COMMENTARY : Pretty Women, Pretty Scary : Movies: In UCLA’s film series starting Saturday, there’s hell to pay when a woman unleashes her sexuality. Freud, you’ve a lot to answer for.

Let’s see, exactly where are we on the feminist timeline? On the evidence of “Scary Women: Female Monsters and Fiends in American Film,” a new film series at UCLA exploring female monsters in American movies, we’re still strictly in the Stone Age.

The series--curated by Andrea Kalas and Andrea Alsberg for the UCLA Film and Television Archive and featuring 19 films from 1935 to 1992--repeatedly reiterates a belief women have been struggling against for centuries. Permeated with traditional Christian perceptions of feminine virtue, virtually all these films pivot on the idea that there’s hell to pay when a woman unleashes her sexuality.

This comes as no surprise; however, a handful of unanticipated themes do surface in the series, which begins Saturday at UCLA’s Melnitz Hall and runs through Feb. 1. At the top of the list is the idea that more often than not, feminine evil is rooted in a perversion of the mothering instinct. Mothers who are unable to release their offspring into life (as well as mothers who just don’t give a damn) turn up left and right in stories in which the drive to nurture accelerates into a need to control, which ultimately explodes into total mayhem.

Equally noteworthy is the omnipresence of psychoanalytic theory in these movies. By the 1930s, when this series commences, the ideas that rocketed out of Vienna had had a profound effect on Hollywood, and abnormalities of any sort had come to be seen as the terrain of psychiatry. Hence, shrinks are prominently featured in eight of the films, and Freudian notions about sexuality are central to nearly all of them.

The series falls short in a few regards, most notably in its failure to examine state-of-the-art scary women who haven’t yet solidified into archetypes. Where, for instance, is Julia Roberts’ “Pretty Woman”? (She’s just a cute kid in need of some quick cash. Turn a trick? No problem.) Or how about Madonna in “Truth or Dare,” in which she gives a narcissistic display of steely control so extreme that it’s terrifying? Or Sherilyn Fenn in “Boxing Helena,” a film that took the idea of female victimization to new depths of depravity? How about Demi Moore in anything? Her shameless immersion in the cult of the body is disconcerting, to say the least. (Last year’s “Indecent Proposal” was like a mash note to Moore’s well-toned rear end.)

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The closest the series comes to addressing current scary film females is with the 1992 movie “Poison Ivy,” which features Drew Barrymore as a sociopathic stoner chick whose problems are the result of an abandoning father and inadequate mothering (oh, that again). What makes this threadbare story contemporary is Barrymore’s wardrobe (she’s got lots of tattoos) and the fact that changes in censorship laws made it possible for Barrymore’s Ivy to seduce her surrogate daddy on screen in a surprisingly graphic sequence.

The evolution of censorship in film is thrown into high relief when one rewinds from “Poison Ivy” to the pair of films that open the series Saturday. Chaste little thrillers that center on female characters whose unresolved relationships with their mothers make them vulnerable to malevolent poltergeists, “The Haunting” (1963) and “The Uninvited” (1944) seem quaint by today’s standards of on-screen horror.

We’re clued in, for instance, that the female protagonist of “The Haunting,” played by Julie Harris, is being pushed to the breaking point by pesky ghosts when she gets drunk and paints her toenails red. It is, however, a non-supernatural fit of sexual jealousy that finally pushes Harris over the edge.

Sexual jealousy is a leitmotif that turns up in virtually every film in the series, and it drives the plot in many of them. The idea of the woman whose jealousy transforms her into a depraved stalker is central to Jacques Tourneur’s 1942 film “Cat People,” which explains itself in a voice-over (from a therapist) as being about “the descendants of an ancient race of people who fell away from Christianity and began to worship Satan and are afflicted with corrupt passions that drive them to transform into cats and kill” (woman as a cunning, catlike creature is an ancient stereotype). Tourneur tips us off at the beginning that we’re dealing with a loose cannon in his film: In the opening scene his heroine introduces herself as an artist, then throws a wad of paper on the sidewalk--a catperson and a litterbug to boot!

Equally comical is Nathan Hertz’s 1958 film “Attack of the 50 Ft. Woman.” Set in the flying-saucer-obsessed ‘50s (wow, what a paranoid decade), the film chronicles the woes of a woman who has an encounter with a UFO that causes her to mutate into a giant, thus enabling her to get revenge on her philandering husband. In one hilarious scene, two therapists discuss this bummed-out heroine’s midlife crisis and sadly conclude “she’s aging” (the idea that aging is a crime women are forbidden to commit comes up in several films). This neglected wife may be past her prime, but she’s not too old to wear a two-piece swimsuit when she stalks the land wreaking destruction in her path!

The female stalker in Clint Eastwood’s 1971 directorial debut, “Play Misty for Me,” is considerably more menacing, and the stalker reaches an apotheosis in the 1987 film “Fatal Attraction.” Thinly disguised morality tales that tell us with a wagging finger of the wages of a one-night stand, these films are wildly conservative in their sexual politics and are infused with a disturbingly negative view of women.

The same can be said for Brian De Palma’s “Dressed to Kill” (1980), a truly reprehensible film that verges on pornography. One can’t really take this film to task for its negative depiction of women, however, because it’s an equal-opportunity smear job that expresses a searing contempt for the human race in general.

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“Dressed to Kill,” the story of a sexually hung-up woman whose frustration with her husband’s insensitivity in bed leads her to pick up a guy in a museum, shifts its focus midway to a crazed man who must dress as a woman in order to act out his killer instincts. De Palma’s contempt for women really comes through in this shabbily drawn character; any transvestite who’d run around in a wig as cheap as the one this man wears can’t have much regard for the female sex.

Male cross-dressing is also a crucial plot point in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 horror classic “Psycho,” which opens with the activities of a cool blonde whose greed and lust drive her to commit a crime. “Psycho” tosses out several red herrings before revealing the real monster of the piece--a selfish mommy who played a little too fast and loose with her son’s psyche.

The mommy problem is also central to 1992’s “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle,” which chronicles the descent into madness of a perky young blonde played by Rebecca De Mornay whose mothering instincts are thwarted by a miscarriage and emergency hysterectomy; she’s left with no alternative but to kill several people. Reproductive mishaps are also central to David Cronenberg’s “The Brood” (1979), the grisly tale of a woman whose suppressed rage takes the form of murderous children she breeds in tumorous growths.

Cronenberg modeled the evil mutant children of “The Brood” after the character played by Patty McCormack in “The Bad Seed,” the 1956 film that interprets the drive to do evil as some kind of genetic affliction rather than a matter of moral choice. In a similar vein is the 1973 film “The Exorcist,” which was dismissed by critic Pauline Kael as “the biggest recruiting poster the Catholic Church has had since ‘Going My Way’ ”; the film makes a wildly emotional case for the religious right in its handling of ideas of good and evil. Religious fanaticism--along with mother problems--is also at the heart of De Palma’s “Carrie,” the story of a teen-age girl who’s blossoming sexuality enrages her psychotically devout mother, thus making Carrie fertile ground for vengeful telekinetic powers. Conflict around the notion of unnatural desire also rears its head in Tony Scott’s 1983 vampire fable “The Hunger,” which finds Susan Sarandon flirting with a lesbian affair.

Laughably dated in many respects, Lambert Hillyer’s 1936 thriller “Dracula’s Daughter” is a far superior vampire film, and has a tenderness toward its subject that’s completely lacking in the Scott film. Hillyer’s is essentially a love story about a female vampire who is destroyed when she falls in love with one of her victims, thus echoing a theme that resonates through this entire series: Romantic love is a purifying nectar that tends to cramp the style of aspiring female monsters.

* “Scary Women: Female Monsters and Fiends in American Film,” Melnitz Theater, UCLA; tickets available one hour before show time. Admission: $5; students and senior citizens, $3. Call (310) 206-FILM for specific programs and screening times. “Scary Women: The Symposium” will take place in the Melnitz Theater on Jan. 29 from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Admission is free .