In the last few decades, there has been a shift towards a new kind of feminism in horror: increasingly, films tell stories about women’s internal conflicts within oppressive systems, rather than depicting their physical struggles to fight the patriarchy. These new films complicate the simplistic, vicarious satisfaction we experience when watching female ’empowertainment’ stories. They force us to confront the reality that, even when women assume positions of power, oppressive systems persist.

In this collection of essays and interviews, we explore stellar films like Unsane, Raw, Personal Shopper, and Thelma, which take a female protagonist’s inner-struggle as their primary subjects. Through interviews with the filmmakers, we investigate how ‘feminist’ horror is changing, and, in our long-form essays, we draw connections between the feminist approaches across these movies. In these films, horror is what consumes women when they lose control.