How has the horror genre altered the role of women in film?

Answer 1

I am not sure it has. Traditionally women in Horror films were usually positioned as generic victims—so-called “scream queens”—whose encounter with a monster produced hysterical shrieks and sobs. They needed to be saved from the monstrous threat by a stalwart male hero. More rarely, women occasionally got to be monsters themselves, as in films like Dracula’s Daughter and Cult of the Cobra (1955).

The sexual and gender revolutions of the 1960s—along with the weakening of censorship codes in many Eurocentric nations—gave rise to much more eroticized violence against women in horror films, as well as a spate of female monster movies including lesbian vampire films like Blood and Roses (1960), The Vampire Lovers (1970), and Daughters of Darkness (1971). One memorable female monster from this era is Regan in The Exorcist (1973)—or perhaps she should be considered the victim of a male (or queer) demon…? Many horror film scholars see these films as reactionary patriarchal fantasies meant to respond to male fears about the era’s stronger, phallic women. After all, Regan is the monstrous unruly daughter of a single working mother; she can only be returned to “normality” via old white Christian patriarchs.