On why having shrew-wives and shitty moms does not equate adding women to your horror, basically. A rant in brief…

There’s a part of me that feels like some horror writers in the mid-to-late twentieth century heard all the complaints about how folks like H.P. Lovecraft and M.R. James did not have enough female characters in their stories and went, “I got you fam!”

Then proceeded to spend the next fifty-or-so years writing a large swath of emotionally-vampiric, sex-fiendish, immature, abusive women-children to fix the problem. If only they had stopped to read some folks like you know, the female and queer writers who have been fighting the good fight for very long time, they might have taken the time to write stories in which character, regardless of gender and sexuality, were interesting in ways that wouldn’t show up in the shallow end of the Common Tropes pool.

Instead we get women who screech and run away or run into danger [either fight or flight being treated as bad in this case, often as the guy initially stands around and gawks in indecision]. Women who get captured, raped, and murdered so the man can have a reaction. Women who stand in for the man’s own self-loathing as he asks himself, fists raised to heavens, “Why couldn’t I save her? What kind of man am I!?” Women who are drug into literal hell by the heavy-hearted hero’s attempt to be a stand-in for the kind of person that may or may not be the author himself, or at least a facsimile of the supposed reader of the horror.

Why the fuck is so much outbreak/proto-apocalyptic horror concerned with rape, sexual assault, and other acts treated as insults to the male character? Why are so much sexual/abuse-trauma driven stories more concerned with the responses of the people who loved those characters than the characters’ own need for survival? I don’t care if it’s only a percentage, it feels like too much.

It’s sometimes shocking how different feminist-themed horror is and horror written by absolutely anyone who try just a little to not portray women as either sexual destroyers, emotional abusers, or kicked puppies. This is before I get the even more complex minefield of depictions of queer characters and general non-gendered folk.

And no, and I’m not 100% sure how bad this is, really, because I can myself think of multiple authors who have written interesting female characters, but it still seems strikingly common for the the post-King, post-Little, post-etc Middle-Class-Americana-Schmuck horror genre to rely on the shrillest of the shrill as our boy The Main Character deals with mental trauma from both his parents and his ex-/soon-to-be ex-spouse. Or girlfriend. Or batshit crazy sister. Whatever.

“Gosh, I know she was a bitch, but I need to save my son!”

Women being turned into plot points in a story about how a dude most likely won’t really turn up when the stakes are high, even though said guy will feel really, deeply badly about their failings so we know they were a Good Guy.

Even the inverse feels just as bad. The many “Couple loses a child and tries to rebuild their life but the woman just doesn’t handle it so the man doesn’t handle it,” or “Man destroys his wife and then feels badly about it by being haunted by large-breasted nurses” sub-genres. It’s just a stupid cheap way to bring in so much crap in an easy to trope package. Even when our Good Guy is actually a shit-stain, it is so often depicted as directly in connection to his failures with women.

I was going to say, in frustration, “Fuck it, no examples, only vibes!,” but here’s two that stick in my craw: (a) the above screen grab from way back when [15 years ago!] I wrote a review about the 2009 version of Children of the Corn and (b) the Bentley Little story about a young girl [she was…12? something like that, I refuse to look it up] who seduced and destroyed an old man because, presumably, her ovaries or her original sin made her do it.

But hey, at least we get female-presenting characters, amirite?