Women, Horror, and the Politics of Pain: Part Two
Screaming Into the Void
In the first installment of this series, many moons ago, I explored how horror films reflect and reproduce societal anxieties about women, particularly about bodily autonomy, gendered violence, and institutional control. This time, we’re digging deeper into the visceral, evolving tropes of body horror, psychological disintegration, and technological fear and how they connect to modern political structures that seek to dominate, erase, or fetishize the female experience.
If the monstrous feminine has long been a symbol of threat, the contemporary horror landscape asks: What happens when that threat becomes institutional? What happens when fear isn’t just metaphoric but policy-driven?
Body Horror as Political Metaphor
In films like The Invisible Man (2020), Run Rabbit Run (2023), and Hereditary (2018), the female body is depicted as a site of transformation, deterioration, and betrayal. The horror emerges not from a singular monster but from the body itself—rebelling and unraveling; it reflects a loss of control that feels alarmingly familiar in post-war America.
As scholar Barbara Creed noted, the monstrous feminine is often associated with abjection: the leaking, bleeding, unpredictable body. Today’s horror doesn’t just echo that; it magnifies it. Women suffer postpartum psychosis (Baby Ruby), hereditary madness (Smile), body-image distortion (Swallow, Clock), or irreversible physiological change (The Substance). These films speak to the politicization of the female body, where horror becomes a way of externalizing the fear, shame, and surveillance women endure.
Even in more absurdist or surreal interpretations, like Infinity Pool (2023) or Poor Things (2023), the horror is rooted in questions of autonomy and control. These films challenge the boundaries between desire, transformation, and ownership, interrogating how patriarchal systems consume women’s bodies, literally and metaphorically.
Surveillance, Control, and the Horror of Being Watched
Increasingly, horror has turned its gaze toward surveillance—both technological and social—as a means of control. In Cam (2018), identity is stolen and commodified. In Watcher (2022), paranoia becomes prophecy. M3GAN (2022) presents a sanitized parenting nightmare under algorithmic influence, where even maternal instincts are outsourced to machines.
These films resonate within a political climate where digital privacy is increasingly weaponized. Women who seek abortions or gender-affirming care must now navigate a world where every search, message, or app could be evidence. Horror doesn’t have to invent dystopia. It simply reflects what is already terrifyingly plausible.
When Grief Becomes Genre
So many recent horror films use grief as their driving emotional engine, especially maternal grief. In The Babadook (2014), Relic (2020), and Attachment (2022), women are tasked with containing, processing, and surviving grief that society refuses to acknowledge or support. These narratives are soaked in loss: of control, identity, and generational memory.
Grief, in horror, is often a generational wound—passed down like a cursed inheritance. Talk to Me (2023) reframes teenage grief into a kind of possession, where speaking to the dead becomes a substitute for emotional care. In You Won’t Be Alone (2022), grief is embodied in witchcraft, transformation, and longing for connection. These films ask what happens when women are left alone to process trauma in silence and whether that silence can ever remain contained.
The Future of Fear: What Horror Is Becoming
What makes current horror so potent is not inventing new fears but reframing existing ones. The genre has not abandoned its obsession with female suffering; it has simply evolved into a more sophisticated (and sometimes more insidious) reflection of contemporary realities.
In The VVitch (2015), a girl is punished for growing into womanhood. In Pearl (2022), a woman’s ambition curdles into madness. In The Invisible Man, a woman escapes abuse only to be gaslit and disbelieved. In Soft & Quiet (2022), the real horror is the banality of white suburban violence. These are not isolated stories; they are part of a larger cultural pattern that frames women’s agency as dangerous, their grief as destabilizing, and their resistance as monstrous. Horror films, like the novels they echo, have become critical cultural artifacts through which to understand how power moves through the body, how policy shapes identity, and how violence is aestheticized and normalized when enacted upon marginalized subjects. The horror genre doesn’t just present anxiety—it curates it. These films are rich texts for analyzing systems of control: reproductive, racial, domestic, and digital. They force us to examine not just what we fear but who benefits from it and why it continues to be relentlessly projected onto the female form.
What’s especially notable is how many of these films are now written and directed by women. They are no longer just representations of pain but examinations of it. Horror has always been cathartic, but it’s becoming curatorial, too, offering space for fear, complexity, ambiguity, and rage.
Screaming Back
Horror continues to act as a cultural pressure valve—a place where societal anxieties can be dramatized, distorted, and dissected. And in doing so, it offers a space where women’s fears can be seen, named, and sometimes avenged. But it also continues to reflect the very systems that produce those fears.
If horror is a mirror, it’s one cracked by the weight of its own metaphors. Women are not just surviving the genre—they are reshaping it. The question is whether women will continue to suffer on screen and whether their stories will finally shift from spectacle to agency.
Stay tuned for Part Three, where we’ll explore how horror written and directed by women is changing the genre from the inside out.
Further Reading: Horror Novels That Echo the Feminine Uncanny
While film often dominates the conversation, contemporary horror literature has produced rich, unsettling explorations of women’s bodies, minds, and societal roles. From speculative nightmares to psychological thrillers, these novels interrogate the same themes seen on screen: grief, transformation, motherhood, surveillance, and rage with remarkable nuance.
Recommended Reading (for myself and you):
Motherthing by Ainslie Hogarth — A darkly comic and disturbing exploration of maternal control, legacy, and psychological descent.
Bunny by Mona Awad — A surreal campus novel where loneliness, girlhood, and cultish femininity twist into body horror and identity collapse.
Such Sharp Teeth by Rachel Harrison — A modern werewolf story that reframes bodily change, trauma, and female rage as monstrous and redemptive.
The Need by Helen Phillips — A surreal thriller that blends motherhood, alternate realities, and existential dread.
Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield — A queer, oceanic horror that uses grief, silence, and bodily transformation to question intimacy and loss.
Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder — A feral feminist satire about a stay-at-home mom who believes she’s turning into a dog, unraveling the boundaries of identity and rage.
We Are Here to Hurt Each Other by Paula D. Ashe — A short story collection that spans horror, eroticism, and transgression, with stories that center on the monstrous feminine.
These novels challenge readers to rethink who the real monsters are and what it means when women refuse to be silent. Together, they trace the politics of femininity in crisis: how motherhood and madness blur into each other, how grief transforms the body, and how the female experience is constantly surveilled, distorted, and dismissed. They don't simply illustrate horror; they dissect it—revealing the ways women are punished for their desires, their anger, and their refusal to conform. Whether through psychological descent or supernatural transformation, these books remind us that horror literature, like film, has become a critical site for exploring the tensions between identity and power in an increasingly volatile world.
Recommended Viewing: The Invisible Man (2020), Watcher (2022), Smile (2022), Relic (2020), Run Rabbit Run (2023), Pearl (2022), Attachment (2022), Soft & Quiet (2022), Infinity Pool (2023), The Substance (2023), Talk to Me (2023), Swallow (2019), You Won’t Be Alone (2022), Clock (2023), M3GAN (2022), Poor Things (2023)
