Have horror films overcome all gender-based problems in the genre? It's complicated.
In 2009, Entertainment Weekly published a piece by Christine Spines entitled "Chicks dig scary movies." The essay explored, through interviews with both horror fans and key creative figures in 2000s horror, how women were the primary audience for scary movies. This included even the torture horror genre, with one executive remarking surprise that, with all the data they saw, women were the most dedicated fanbase to things like the Saw franchise.
Of course, these issues weren’t present in every single horror title and many of them are emblematic of much larger issues on how mainstream cinema views people who aren’t cis men. Lord knows Halloween isn’t the first movie to feature a woman getting saved by a guy just in the nick of time and the trend of using sexual assault as an easy gateway to shallow depictions of nudity runs chillingly rampant throughout a lot of global genre cinema.
Since then, the likes of Karyn Kusama , Jennifer Kent , Nia DaCosta , and Nikyatu Jusu are just a few examples of the filmmakers who’ve been taking mainstream and indie horror into exciting new directions. Now a genre that’s always resonated with women can also be molded creatively by this community. Additionally, even many male-directed horror films in the modern era are conscious of offering up messier, more nuanced characters for ladies to inhabit.
Modern Horror Still Has Some Issues With Women Characters Classic horror films often had problems with treating women like people, but they could also contain themes, characters, and story points that resonated with people who identified as marginalized genders. Art is complicated, regressive approaches to ladies can co-exist inside movies that also have material that deeply impacts those same viewers.
Plus, the ongoing prominence of women in horror films hasn’t allowed for equal visibility for all women in this genre. Women of color have anchored major titles like Barbarian and the last two Scream movies but are still scarce as protagonists in the world of modern horror. Other marginalized members of this community, namely disabled women, have also been mostly absent from scary cinema.
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