Horror Studies Special Issue: Women and Horror
This special issue of Horror Studies aims to address female empowerment (cis- and transgender women) in literary and cinematic horror from 2010 to the present. The issue will showcase horror media (literature, films, television, and gaming) created by women. An intersectional approach should be applied to analyses, stressing categories of race, gender, sexuality, class and/or age in submissions. While we are interested in submissions focused on various forms of horror media, we are eager to receive submissions that foreground literary texts.
The recent proliferation of horror media created by (and often for) women suggests that horror is being enacted as a space of transformative justice. In effect, the reconfiguration of the monstrous-feminine, a concept developed by scholar Barbara Creed, and new understandings of the abject, alongside a notable repositioning of the viewer’s/voyeur’s gaze, signify a shift in both the production and consumption of horror literature and film and a decentering of white heteronormative patriarchal constructions of women.
In Teen Film (2011), Catherine Driscoll considers the character categorization with regard to adolescent female characters in horror cinema. Poignantly, Driscoll identifies that in many male created horror cinema contributions the leads are often adolescent young women. She furthers her critique of adolescent-led horror by asserting that “Teen horror is particularly useful for thinking about how recognition, familiarity and identification work in teen film because horror must operate on the border between what we know and what we don’t or, in fact, what can never be known” (83). Highlighting that children’s and Young Adult literary contributions incorporate “motifs, characters, themes, and tropes” originating in adult-directed works, Jessica R. McCort’s introduction to her collection, Reading in the Dark: Horror in Children’s Literature and Culture (2018), centers on the emotional reactions to be felt by young readers, namely fear and enjoyment.
In theoretical examinations often the body takes center stage. In Searching for Sycorax: Black Women’s Hauntings of Contemporary Horror, Kinitra D. Brooks takes on the theme of consumption and race in both literary and cinematic media. Robin R. Means Coleman and Mark H. Harris in The Black Guy Dies First (2023) identify character tropes about Black women frequently found in horror including those originating from American enslavement (for example, the Seductress is connected to the Jezebel). Cayden Mark Gardner and Willow Catelyn Maclay (Corpses, Fools, Monsters: The History and Future of Transness in Cinema; 2024) enact the May Test for trans cinema as much of what has been released about the gender non-conforming body causes anguish for transgender viewers. Recent scholarship concerned with embodiment, such as Erin Harrington’s Women, Monstrosity and Horror Film: Gynaehorror (2016) and Sunny Hawkins’ Deleuze and the Gynesis of Horror: From Monstrous Births to the Birth of the Monster (2022), employs diverse theories of corporeality to explore cinematic representations of the reproductive body. Indeed, Barbara Creed herself, revisiting the topic in her follow-up study, Return of the Monstrous-Feminine: Feminist New Wave Cinema (2022), has argued that in recent feminist cinema, the monstrous-feminine is “in revolt against male violence and corrosive patriarchal values including misogyny, racism, homophobia, and anthropocentrism” (2).
Drawing on this profusion of exciting scholarship, the special issue will center women who create horror across various media formats, with a particular emphasis on literature, in order to explore how the genre is being deconstructed and reconfigured to challenge ingrained ideas about gender, sex, race, desire, and the body.
In the realm of literature, impactful horror fiction by and about cis- and transgender women has included The Devourers (Indra Das, 2015), Her Bodies and Other Parties (Carmen Maria Machado, 2017), Our Share of Night (Mariana Enríquez, 2019), Tender is the Flesh (Agustina Bazterrica, 2020), Mexican Gothic (Silvia Moreno-Garcia, 2020), Five Little Indians (Michelle Good, 2020), Tell Me I’m Worthless (Alison Rumfitt, 2021), Manhunt (Gretchen Felker-Martin, 2022), The Reformatory (Tananarive Due, 2023), She is a Haunting (Trang Thanh Tran, 2023), Our Wives Under The Sea (Julia Armfield, 2023), Bad Cree (Jessica Johns, 2023), and The Lamb (Lucy Rose, 2025).
Since the early 2010s, there has been a surge in horror cinema written and/or directed by women. Notable examples include Jennifer’s Body (written by Diablo Cody and directed by Karyn Kusama, 2009), American Mary (the Soska Sisters, 2014), The Babadook (Jennifer Kent, 2014), A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (Ana Lily Amirpour, 2014), The Lure (Agnieszka Smoczyńska, 2015), Raw (Julia Ducournau, 2016), Saint Maud (Rose Glass, 2019), Candyman (Nia DaCosta, 2021), Pearl (co-written by lead performer Mia Goth, 2022). In 2024 alone, new releases included women-led horror films like The Substance (Coralie Fargeat), Lisa Frankenstein (directed by Zelda Williams and written by Diablo Cody), and I Saw the TV Glow (Jane Schoenbrun).
Possible topics may include but are not limited to:
● Madness, trauma, ‘hysteria’, or mental illness
● Corporeality, embodiment, body horror, or the body as a site of resistance
● Female or feminised monsters, i.e., witches, vampires, mermaids, sirens, etc.
● The environment (EcoHorror), nature, and anthropocentrism
● Cinematography, the female gaze, and bodies on screen
● Ageism and the ageing body
● Fatphobia and fat bodies
● Consumption and the grotesque
● Mothers, motherhood, pregnancy, and the maternal
● Adolescence and transformation
● Gynehorror and menstruation
● Religion and the supernatural
● Sexual violence, exploitation, (rape) revenge
● Indigenous horror and MMIW (Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women)
● Colonialism and neocolonialism
● The Black body and racism intersectionality
● Female social justice movements (including #MeToo and the Pussyhat protests)
● Classism, precarity, the neoliberal economy, and capitalism
● Transgender identities and bodies, body dysphoria, transphobia
● Sex, desire, transgression and “monster fucking”
● Sex work
● Social justice and activism
● Slasher films and the Final Girl characterization
Please send abstracts of 500 words and a brief CV to: mamarotta@wm.edu and miranda.corcoran@ucc.ie by August 1, 2025.
Once abstracts have been accepted, completed submissions of 5,000-6,000 words (including notes and references) are due by December 1, 2025.
The Horror Studies journal is double-blind peer-reviewed.
For further information, please see Intellect’s Information for Journal Editors and Contributors. Contributors are required to use the Intellect Style Guide for referencing.
Please direct inquiries to mamarotta@wm.edu and miranda.corcoran@ucc.ie
AI Statement: Authors should refrain my using generative AI in the writing of both abstracts and articles. If AI is used for other purposes (i.e., compiling graphs and charts), this should be stated at the end of the submission or in the footnotes.
About the editors:
Melanie A. Marotta is a Visiting Assistant Teaching Professor in English and Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at the College of William & Mary. Her monograph, African American Adolescent Female Heroes: The Twenty-First-Century Young Adult Neo-Slave Narrative, was published by the University Press of Mississippi and part of the Children’s Literature Association Series (2023). Recently, she has had publications in The Lion and the Unicorn, College Literature, and The Routledge Handbook for Transgender Literature.
Miranda Corcoran is a lecturer in twenty-first-century literature at University College Cork. She is the author of Witchcraft and Adolescence in American Popular Culture: Teen Witches, published in 2022 by the University of Wales Press. She currently the Chair of the Irish Association for American Studies and a co-editor of the journal Shirley Jackson Studies.
Last updated April 30, 2025
