper, titled “Valerie the Vampire Slayer: Abjection, the Czech New Wave, and Feminist Interventions,” at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Undergraduate Conference at Wilfred Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario. Alex was one of only 30 students to be accepted to this peer-reviewed, international event. SCMS is the premiere research organization dedicated to media studies, and this conference is the sixth event focused on undergraduate research.

Alex’s research explores an understudied work of the Czech New Wave in relation to genre, national histories, and feminist politics. See the shortened abstract below:

Czech New Wave cult classic Valerie and Her Week of Wonders has historically been examined as a surrealist horror film, but this is missing its larger condemnation of the objectification and subjugation of young women as they reach sexual maturity. The film asserts that women are not allowed to come of age organically, but are molded into submissive sex objects for men in power to manipulate once they get their first period. It is not so much a sexual horror film; rather, the horror originates from the sex. For young women, sex is horror. 

Valerie uses the vampire genre as a metaphor for the way men groom young women sexually, as illustrated by the vampire’s stalking of Valerie once she gets her first period. Valerie is forcibly exposed to a sadomasochistic dynamic in which women are molded into subjugation, but her resistance illustrates the Czech New Wave’s feminist intervention into horror.