Five Horror Movie Recommendations for the Feminist Film-Lover

The season for horror movies is in full swing, which, for many of us, is great news—we host watch parties for our favorites, stay up late and freak ourselves out with the classics, and maybe even catch a new release in theaters. At the same time, though, horror can be tricky for its female fans to navigate. Historically, women have always been central to the genre. From Marion Crane in Psycho to Regan MacNeil in The Exorcist to Laurie Strode in Halloween, all of the early horror films that defined the genre feature female lead characters—but notably, they also feature their pain. 

The presence of female characters doesn’t necessarily make a horror movie “feminist.” Women have historically been seen as more vulnerable than men, and a lot of horror films capitalize off this stereotype, drawing fear from audiences by putting female characters through hell (sometimes literally). Statistically, female characters in horror movies tend to be shown in fear five times as long as their male counterparts, further proving just how much the genre has historically relied on women’s suffering.

This can get pretty emotionally taxing to watch! I love movies because they can transport you to another world, but there’s nothing very transportive about watching a graphic sexual assault scene or seeing men terrorize women. Unfortunately, women are all too familiar with these types of scenes. I’ve encountered men who have questioned whether I can call myself a true horror fan because I tend to stay away from some of the gorier stuff. But despite how “culturally significant” some of them may be, torture porn films like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre rely so completely on brutalizing female characters that I just don’t find them very compelling. We can dream so much bigger when it comes to horror movies—it’s more than possible to be scared without feeling like you’re watching a cinematic recreation of the latest awful news headlines.

I think horror has some of the greatest potential out of any film genre to be targeted toward female audiences because we’re more likely to get it. Tons of the most recognizable tropes of the genre draw heavily on the female experience. Their horror is only derived from their application to men. For example, the classic werewolf story is about an innocent man transformed into a bloodthirsty creature by forces beyond his control, which just so happens to function as a great allegory for female puberty. The idea of having a parasite, or a monster that resides within, similarly borrows its horror from the terrifying concept of having something unwanted living inside of us, a reality that already exists for women forced to carry unwanted pregnancies.

The horror genre would be nothing without women, but not too many of our horror favorites do a great job honoring that—I want to highlight some of the few that do. So, for your next movie night this Halloween season, here are five recommendations for scary movies that handle their female characters and/or gender-driven themes particularly well:

1. Alien (1979)

We’re starting with a classic: Ridley Scott’s Alien. This movie has been categorized as both horror and science fiction, so it’s a great pick for those who tend to avoid all-out horror. Sigourney Weaver stars as Ripley, an officer on a commercial spaceship who, along with the rest of her crew, stumbles across what they believe is an abandoned alien ship. Naturally, it’s not abandoned, and the film centers around the crew being terrorized by an alien creature. 

It’s a pretty standard sci-fi horror plot that had the potential to end up being just another corny action movie set in space, and I’ve learned to become skeptical of the character archetype of “badass female action hero,” many of which are two-dimensional and manage to lose an article of clothing in every single fight scene. Alien does a great job of escaping these tropes, though, perhaps because the character of Ripley wasn’t specifically written as female. None of the characters are explicitly gendered in the original screenplay: “All parts are interchangeable for men or women,” according to co-author Ronald Shusett. So, Ripley’s character doesn’t fall victim to getting reduced to a trope, because she could have just as easily ended up being played by a man had the casting directors not chosen Weaver. In my opinion, though, Ripley being a female character adds a lot to the story, which deals with some surprisingly gendered themes. 

When you think of Alien, you probably picture the iconic “birth” scene where the alien bursts out of one of the crew member’s chests. Screenwriter Dan O’Bannon has spoken about his inspiration for this scene, explaining that he wanted to write a film about rape that acted as “payback” for all of the movies that have subjected their female characters to graphic sexual assault for the sake of horror. So, he wrote a scene that depicts a character giving birth to an unwanted product of rape but made it more terrifying for male audiences by making that character a man (and by making the “birth” an alien, of course). As a result, the film ends up accomplishing something that very few others have: it’s an effective horror story about sexual assault that doesn’t derive its scariness from making us watch a female character experience it.

2. The Descent (2005)

Neil Marshall’s The Descent is a film I don’t often hear people talk about, but I always recommend it for scary movie nights with friends. It’s a classic thriller where everything goes wrong, and the characters spend basically the entire movie in mortal peril, so it’ll keep your heart rate up. Despite this, it’s also unique, and I’ve never seen another horror movie quite like it. 

The Descent features an all-female cast, with the plot centering around a group of six friends who take a spelunking trip into a cave system and end up encountering terrifying perils of all kinds (and I mean, seriously, all kinds—there’s a second-act twist that you’ll never see coming, with one of the scariest reveals I’ve ever seen). It’s rare to see a horror movie exclusively supported by its female cast, and the actors all do a great job. I’m also usually not a fan of when male screenwriters write dialogue between female friends because it never feels very realistic, but this movie is an exception and is one of the better on-screen depictions of a complex female friend group.

The film also has some more complex themes than your average disaster thriller. The title, The Descent, is a clue into one of them—it’s mostly in reference to the characters’ physical descent into the cave, but it could also represent the main character, Sarah’s, metaphorical descent. The reason for the caving trip is partially to get Sarah back to her old, adventure-loving self after losing her husband and daughter in an accident a year prior. Throughout the movie, we see this take a toll on Sarah, with her becoming more crazed and eventually embracing the animalistic violence she needs to survive. We see male characters go through this descent into madness in a not-so-explicitly-negative light all the time in the film, so it’s refreshing to see a female character we sympathize with get to be unapologetically terrifying.

3. Jennifer’s Body (2009)

If you’re anything like me, you saw this movie’s trailer years ago and intentionally avoided watching it for years afterward because of what you saw. I thought it seemed like your standard high school slasher and was not reassured by the poster’s depiction of Megan Fox in a schoolgirl skirt. I’ve come back now, though, to admit I was wrong. I still think the advertising for this movie was a little misguided, but only because it doesn’t do it justice. The real target audience for the film is not the teenage boys who were enticed by the Megan Fox credit and then probably walked out of the theater disappointed—it’s us.

Jennifer’s Body, directed by Karyn Kusama, follows the titular Jennifer, played by Megan Fox, and her less popular best friend, Needy, played by Amanda Seyfried. The main plot is instigated when the two friends attend a concert, and Jennifer is kidnapped by the band members to be offered up as a virgin sacrifice. The ritual fails, though, because Jennifer isn’t a virgin, and she instead becomes possessed. It’s a fascinating subversion of the classic slasher movie trope where “final girls” (i.e., the last ones left standing) tend to be virgins, implying that there’s some purity inherent in female virgins that protects them from death in these stories. It’s a trope that might not always have a malicious agenda, but it still signals to audiences that purity in women should be rewarded, which is especially harmful when male characters don’t get the same treatment. Jennifer’s Body makes fun of this trope, as the newly-possessed Jennifer begins a reign of terror targeting men who want to sleep with her (which would be making them complicit in the failed ritual that transformed her into a man-eating demon in the first place).

The movie also explores an interesting dynamic between Jennifer and Needy. Several characters make jokes about them being lesbians, but the story itself doesn’t play their relationship for laughs. Jennifer, in her demon form, tries to seduce Needy but can’t bring herself to kill her, and while I won’t give any explicit spoilers, I will say that their relationship is central to the story’s conclusion. In summary, this movie is carried by its female characters and their relationship. The men act only as plot devices and helpless victims, a rare reversal of traditionally gendered horror movie roles.

4. Immaculate (2024)

Like Jennifer’s Body, Michael Mohan’s Immaculate is a movie that I think fell victim to some of the untrue assumptions people made about it when it was first released. Religion is a pretty popular theme in horror, and plenty of horror movies have derived shock factors from depicting religious figures such as nuns in controversial ways. The fact that Immaculate‘s star, Sydney Sweeney, is generally considered a sex symbol probably didn’t help dissuade assumptions that this film would do the same. This movie doesn’t rely on shock value, though, and is not at all unnecessarily sexual. It’s a years-in-the-making passion project for Sydney Sweeney. She initially auditioned for the project in 2014, but the script didn’t get picked up until she returned almost a decade later, using the money she earned on Euphoria to buy the rights herself and sign on as a producer. The timing ended up working perfectly, because I think this film resonates even more in a post-Dobbs decision world.

The plot follows Sweeney’s character, a nun-in-training named Cecilia, joining a convent in Italy and discovering one day that, impossibly, she is pregnant. The other members of the convent insist that it must have been an immaculate conception and that she has been chosen to carry the second coming of Christ. At first, she believes this might be true, but strange things keep happening, and the priest prevents her from leaving to get medical help when her pregnancy becomes dangerous. No spoilers, of course, but the mystery reveal is one I never could have seen coming. I dreaded the idea that it was all going to be explained by sexual assault, but the real answer is much stranger than that, better serving the movie’s central theme about a woman’s right to her own body.

This is a movie about consent and reproductive rights that might make you uncomfortable at times, but doesn’t subject its main character to explicit on-screen sexual violence. The horror that Sweeney’s character goes through is primarily psychological, which, in my opinion, can be much more terrifying. Immaculate is a pertinent social commentary about one of the most terrifying issues American women face right now, told through great acting, stunning cinematography, and an insane (yet uncomfortably familiar, I think you’ll find) plot.

5. The Substance (2024)

There’s something so special about physically going to the movies, so I have to finish this list with a recent release that’s probably playing at your local cinema right now. The Substance is French director Coralie Fargeat’s second film, starring Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley. It recently won the Best Screenplay award at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival and has been getting some serious Oscar buzz in recent weeks, which is a pretty big deal for a horror movie (The Silence of the Lambs is the only one ever to win Best Picture, and only five others have ever even been nominated). 

The film’s main theme is one that hasn’t been extensively explored by the horror genre: aging and beauty standards. The plot follows Demi Moore’s character, a middle-aged actress named Elisabeth, who has just begun to age out of her prime as a Hollywood star. To cope, she starts taking a mysterious substance (called “the Substance,” per the title) that creates a younger, “better” version of herself, played by Margaret Qualley. Elisabeth and her other self (who adopts the name Sue) are technically the same person, but the Substance doesn’t allow them to be conscious simultaneously. They switch back and forth, with Sue becoming Hollywood’s new darling and Elisabeth spiraling even further into self-hatred. They grow to hate each other and begin a war of sabotage on each other’s lives that backfires horribly because, as the instructions for using the Substance constantly reiterate: they are one.

I’ll stop my summary there to avoid spoilers, but be warned that this film devolves into the craziest third act I’ve possibly ever seen. It’s disgustingly gory and not for the weak-of-stomach. But it’s not just gross for the sake of being gross, which differentiates it from many of its peers. At its heart, The Substance is a movie about the harm women do to ourselves by hating our appearances. The gore acts as a physical manifestation of the effects of that self-hatred, laid out in a way that helps us realize just how vicious and cruel we can be to our bodies. This is a body horror movie simply because there’s no better genre to drive its point home. In a recent interview with NPR, director Coralie Fargeat explained that her motivation for making horror movies was to explore topics that the genre hasn’t paid much attention to in the past: “I think it’s fantastic that younger generations can also see what’s in the mind of women directors. You know, what’s our fears? What are our fantasies?” The Substance does a great job of exploring some of these fears, and I hope its success helps show the film industry the value of platforming female directors and storytellers. Who would have thought the best horror movie of the year would be about being pretty? A room full of Hollywood suits probably wouldn’t have, but women have always known that the pursuit of beauty can be horrifying.