Abstract
Kyle Green and Kelsey Berry on the real fears behind scary movies.
At some point you’ve probably encountered the “Final Girl.” You know, that standard horror movie trope where the main character, a teenage cisgender White girl, survives because of her virtue and purity while the monster of the moment picks off her more promiscuous and rebellious friends. However, in recent years there has been a marked shift: the lone survivor no longer makes it to the end because of her innocence. Instead, she is forced to relive, then overcome and find strength in past trauma. We call this character the “Trauma Girl”and believe the widespread use and construction of this rapidly emerging narrative can tell us a lot about Western (particularly U.S.) culture.
Indeed, horror movies are having a moment. Their commercial success in homes and theaters around the United States is particularly notable amid the larger Hollywood slowdown that corresponded with the COVID-19 pandemic and a number of high-profile industry strikes. Bolstered by the rise of “prestige” horror films like Midsommar and The Lighthouse from relatively new production studios like A24, scary films have even begun attracting the attention of movie critics, a group that has more traditionally overlooked the genre as not serious enough to merit their attention or inclusion on best-of lists.
It isn’t just the recent markers of success that attracts our interest. As cultural theorists like Carol Clover, in Men, Women, and Chain Saws, and Barbara Creed, in The Monstrous-Feminine, have demonstrated before us, horror offers a powerful insight into the dominant concerns of society. In the 1950s, science-experiment-gone-wrong monster movies responded to fears about technology and the disruption of the natural environment (think Creature from the Black Lagoon), while in the late 1970s, 1980s, and late 1990s, teenage slasher (and Final Girl!) films from Halloween and Nightmare on Elm Street to the Scream franchise took on the deviance of suburban youth and the darkness lurking within seemingly idyllic communities. In the 2000s, waves of zombies (think 28 Days Later) filled theaters by invoking uncontrolled contagions and post-apocalyptic nightmares. In other words, horror films put a scary face to society’s collective fears, telling us a great deal about which social problems the general public is willing (or unwilling) to engage.
Horror films put a scary face to society’s collective fears, telling us a great deal about which social problems the general public is willing (or unwilling) to engage.
To get a better sense of the genre today, we watched and coded more than 150 horror movies, including the top ten highest-grossing horror films and top ten critically acclaimed horror films from 2016 through 2022. It didn’t take long to recognize the emergence of the Trauma Girl—unsurprising to horror aficionados, the themes are rarely subtle. For example, in 2017’s Split, the main character is spared by the “The Beast” (a man with Dissociative Identity Disorder) after he notices the scars that she carries from years of sexual abuse. In 2020’s Freaky, unpopular highschooler Millie is able to both survive and stop a serial killer (if only after swapping bodies with him). In their final showdown, “The Butcher” mocks Millie’s physical weakness, anxiety, and past traumas, but instead of giving up, she turns her shortcomings into a source of resolve and kills him with a broken table leg.
Though the Trauma Girl generally comes with more backstory and life experience than the Final Girl, the sources of her trauma are almost always gendered and often relate to motherhood. The highest grossing movies in our study commonly featured abuse and motherhood (think It, The Invisible Man, and The Boy), while motherhood and isolation are more frequent narrative devices in critically acclaimed films (including The Witch, Suspiria, and The Eyes of My Mother). These traumas may occur through losing a child, as we see in Hereditary, wherein a mother’s grief over losing her daughter leads her to distrust her family and get involved in the occult. Or the trauma may be the lasting impact of an abusive mother, as in Don’t Breathe, featuring a protagonist who turns to crime to fund her and her little sister’s escape from their alcoholic parent. The focus on motherhood is also seen in fears around pregnancy (see Swallow) and in tension between sisters where the older sibling takes on a maternal role while the younger sibling, the protagonist, is judged for choosing a career-focused path (see Evil Dead Rise, Smile, and M3GAN).
In these films, men have been relegated to roles as either oblivious or conniving side characters whose sole purpose is to make the central character doubt her grip on reality. In its more sinister form, we meet the logical husband or loyal love interest who effectively gaslights (a phrase and concept that emerges from a 1944 film fittingly titled Gaslight) his partner with assurances that the threats she perceives are all in her head.
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Hereditary (2018) provides a clear example as the husband, a licensed therapist, dismisses his wife’s increasingly desperate claims that supernatural events are plaguing their family. His unwillingness to listen eventually leads to his death, a common occurrence among love interests who only realize the main character was right seconds before their demise. Even when men die early in the film, the death only seems important because it adds yet another layer to the tragedy of the Trauma Girl (see Halloween or Gerald’s Game). In every instance, save the stories in Jordan Peele’s films (notably, Peele is the only Black writer/director on the our top ten lists), it is women, not men, who suffer until they find strength by mining—if not overcoming—their personal traumas.
Unsurprisingly, the increased focus on mental health in horror films has resulted in an abundance of on-screen therapists in our 2016-2022 sample (see Suspiria, Swallow, and Invisible Man). However, rather than providing the main character support, the mental health experts generally join the men in their lives by leading the Trauma Girls to doubt their grip on reality. Or, even worse, therapy is weaponized against the protagonist (as in Get Out).
Notably, recent horror films have shifted away from depicting traditional monsters. Even if the occasional ghost or demon appears, the movies directly tie these monsters to the protagonist’s internal struggles (think St. Maud and It Follows). In their place, the majority of movies now feature cults, religion, and the supernatural (Midsommar, Suspiria, and The Perfection fit the bill). All of these easily tie into gendered trauma and grief while also introducing fears of isolation and the perils of finding a space to belong and something bigger to believe in—concerns that reflect the present moment’s unease around loneliness and its perils.
Notably, recent horror films have shifted away from depicting traditional monsters.
M3GAN and Smile, both of which debuted in 2022, stand out as original horror movies with exceptionally large cultural impacts, in terms of their box office success, critical reception, social media presence, and wide-spread advertising campaigns. (You need not be a fan of scary movies to remember tie-in stunts including spectators with rather disturbing smiles clustered behind home plate at Major League Baseball games or a cadre of creepy girls marching in sync at the 50-yard line of a National Football League game.)
In Smile, we follow Rose, a therapist who, after witnessing a patient brutally take her own life, becomes haunted by an entity that feeds on trauma. Predictably, those around her, including her fiance and older sister (a married mother), do their best to convince Rose that she’s not under threat—simply overworked and unstable. Rose’s own therapist agrees, suggesting that her problems stem from the childhood trauma of her abusive mother’s death by overdose. Fittingly, it turns out that Rose’s only hope for survival is to return to her childhood home, the site of her original trauma, to fight the monster who has now taken the shape of her mother. Again, the genre is rarely subtle.
In M3GAN, Gemma, a successful roboticist, takes on guardian status for her young niece, Cady, when her sister and brother-in-law die in a car accident. Struggling to manage her new parental responsibilities and her work obligations at a prestigious toy company, Gemma creates M3GAN, an AI doll designed to be a child’s constant companion. But when M3GAN begins to take extreme measures, such as the occasional murder, to protect Cady, Gemma must take action to stop her 21st-century Frankenstein. While the plot is somewhat complicated by the presence of not one, but two Final Girls, Cady and Gemma, the general trends remain: the main character’s past trauma serves as both source of fear and strength, motherhood is a source of anxiety and suffering, and tension exists between the (now dead) older sister’s more traditional path and the younger sister’s choice to prioritize career over motherhood. As in Smile, M3GAN further uses the isolation of women protagonists as a central plot point, with men and therapists happily questioning their decision-making along the way.
These tropes have become more commonplace in recent films, but they are not entirely new. Those familiar with movies like The Entity (1982) or Rosemary’s Baby (1968) will see many parallels. What stands out with the current wave, however, is the way these trends, which offer such a sharp contrast with most offerings of previous decades, dominate the horror landscape across both popular and indie productions. Again considering the seminal works of Carol Clover and Barbara Creed who argue that horror, at its core, is about society’s fear of women, we believe it says a great deal that the genre has shifted from the “Satanic Panic” and fears of teenage sexuality to the post-trauma based suffering of mothers and women who have prioritized their careers. Our protagonists are not subject to terror because of their virtue, but because they have not handled pain in the “proper” way—in fact, even in the moments of greatest danger, we must confront the idea that the threats may be all in the main characters’ heads.
The absences in horror movies may be just as telling as what appears on the screen. The last decade, for instance, has been marked by protests around racism and police violence as well as increased attention to diversity and equity issues at the institutional level, yet the horror movies that have engaged with Black American experiences in any depth can be counted on one hand (and the aforementioned Jordan Peele is credited as the producer, writer, or director for virtually all of them). Similarly, while inequality drives a significant portion of horror storytelling in countries outside the United States (for instance, the Mexican horror film Tigers Are Not Afraid or South Korea’s Train to Busan and its sequel), American writers seem either uninterested in or unwilling to engage with class critique. Instead, in the post-#MeToo moment, they stick with tales of women suffering, capitalizing on stories about sexual abuse, motherhood, and gender-based inequality. For the White creators and decision-makers who dominate the industry, conversations around racism and class-based inequality appear more risky (and end up underfunded).
Because of this, the last decade of horror movies raises a fundamental question—one raised by Herman Gray in his excellent Watching Race—about when representation should be read as progress. Yes, the recent wave of movies brings a variety of gender-based traumas to the screen and increases the visibility of these social issues. Yes, these movies have created numerous lead roles—many of them multi-faceted and emotionally deep—for women. Still, we hesitate to celebrate movies that subject viewers to scene after scene of women being tortured, physically and psychologically, often as a sort of punishment for having chosen to have (or not have) children, until they find desperate strength in refashioning their trauma. It is harder still to celebrate when few of the directors and head writers of such films are women. Perhaps the real fear here is an age-old one: women telling their own stories.
Perhaps the real fear here is an age-old one: women telling their own stories.
Contemporary horror movies, like classical cinematic masterpieces, continue to hold a mirror up to society, showcasing human pain and suffering, manifesting moral panics and embodying our political preoccupations, prejudices, and silences. This current shift from the Final Girl to the Trauma Girl is yet another reminder that movies don’t scare us—no, they reflect what already scares us as a society.