The leaves are turning and the winds are whipping which means its time to put on your sweaters, turn down the lights, and scream your heart out to some iconic horror films. I wanted to look at horror films with women as the main characters and see if and/or how their gender affects their experience. I chose five films from five different decades to see if the era influenced the characters or how the films affected women at that time. Trigger warning for violence, assault and rape.
Rosemary’s Baby
Rosemary’s Baby is a 1968 film by Roman Polanski who made his American debut with this film. The movie focuses on Rosemay Woodhouse, the wife of a struggling actor named Guy Woodhouse, who experiences a strange and painful pregnancy that slowly pushes her to distrust those around her. The horror of this movie is largely centered around fears many women have; being drugged, raped, gaslit by their spouse, and losing control over their bodies and lives. The truth of Rosemary’s pregnancy is that her Satanist neighbors have her husband Guy make a deal with their coven to help them drug Rosemary, so that the devil can rape her and get her pregnant in exchange for fame. The scene where this occurs is frightening and disturbing since Rosemary does not ingest all the drugged food, causing her to be conscious during the assault but not being able to stop it. However, she is tricked into believing it was all a dream. Through her pregnancy Rosemary feels pain in her stomach, she becomes pale and sickly looking, and the doctor she sees tells her this is normal. The only people who listen to Rosemary’s fears and try to help her are her young friends who are scared for her and recommend she seek a second opinion from Dr. Hill. This film does a great job mixing real life horror with paranormal horror and points to the issues women faced at that time, like having to rely on their husbands financially, as seen when Rosemary demanded to see another doctor, but Guy refuses to pay for it. These fears are founded in reality and the tragic ending with Rosemary accepting the role of mother to the Anti-Christ showed the lack of power she had but also the connection mothers have to their children, even when they’re literal monsters.
Halloween
I’m sad to say that Halloween was my least favorite film I watched for this article. It is a slow burn film with the first death happening a little over an hour into the movie. But even with its flaws Halloween is one of the most influential movies in this list for multiple reasons. First is the budget of this movie, which was $325,000, an incredibly low production cost when compared to The Exorcist which cost 12 million dollars to produce. Second, Halloween popularized the slasher film genre influencing movies like Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street as well as modern classics like American Psycho and X. Finally, this film created the Final Girl trope which has become a staple for women in horror. The Final Girl is the female character that lives to the end of the story while her friends or companions all die.
In Halloween Laurie Strode takes the roll of the Final Girl with her best friends Annie Brackett and Lynda Van Der Klok, both being killed by the recently escaped prisoner and notorious psychopath Michael Myers. In the film Laurie is babysitting a neighbor kid, Tommy Doyle, on Halloween. Meanwhile, her friends Annie and Lynda spend the holiday like many other teenagers; by drinking, smoking, and having sex with their boyfriends. In the end Annie, Lynda, and Lynda’s boyfriend Bob, are all killed when engaging in activities they aren’t supposed to. Annie leaves Lindsey, the girl she’s babysitting, with Laurie so she can meet up with her boyfriend but is killed by Myers in the car. Bob is stabbed when he’s grabbing beer for him and Lynda, while Lynda is choked with a phone cord while she is naked.
Laurie is the pure girl in the movie, often being made fun of by her friends for it, but it is Laurie who notices Myers stalking her during the day, seeing Myers carrying her dead friend, and ultimately, it’s Laurie who saves Tommy and Lindsey’s lives. The idea that Laurie is pure and doesn’t engage in scandalous acts is likely a commentary on the more sexually free era of the 70s and is meant to be a warning to young people. We see this purity saving characters from death would also be repeated in Friday the 13th but in the movie X a porn star is the Final Girl.
The Silence of the Lambs
If there is one movie in this list you should watch, it’s The Silence of the Lambs. The film follows Clarice, a student at the FBI academy, who is asked to interview notorious killer Hannibal Lecter and assists in the Buffalo Bill case. The audience is put in the place of Clarice many times, specifically when she is talking to men as they look directly into the camera as if we are Clarice. We see that Clarice is hit on by men like Dr. Fredrick Chilton when she first meets him and he tells her that she is exactly Lecter’s type right before she goes to meet him. There are many moments where Clarice clearly wants to cry, specifically when Miggs, a prisoner, throws his semen at her face and when she sees the body of one of Buffalo Bill’s victims who had been skinned. This points to a common experience that women in male dominated fields have, that they need to keep their emotions in tact and must not cry.
One of my favorite scenes in the film takes place after Clarice and her boss Jack Crawford meet with the local police and inspect the body of one of the victims. Crawford takes the sheriff into another room saying this isn’t a conversation that would be appropriate for a woman to hear, leaving Clarice in a room full of male cops. On their ride home Crawford acknowledges that this action was upsetting for Clarice and that it was just a way for him to get the sheriff to leave but Clarice counters that saying, “It matters Mr. Crawford. Cops look to you to see how to act. It matters.” This point is often repeated by the women I am friends with who say that men need to be aware of the affect their words can have on their female employees or co-workers, especially in male dominated spaces.
But the scene that made me love Clarice was when we learned about a traumatizing experience in Clarice’s childhood. When she was living on a ranch with her aunt and uncle after the deaths of her parents, she heard the lambs screaming while being slaughtered, she tried to free them but they would not run away and when she tried to run away with one, she couldn’t carry it far and got caught. To Clarice, these female victims are the lambs and she wants to stop their screaming and save them. But she can never bring back the women who died, and she can’t stop every Buffalo Bill or Hannibal Lecter. This movie had a huge influence on the horror detective genre with it influencing the show The X Files and modern films like Longlegs. The FBI also noted an uptick in women applying to the FBI thanks to Jodie Foster’s fantastic performance as well as the accurate depiction of the FBI.
Jennifer’s Body
Jennifer’s Body is a unique entry into this list because it is a horror comedy and is the only film written and directed by women, and it shows.
The film mainly follows Anita “Needy” Lesnicki, the best friend of Jennifer Check, as she starts to realize Jennifer has been possessed by the devil. In the beginning of the film Needy and Jennifer go to a local band’s show and after a fire breaks out, and the girls escape. The band invites Needy and Jennifer to hang out with them. Needy denies the invitation but Jennifer decides to go with her soon realizing that she is the virgin sacrifice that the band needed to become famous. Unfortunately, as Jennifer said to Needy earlier, “I’m not even a back-door virgin.” And because of this Jennifer is brought back to life with an insatiable desire to eat humans, more specifically, boys. Needy, who was the only person to see Jennifer the night she was killed and came back to life, starts to suspect that Jennifer is killing and eating people after a football player that Jennifer was hitting on is found ripped apart with bits of him being eaten.
The film reaches it climax when Jennifer tries to take Needy’s boyfriend Chip and ultimately kills him, when he choses Needy over Jennifer, and the true feelings of Jennifer become apparent. She is insecure and keeps Needy around to make her feel better about herself. Needy can’t be prettier than her, Chip can’t deny Jennifer’s advances, and Needy can’t be her own person separate from Jennifer. After Needy kills Jennifer in an act of revenge she goes to kill the band that caused the issue in the first place, in a way getting revenge for her long-gone friend.
This film is a product of its time, with the setting being a high school in the 2000s and the main villain being Megan Fox, an iconic sex symbol of the 2000s. This film was originally a flop in the box office because the marketing was geared towards a young male audience but has now become a cult classic among female audiences. It’s implied, and writer Diablo Cody confirmed, that Needy doesn’t see Jennifer as just a friend, but is attracted to her. Jennifer knows and takes advantage of this by holding her hand, asking if they want to play boyfriend and girlfriend like they used to, and even kissing at one point. In the scene where Jennifer is getting sacrificed, the band is laughing in her face as she panics since she knows what is going to happen to her, making the scene a disturbing allegory for assault and rape.
Us
Us is a film that breaks the horror trope of the black person dying first. Directed by Jordan Peele, the story focuses on the Wilson family, but more specifically Adelaide, as they are being hunted down by their evil doppelgangers, called The Tethers, trying to take their lives by killing them. In the film Adelaide has negative memories about her family visiting the Santa Monica boardwalk where she had gotten lost when she was a child. When her parents found her again, Adelaide didn’t speak for two years and she stopped dancing ballet, even though she was very good at it. In the present-day, Red’s Tether, leads the Tether family in the attack against the Wilson family, with Red being the only one who can speak.
At the end of the film, we learn that the Adelaide we knew was originally from the tunnels under the United States, where every American’s Tether is located. This reveals that Red is the true: Adelaide was originally lost. This explains why Red was the only one who could speak, and why is took Adelaide two years to talk again.
The film is a commentary on class divisions in America with the Tethered living in squalor in the tunnels while their above ground counterparts get to experience a good life above ground. Adelaide and Red are two sides of the same coin, and while Adelaide is horrified by Red and the other Tethered family members, she could’ve easily become one of them if she had not switched places with Red on that fateful day. Peele has said that the film is a commentary on the fear of the other, that it isn’t what we know that is terrifying, but it is those that we know that often scare us the most. Jordan Peele has been an important figure in modern horror by having black people be the main characters in the film. His movies often tackle issues of race, class, politics, and culture and have been praised for bringing a new wave of film not based on tired tropes, but rather empowering communities that are often the victims. It’s not common for a black woman to be the lead in a horror film, and it’s especially uncommon for them to live to the end and Lupita Nyong’o’s performance as both Adelaide and Red makes the audience walk away from the film wondering if it’s better that Adelaide won.
The horror genre is full of over used tropes and predictable plots but I feel that these films matter because they wither established the tropes we know of today or completely subverted them. Rosemary’s Baby taps into the fears of wives and pregnant women while incorporating the occult. Halloween established the most iconic horror genre, slasher films, as well as the Final Girl trope. The Silence of the Lambs helped audiences understand the struggles of women in male dominated films as well as popularized the detective horror genre. Jennifer’s Body depicts the story of a victim who becomes the victimizer and tackles issues in toxic female friendships. Us breaks the trope of the black people dying first and comments of the violent differences between different social classes. I hope you and your girlfriends can get cozy, bake some cookies, and watch some killer women on the big screen.