Credit: MUBI
Film
Feminist horror films: 18 terrifying movies that explore the unique horrors of womanhood
By Kayleigh Dray &Shahed Ezaydi
5 months ago
12 min read
From Midsommar to The Substance, these feminist horror films deal with everything from gaslighting to pregnancy – no holds barred.
Horror films don’t always get their flowers, especially horrors that focus on women. It tends to be a misjudged and overlooked genre that’s seen as cult-like rather than a genre that is an art form in itself. Horror films rarely get afforded any award recognition, even though there have been some stellar films and incredible talent in recent years – in particular Mia Goth. This is an actor who has shaken up the horror genre and has become a modern-day scream queen with her versatile and terrifying performances in several horrors of the last five years.
Shining a light on feminist horror films that navigate issues surrounding womanhood, we’ve rounded up some of our standout favourites, including the recent body horror The Substance.
The Substance
Directed by Coralie Fargeat and starring Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley, The Substance is a film about the toxicity of fame, beauty standards and the addictive nature of wanting to stay young forever – a theme that seems very relevant in today’s ‘tweakment’-obsessed society.
Moore plays Elisabeth Sparkle, a washed-up movie-slash-TV aerobics star who gets fired on her 50th birthday by her boss, Harvey (Dennis Quaid). Rejected and questioning her future, Elisabeth comes upon a mysterious proposition in the form of The Substance – a programme that promises a ‘younger, more beautiful, more perfect’ version of herself. All she has to do is sacrifice her existing body every seven days to sustain it all.
Pearl
Trapped on her family’s isolated farm, Pearl must look after her ailing father under the bitter and overbearing watch of her devout mother. Lusting after and dreaming of a glamorous life like the one she’s seen in the films, Pearl finds her ambitions, temptations and repressions all colliding in this beautiful and horrifying technicolour-inspired origin story of X’s iconic villain. And Pearl also delivered us a new horror icon in the form of the brilliant and talented Mia Goth, who recently starred in MaXXXine.
Don’t Worry Darling
Even though decades have passed since she was invented, the image of the perfect Western housewife of the 1950s and 60s still looms large in our culture. She haunts our screens with a force that is both familiar and destabilising. We’ve come to associate the housewife with the uncomfortable indication that something isn’t quite right beneath the surface. And that’s exactly the case in Olivia Wilde’s Don’t Worry Darling.
The story follows Alice (Florence Pugh), a young wife living in a mid-century suburban paradise with her husband, Jack (Harry Styles). When Alice begins to question the exact nature of the work that Jack and the town’s other men are undertaking at a mysterious facility called the Victory Project, cracks begin to appear in her perfect life and even in reality itself.
Promising Young Woman
Don’t be fooled by the cute outfits or sickly sweet pop songs, Emerald Fennell’s Promising Young Woman is more of a horror than a drama. And one many of us will sadly relate to.
The film follows Carey Mulligan’s character Cassie, a 30-year-old woman who has dropped out of medical school for reasons unknown. At the start of the film, we know that Cassie is a woman on a mission. Most nights, she leaves home and goes out to a club where she meets a series of ‘nice guys’ who want to take her home. (These nice, good, decent guys are played by actors including Adam Brody and Christopher Mintz-Plasse).
When they take her home, they discover that she’s not the drunk woman they were expecting. In fact, she’s stone-cold sober and ready to hit them with hard truths. Without spoiling too much, we eventually figure out why Cassie is doing this, and it all goes back to her best friend Nina. It’s a film packed with female rage and revenge but also a story of love and female friendship.
Swallow
While this movie may not immediately strike you as a typical horror movie, the slow-burning suspense will surely have you on the edge of your seat. Or, more likely, recoiled back in horror. The 2019 film follows a young housewife with a seemingly perfect life who develops a disorder that gives her the irresistible urge to eat inedible objects.
Newly pregnant and consuming increasingly dangerous objects, Haley Bennett (who has starred in The Girl On The Train and Widow Clicquot) shines in the lead role as Hunter.
Censor
Censor takes us back to the ‘video nasties’ scare of the early 80s. There, we join film censor Enid (Niamh Algar), who has developed a macabre fascination with schlocky horrors as she spends her days watching, cutting and classifying scenes of violence.
When she discovers an eerie horror that speaks directly to her sister’s mysterious disappearance, she resolves to unravel the puzzle behind the film and its enigmatic director – and it’s not long before her quest begins to blur the lines between fiction and reality in terrifying ways.
Without giving too much away, Censor is a thoroughly scary indie horror, but it also has a lot to say on art, media consumption, politics and society.
Saint Maud
This critically acclaimed horror follows Maud (Morfydd Clark), a reclusive hospice nurse charged with looking after Amanda (Jennifer Ehle), a retired dancer ravaged by cancer. As the film’s events unfold, Maud’s fervent faith quickly inspires an obsessive conviction that she must save her ward’s soul from eternal damnation… whatever the cost.
The majority of slasher films follow an age-old set of heteronormative rules – the girls who casually indulge in drugs, alcohol and sex are the first to be killed off, while ‘the final girl’ (aka the survivor) is sweet and virginal. Saint Maud, however, pushes against these expectations brilliantly, offering up a very different kind of ‘body horror’.
In the process, it forces us to consider whether or not Maud – or any other woman, for that matter – can ever hope to achieve greatness in a patriarchal society that judges her worth by her sexuality. And, similarly, whether bodily autonomy will ever truly be achieved by womankind.
Midsommar
Midsommar doesn’t rely on darkness and shadow to send shivers down our spines. Quite the opposite, in fact. But that’s because this isn’t your typical horror film; rather, it’s an all too relatable tale about gaslighting and unhealthy relationships.
Right from the beginning, it’s made clear that Christian (Jack Reynor) is thinking about dumping his girlfriend. He’s simply going through the motions of being a good boyfriend until he’s paid his dues, and he’s simultaneously been pushing Dani (Florence Pugh) away in the hope that she will do the hard bit for him: he wants her to initiate the breakup.
We know, likewise, that Dani isn’t innocent: her co-dependency has rendered her blind to Christian’s behaviour, and she views her relationship as beautiful even though it’s inherently toxic. She does her best to make things work. She does this even though she’s second-guessing herself all the time, feels confused and finds herself always apologising to (and for) her boyfriend. And she does this even though that aching, aching, aching hole in her heart keeps her awake at night.
It’s the sort of film that’s bound to touch a nerve with any woman who’s found herself in a similar situation.
The Invisible Man
In The Invisible Man, Elisabeth Moss expertly creates a sense of fear and paranoia so palpable it swiftly becomes our own. Because, just as she does in The Handmaid’s Tale, the actor is able to convey years of pent-up terror and anguish with just a twitch of her lips or a shift of her eyes. This is a film, after all, about a woman desperate to escape a cycle of coercive control, and everything she does makes us fully aware of the fact that Cecelia is a victim of abuse.
As such, the film’s tense eight-minute opening hammers home the fact that she has to get out before it’s too late. That her life is on the line. That, if Adrian catches her, he will punish her in ways far too horrible for viewers to imagine. What Cecelia fails to realise, though, is that Adrian will never let her go. And thus the unseen monster of this uniquely feminist horror is born.
Gothika
When Miranda (Halle Berry), a renowned psychiatrist, awakens as a patient in a mental institution, she quickly realises that she has absolutely no memory of the murder she’s accused of committing.
It quickly becomes apparent (to her, at least) that she has been possessed by a vengeful spirit, and one which has no qualms whatsoever about manipulating her into doing its bidding. To everyone else, though, Miranda is just another crazy woman who’s killed her husband. Which means that, no matter what she says or does, she will be treated as such by the people around her.
It’s a silly supernatural horror, true, but it’s one that taps into a fear that many of us share. Essentially, then, this is another film about gaslighting. So try rewatching it with this thought in mind, and see how you feel about it then.
The Witch
In 1630, our coming-of-age hero, Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy), struggles to comprehend the puritanical gender roles being forced upon her not only by society but also by her family. She’s also forced to reckon with the vilification of young women who break rank.
As such, The Witch tells a story of female anxiety and dread. It shows us what happens when a woman is left choiceless, seemingly with no viable option other than to become a wife and mother. And it reminds us, too, that the path to self-determination is never a smooth one for those who refuse to conform to sexist stereotypes.
False Positive
In False Positive, Ilana Glazer plays Lucy, a woman struggling to conceive – until, that is, her husband Adrian (Justin Theroux) takes her to see fertility expert Dr Hindle (Pierce Brosnan). Within a few sessions, Lucy finds herself pregnant. And, while she’s overjoyed, she still can’t shake the lingering feeling that something is deeply wrong.
Consider this the Rosemary’s Baby for the modern age.
Scream
Oh yes, we’re 100% talking about the seminal 90s slasher. Because, while it’s all too easy to dismiss Scream as just another scary movie, it’s important to look past Ghostface’s reign of terror and take a closer glance at the film’s feminist hero.
For much of the first film, Sidney (Neve Campbell) isn’t just dealing with a psychotic serial killer; she’s also struggling to make her abusive boyfriend understand that she’s not ready to have sex with him. It’s an incredibly reasonable request, but one he does not take lightly; indeed, he bullies her into believing that she is a terrible girlfriend for refusing to give him what he feels he’s owed.
Jennifer’s Body
On paper, this cult comedy-horror sounds silly: Jennifer (Megan Fox) turns into a succubus, using her sexuality to lure men to their untimely ends. And, when her best friend Anita (Amanda Seyfried) learns the truth, it’s up to her to stop her pal… before it’s too late.
Watching the film in a post-MeToo world, though, there are bigger questions to wrangle with. Namely, what really happened to Jennifer after she was bundled into “one of those white molester vans with no windows” and driven off against her will.
The answer, of course, is that she’s been used and abused by a group of men, who decided to make her the virgin sacrifice in their Satanic ritual. Because she’s not a virgin, though, everything goes wrong – resulting in the aforementioned succubus situation.
Us
When Adelaide (Lupita Nyong’o) takes her family to the beach for a much-needed vacation, she isn’t expecting them to be attacked by their own murderous doppelgängers, clad in blood-red jumpsuits and armed with frighteningly shiny scissors.
Thankfully for her husband and children, the matriarch is more than willing to step up and fight for them. Hard. And this, when you consider how Black women have been portrayed by the genre until now, feels like “an act of defiance”.
As Danielle Dash puts it: “The history of horror on the silver screen is a damning indictment of the treatment of Black women at the hands of the genre’s leading voices. Us reminds Black people, and Black girls and Black women specifically, that while our race is important, it’s not all we are.”
Carrie
On the day of her prom night, 17-year-old Carrie (Sissy Spacek) discovers that she possesses telekinetic powers. And we all know what happens next, don’t we? As ever, though, there’s more to the Stephen King adaptation than that.
Speaking honestly about his inspiration for the story, King says: “Carrie is largely about how women find their own channels of power, but also what men fear about women and women’s sexuality.
“Writing the book in 1973 and only three years out of college, I was fully aware of what Women’s Liberation implied for me and others of my sex. Carrie is a woman feeling her powers for the first time and, like Samson, pulling down the temple on everyone in sight at the end of the book.”
Considering the film also deals with the trauma of puberty, adolescence and sexual awakenings, there’s a lot to unpack in this 1976 classic.
The Babadook
Another horror film about the horrors of motherhood, The Babadook centres on Amelia (Essie Davis), whose young son, Samuel, has violent tendencies and frequent temper tantrums.
Struggling to deal with his difficult behaviour, Amelia is constantly left exhausted and embarrassed. Nothing she does is deemed good enough. She struggles to sleep, to empathise with those around her, to deal with her own traumas. And, most of all, she deems herself a monster because of her failure to connect with her son.
Speaking to The Guardian about her film, director Jennifer Kent says: “We’re all, as women, educated and conditioned to think that motherhood is an easy thing that just happens. But it’s not always the case. I wanted to show a real woman who was drowning in that environment.”
I’m Thinking Of Ending Things
I’m Thinking Of Ending Things is a strange sort of horror film, examining the identities we project onto our romantic partners. But trust us when we say that it is so much more than just a tale about a relationship past its sell-by date; it’s about the enormous pressure that women are put under when it comes to ensuring the people around them feel comfortable and happy – even if this comes at their own expense.
As Almara Abgarian puts it: “It’s female nature to say yes (or stay quiet) when we want to say no, whether it’s ignoring our gut and continuing a relationship that we know isn’t good for us or pandering to a man’s emotions for fear of hurting his ego.
“It has been drilled into us since we were young: ‘good girls do as they are told’ and all that… [but] we need to demand more for ourselves.”
Images: Mubi
Sign up to Stylist’s weekly curation of the best TV, films, documentaries and more, and you’ll never wonder ‘What should I watch?’ again.
By signing up you agree to occasionally receive offers and promotions from Stylist. Newsletters may contain online ads and content funded by carefully selected partners. Don’t worry, we’ll never share or sell your data. You can opt-out at any time. For more information read Stylist’s Privacy Policy
Thank you!
You’re now subscribed to all our newsletters. You can manage your subscriptions at any time from an email or from a MyStylist account.