Feminist horror after #MeToo

This dissertation illuminates the cultural significance of the emerging subgenre of “feminist horror” through close textual analysis of several relevant A24 films released after the mainstream inception of the #MeToo movement in 2017. Taken together, these films speak to the ways that women and femmes are made into monsters through the horrors of womanhood’s lived reality. Using exaggerated horror narratives, these films viscerally play out the horrors of womanhood, girlhood, and even, at times, popular feminism itself. Feminist horror films open up spaces and avenues where female monstrosity is acceptable and even encouraged, though this monstrous embodiment is also limited in its radical potential. Through filmic analysis undergirded by American studies and intersectional feminist theory, I demonstrate the important updates that the horror genre has made to its historically gendered tropes and themes in order to speak to a new historical context and a primed feminist viewership amid a “horror renaissance.” Though the updates that these films make to their respective horror tropes are significant and symbolic of an important cultural shift, progress is still highly limited by a variety of factors, including whiteness as default and a continued gendered imbalance in key behind-the-scenes filmmaking roles.