Women in Horror Month 2015 - Introduction

Now that we've all had some time to recover from Halloween, let's get revved up for another Women In Horror Month! Last year, I took a look at some box office numbers to see what the genre looks like right now. And first of all, let me apologize. I don't remember what search engine I was using to get those numbers, but I clearly did something wrong because I somehow overlooked World War Z, The Purge and Warm Bodies while gathering my data, which should have bumped half my original contenders off the list. It's still a pretty cool list, but I'll get back to that later.

So this year, instead of looking at just one year's box office results, I decided to look at the overall trends since 2005. The reason I'm focusing squarely on box office numbers is because money and audience demand are what drive the industry. Nothing gets changed if the status quo isn't challenged in a recognizable way. And for better or worse, looking at box office numbers is a way to quantify what people wanted to see in a given year. Otherwise, I'd just be talking about my own personal tastes, and while I'll never stop recommending cool, under-the-radar stuff like Stoker, We Are What We Are and The Moth Diaries, that's not the point of this project.

Whenever I get excited about a new short story collection/TV show/movie/book with positive female representation either in the characters or behind the scenes, inevitably someone makes the argument that it's not enough that women be present in this type of media. It has to also be good, high-quality, intelligent, thoughtful media. Now, I don't have any problem with asking for good quality stuff, but I feel like this argument is asking for female creators and characters to be that much "better" than their male counterparts in order to make up for the fact that they're female. Which I don't think is fair. Get them into the rotation in the first place, and we can worry about whether they're awesome enough to deserve their places later. More to the point: horror fans in general, myself included, sometimes develop a taste for really appalling, cheesy, low-grade trash. I don't want to see that stuff go away. It is awesome in its own way. If the boys are allowed to have their cheese and eat it too, then dammit, so should we.

I asked Twitter and Absolute Write who were their favorite Horror Heroines prior to 2005, just to get a starting baseline. Here are the top 5 results, in descending order from most chosen to least:

Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), Alien
Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis), Halloween
Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster), Silence of the Lambs
Alice (Milla Jovovich), Resident Evil
Nancy (Heather Langenkamp), A Nightmare on Elm Street

These are the golden oldies, the ones we've looked up to and cheered on for decades--with no leading on my part, and no parameters specifying any particular definition of "heroine." And I gotta say, Alice surprised me. I didn't realize she was so well-loved, since she's the relative newcomer to the lineup here. I also thought Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton, Terminator) would get more votes--when I started asking, she was only mentioned once. This is all very informal of course, and my sample pool is very small, so the net I'm liable to cast isn't but so wide.

Still, here's my question: Who are the new Horror Heroines? Who have we, the viewing public, deemed worthy successors to the badass, monster-fighting ladies of yore? And who does the horror community, always with its ear to the ground for cool, under-the-radar stuff, wish more people knew about and celebrated?

The results might surprise you. Stay tuned, and I'll be back with the numbers from 2005 next time!