Carry on screaming: why women are drawn to horror

Whenever I tell someone I love horror, one of two reactions usually follows: “I don’t do horror” or “What’s wrong with you?” After my very first encounter, with A Nightmare on Elm Street, aged about eight, I immediately went back for more. These films allowed me feelings I had no language for yet, feelings that were too unseemly to discuss with other people, and they validated the wild, volatile and lonely experience of growing up in a woman’s skin. So, I watched everything: black and white chillers, such as The Seventh Victim; cosmic horrors, such as Event Horizon; body horrors (in which human biology is distorted), including Society; and hallowed modern classics, including The Exorcist and Halloween.

I became adept at hiding this interest until well into my twenties, because, more than almost any other form of entertainment, I have found that horror carries with it a great deal of judgement. What’s to like about stories specifically engineered to provoke fear and revulsion? People’s knee-jerk reactions are that it is grotesque or demeaning – especially for women. We’ve spent millennia being billed as ‘the weaker sex’ and are finally en route to equality: how could we possibly enjoy worlds where women are regularly dominated, maimed, seduced and killed?

The answer is to look closer. What the subgenres – slasher, folk, supernatural and gothic – all have in common is the desire to scare, yes, but to do so by probing taboo questions about human existence. They force us to look fear in the eye in a way that romance, drama and even tragedy can’t always do. While horror can, and should, send your adrenaline jumping, it also holds up a mirror to your dreams and worst nightmares. This is why it demands complete emotional surrender from the audience.

Throughout the past decade, the genre has evolved, with the newest additions to the canon turning more psychologically astute, self-reflective and inching closer to mainstream respectability – particularly after Get Out received a rapturous critical response and an Oscar in 2018. Fans and experts have stepped out into the light, and my film collective The Final Girls has become a popular podcast that investigates horror’s history through a feminist lens. One of the reasons for the genre’s sustained popularity, among fan communities and regular cinema-goers alike, is that it provides opportunities for both emerging and established actresses to stretch their emotional and physical range on screen. This year alone, we’ve seen the release of Cuckoo starring Hunter Schafer and Sydney Sweeney’s Immaculate, while Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley swapped bodies in The Substance. Elsewhere, Cailee Spaeny pivoted from playing Priscilla Presley to fighting space monsters in Alien: Romulus, and a major Nosferatu remake, led by Lily-Rose Depp, will be released on Christmas Day.

Helping the genre shrug off its misogynist reputation is the fact that scripts are becoming increasingly nuanced – which actresses, from aficionados to newcomers seeking interesting projects in the sphere, are delighted to see. “I was in Hollywood for the transition from exploitative films to a more character-driven art form,” says Kate Siegel. A Hollywood-horror veteran, Siegel starred in 2016’s Hush followed by the series The Haunting of Hill House and Midnight Mass.

The sentiment is shared by Romola Garai, who is best-known for period dramas but is a lifelong horror fan. She returned to the dark fairy-tales she loved as a child when creating her 2020 directorial debut Amulet, a claustrophobic tale of an ex-soldier trapped in a nun’s rotting house with a screaming invalid living in the attic. “Nowhere else do you have to reveal so much,” Garai tells me. “Horror is very exposing.” She appreciates the full narrative arcs found in the genre. “Women are forced to exist in a landscape where they’re navigating the dreams, desires and expectations of men. Horror allows us to explore our own.”

Indeed, as well as female fears, horror is a perfect place to explore rage, or hunger for things that are still considered controversial, such as sex, food or success. While the plots edge towards fantastical, they provoke very real responses: Hush turns a safe space into a place of terror when a deaf woman is attacked in her home; 2020’s The Invisible Man revisits the classic HG Wells novel to tackle domestic violence; the anger of grieving widows is dissected in The Babadook; and mental deterioration prompted by religious fervour is beautifully chronicled in St Maud. Women are no longer simply victims or survivors. The ‘final girl’ trope, popularised in the 1970s – where one woman is left standing at the end of the movie to confront the killer, as in Alien and Scream – has grown up. Contemporary horror is turning inward, blurring the lines between victim and monster; prey and predator. This grey area has become the place where actresses can find roles that are different shades of tragic, brave, unlikeable and monstrous. Horror provides a playground for outsize emotions, which understandably makes it appealing.

This is the case for Naomi Scott, the star of this month’s release Smile 2, who is a new convert to the genre. The upcoming sequel to the 2022 box-office hit allowed her “to play in different sandboxes”, she tells me. “It felt like making multiple movies in one.” Her passion for the project also reflects a changing place for women of colour in a genre that historically fell short of racial equality, and is finally moving away from the trope of non- white characters dying first. Indeed, the protagonist of the 2023 film Raging Grace, which picked up multiple awards at South by Southwest, is a Filipina carer, and the story highlights the plight of undocumented workers in the UK.

The horror-film industry’s ability to look a woman’s lot in the eye doesn’t come out of nowhere, though. In the 1960s, the post-war era when careers and cosmetics were beginning to boom, a new subgenre appeared, placing older women front and centre: these characters were often driven to outlandish behaviour by the pressure to remain young and beautiful, and to disappear once they failed to do so. The films Sunset Boulevard and Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? cast semi-forgotten movie stars of early Hollywood as their leading ladies. Although they are now regarded as classics, they were initially derided by critics, who decreed that the stars Gloria Swanson, Bette Davis and Joan Crawford were debasing themselves with such horrifying roles. Happily, proving the point of feminists worldwide, they still got their Oscar nominations.

While a reputation for revelling in gore and senseless violence still prevails for some people, when I think of horror, I think of women’s faces. As well as shimmering in jewels and gowns on red carpets, Anya Taylor-Joy, Morfydd Clark, Lupita Nyong’o and Mia Goth have recently given arresting performances in horror films, playing witches, subterranean creatures and serial killers. The heightened, fantastical scenarios provide new ways to articulate dreads that have been ignored or dismissed. And, most radically, to smuggle in empathy for these characters.

Alongside that, the elasticity of the genre excels at interrogating what it means to be literally living in a woman’s skin. Ira Levin’s novels The Stepford Wives and Rosemary’s Baby, both of which were turned into iconic films, explore the unspeakable things that can happen when men feel entitled to use women’s bodies as their property, whether to progress their career or for other, more supernatural, reasons.

From the very start, women have been addressing these thorny topics by crafting stories. Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein asked questions about humans’ (especially men’s) power to manipulate other people’s bodies – questions Yorgos Lanthimos continued to probe in last year’s Poor Things. Daphne du Maurier’s exposure of how gaslighting can send women mad is a theme that beguiled Alfred Hitchcock and is, in fact, increasingly investigated by authors, actors and directors today. Daisy Johnson, the Booker-nominated author of Fen, Sisters and the upcoming The Hotel, thinks contemporary horror is particularly adept at reflecting “the turbulent times we live in, where it feels like the control over our bodies is out of our hands”. In the wake of abortion rights being overturned in multiple countries, that fear is more relevant than ever.

Another taboo explored by Johnson’s books is the uncomfortable dynamics that can exist between women, and two upcoming novels, Heather Parry’s Carrion Crow and Lucy Rose’s The Lamb, both deal with highly dysfunctional mother-daughter relationships. In Parry’s book, a mother locks her daughter in the attic to teach her a lesson. The author modelled it on experiences she has witnessed: “I’ve seen such violence done to women by mothers, or the other way round.” She is seeking a language to articulate the transgression of women breaking through the expectations placed upon them, and the betrayal felt at women subjugating other women. Rose, who tells me she wrote “aimlessly” until she started writing horror, seeks permission to “take those seemingly mundane relationships, neuroses, biases and more, and heighten them to their absolute extreme”. In her novel The Lamb, a young girl craves the attention of her cannibal mother, who instils in her the taste for human flesh.

These characters offer a safe pathway to exploring turbulent feelings in ourselves, too. Rose calls it a “refuge” for her to make sense of the world and her place in it. Parry says the genre “makes space for women’s emotions that otherwise are tapped down, and eroded, and made sensible,” and Garai describes it as a “canvas for our dreams and our hidden desires”. When operating in a world that expects women to be flawless, horror allows them, as Siegel puts it, “to make big mistakes... and then deal with the consequences”.

So, when someone says horror is misogynistic, I tell them to show me another genre that can do all that. Show me a genre that can put the female experience, emotional and physical, under a microscope and tear it apart to figure out what it all means; that can illustrate what it looks like to feel rage, pain, fear or power that close-up and unvarnished. Women have built their world view into horror since its very inception, and their creations have helped us validate our own experiences. To naysayers, I say: give me more monsters.