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The Final Girls (Todd Strauss-Schulson, 2015) is the story of a group of teenage friends that, during the screening of a Friday the 13th-like 1980s slasher horror, happen to be sucked into the film. Trapped in the gruesome narrative, they have to survive the deranged killer that haunts the premises of the campsite by applying their knowledge of the rules and cliches of the slasher genre. The film is of interest not only because it mixes horror and comedy and exaggerates the horror genre’s conventions – as Scream and other neo-slashers already did. By employing the device of the screen rupture, the film constructs a complex network of self-reflexive moments and intertextual references. The metalinguistic play involves in particular the notoriously sexophobic and gender-led dynamics of the 1980s slashers – those more emancipated girls who have sex are killed; the most prudish girl is the one that eventually manages to defeat the monster, the ‘Final Girl’. In this sense, the film is almost like a video essay that reprises and illustrates one of the most seminal study of the slasher genre, Carol Clover’s 1992 Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. The chapter presents the defining elements of the slasher subgenre as theorized by Clover and then focusses on the analysis of the metalinguistic elements of The Final Girls vis-à-vis Clover’s classic text.

The popularization of slasher as subgenre begins with the release of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Hooper, 1974) and Halloween (Carpenter, 1978). Both films serve to define the topic of the subgenre: a serial killer that often slaughters groups of teenagers, especially attractive young women, using bladed weapons (Linz & Donnerstein, 1994; Molitor & Sapolski, 1993, 1994). Thus, although the definition of the slasher is not really fixed in terms of gender, the killers have been traditionally interpreted by men, while the victims have been usually interpreted by women (Clover, 2015; Trencansky, 2001; Weaver et al., 2015). Not for nothing, another important character is the final girl, who uncovers the monster´s motivations and finishes the killer off in the final scene; an important role that is actually a form of female subjugation. However, some exceptions can be found such as Pamela Voorhees (Friday the 13th, Cunningham, 1980), but she is simply defined as Jason´s mother. More interesting is the case of the Scream saga, in particular Scream 4 (Craven, 2011) where a teenage girl, portrayed by Emma Roberts, tries to play the role of the killer and the final girl at the same time.

In recent years, the slasher has gained importance in television. After Harper’s Island (CBS, 2009), an homage to the subgenre rather than a real slasher TV show, in 2015, MTV launched Scream, based on the film series and which continues exploring the gender roles anticipated by the last movie of the saga. In the same year, Fox launched Ryan Murphy’s Scream Queens (2015–2016) starred by Jamie Lee Curtis, the final girl of Prom night (Lynch, 1980) and Halloween saga, and Emma Roberts. In this regard, current television tries to renew the slasher, but starting from the clichés and even some familiar faces of the subgenre.

The purpose of this chapter is to evaluate the representation and evolution of female characters in slasher television series, exploring the relationship among the killer, the final girl and the rest of the victims. In this way, television series like Scream, Scream Queens (Fox, 2015–2016) or Slasher (Super Channel, 2016–) are analysed.

This chapter considers the influence of horror on the production of commercial gay pornography. I see this influence reflected especially in the production and popularity of gay pornographic films inspired by horror franchises from the slasher and ‘torture porn’ cycles that have been remade in recent decades. Nine texts are selected for analysis – from the slasher genre: Bryan Kenny’s 2010 A Nightmare on Twink Street (inspired by the A Nightmare on Elm Street series), Andy Kay’s 2012 Black XXXmas (inspired by Black Christmas), Frank Fuder and Angel Skye’s 2009 Halloweiner: Friday the Fuckteenth and Chi Chi LaRue’s 2016 Scared Stiff (both inspired by the Friday the 13th series), Bromo’s 2017 Cream for Me (Scream series); and from the torture porn genre: Jett Blakk’s 2006 Bonesaw, John Bruno’s 2006 Rammer and Bryan Kenny’s 2010 Raw I and 2011 (with Andy Kay) Raw II (inspired by the Saw franchise). The specificity of the horror genre is addressed, as is the importance of gender. But particular focus is directed toward the structural aspects of gay porn parodies and the degree to which horror parodies in particular have the potential to blend pornographic homosex with graphic violence, perhaps most extreme in the slasher and torture porn horror variants. Other potentialities are also explored, such as for the easing of narrative/sex porn tensions.

In interviews, Jamie Lee Curtis positions Halloween (2018) as a #MeToo film. As merely self-serving publicity, this reading is far too simplistic. In Halloween (1978) Laurie Strode is victimised; she then assumes the role of quintessential Final Girl as described by Carol J. Clover, providing the template for the entire sub-genre of horror slasher films birthed in its wake. However, in the similarly titled 2018 film, Laurie is no longer a victim. Instead of following the role of the stereotypical Final Girl of slasher films, she falls more in line with one of Yvonne Tasker's Warrior Women.

This chapter investigates Laurie Strode's transformation throughout the Halloween franchise. Once passive and victimised, Laurie has evolved: No longer the Final Girl – or victim – her position and behaviour in this film is much more in line with the neoliberal Warrior Woman of action films. Thus, the film assigns her the role of action heroine as a vehicle for responding to the concerns of the #MeToo era – and in this era, women are no longer victims. Women can and will fight back.

The figure of the female revenger has haunted the western imagination as far back as some of the earliest extant texts, most starkly in Euripides' tragedies Hecuba and Medea (c. 430–420 bc). She has tended to take on one of three forms: the scorned woman, the vengeful mother or the victim of physical violence, almost always sexual violence.

This chapter presents an interdisciplinary and transhistorical understanding of the troubling figure of the violent female revenger in her shifting incarnations. The investigation traces conceptual strands through a variety of cultural texts, focusing on specific instances that are both situated historically and simultaneously analysed for the ways in which they reflect recurring priorities and cultural anxieties through the centuries.

After considering key ideas such as revenge and justice and gender and revenge, the chapter looks more closely at the so-called rape-revenge genre, moving from the earliest examples such as I Spit on Your Grave (1978) to more recent films which are considered for the ways they intersect with the global feminist protest movement #MeToo, and other key cultural moments such as the Harvey Weinstein case and the very public trial of the USA Gymnastics national team doctor Larry Nassar: Revenge (2017), The Nightingale (2018) and Promising Young Woman (2020). The chapter draws direct lines of connection between imaginative works, cultural types and stereotypes, and lived reality in order to come to a fuller understanding of the female revenger.

Roland Joffé, the film-maker behind the significant critical hits The Killing Fields (1984) and The Mission (1986), employed a hypnotic aesthetic, which unflinchingly depicted violence and brutality within different cultural contexts. In 2007, he used a no less impressive aesthetic in a similar way, although this film, Captivity, was met with public outcry, including from self-proclaimed feminist film-maker Joss Whedon. This was based upon the depiction, in advertisements, of gendered violence in the popularly termed ‘torture porn’ subgenre, which itself has negative gendered connotations.

We aim to revisit the critical reception of Captivity in light of this public controversy, looking at the gendered tensions within considerations of genre, narration and aesthetics. Critics assumed Captivity was an attempt to capitalize on the popularity of the torture horror subgenre, and there is evidence that the film-makers inserted scenes of gore throughout the narrative to encourage this affiliation. However, this chapter will consider how the film works as both an example of post-peak torture horror and an interesting precursor to more overtly feminist horror, such as A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014) and Raw (2017). This is seen through the aesthetic and narrative centralizing of a knowing conflict between genders, which, while not entirely successful, does uniquely aim to provide commentary on the gender roles which genre criticism of horror has long considered implicit to the genre’s structures and pleasures.

While horror film is hardly new to Latin America, film scholars have largely emphasized the paradigms of socially engaged, ‘serious cinema’ over exploring how genre, cult or other transgressive film-making modes have developed in and reflect the region (Tierney, 2014). To characterize Latin American horror, it is typified by the supernatural, which indeed contradicts serious cinema. Since about 2010, however, Latin American film-makers have revisited the ‘abduction’ subgenre of horror film. This chapter analyses three such films – Scherzo Diabolico (García Bogliano, 2015), Luna de Miel (Cohen, 2015) and Sudor Frío (García Bogliano, 2010) – to suggest how their representations of gender and class complicate assumptions about everyday life in the region. The chapter also interrogates how this revived mode of horror film-making reconfigures gender ideologies to challenge the Latin American sociopolitical structures of machismo and patriarchy. By integrating conceptualizations of hybridity with transnational views on horror film-making and Freeland’s (1996) reworked feminist strategy for analysing horror texts, this chapter argues that, in tandem with new means of accessing and viewing Latin American horror globally, we should rethink how the abduction subgenre reflects new realities of Latin American society.

The horror genre is and always has been populated by women, who can be seen to be at once both objectified and empowered. Building off the preexisting gender hierarchies and dynamics embedded in the history of horror cinema, this chapter looks at a number of New French Extremity films that assault audiences with unrelenting scenes of violence, torture and self-mutilation, which are performed almost exclusively upon or by women. Although the films of the New French Extremity have been dismissed as exploitative in their representations of wounded and suffering female bodies, their narratives also offer internal criticisms of the misogynistic portals of victimhood that are prevalent in the genre. Through a close analysis of the films Inside (Bustillo & Maury, 2007) (French title: À L’intérieur) and Martyrs (Laugier, 2008), this chapter will examine how both films deviate from the male monster/female victim dichotomy. Although the women of these films may start off vulnerable, they take charge of their situations, while also compacting the nature of feminine identity.

This chapter will focus on the Netflix television series The Exorcist (2016–) starring Gina Davis as Angela Rance/Regan MacNeill and Ben Daniels as Father Marcus. The Rances are a well-off urban family in Chicago, with Angela, a successful and powerful professional woman. The Exorcist allows Angela Rance, a woman in midlife, to be central to the narrative, despite the paucity of positive, central roles for women over 50.

The chapter will also examine the depiction of gender through the themes of families and homes. Homes are sanctuaries but can also be a site of violence. The Rance home is the first clue that all is not well, when Angela hears noises in the walls. Families, homes, faith and betrayal are everywhere in The Exorcist, including the Rances, the Church, the priesthood, the Friars of Ascension and the homeless settlement. Traditionally, families and homes are where women can achieve creativity and some kind of agency, as well as being contained.

The third approach of this chapter will be to compare gender representations in the television series and the film The Exorcist (1973). In theory, the intervening 44 years could have seen gains for women and feminism, but 2017 has seen women’s rights eroded yet again. The film was made at the height of the women’s liberation movement and second-wave feminism, and at the start of the era of ‘video nasties’ and explicitly gory slasher and cannibal films, so I will use the historical context to frame a discussion about the two different versions.