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4 Types of Scary Women in Horror Films and Fiction
Watch out for those sweet-looking grandmothers and seemingly innocent young girls
Every month I co-lead a short story discussion group on Zoom for writers from around the U.S., all of whom have written books or worked for daily newspapers. The group began as a way for friends and former co-workers to keep in touch during the pandemic, but it’s had an unexpected benefit.
Each meeting focuses on a classic short story or two and begins with a brief talk by a member who puts into context what we’ve read. These introductions often reveal aspects of an author’s work we hadn’t noticed or our English teachers didn’t mention.
For Halloween, we read one of Edgar Allan Poe’s detective stories, “The Purloined Letter,” and a Roald Dahl horror story for adults, “The Landlady,” which centers one of the most sinister older women you’ll find outside of that wolf in a bonnet in “Little Red Riding Hood.”
One lesson of our meeting was that while we tend to associate horror with male characters like Dracula or Hannibal Lecter, lethal girls and women turn up often in the genre.
What these female characters have in common is that they violate societal norms. Their transgressive actions make them all the scarier: They defy…
