From the earliest slashers to contemporary psychological thrillers, the horror genre seems to have a certain obsession with the female body. In these works, women are portrayed as persecuted, punished, and sexualized characters, exposing the gaze of a society that projects its fears and desires onto them.
Horror cinema has always constructed predictable female archetypes, such as the “sexy blonde” who is always the first to die, the hysterical mother who no one believes, and so on. Women are often reduced to a vulnerable, desired, and/or punished body.
These stereotypes reinforce patriarchal norms, where the female body is nothing more than a territory of moral control.
Final Girl: The moralized heroine
The term Final Girl, created by University of California, Berkeley, film studies professor Carol J. Clover, describes the last woman who survives the massacre and faces the villain. This woman is:
- Intelligent, observant, and emotionally restrained.
- Generally, morally upright.
- And transformed into a heroine, but within the limits imposed by patriarchy.
Some of the most iconic examples of final girls in cinema include Laurie Strode from Halloween (1978), Sidney Prescott from Scream (1996), and Nancy Thompson from A Nightmare on Elm Street (1988). Final girls may represent resistance, yes, but they also reveal a new form of control. They survive because they adapt to what the system demands of them.
Complex Women in Contemporary Horror
In recent years, horror has reinvented itself by presenting ambiguous, powerful, and emotionally dense female protagonists. They are no longer just victims, they are agents of the narrative.
In the film The Babadook (2014), Amelia faces grief and desires that society doesn’t allow a mother to even consider. In Midsommar (2019), Dani begins as an emotional victim and ends as a cult leader, on an ambiguous journey of empowerment and alienation. The folk horror film Men (2022), in turn, addresses the constant feeling of female insecurity in society. And finally, in Pearl (2022), we are introduced to a female villain with psychological depth, whose desires and frustrations are as human as they are disturbing.
These films show that horror can be a space for social criticism, where the feminine ceases to be imposing and reveals its complexity.
Horror as a social mirror
Horror cinema is more than scares, it’s a mirror of collective fears. The way women are portrayed reveals a lot about the dynamic imposed on our society.
As new protagonists emerge, the genre becomes fertile ground for discussing empowerment, ambiguity, and transformation. Horror doesn’t just scare us, it reveals who we are, who has power, and who survives.
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The article above was edited by Alyah Gomes
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