Women Horror

The horror genre is full of remarkable writers—masters of prose that can make your skin crawl, your pulse quicken, and your breath ragged. But nothing is as special as a badass female author who evokes a sense of fear and dread so intense that it affects the listener for days afterward.

From its first publication in 1992, Men, Women, and Chain Saws has offered a groundbreaking perspective on the creativity and influence of horror cinema since the mid-1970s. Investigating the popularity of the low-budget tradition, Carol Clover looks in particular at slasher, occult, and rape-revenge films. Although such movies have been traditionally understood as offering only sadistic pleasures to their mostly male audiences, Clover demonstrates that they align spectators not with the male tormentor, but with the females tormented.

Satisfy your craving for extraordinary authors and exceptional fiction: Meet the women writers who defied convention to craft some of literature’s strangest tales, from Frankenstein to The Haunting of Hill House and beyond. Frankenstein was just the beginning: horror stories and other weird fiction wouldn’t exist without the women who created it. From Gothic ghost stories to psychological horror to science fiction, women have been primary architects of speculative literature of all sorts. And their own life stories are as intriguing as their fiction.

Cinema is full of neurotic personalities, but few things are more transfixing than a woman losing her mind onscreen. Horror as a genre provides the most welcoming platform for these histrionics: crippling paranoia, desperate loneliness, masochistic death-wishes, dangerous obsessiveness, apocalyptic hysteria. Unlike her male counterpart—the eccentric'—the female neurotic lives a shamed existence, making these films those rare places where her destructive emotions get to play.

From scream queens to femmes fatale, horror isn’t just for the boys. Gothic media moguls Meg Hafdahl and Kelly Florence, authors of The Science of Monsters, and cohosts of the Horror Rewind podcast called “the best horror film podcast out there” by Film Daddy, present a guide to the feminist horror movies, TV shows, and characters we all know and love. Through interviews, film analysis, and bone-chilling discoveries, The Science of Women in Horror uncovers the theories behind women’s most iconic roles of the genre.

Joyce Carol Oates assembles an outstanding cast of authors—including Margaret Atwood, Tananarive Due, and Megan Abbott—to explore, subvert, and reinvent one of the most vital subgenres of horror.

Women write horror and have written it since before Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein. This anthology highlights the fact that women write great horror and kills the fallacy that they aren't in some way up to standard. They are. Hear stories by Elizabeth Massie, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Lucy Taylor, and a plethora of other great writers as they work on your nerves, get inside your head, and bang out some of the scariest tales written today. Lock the door and windows, put on a light, and remember, it's not real.

From the screenwriter of the Lionsgate horror film “The Inhabitant” comes a terrifying tale of survival. Sally and her dog, Maureen Bojangles, MoBo for short, make the slog from Brooklyn to the family cabin upstate. It’s a 2-hour drive from the city, but it might as well be another planet. Twenty-four pharmacies and bass-thumping clubs, are replaced by tiny hamlets and shoddy cell phone service. But the remoteness is what Sally needs to write her memoir and reconnect with the painful memories of her abusive father.

Having only three months for Arianta to write her new book and then satisfy her insatiable cravings, things quickly spiral out of control as Katherine's heart grows bigger than her stomach, blurring the lines between predator and prey. Will Katherine be able to battle her internal moral compass and the challenges that arise, or will her reign of terror finally come to an end, not at the hands of the authorities, but by those closest to her?

A recruiting event at an amusement park turns deadly when the attractions develop minds -- and purposes -- of their own. A woman struggles with whether to stay in her soulless job, unaware that far more than her career is at stake.