10 Horror Movies That Are Pro-Feminism

1. The Witch

A movie that not only managed to impress fans of a more psychological, slow-burning type of horror but mainstream film critics too, Robert Eggers’ directorial debut The Witch tells the tale of a family of breakaway Puritans whose simple, isolated existence is torn asunder by religious superstition and black magic after the vanishing of their infant son, with the finger of blame pointed solely at the film’s young protagonist, eldest daughter Thomasin.

The Puritan lifestyle wasn’t exactly the most liberating for its female participants. Basically, if you were born female, the only option was to live a pious life full of prayer, marry a fellow devotee and birth a brood of mini Puritans – a wash, rinse, repeat existence that if deviated from usually indicated you were a witch worthy of execution by hanging. But in Eggers’ film, the traditions of religious zealotry represent confinement, and the occult freedom for young Thomasin.

Not that witchery and devil worship is necessarily a preferable route to the more, shall we say, heaven-oriented religions or indeed activities that should be equated with feminism (well, at least not the first two waves). But if posed with the choice of Puritan-style oppression and pious drudgery or the alternative of ‘living deliciously’, it’s definitely an affirmative to the latter.