Halloween approaches, so what better time than now to explore the topic of women in horror films? As with most examples of the depiction of women in movies, it is a subject that is far more complex than it first appears to be – not least because the way in which women are represented in the horror genre has evolved significantly over time. Let’s take a whistle-stop tour.

From the earliest days of cinema, horror films often relegated women to the role of ‘damsel in distress,’ and many of these films remain classics of the era – Dracula, The Phantom Of The Opera, and Frankenstein, for example. The women in these films were generally comely young things who fell foul of some terrible monster that sought to feed upon their perceived innocence and naivete.