Picture this. It’s late at night, and you’re sitting alone in the dark, watching a horror movie. The house is dead quiet and tension fills the air. The killer finally steps into the frame, and a terrified scream echoes through the room. Now, wait a second. Who just screamed? I never actually told you. Yet, I bet the voice in your head belonged to a woman.
That assumption is no coincidence. The image of a woman screaming in fear reflects a familiar convention in horror cinema, where female characters often endure graphic and prolonged violence. But the reasons behind this recurring pattern go beyond simple jump scares.
The psychology of Horror
To understand why women play such a central role in horror, we need to look at how the genre creates fear.
Suspense draws us in by making us anticipate danger and worry about what will happen to the characters on screen. In a review of research on horror films, psychologist G. Neil Martin identifies empathy and emotional responses as important factors in how viewers react to frightening scenes. Even when the threat is fictional, the fear and concern it evokes can feel real.
But why are women so often the targets in these situations?
Part of the answer may lie in how society perceives vulnerability. A meta-analysis by psychologist Alice Eagly and her colleagues found that women are more strongly associated with communal traits, such as warmth and emotional sensitivity, while men tend to be associated with agency.
When a woman is hunted by a killer and appears to have no way out, her vulnerability can heighten the audience’s concern for her survival. Such scenes draw on familiar cultural assumptions that portray women as helpless, turning those expectations into another source of fear.
These portrayals reflect traditional patriarchal ideas of femininity that associate women with passivity and dependence. As criminologist Tea Fredriksson explains in her analysis of the damsel in distress, this figure is closely connected to the cultural idea of the “ideal victim,” someone perceived as innocent, passive, and deserving of protection.
When Horror Reflects Reality
Horror also draws on fears that exist beyond the screen. Researchers Becky Millar and Jonny Lee explain how the genre can give shape to difficult human experiences, such as grief and trauma, through fictional threats and monsters. By turning these experiences into stories, horror can explore anxieties that audiences may already recognize in their own lives.
This connection becomes particularly significant when horror depicts misogyny and violence against women.
According to UN Women and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, around 83,000 women and girls were intentionally killed worldwide in 2024. These figures highlight the scale of lethal violence affecting women and girls, a reality that horror often explores through stories of women being stalked, threatened, assaulted, or murdered.
By bringing these threats to the screen, the genre connects fictional depictions of violence to the dangers women face in real life. Such narratives reflect a world in which violence against women is not merely an imagined threat. They also raise questions about how this violence is portrayed, whether as a way to expose misogyny or as a spectacle built around women’s suffering.
The Problem with Graphic Violence
Horror has always pushed audiences to confront disturbing images. Graphic violence can make a killer seem more threatening, show the consequences of an attack, or bring viewers closer to a character’s fear.
But how much violence is really necessary?
When a film lingers on a woman’s body as she is tortured or killed, it becomes harder to tell whether the scene is exposing the brutality of misogyny or simply using her suffering to shock the audience.
Few films illustrate this tension as clearly as I Spit on Your Grave (1978). The film spends much of its first half depicting Jennifer’s prolonged sexual assault before following her pursuit of revenge against her attackers. While some interpretations emphasize her revenge as a way of reclaiming control, the extended portrayal of her suffering raises concerns about how a film can condemn violence against women while keeping the audience watching that violence in such detail.
Another concern is desensitization. Psychologists Charles Mullin and Daniel Linz explored this question in an experiment in which participants watched sexually violent films. After repeated exposure, participants showed less sympathy toward victims of domestic abuse and judged their injuries as less severe. Although the effect was temporary and the study did not focus specifically on horror, its findings raise questions about how repeated portrayals of violence can shape responses to real suffering.
Of course, graphic violence does not affect every viewer in the same way, and its presence alone does not determine what a film is saying. The distinction lies in how the violence is presented and what it contributes to the story. When a woman’s suffering becomes the main attraction, horror risks turning the very thing it seeks to expose into entertainment.
The Representation of Women
Women in horror have long been portrayed through the relationship between sexuality, vulnerability, and violence.
Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) was a groundbreaking film that pushed the boundaries of how violence and sexuality could be portrayed on screen. Its infamous shower scene remains a striking example of how the female body can become part of the horror itself. As Marion is attacked, the camera draws attention to her exposed body, intertwining her physical vulnerability with the violence of her death.
This connects to film theorist Laura Mulvey’s concept of the “male gaze“, which describes how mainstream cinema often presents women as objects of visual pleasure while men take on more active roles in the story. In horror, this dynamic can emerge when the camera lingers on a woman’s body, particularly when she is frightened, exposed, or being attacked.
Another recurring pattern, particularly in slasher films, is the association between female sexuality and death. Sexually active women are often killed shortly after intimate scenes, while more reserved characters are allowed to survive, turning violence into a form of narrative punishment.
In John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978), Laurie Strode survives Michael Myers while her sexually active friends are killed. This contrast reflects a familiar pattern in which sexual restraint is rewarded with survival, while female desire is associated with punishment. Laurie’s survival also connects to one of the slasher genre’s most recognizable figures, the Final Girl.
The Final Girl
In her 1987 essay Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film, film scholar Carol J. Clover introduced the concept of the “Final Girl”, the female survivor who faces the killer in the film’s final confrontation.
The Final Girl, however, occupies an unusual position between femininity and strength. She is often less sexualized than the other women in the story, and her practical, observant nature sets her apart from traditional portrayals of femininity.
To survive, she must take on traits commonly associated with masculinity, such as rationality, resourcefulness, and the ability to fight back. Yet she rarely resembles the confident, nearly invincible hero found in action films. Her strength emerges under pressure, when she has little choice but to resist.
Although she breaks away from the role of the helpless victim, her survival often depends on her remaining sexually restrained and enduring extraordinary suffering. She is strong enough to outlast the killer, but her agency remains tied to a narrow set of expectations about how a woman should behave.
The Final Girl may challenge the role of the helpless female victim, but her strength is often defined by how much suffering she can endure and how closely she fits the genre’s expectations of femininity.
Beyond the Victim
But women in horror do not always have to be the ones running from the monster. In Ti West’s Pearl (2022), the protagonist’s frustration with her restrictive life and unfulfilled ambitions gradually turns her into a killer. Instead of fearing for her survival, the audience begins to fear what she might do next.
This shift connects to the concept of the “monstrous-feminine“, developed by film scholar Barbara Creed to examine how horror turns aspects of femininity into sources of fear. Female desire, rage, and refusal to conform can all contribute to what makes a character seem threatening. In Pearl, the protagonist’s ambitions and violent impulses drive the story, challenging the familiar expectation that women in horror should be innocent, vulnerable, or in need of protection.
The term “femgore” also describes horror that places female violence, rage, and revenge at the center of the story. In that way, they complicate the roles traditionally assigned to women in horror, allowing them to be more than the victims who suffer or the survivors who escape.
Horror Depends on Women
Women have always played a central role in horror. Their fear makes danger feel real, their pain gives violence an emotional weight, and their anger can turn them into sources of terror themselves. Through these characters, horror can also bring real-world issues, such as misogyny and violence against women, to the screen, forcing audiences to confront fears that exist beyond fiction.
Yet, the way women are portrayed matters just as much as the roles they play. When female characters are reduced to helpless victims, their bodies become objects of the camera’s gaze, or their suffering is prolonged simply to shock the audience, horror risks reinforcing the patriarchal ideas it could challenge.
The genre must look beyond women’s pain to explore their experiences, choices, and strength. Their stories can reveal as much about the world outside the screen as they do about the fears we bring into the theater.
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The article above was edited by Julia Delboni.
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