Gender and Morality in Horror Fiction: First Thoughts

Victor LaValle

I enjoyed Victor LaValle’s latest novel, Lone Women, with its unromantic tone toward the American frontier, and its themes of pervasive loneliness. But the longer the story percolates within my memory, the worse the novel’s resolution sits with me. (Spoiler alert.) Having overcome the Montana community’s narrow-minded attitudes and its easy recourse to violence, the titular women decamp upriver. Their reputation moves beyond them, though, and soon, they’re the nucleus of a women’s prairie utopia.

According to LaValle’s acknowledgements page, this resolution comes partly from his wife, Emily Raboteau, who asserted that women paying for men’s egos has become cliché. Which, in fairness, it has. I appreciate the sentiment, yet the outcome is awkwardly moralistic. The villains, who behave in patterns we recognize as villainous because they’re basically lynchings, pay for their transgressions. The heroines, having passed through mortal terror, emerge baptized in purity, offering to fix society for us.

I don’t want to disparage uplifting or redemptive endings. In a world where justice and deliverance often seem painfully rare, fiction often reminds us that the possibility still exists, and remains worth striving after. But simultaneously, horror fiction often reminds us that injustice still exists, that outcomes don’t reflect our deserving, and life is frequently outside our control. And I’ve noticed an unexpected pattern: the authors most willing to embrace horror’s injustice are often women.

Catriona Ward

Please don’t misunderstand: this judgement comes, I confess, from a place of ignorance. Though my generation grew up with the 1980s slasher movie boom, my parents strictly enforced age-appropriate content bans. As children do, I worked to retroactively justify that I myself didn’t enjoy horror, until even I believed it. Though I dabbled in Stephen King or movies like Near Dark in my twenties, I didn’t embrace the horror genre until well into my forties.

So I probably have an excessively small sample for broad generalization. From my perspective, however, women not only seem more willing to put readers through a more aggressive gantlet, but also have courage enough not to walk back the pain. I remember that, in Stephen King, the dead stay dead, and he doesn’t offer Jack Torrance or Margaret White easy redemption arcs. But he usually concludes with family-oriented bonding, and a sense of “lessons learned.”

Authors I’ve enjoyed recently, like Ania Ahlborn and Catriona Ward, avoid this. Ward’s The Last House on Needless Street features several alternating viewpoint characters, most of whom have their stories resolved, though not necessarily happily. Ted Bannerman gets a shot at healing, but only after his beloved cat Olivia must disappear, and he must forcibly restrain his daughter Lauren. And Ted’s neighbor Dee, whose story runs on obsessive, vindictive illusions, doesn’t receive a proper funeral.

Ania Ahlborn

Ahlborn doesn’t even offer her characters that. In Brother, Ahlborn’s protagonist Michael is meek, amiable, and endearing, and we want him to wind up with the girl who clearly loves him. But we also realize Michael doesn’t deserve redemption. He’s been complicit in his family’s crimes for over a decade. Ahlborn’s bleak, apocalyptic conclusion is almost poetic in its justice, at least for Michael, if not for everyone he’s hurt through childlike malice or inaction.

Perhaps my first deep dive into horror cinema, Leigh Janek’s Fear Street trilogy, adapts this loosely. Trilogy protagonists Deena and Sam get their happy-ending kiss, eventually, after enduring constant supernatural abuse. But in the first film, Kate and Simon suffer gruesome onscreen deaths which reset the trilogy’s tone. The second film features a scene where the killer corners a roomful of children, and we’re sure director Janek will somehow spare the kids. But we’re wrong.

Stephen King and Victor LaValle apparently think the horror their characters endure must “mean something,” that despite the pain, the survivors gain something from the experience. We could continue: The Exorcist’s Father Damien Karras dies, but Chris McNeil gets her daughter back. People must suffer, but things ultimately end “well.” Ward, Ahlborn, and Janek seemingly don’t agree. Though Ted Bannerman or Deena and Sam have their “happy endings,” their trauma isn’t redemptive, it’s just awful.

At present, I have only thoughts, no explanations for this apparent divide. Perhaps some difference in how women experience a society that centers men’s pains and sacrifices. Perhaps a natural ability to absorb physical pain lets them not minimize psychological pain. Perhaps there’s no explanation, and I’ve simply observed a coincidence. Time and familiarity with the literature might explain everything. Or maybe I’ll discover a better class of confusion. Either way, I’ll have fun learning.