The Feminine Horror Renaissance
Why Horror Finally Put On Lip Gloss Horror has always loved women; it just did not always necessarily know how to treat them. Take a look at the genre as a whole, I mean, one of the community’s absolute favourite tropes has always been the final girl; so why did it take so long for the producers/writers of these films to stop mocking “her” for being a woman? Classic horror often framed our favourite femmes as naive, vain, or simply to be seen as someone who has survived despite being a woman. As discussed briefly in my Fear In Frame article , specifically in the 1950s-1980s era, some of Final Girl Royalty, such as none other than Laurie Strode, were less actual characters and more of a message. They survived not because horror celebrated femininity, but because they represented restraint. In many early slashers, the final girl was always rewarded for purity while the hyper-feminine women were punished - a message that quietly framed womanhood itself as something dange...
