ReFocus: the films of John Hughes

Abstract

the characters in these films and where popular cinema ultimately compromises on its subversive potential. In conclusion, then, there are a few ideas which remain unexplored in this anthology. First, there is no clarity offered as to what constitutes bad in the contemporary moment, although sufficient attention has been paid to what constituted ‘bad’ in the decades leading up to the twenty-first century. Second, horror as a genre that creates female monsters does not find room within this volume, which limits its scope because it is in horror that evil (feminine or otherwise) is not banished to the outskirts of rationality but rather is brought inside the periphery for close analysis. Third is the book’s overwhelming conclusion, which suggests there are in fact no ‘bad’ women, and the quotations in the title begin to haunt and consume the theoretical underpinning of the text. I leave you with this question then: are there in fact, on a closer examination, no bad women to be found in popular imagination?