Misfit Sisters: Screen Horror as Female Rites of Passage (review)

In Misfit Sisters, Sue Short argues that contemporary horror films share several elements with fairy tales, most notably fear, fantasy, and initiation rites. She suggests that “contemporary horror can be best understood as a means of revisiting, and at times refuting, many of the assumptions contained in fairy tales” (6). Short’s study focuses on contemporary horror films with female protagonists in coming-of-age stories. The female protagonists discussed are noteworthy because like Little Red Riding Hood, one of Short’s primary fairy-tale references (the other being Cinderella), they “stray from the path,” which allows them to “assume narrative agency and learn valuable lessons in self-reliance” (ix). Short’s focus is on the development of agency, what must happen to achieve agency, and the ramifications of that agency. Aligning contemporary horror films to fairy tales that follow the maturation of an adolescent heroine, Short sets out to demonstrate “how many female protagonists . . . are forced to prove themselves in horror; evaluating what risks they take, what roles they play, and what such stories tell us about changing gender roles and expectations” (ix). Additionally, she examines the influence of feminism on the horror genre and female characters in light of a female audience.

As a foundational premise, Short argues against Carol Clover’s 1992 Men, Women, and Chainsaws and Barbara Creed’s 1993 The Monstrous Feminine, which denote a male audience for horror films and argue that the genre reflects male fears of female sexuality and power (2). Short asserts that contemporary horror has a prominent female audience, as evident by the increasingly common female protagonists and the “sympathetic” portrayal of a variety of female figures in the films (2). Her assumption of a female audience allows Short to explore a relatively new focus in the field—the appeal of the horror film to women and what the horror genre provides for women that traditionally “female” genres cannot. She argues that female journeys to adulthood are “virtually ignored” in film and that this journey is a crucial subtext to the horror genre (4).

The 1976 film Carrie is at the center of Short’s study, establishing a framework from which she develops her analysis of films created in Carrie’s wake. The analysis of Carrie, both in the chapter dedicated to the film and woven throughout the text, builds the interesting argument that rather than an antifeminist doctrine, the film shows the power of women and the failure of patriarchal-approved models of female behavior to help women reach maturity. Like Carrie, many of the heroines in the discussed films do not “fit in,” and attempts to make them fit in (often falling into the wear-makeup-and-attend-prom variety) do not work, with the female guides or heroines dying in the process. Short makes an intriguing and compelling argument about how the contemporary horror film that has at its center a female protagonist consistently and continually points to the failings of patriarchy in providing young women productive models of maturity. Short argues that Carrie’s legacy is an “interrogation of the failures of patriarchal myths (including religion and romance), inaugurating a mode of questioning that has endured in horror’s subsequent interest in misfit females attempting to negotiate their place in the world” (15). She demonstrates that though there are many misogynist elements in contemporary teen horror (and she cites all of the common criticisms), the genre itself is more nuanced and reflective than a simple anti- or pro-woman label can provide. Rather than viewing horror films as a way to work out male anxieties about women, she argues that contemporary horror examines the possibilities for female identity and agency (both patriarchally approved models and those that are not).

Short’s work contributes very little that is new to the field of fairy-tale studies, and her discussion of fairy tales is a survey of readily available information that should be recognizable to...