To help celebrate Women’s History Month and spooky season, we’ve curated a selection of feminist horror books and films. Discover the contributions of feminism to the horror genre through film and literature.
An Ordinary Violence
by Adriana Chartrand
“Creepy and unsettling, this assured debut addresses the ways violence, grief, and unprocessed trauma reverberate over years, keeping fractured psyches and relationships from mending.” —Booklist
Bloody Women: Women Directors of Horror
Edited by Victoria McCollum and Aislinn Clarke
“More than just another academic reading of pop culture, Clarke and McCollum have offered a gift to fans and a love letter to the women who shaped the genre.”
—W. Scott Poole, Department of History, College of Charleston
The Writing Retreat by Julia Bartz
“Julia Bartz’s shrewd, suspenseful debut takes the typical writer’s anxieties and obsessions and transforms them into a pulse-pounding, impossible to put down thriller.” —Layne Fargo, author of They Never Learn
Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
“Rebecca is a masterpiece in which du Maurier pulls off several spectacular high-wire acts that many great writers wouldn’t attempt.”
—Jim Crace, Guardian
Non-Fiction
Alien legacies : the evolution of the franchise / edited by Nathan Abrams and Gregory Frame
Gothic forms of feminine fictions / Susanne Becker
Searching for Sycorax: Black women’s hauntings of contemporary horror / Kinitra D. Brooks
Killing women : the visual culture of gender and violence / Annette Burfoot and Susan Lord, editors
Men, Women, and Chain Saws: gender in the modern horror film / Carol J. Clover
The monstrous-feminine: Film, feminism, psychoanalysis / Barbara Creed
Return of the monstrous-feminine: Feminist new wave cinema / Barbara Creed
The female investigator in literature, film, and popular culture / Lisa M. Dresner
The Monstrous-Feminine in Contemporary Japanese Popular Culture by Raechel Duma
Monsters, Demons and Psychopaths: Psychiatry and horror film / Fernando Espi Forcen
Shirley Jackson : a rather haunted life / Ruth Franklin
The Naked and the Undead: Evil and the appeal of horror / Cynthia A. Freeland
The Dread of Difference: Gender and the horror film / edited by Barry Keith Grant
Hollywood Heroines: Women in film noir and the female gothic film / by Helen Hanson
I spit on your celluloid: The history of women directing horror movies / Heidi Honeycutt
Screening the gothic / Lisa Hopkins
Women and the gothic : an Edinburgh companion / edited by Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnik
Stepford daughters: Weapons for feminists in contemporary horror / Johanna Isaacson
Violent Women in Contemporary Cinema / Janice Loreck
Horror film and otherness / Adam Lowenstein
The new queer gothic : reading queer girls and women in contemporary fiction and film / Robyn Ollett
John Fawcett’s Ginger Snaps / Ernest Mathijs
Bloody Women: Women directors of horror / edited by Victoria McCollum, Aislínn Clarke
Final Girls, Feminism and Popular Culture edited by Katarzyna Paszkiewicz, Stacy Rusnak
Women make horror : filmmaking, feminism, genre / edited by Alison Peirse
Recreational Terror: Women and the pleasures of horror film viewing / Isabel Cristina Pinedo
New blood in contemporary cinema : women directors and the poetics of horror / Patricia Pisters
Carmilla: a critical edition / by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
Misfit Sisters: Screen horror as female rites of passage / Sue Short
Mastering fear : women, emotions, and contemporary horror / Rikke Schubart
Phantom Ladies : Hollywood horror and the home front / Tim Snelson
Scare tactics : Supernatural fiction by American women / Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock
Why Buffy matters: The art of Buffy the vampire slayer / Rhonda Wilcox
Gothic (re)visions : writing women as readers / Susan Wolstenholme
Films
Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho / Universal ; a Paramount release.
Carrie directed Brian De Palma
Ginger snaps directed by John Fawcett
Ginger snaps : unleashed directed by Brett Sullivan
Onibaba directed by Kaneto Shindo
Rosemary’s baby directed by Roman Polanski
What ever happened to baby Jane? produced and directed by Robert Aldrich