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Horror has long been a genre that polices women’s bodies, but recently, in the hands of women and people of marginalised genders, it has been reconfigured into a counter-archive of fear, survival, and refusal. This talk explores how feminist, queer, and trans horror unsettle the conventions of patriarchal storytelling to reframe marginalised creators as architects of dread and testimony.
Theoretically, I draw on Barbara Creed’s “monstrous feminine,” Erin Harrington’s “gynehorror,” and Kinitra Brooks’ Searching for Sycorax to focus on the entanglement of marginalised embodiment and haunting (Brooks) and reconceptualise monstrosity as an insurgent force against patriarchal structures(Creed). These frameworks come alive in three case studies from different contexts: Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook (Australia, 2014), Smita Singh’s Khauf (India, 2025), and Brad Michael Elmore’s Bit (US, 2019). The Babadook renders grief and maternal ambivalence through Gothic allegory, while Khauf situates horror within gendered violence and systemic precarity in urban India. Bit, meanwhile, reclaims the vampire mythos through a trans heroine, fusing camp aesthetics with horror to explore queer girlhood.
By situating these texts in dialogue, the talk also highlights horror’s global capacity to register marginalised experience and to imagine radical alternatives in a world increasingly hostile to such voices. Together, they demonstrate how feminist, queer, and trans horror shift monstrosity away from pathology and towards systemic critique. In doing so, they transform horror into an affective archive which unsettles the silences of women and people of marginalised genders.
