Here Are the Feminist Horror Films to Watch This Halloween

Reported by Harper's Bazaar.

Horror has always known what it was doing with women — using them as props, victims, virgins, bait. What feminist horror did was take that same genre machinery and run it in reverse. According to Harper's Bazaar, the canon stretches further and cuts deeper than your average Halloween watchlist suggests.

The foundational texts are non-negotiable. Bob Clark's Black Christmas (1974) invented the final girl before anyone had a name for her — Olivia Hussey's Jess is the blueprint Halloween, Scream, and every slasher after owes a debt to, complete with a storyline that handled abortion with a sensitivity radical for its decade. Carrie (1976) weaponized female rage fifty years before the conversation caught up to it, framing its opening scene — a girl's first period, met with cruelty — as the thesis statement for everything that follows. Alien (1979) gave us Sigourney Weaver as Ellen Ripley, a character originally written male, surviving not by luck or purity but by sheer competence. And Cat People (1942) was doing all of this even earlier — building a female protagonist whose sexuality was the monster society made her afraid of, not the audience.

The New Wave Isn't Waiting for Permission

Contemporary feminist horror doesn't just subvert tropes — it dismantles the logic underneath them. Jennifer's Body (2009) flipped the virgin sacrifice formula into a story about female appetite, spent years underrated due to poor marketing, and is now a cult film potentially heading toward a sequel. Coralie Fargeat's Revenge (2017) made the bold choice to skip the assault entirely, centering the aftermath instead — a structural decision that changed what the film was about. The Mark of Lilith (1986) goes even further back in its radicalism: a Black queer feminist vampire short made by graduate students of Laura Mulvey — the British theorist who coined "the male gaze" — filmed with Brixton-based artists and activists. Ana Lily Amirpour's A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014), billed as the first Iranian vampire Western, used the supernatural to interrogate what it actually means for women to move through dangerous spaces. And Arkasha Stevenson's The First Omen (2024) brought bodily autonomy and religious coercion into a legacy franchise that had no idea it needed the conversation.

Then there's the horror that goes internal. A24's Talk to Me (2022) wraps grief, motherhood, and female friendship in genuine supernatural dread. Ginger Snaps (2001) recast lycanthropy as puberty — aggressive, transformative, and terrifying to everyone who prefers girls manageable. MaXXXine (2024) closes Mia Goth's X trilogy by setting female rage loose inside Hollywood's most exploitative era. The Slumber Party Massacre (1982), written by feminist author Rita Mae Brown, mocked slasher misogyny from the inside. And Curry Barker's Obsession goes after a very specific contemporary villain: the soft guy who dresses entitlement in sensitivity and calls it love.

Feminist horror has always been the genre most honest about what women are actually up against — the best of it just makes you scream while it says so.

Read the original at Harper's Bazaar.