What some audiences dismiss as “girl horror” is really a wave of films interested less in cheap jumpscares and more in female autonomy. These stories ask what it means to live in a world that questions your agency before it questions your fear, a world where your value is too often tied to how your body is perceived, controlled or consumed.

To think of horror, or film in general, as apolitical is how we end up overlooking what the genre is actually saying. Films like Terrifier (2016), for example, foreground women’s suffering through an intensely voyeuristic lens, prioritizing spectacle over perspective. Horror written without understanding or engaging with the female experience often falls into the same trap where audiences are invited to watch women violently and graphically hunted, assaulted and murdered from a safe emotional distance. 

The most exciting horror films today are doing something different.

Horror has always been for the girls. It’s the perfect medium to capture the impossible pressures placed on women, how beauty becomes a currency, how aging is framed as failure, and how suppressing anger eventually transforms into something monstrous. These films understand that the real horror isn’t becoming a monster, it’s living in a society that decides that you already are.

Film scholar Barbara Creed famously coined the term “the monstrous feminine” to describe the way horror has historically feared not simply women, but female biology, sexuality and motherhood itself. In Carrie (1976), adolescence and menstruation become inseparable from terror. In Rosemary’s Baby (1968), pregnancy becomes a story of possession, where Rosemary’s body no longer belongs to her. Even Alien (1979), transforms reproduction into something grotesque: the ship itself is called “Mother” (MU/TH/UR 6000), while the Xenomorph Queen exaggerates reproductive labour into an image of endless expansion. The angelic image of motherhood is replaced with leaking, expanding and devouring.

Thankfully, contemporary girl horror has begun reclaiming these monsters instead of punishing them. In Raw (2016), appetite becomes inseparable from identity. The monstrous feminine is no longer a warning, but a reflection of the cultural anxieties surrounding puberty, fertility, sexuality, desire and women’s refusal to remain contained. Modern girl horror dismantles the patriarchal fantasy of the ideal mother, dutiful wife and selfless caretaker one strange woman at a time.

Few recent Canadian films embody that evolution better than Avalon Fast’s CAMP (2025). The film follows Emily (Zola Grimmer), whose grief slowly gives way to something stranger during a transformative summer at camp. Fast stitches together girlhood, spirituality and community into a coming-of-age horror film that feels as hazy, beautiful and quietly unsettling as an afternoon spent lying in a sun-soaked field.

CAMP joins an exciting new wave of horror films exploring women’s self-expression within systems designed to suppress it. RANGE spoke with Grimmer about shooting the film, witchcraft and why girl horror continues to resonate.

“It definitely seems to me like the phenomenon of strong and self-assured women being persecuted as witches has existed since time immemorial,” says Grimmer. In almost every society, she notes, men have historically held the majority of power, making female autonomy appear threatening, or even supernatural.

“Deciding that a non-conforming woman was a witch was an immediate way to undermine her resistance and deem her as ill-intentioned,” she continues.

Many of the characteristics historically used to identify witches now resemble guiding principles of feminist thought. It’s no surprise, then, that contemporary girl horror so often presents witchcraft not as symbols of evil, but as spaces of solidarity, self-discovery and freedom.

“Witches are typically understood to be deeply in tune with nature, so to me it also has an ecofeminist angle to it,” Grimmer says. “The forested setting of CAMP is essential to the way Emily’s coven harnesses its power.”