HYSTERICAL

Why are women so often the central figures in horror films?

There are the obvious answers. In a patriarchal worldview, women are framed as physically weaker, their bodies more vulnerable, more susceptible to external threat. That vulnerability introduces uncertainty — will she survive, will she escape — and horror thrives on that unknown. A female protagonist becomes an underdog the audience can root for. But there is a more insidious explanation as well: women’s bodies, and women’s deaths, function as viewing pleasure. Their survival or destruction unfolds at the audience’s discretion, which means agency is never fully theirs to begin with.

Those explanations make sense if we only look at horror through a traditional patriarchal lens. But long gone are the days when the straight slasher dominated the genre — Halloween, Friday the 13th — and yet women remain central to horror even in what we might call a post-feminist or post-Bechdel world. The genre has evolved, but the fixation hasn’t disappeared. If anything, the violence has intensified. Films like In a Violent Nature, X, It Follows, and The Descent render femicide more graphic, more immersive, and more prolonged. The boogeymen grow larger, more grotesque, more abstract.

Even when horror appears to invite women into the conversation — The Babadook, Pearl, The Substance — the outcome remains the same. Women are still punished. Punished for grief that cannot be contained. Punished for unfulfilled desire. Punished for aging. Punished for participating in systems that exploit them. Some films attempt to critique the spectacle of women’s suffering, but they must still use the visual language of suffering to do so — which means the body remains the site of consumption.

Women in horror may defeat a monster, but rarely escape the system that allowed the monster to exist. And that distinction matters. At the end of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, when Sally jumps onto the back of the pickup truck, laughing hysterically as Leatherface recedes into the distance, she hasn’t won. She’s merely been released back into a world structured to punish her. She has no control over where the truck is going. She isn’t driving. She isn’t even a passenger. She is cargo.

So while the Final Girl may appear to epitomize a feminist ideal — Laurie Strode, a woman who perseveres and escapes harm — the framework ignores the crux of the problem. It presupposes that women are narratively bound to violent suffering. Earlier films coded this failure through narrow ideals of intellect, strength, and femininity, but the structure itself remains unchanged.

And so, we as a society operate on two misguided suppositions: that because women are not as strong as men, we are less tolerant of pain, and that the pain women do endure is more tolerable to others when it is framed as entertainment.

In the late 1800s, Jean-Martin Charcot hosted Leçons du mardi at the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris. Women diagnosed with “hysteria” were brought before an audience to be observed; their symptoms and distress were induced or shaped into a didactic spectacle. Pain became something to be watched, categorized, and consumed. The act of spectacle desensitized the viewer and dismissed women as objects rather than subjects of experience.

That, to me, is the real horror.

Not the monster. Not the violence. But the dismissal that follows, the quiet insistence that the pain is either exaggerated, deserved, or narratively useful only when someone else is watching.

If women are going to remain central figures in horror, we don’t actually need external boogeymen, cults, ghosts, forests, masked men, to imperil them. The horror already exists in the body, and in the systems that refuse to recognize what that body is enduring — real pain. Pain that cannot be easily explained, resolved, or defeated is treated as excess. It is moralized. It is minimized. And eventually, it is ignored. This dynamic — women’s pain treated as spectacle when visible, dismissed when not — doesn’t only belong to horror films.

My body proved this to me.

I’ve had digestive issues since birth. I’ve seen doctors and specialists for as long as I can remember, GI doctors, integrative doctors, holistic doctors, all offering theories, none offering answers. Over time, things didn’t improve. They worsened. I’ve had multiple colonoscopies. The early ones were painless because I was put under. The pain came from the preparation, the forced emptying of a body that already struggled to function. Once, after drinking the prep and not passing anything for hours, I ended up in the emergency room, distended and in agony, spending the night being medically drained. I thought then that I understood pain.

But I was wrong.

This year, I was diagnosed with uterine fibroids, three of them, one measuring ten centimeters, expanding my uterus so significantly it now occupies most of my abdominal cavity. I also have endometriosis, which has tethered my organs together, including my colon, making basic bodily function unpredictable and painful. For months, I was vomiting regularly, living with constant pain, working through it because there didn’t seem to be another option.

Because of the severity of my symptoms, doctors had to rule out cancer. I underwent a uterine biopsy while awake, sedated but conscious. The pain was excruciating. I endured it because that’s what was required and those minutes felt like hours as the pain of what felt like a hot poker boring inside me. There was no escape, no getting away. I stayed present. I endured it. And I thought this had to be the hardest thing I would have to bear.

Again I was wrong.

As my surgery date approached, there was one final requirement: rule out colon cancer. Women with endometriosis often don’t know they have it because there are no definitive tests, and women’s health, broadly, is still treated as secondary. Maternal mortality statistics alone make that clear. Women’s pain is routinely moralized. We are expected to tolerate it, to contextualize it, to justify it.

On New Year’s Eve, I went to the emergency room after experiencing what were essentially labor pains for over a week. I explained my full medical history, the fibroids, the endometriosis, the years of GI issues. The response was to refocus the pain on constipation and prescribe stool softeners. I remember thinking there could not possibly be anything worse than this: constant, unrelenting pain with no relief.

I was wrong.

I prepared for another colonoscopy, determined not to end up back in the ER. I stayed on a liquid diet for weeks. The night of the prep, I vomited repeatedly, exhausted, dehydrated, and starving. When I was wheeled into the procedure room, I was told it would be easy. I would be heavily sedated. They would be in and out quickly.

That’s not what happened.

My colon was compressed, narrowed by the pressure of the fibroids and the endometriosis surrounding it. The scope could not pass easily. I was sedated, but awake enough to feel what was happening. I cried out. I writhed. A nurse held me down while they continued, inching the camera through a space that would not give.

At some point, the pain became unmanageable and endless. I was so overwhelmed my system shut down and I blacked out. I woke up disoriented, nauseated, my head pounding, and spent the rest of the day vomiting and dry heaving.

I worked for two months in this condition. During Zoom meetings I stayed off camera, lying on the floor with a heating pad, trying to quiet whatever was waging war inside my body long enough to get through the call. When I finally quit, my employer didn’t understand. He wanted me to work through it. I had to explain that I was preparing to have three organs removed from my body, that this wasn’t a paper cut, or burnout, or something willpower could solve.

Even after that explanation, he sent me Zoom call invites with clients.

So I’m left asking what the real horror is. Is it the pain itself, or the dismissal that follows it? Being treated my entire life as an anomaly, not sick enough to warrant urgency, not healthy enough to function, until the situation finally became undeniable. Or is the horror the system that finds this acceptable, that assumes women can endure unrelenting agony and still be expected to show up, to perform, to work?

This kind of horror isn’t flashy. There’s no masked figure, no cult, no grand mythological threat. It doesn’t look like The Strangers or Barbarian or even the heightened allegory of The Substance. It’s quieter than that. It’s procedural. It unfolds slowly, over years. For me, it was more than a decade of being told, implicitly and explicitly, that I was weak, dramatic, or simply bad at tolerating pain.

But here’s the thing: we’ve been conditioned. And so has the horror genre.

When horror wants to critique violence against women, it often does so by escalating it, by turning pain into spectacle, exaggeration, metaphor. Bodies are mutilated, stalked, transformed, consumed. What it rarely does is show the more common reality: the slow erosion that comes from minimization, disbelief, and forced endurance. Pain doesn’t need to be heightened to become horrific. It only needs to be ignored.

As someone who writes horror, I struggle with this constantly. I want female representation, but I don’t want women to exist only to absorb violence. This is why filmmakers like Haneke, or films like The Vanishing, feel so destabilizing. Pain isn’t gendered. It isn’t assigned. It’s shared. No single woman is tasked with carrying the emotional burden of the narrative or escaping on behalf of the audience. I feel this is one way film can diversify its experience of pain rather than making it gendered and exclusionary.

So, maybe there is a lesson to be learned here — an awkward and agonizing one.

True horror lies within the dismissal, the systems that insist women’s suffering must be exaggerated, narrativized, or create spectacle before it is believed. Horror externalizes women’s pain into monsters because culture cannot tolerate pain that has no villain, no moral justification, and no catharsis. Pain that simply exists, that demands recognition rather than resolution, threatens the order that depends on women enduring quietly. That is why it must be minimized, aestheticized, or ignored. With my experience now, horror feels less like a monster in the woods and more like being told to spread your legs while someone calmly assures you, ‘this won’t hurt’, when you know you have no choice.