Editorials
Horror Leads the Way in On-screen Gender Equality
A recent study might shed some light on why women love horror, and why the genre is actually a frontrunner for on-screen gender equality. Many people have tried to reconcile the seemingly male genre with the significant female fan base but, like most cultural phenomenons, it’s complicated.
Women have a lot of different reasons for watching horror, but watch they do: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake, along with The Conjuring, Purge, and many other recent horror hits, showed to an audience of more women than men. This has been puzzled over by many, since horror has long been associated with misogyny.
In 1982 Janet Maslin called them “hardcore sexual pornography” in a New York Times article: “It goes without saying that these films exploit and brutalize women.” In a similar, more recent criticism, Anna Biller, director of The Love Witch, says of some horror films: “I would argue that the misogyny is not only obvious but that it’s the main appeal of these films to fans.”
But these critics are narrow and usually specific to one sub genre or a handful of films. This oversimplifies a genre known for innovation where even the most enduring tropes are constantly being challenged, upended and reinvented. And the roles for women are no exception.
As a recent article pointed out: “The genre has moved from taking pleasure in victimizing women to focusing on women as survivors and protagonists. It has veered away from slashers and torture porn to more substantive, nuanced films that comment on social issues and possess an aesthetic vision.”
But horror has always had a significant female fanbase. In “Men, Women, and Chainsaws” (1992) Carol J. Clover coined the term “final girl”, explaining that the target audience for slasher films (young and male) were more comfortable watching a woman in peril than a man. According to her, women identifying with the scrappy heroine was a “happy accident”.
To further confound this phenomenon, it might be the same elements that critics call misogynist that attract some female viewers to the genre:
“Horror, more than any other film genre, deals openly with questions of gender, sexuality and the body,” Said Shelly Stamp, a film professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz “Yes, femininity, female sexuality, and the female body are often presented as ‘monstrous’. But that doesn’t mean that women aren’t interested in watching and thinking about these issues. In many ways, horror films bring to the fore issues that are otherwise unspoken in patriarchal culture – which itself constructs female sexuality as monstrous.”
And, as Journalist Brianna Wu pointed out, “Horror is one of the only genre films where women get to be the star and have rich emotional lives.” There also might be an equality in terror that doesn’t exist anywhere else: “Horror movies are a world where money can’t save you, privilege can’t save you, strength can’t save you,” Wu says. “In some ways, it’s a world with real equality.”
The number of female viewers makes it clear that something significant is happening. Especially when you consider recent research that shows women will stop watching a film if it’s too stereotyped or lacking female characters.
A new computer program, designed to watch and calculate screen and speaking time for male and characters found that horror was the only genre in which women were on screen more than men. This data, of course, does not speak to the content of what’s happening to the women on screen which is another issue altogether. The Horror Honeys recently pointed out that a large number of horror films pass the Bechdel-Wallace test, something that very few movies, overall, accomplish.
Although this explanation, like all of them, will be an oversimplification, I argue that simply seeing women on the screen in equal measure might itself be a powerful motivator for women watching horror films.
I call this the “Girl Boss” argument. A male friend asked me why I watched a mediocre Netflix show, with characters I disliked, in its entirety. After considering this carefully I realized something simple and extraordinary: in a world where I have spent a lifetime surrounded by mostly male characters, it’s simply a relief to watch women on screen. Any women. Even women I don’t like. Women making bad decisions, being obnoxious, running up the stairs instead of out of the house.
Horror, to me, means shining a light into the darkest corners of our collective minds. The fact that somehow, in this cultural moment, there might be more room in horror for women on both sides of the camera only makes me more passionate about it, no matter how we unpack the causes.
There’s a lot of reading left to do in 2026, between the glut of summer releases and the approach of fall, when horror titles get a special push from publishers, but this has already been an incredible year for horror literature.
Some of the biggest names in the genre have turned in outstanding work, rising stars have made their mark, and we’re only halfway through the year.
To celebrate the midway point of 2026, with plenty of horror books still to come, we’re taking a look back at the best horror books we’ve read this year so far, listed alphabetically by author.
If you missed any of these books earlier in the year, consider this your reminder to catch up.
Japanese Gothic by Kylie Lee Baker
A student running from a crime he may or may not have committed escapes to his father’s country home in Japan, only to find himself haunted by strange apparitions, while in the past, a young samurai tries to find salvation for her family and finds a door to the future instead. Kylie Lee Baker’s Japanese Gothic begins with this dialogue between past and present, and then blossoms into so much more, a cross-time ghost story about old wounds and what it really takes to finally heal them. I got so happily lost in this one that I would have read at least 200 more pages.
Persona by Aoife Josie Clements
In this tale of shut-ins, sex workers, artists, and the horrors they both summon and recoil from, Aoife Josie Clements weaves something that feels less like a story to be experienced and more like a psychic wound to be endured, and I mean that in the most complimentary way possible. Evocative in its prose and nightmarish in its imagery, Persona is a story of the masks we wear, and the understanding that not all of our masks are particularly pretty or even easy to breathe through. It’s a dense, literary, unnervingly vicious book, and while it’s already attracted an audience, it deserves a much bigger one.
Dead First by Johnny Compton
Johnny Compton’s latest novel opens with a throwing down of the gauntlet, a sequence that made me instantly think “How on Earth is he going to top this?” It’s a story that begins with a billionaire hiring a private investigator to determine why, despite trying in many brutal ways, he cannot die. That premise, and the scene which sets it all off, is so alluring and delightfully gruesome that you almost can’t believe it’s the way a book begins, and then Compton just keeps going, delivering a supernatural mystery that I could not put down.
Make Me Better by Sarah Gailey
A woman grieving for the life she wanted visits a mysterious island renowned for the healing salt its residents harvest and sell, seeking renewal and relief. What she finds instead is a strange cult with a twisted history with surprising resonance in her own life, and a people who are more than willing to grant the relief she wants, for a price. Laced with beautiful prose and moments of profound realization alongside folk and even cosmic horror, this is vintage Sarah Gailey.
Partially Devoured by Daniel Kraus
If you love horror film history and analysis, Partially Devoured is an essential. Written by Pulitzer Prize-winner Daniel Kraus, the book is a deep dive into his favorite movie of all time, George A. Romero‘s Night of the Living Dead, complete with exhaustive research into the making of the film and passages of deeply moving memoir woven in. If you’ve ever wanted to know what the eerie music that opens the film is called while also bursting into tears at how horror movies can save your life, this is a must-read.
Wretch by Eric LaRocca
Our reigning King of Extreme Horror, Eric LaRocca weaves books of uncommon beauty out of the most nightmarish parts of humanity, and Wretch is no exception. The story of a grieving man who longs for relief and searches for it amid a strange support group that might be a cult, Wretch is a brutal journey into the darkest part of us all, and explores what salvation we might find when we get to the rotten core of the world and peel back its layers. LaRocca’s on a tear of great work right now that few other genre writers can match.
Headlights by CJ Leede
A mystery, a serial killer horror show, a tribute to Stephen King‘s The Shining. All of these things describe CJ Leede’s Headlights, and yet they don’t begin to cover the full breadth of horror awaiting you in this novel. The story of a former FBI agent drawn back into the cold case that haunts him most, it’s a shocker brimming over with vivid moments that’ll live behind your eyes. CJ Leede has now published three novels, and they’re all bangers, so it’s time to get on board if you haven’t already.
It Came From Neverland by Cynthia Pelayo
Cynthia Pelayo has been one of our finest genre writers for years now, but It Came From Neverland is my favorite thing she’s written, and it’s not even close. A dark take on Peter Pan from the perspective of an adult Wendy Darling living in World War I-era London, Pelayo’s book works as both a satisfying horror narrative and a rich exploration of what it really means to never grow up. The horror never loses its potency, but it’s the search for the meaning behind the Peter Pan phenomenon in our own lives, and what we can do about it, that sticks with me most.
Filth Eaters by Ito Romo
Ito Romo’s Filth Eaters is a slim volume, one you can read in just a couple of hours if you’ve got the inclination, but it has the feel of a generation-spanning epic. The story of a breed of vampires born in Central America, the European vampires who encounter them, and the offspring they eventually produced, it spans centuries and packs loads of juicy lore into its pages while never losing its grip on character and narrative drive. I would read hundreds more pages of this world, but I’ll settle for this uncommonly grand-scale novella for now.
Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep by Paul Tremblay
A former pro gamer gets a job at a tech company to pilot a brain-dead human body across the country, and so Paul Tremblay’s sci-fi-horror juggernaut begins. Indebted to Philip K. Dick, the primal snarl of Harlan Ellison, and the quirky comedy of The Big Lebowski, and yet wholly original, this is a towering and ambitious novel by one of horror’s most respected voices. What starts as a high-concept tech thriller soon becomes a startling meditation on the value of stories, who gets to tell them, and what happens when we cede too much control to machines we don’t understand. It’s a stunner.
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