‘The Bride!’ Is the Latest Example of a New Wave of Feminist Horror

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Maggie Gyllenhaal's "The Bride!" is part of a growing wave of feminist horror -- movies that place women’s autonomy, rage and control at the center of the monster story.

Experts say it’s part of a broader shift redefining who the “monster” really is. Scholar Barbara Creed says: “Instead of becoming an abject thing, the heroine owns it.”

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The film’s ambition, in Gyllenhaal’s words, is sweeping: “a celebration of all of the parts of all of us that will not fit into the box that we’ve been told we need to fit into.”

“The Bride!” arrives amid a specific cultural appetite for stories like this, and not by coincidence. Guillermo del Toro’s recent “Frankenstein” reset the moral terms of the myth by building a film in which the creature never harms anyone who hasn’t first tried to harm him — every horror traced back to Victor’s choices, not his creation’s existence. Relatedly, “Poor Things” pushed Bella Baxter’s autonomy to its comic extreme. “The Substance” turned female rage into a grotesque spectacle and called it empowerment. Together, these films are doing something the Frankenstein myth has rarely allowed: placing the created woman’s interiority at the center, and asking what she actually wants.

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Creed sees the current wave of feminist horror as the tradition finally catching up to that idea. In classic horror, the female monster was a cautionary figure — terrifying precisely because she exceeded her assigned role, and was punished accordingly. What she observes now is different: heroines who undertake what she calls a katabasis, the ancient Greek journey into darkness, and emerge transformed rather than destroyed, having claimed rather than fled their own monstrousness. “Instead of becoming an abject thing, the heroine owns it,” Creed says. “She becomes partly abject herself, but she embraces her monstrosity.”

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