FROM THE DAMSEL TO THE DEVIL: THE EVOLUTION OF FEMININITY IN HORROR FILMS
Ananya Warrier
FY B. Sc. Economics (2024-2028)
Reading Time – 7 mins
The Beginning
Close your eyes and think of any horror movie. Start out with your favourite, and then proceed to a host of other ones – famous, underrated, or in another language. Maybe you’ve only seen its poster on Pinterest or IMDb – but you’re bound to find out that each of them has female characters in it in some significant capacity. Of course, the depiction of femininity could change – it could be misogynistic, brutalising women to a sick degree, or it could be empowering and uplifting, giving women almost an equal voice and depth as men, which is the type of horror content that is coming out more in recent years.
The Conflict
Cinema, as a medium, had just been born. There were no restrictions on the portrayals of characters on screen, leading to some amazing performances liberated from any moral constraints. This included women playing, writing, and directing more films than men did, so much so that women were better represented during the silent film era in Hollywood than at any other time in American cinema. Some people even dubbed this era “manless Eden.” This allowed for complex and layered characters in all forms of audacity and lethality, as these films did not hesitate to depict women as both victims and monsters, as multifaceted women with agency.
Soon, however, the rigid Hays Code, a set of guidelines to regulate content, deeply rooted in conservative and traditional values, turned films into more conservative, sanitised art. This meant that female characters had diminished agency, often downgraded to playing roles of naive heroines with hearts of gold or victims that were the epitome of virtue. Thus emerged one of the oldest tropes of cinema – the damsel in distress, a vulnerable, helpless woman who could not survive on her own and needed to be taken care of.
Crisis
This double whammy of diminishing a woman’s agency and setting her up to be a damsel in distress, coupled with the male gaze in horror cinema, meant that female characters that did not follow the norm of virginal good girl usually ended up as victims, the worst kind of treatment possible in a horror cinema – a cautionary tale, one that was used to warn other young girls that to deviate from the well-trodden path of “good girl” was to meet with a fate both horrible and brutal. This depiction continued well after the Hays Code was taken down in 1968. During the 1970s, many “revenge films” like I Spit On Your Grave (1978) were made that, though told from a woman’s perspective, portrayed such gruesome sexual violence against women that these movies were banned in many countries, such as Norway, Ireland, West Germany, and Iceland, because people argued that it’s lengthy, drawn out rape scenes glorified violence against women.
On the other hand, this decade saw the rise of films where women overcame the obstacles put in their way by malevolent forces and fought them, often to the death, victory on their side. This shift in depiction coincided with the turbulent social and economic changes that the second wave of feminism in the 1970s ushered in, allowing more women to participate in the workforce. Take the same film I Spit On Your Grave. While earlier films would have had the survivor’s male partner or friend get revenge on her behalf, it showed the survivor herself getting revenge against the men who assaulted her. Carrie (1976), an adaptation of Stephen King’s novel, shows a shy girl who is bullied at school and soon develops telekinesis, with the help of which she is able to wreak vengeance against her bullies.
Slasher movies too followed a new pattern – the final girl, immortalised in Carol Clover’s 1987 essay “Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film.” Here, a psycho-killer would target and kill a set group of people until defeated by a prudish, intelligent woman who finally learned how to stand up to him. She’s terror personified, symbolising life, and her defeating the killer shows how she has now overcome the terror and has earned her right to live. The final girl soon became the epitome of horror movies, from Halloween (1978) to A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) to Scream (1996).
Climax
Soon, though, horror films had become stale, as they relied heavily on pre-existing tropes and were not very well executed. However, with the advent of Jennifer’s Body, one of the first movies since the 1920s that didn’t make the beautiful character’s sexuality her weakness, but rather helped her to seek vengeance against her perpetrators, horror cinema was reclaimed by women filmmakers, who went on to direct such masterpieces as Jennifer’s Body (2009), Black Swan (2010), A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014), and The Babadook (2014). A lot of the time, these movies move beyond the age-old trope of a terrifying entity pursuing and stalking the woman and delve more into how the women themselves could be monsters, the agents of their own destruction. This even spilled into other genres – In Gone Girl, Amy Dunne did not shy away from her dark side and even indulged it so that she could wreak havoc in her husband’s life. This shift in mood and depiction paved the way for myriad portrayals of women in all their horrific glory – indulging and embracing their dark side, when they had otherwise been shunned from doing so. Other times, they can be spun into a tale of the solitary woman pitted against the patriarchy, and how she can come out on top. After all, most great horror is about the destruction of what is traditional, conservative, and middle-class. What better way of portraying that than to have a “weak and helpless” – the more vulnerable, the scarier the peril – woman who must rise to the challenge posed to them – be it a competitor, a predator, an unseen evil force that is hell-bent on her destruction – and get the better of the embodiment of her insecurities. Some brilliant movies that use this tool are Bulbbul (2020), The Silence of the Lambs (1991), and The Stepford Wives (1975). In this subgenre, a woman, who finds herself in a new place or situation, finds things amiss, and must now fight – sometimes for her life too. At first, their femininity is shown as a weakness, but it is this same femininity that helps them to emerge victorious.
The End
To see this journey that horror has taken, with all its ups and downs, from showcasing the many shades of being a woman, to being a one-note template that all women had to follow, to once again redefining the horror genre again and again, is certainly a tale to behold. There is a certain catharsis that develops seeing a woman, who for the most part has been belittled and mistreated, to move beyond her limitations and defeat the patriarchal forces. It almost feels like we, along with the protagonist, have won.