This research examines the coupling between residential towers and threatening and/or threatened female bodies in two films—David Cronenberg’s Shivers (1975), and Bernard Rose’s Candyman (1992)—locating in each productive engagements with different stages of neoliberalism and urban development. Negotiating the complex legacy of the association of the home with the realm of the feminine, I propose the concept of concrete maternality, which alludes to the residential tower as a new site that incubates anxieties related to the late capitalist transformation of social relations and its gendered formulations of unhomeliness. The dialectical oppositionality of the concrete, a harsh and industrial material, and the maternal, which evokes both intimacy and repression, enables a conceptualization of the cinematic abject in high-rise horror films as referring to a boundary breach for subjectivity. In treatment of the residential high-rise as womb-like, I understand the building as concrete, objective in its materiality, while envisioning its interiors to be experiential/embodied, thus open to subverting the logic of late capitalism from within.

Keywords: concrete maternality; abject; grotesque; gendered building; architecture; high-rise; late capitalism