Historically, the role of women in horror films could not be clearer. The genre has treated us to innumerable distinctly male killers with unmistakable sexual fury towards his victims. These victims, of course, are inevitably young, beautiful women -- and typically ‘sexually liberated.’ The image of Freddy Kruger’s long, blade-nails reaching between Nancy’s legs as she bathes or Psycho’s infamous shower scene have been seared into our collective cultural consciousness, whether we’ve seen the film or not. Though we have seen some efforts to deviate from this formula in recent years -- 2018 saw the return of the Halloween franchise which positioned Jamie Lee Curtis not as a passive damsel but still definitely the object of Michel Myers’ sexual wrath -- it seems that Dario Argento’s sentiment still rings true in cinema; “I like women, especially beautiful ones. If they have a good face and figure, I would much prefer to watch them being murdered than an ugly girl or man.” It is no wonder then, that the feminist film theorists so often turn a critical eye toward the genre of horror.

In 1996, Cynthia A. Freeland published an essay in the journal Dark Thoughts: Philosophic Reflections on Cinematic Horror. Her essay, “Feminist Frameworks for Horror Films” offers a response to the albeit small yet robust cannon of horror-related feminist film criticism that existed at the time. Specifically, her aim is to refute the tradition of psychoanalytic theory as it exists in the vast majority of feminist film criticisms. In this essay I will use Freeland’s piece as a jumping off point to construct, or at least begin to construct, a more robust progression beyond feminist psychoanalytic frameworks in film analysis for the horror genre.

This paper aims to trace the development of carceral feminist politics within American institutions and feminist movements. I focus on four different historical political moments: the development of a homogenous understanding of women’s oppression in the second wave feminist movement; a rising political salience of racialized crime leading to tough-on-crime policies nationwide in the mid-to-late 1970s and 1980s; the expansion of reactionary feminist anti-violence movements during the 1970s and 1980s that relied on punitive enforcement and policing; and finally the federal action against the so-called "campus rape epidemic” that solidified the domination of carceral feminist approaches in the educational context in the 2010s. I end by highlighting a different kind of feminism, abolition feminism, coined by activist and legal scholar Angela Y. Davis. Learning from Black and POC-led abolition feminist organizations, I highlight three elements that are key to a feminist activism that works to reduce both interpersonal violence as well as the violence caused by the carceral state.