How women in horror are turning fragility into ferocity

Horror has always reflected society’s anxieties in a grotesque and uncanny form. Yet, for decades, women in horror were often reduced to tropes: the final girl, the screaming victim, the haunted mother. Today, this narrative is changing. Storytellers are reimagining femininity not as fragile but as feral, and transcending that into tales on the screen.

It’s no surprise that this wave has also taken over timelines and feeds. Scenes from Midsommar or The Substance have found their way into fan-made edits on social media. Beyond the regular experience, horror enthusiasts reframe these films, trade references, and build communities around them. 

Redefining femininity in horror means moving past the set connotations of characters and embracing female roles which are layered and unpredictable. It shifts fear from something that simply happens to them into something they can wield, resist, or even claim. And in that shift, horror finds stories that feel sharper, stranger, and closer to the essence of it.

Longlegs

Osgood Perkins’ Longlegs is not about loud scares. It builds with a slow suffocation of dread, anchored in the dynamic between mothers and daughters. The film follows FBI agent Lee Harker as she confronts a case tied to her own mother, unravelling themes of generational trauma and inherited violence. Here, femininity is not coded as delicate but as something sinisterly complex—mothers both protect and destroy, daughters inherit strength and curse alike.

Perkins weaponises maternal instinct, turning what is often portrayed as a nurturing force into a labyrinth of fear. This inversion places Longlegs firmly in the realm of feminine horror: it is about the horror of becoming what we fear most, about the inescapable intimacy between bloodlines. The terror here is not an external monster but the maternal bond itself—making the film’s fear deeply intimate, psychological, and profoundly feminine.

Nosferatu

Robert Eggers’ reimagining of Nosferatu revives gothic horror with an unflinching emphasis on desire, autonomy, and female power. Where early vampire films often reduced women to victims of lust or symbols of purity to be corrupted, Eggers’ version allows his female characters agency. They are not passive recipients of horror but participants in its unfolding—both resisting and shaping the myth. Feminine horror here lies in the collision of desire and danger, in women who are conscious of their allure and the peril it carries. By centring the female experience within the story of vampirism, Nosferatu becomes not just a tale of monstrous hunger but of power negotiations between genders. Eggers transforms gothic femininity from victimhood into confrontation, rewriting the classic vampire narrative as a space where women can wield the same terror once reserved for the monster himself.

Midsommar

Ari Aster’s Midsommar is a daylight horror, drenched in florals and pastoral imagery yet brimming with psychological unease. At its core lies Dani, a woman navigating grief, heartbreak, and a suffocating relationship. Instead of descending into madness in the shadows, Dani’s horror unfolds in the brightness of ritual, where femininity becomes communal, primal, and unstoppable. The infamous flower crown finale transforms her pain into sovereignty—grief and rage sublimated into ritual power. Feminine horror here emerges in its refusal to shy away from vulnerability. Dani’s tears, her breakdowns, her silence—all are central to her eventual metamorphosis. Unlike traditional horror, Dani does not escape the cult; she embraces it, finding liberation in what terrifies. In Midsommar, femininity is not weakness but a terrifyingly fertile force, capable of blooming into horror that is as radiant as it is devastating.

Orphan

Orphan disrupts our cultural fixation on innocence by weaponising girlhood itself. Esther, the child at the film’s centre, is not what she seems—her façade of innocence conceals something far more predatory. This inversion strikes at the heart of feminine horror: the dismantling of assumptions tied to age, purity, and appearance. The fear does not stem from supernatural monsters but from the realisation that the most familiar archetype—the little girl—can conceal unimaginable danger.

By recasting innocence as a threat, Orphan critiques societal tendencies to infantilise and underestimate women, showing how those perceptions can be twisted into power. Esther embodies the horror of the unexpected: that femininity, so often policed and romanticised, can itself become the mask of terror.

Bring Her Back

Grief has always accompanied horror, but Bring Her Back treats it as a visceral, almost bodily phenomenon. The film follows a mother navigating the impossible ache of loss, blending psychological torment with supernatural echoes. Unlike horror that frames women’s pain as spectacle, this story allows feminine grief to be its own monstrous presence—suffocating, relentless, and all-consuming. The horror is not in external forces but in how love and loss mutate the body and spirit.

Bring Her Back positions femininity as the site of both suffering and strength, showing how women are asked to carry the unbearable. The maternal figure becomes the centre of terror not because she is weak, but because her grief is boundless, stretching beyond logic into the supernatural. This is feminine horror at its rawest: the fear that love itself can undo you, and that the body remembers what the mind cannot let go.

The Substance

Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance is as grotesque as it is brilliant, a body horror that slices into society’s obsession with youth, beauty, and perfection. Starring Demi Moore, the veteran actress who undergoes a radical treatment promising reinvention, the film literalises the horror of beauty culture. Here, femininity is dissected in the pursuit of desirability. What makes it feminine horror is its unflinching gaze on how women’s bodies are commodified and punished—how age itself becomes monstrous in a culture that worships youth.

The film’s gore is shocking, but its critique is sharper: femininity is both the stage and the battlefield, where beauty is demanded at any cost. The Substance terrifies by exposing the very real societal horrors women endure daily. It is a mirror held too close, reflecting truths that are as disturbing as any creature feature.

What makes these films striking is not just their ability to terrify, but their insistence on reframing who gets to hold power in horror. They invite us to sit with discomfort, to see femininity not as fragile but as ferocious. In their wake, horror expands beyond being a genre—it becomes a reckoning, proving that sometimes the scariest thing is not the monster lurking in the shadows, but the reflection of ourselves staring back.

All images: IMDB

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