Ferocious Fatherhood: A Crisis in Masculinity and Fatherhood in American Horror Cinema

Ferocious Fatherhood examines the evolving representation of fatherhood in horror cinema from the early 1970s to the present, developing a new theoretical framework to understand how paternal figures embody shifting cultural anxieties.

Drawing on psychoanalytic theory, feminist film scholarship, and socio-political analysis, the book introduces a taxonomy of archetypes, including the Faux Father, Cannibal Father, Haunted Father, Fragmented Father, and their contemporary transformations into Objectified and Bereaved forms. Through close analysis of key films such as The Exorcist, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Shining, and The Stepfather, alongside contemporary texts including Get Out, Hereditary, and The Conjuring franchise, it demonstrates how horror cinema stages crises of masculinity, authority, and the nuclear family. These paternal figures reflect broader tensions surrounding capitalism, race, gender politics, and generational conflict, revealing fatherhood as an unstable and contested site within cultural discourse.

Extending beyond historical analysis, the author argues that contemporary horror reconfigures fatherhood through processes of evolution, inversion, and fragmentation, particularly in response to post-2000 socio-political conditions and emerging technologies. In doing so, horror not only reflects the crisis of patriarchal authority but anticipates its transformation. By positioning the father as a central figure through which horror negotiates questions of power, identity, and belonging, Ferocious Fatherhood offers a new framework for understanding masculinity in genre cinema and contributes to ongoing debates within film studies, gender theory, and cultural analysis.