Lesbians, nymphomaniacs, and enema specialists: nurses, horror, and agency

Abstract

Nursing is the healing profession, established by Florence Nightingale on high-minded principles, to comfort and treat the sick. Films of her life and career, especially in the wards at Scutari, made in 1915, 1936 and 1951 showed her as this source of comfort (see Richard Bates’s chapter in this collection). Similarly, hospitals are (or should be) places of safety and healing. What therefore are the messages to taken from those media texts, primarily films, which situate menace not only among the ranks of the nursing profession but in the putatively safe spaces of hospitals? Pursuing these points, and focusing on the unsettling juxtaposition of the horrific and the healing, this chapter examines instances of horror where nurses, nursing and places of healing become sites of horror. It takes examples from English-language film and television productions extending from the 1970s to the present