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Carry on SCREAMING!
Harper's Bazaar Malaysia|January - February 2025
Anna Bogutskaya investigates why women are drawn to horror, and celebrates the genre’s feminist renaissance.
Carry on SCREAMING!

Whenever I tell someone I love horror, one of two reactions usually follows: “I don’t do horror” or ‘What’s wrong with you?” After my very first encounter, with A Nightmare on Elm Street, aged about eight, I immediately went back for more. These films allowed me feelings I had no language for yet, feelings that were too unseemly to discuss with other people, and they validated the wild, volatile and lonely experience of growing up in a woman’s skin. So, I watched everything: black and white chillers, such as The Seventh Victim; cosmic horrors, such as Event Horizon; body horrors (in which human biology is distorted), including Society; and hallowed modern classics, including The Exorcist and Halloween.

I became adept at hiding this interest until well into my twenties, because, more than almost any other form of entertainment, I have found that horror carries with it a great deal of judgement. What’s to like about stories specifically engineered to provoke fear and revulsion? People’s knee-jerk reactions are that it is grotesque or demeaning—especially for women. We’ve spent millennia being billed as “the weaker sex” and are finally en route to equality: how could we possibly enjoy worlds where women are regularly dominated, maimed, seduced and killed?

The answer is to look closer. What the subgenres—slasher, folk, supernatural and gothic—all have in common is the desire to scare, yes, but to do so by probing taboo questions about human existence. They force us to look fear in the eye in a way that romance, drama and even tragedy can’t always do. While horror can, and should, send your adrenaline jumping, it also holds up a mirror to your dreams and worst nightmares. This is why it demands complete emotional surrender from the audience.

Bu hikaye Harper's Bazaar Malaysia dergisinin January - February 2025 sayısından alınmıştır.

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Bu hikaye Harper's Bazaar Malaysia dergisinin January - February 2025 sayısından alınmıştır.

Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.

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