We are not unique in our quest to understand what it means to be a person or more specifically what it means to identify with a certain gender, or really any identity based group. A question many of us young women, both CIS and not, have asked themselves and the world around them is, “what does it mean to be a woman,” something simply complicated.
This is the one and only content warning in the article, from this point on there will not be trigger warnings or spoiler warnings. Can confirm that this article includes both triggering content and spoilers throughout so please proceed with caution and watch at your own risk. Welcome to the Feminine Coming of Rage Horror two part series.
The popular therapy platform, Better Help, answers the question as, “The social construct of gender (typically assigned at birth based on sex characteristics)…binaries (that) can continue as (children) grow older.” Essentially being a woman meaning adhering to a social construct you agreed to at birth. Granted, we know that it’s far more complicated and far less rigid than that in reality. So, what is it that society recommends adhering to for women? And how do girls learn to be women or what kinds of women they can become?
According to a variety of sources the best list I could come up with starts with social feedback. This occurs when you are granted access or restricted from social groups, in addition to either being bullied if you’re on the outside and avoiding bullying on the inside, and finally, a gain or loss of opportunity.
...in the western understanding and passing-down of what it means to be a woman. This media includes movies, shows, reality television, music, books, and anything else you can think of. A new source of information and feedback that is quickly becoming as important as media are internet spaces like social media platforms. That can also include comment sections and threads. Finally, the other place I think is most important for this article is belief systems. Religious spaces and communities, sports, hobby-based groups, and politics can all impart knowledge as to how a person, in this case, a woman, can be liked or disliked by that group.
While I think he’s, she’s, and they all experience rage—this article is specifically about feminine rage expressed by CIS-women in horror films that are of the “coming-of-age” variety. Since this is rather specific and I’m sort of talking about an idea I’ve heard and seen rather than a full-fledged horror genre I’ll better define that.
Question: What is feminine rage in this context? Answer: Rage expressed by women that seems more shocking due to broad societal, quote, “-expectations of docility, homemaking, and submission,” from Cherwell (Chair-well), an Oxford publication.
...Victoria Pedretti’s portrayal of Love Quinn from Netflix’s You series confronting her murdering, philandering husband, Joe Goldberg. Another example is Natalie Portman’s portrayal of Nina Sayers in Black Swan, a lead professional ballerina who loses herself in exchange for achieving her dreams. This type of rage is considered intense in part due to its taboo nature in western society, women going against the “best practices” and behaving in ways we’d feel more comfortable attributing to a male-coded character.
The second part of this specific scope, the coming-of-age genre, is defined on MasterClass as, A sub-classification for teen movies in which the story, quote, “follow(s) the lives and adventures of young adults,” unquote, generally involving characteristics like character growth and social commentary while having dialogue heavy plots. Typically the plot follows an outsider breaking into a clique and learning about the high school landscape, including how relationships function, the consequences to certain behaviors, and the social fabrics. I don’t think it’s wild to attribute many high school tropes as mini-versions of adult milestones, an audition for adulthood with less consequences.
Coming-of-rage is a well regarded sub-genre of and includes many huge movies like The Breakfast Club, a 1985 classic John Hughes movie about a group of high school peers spending Saturday in detention. Starring Molly Ringwald as popular in pink Claire Standish, Ally Sheedy as quiet outcast Allison Reynolds, Emilio Estevez (Em-il-io Es-tey-vez) as popular jock Andrew Clark, Judd Nelson as bad boy John Bender punching the sky in triumph by the end of the movie, and Anthony Michael Hall as the nerdy Brian Johnson, endearing and relatable.
Another coming of age staple is the 1995 movie, Clueless, starring Alicia Silverstone (Aly-sha) as Cher Horowitz, Stacey Dash as Cher’s best friend Dionne Davenport, Paul Rudd as Cher’s step brother Josh, Brittany Murphy as new girl Tai, and Donald Faison (Fay-sen) as Dionne’s boyfriend Murray. The comedy laden plot follows teenage Cher as she faces challenges specific to Beverly Hills but relatable to teen girls.
Later in 2004 Mean Girls came out with a similar focus but this time we follow the new girl, Cady Heron played by Lindsay Lohan, as she infiltrates the school’s top clique, the Plastics, including Rachel McAdams as Regina George, Amanda Seyfried as Karen Smith, and Lacey Chabert (Shuh-bear) as Gretchen Wieners. In a more serious summer break example Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants came out in 2005 based on a tight-knit friend group that spent the break apart but sent a pair of magical pants back and forth with updates about their adventures. Coming of age has taken many forms but from here on out we’ll be looking at examples of Feminine Coming of Rage Horror.
This type of horror is obviously rage filled, sometimes internal and other times external. It also includes psychological elements and lessons that pertain to womanhood and what it means to be a woman.
I’m sure many examples exist, maybe even better examples, but the ones in this series include more than one personal favorite: Carrie 1976, Heathers 1989, The Craft 1996, The Rage: Carrie 2 1999 all in this article and then part 2 of the series will cover Ginger Snaps 2000, Jennifer’s Body 2009, Tragedy Girls 2017, Totally Killer 2023, and finally Lisa Frankenstein 2024. The movies will be in chronological order and timestamps will be included in the description if you’re only interested in certain movie’s analyses.
...made-up subgenre name for the purpose of this series but nonetheless the small but cult-followed collection of movies covered are examples of girls becoming women within the confines of gender roles. The push-pull of young women coming-of-age is in part informed by conflicting social feedback, media, internet spaces, and belief systems. The positive or negative feedback from them form a foundational knowledge of what is good and what is bad for a woman to do. This also informs the consequences to a chosen path, like social ostracization if you have membership in a group that another group disapproves of.
For the purposes of this video series "women" refers to the social construct of gender based on sex characteristics of CIS-females. Specifically, young women dealing with female puberty and the hormonal impacts upon their life. Women outside of this context is a broad identifier of people, however.
I would like to acknowledge that women are not just confined to the topics and issues covered in this post. The main characters of the films that fit this category are CIS-women but as the subgenre expands there is space and interest in stories about trans-girls and their coming-of-age horror stories being told.
Lessons in how to be a woman and about womanhood are often learned during the window of time specific to the coming-of-age genre like the transition from middle to high school, and time spent in high school or college. According to MasterClass, story aspects like character growth and social commentary are key for the genre about this age group. The combination of coming-of-age and rage generates stories that push back against the expectations for women, sometimes being more sexual, more aggressive, or just plain old, more when the expectation is that they make themselves lesser.
...through individual trial and error and through forced social spaces like work and school, both not included in part one. Trial and error from experiences, anecdotal included, can heavily inform the choices of women based on the positive or negative outcomes. For example, dating best practices for women are generally derived from one’s own dating experiences combined with those of trusted women who share do’s and don’ts.
Work or school spaces that are somewhat necessary to exist within have a varying degree of issues that women face and how they are taught to deal with such issues. For example, some communities prefer issues between women to be dealt with in a street fight whereas others prefer to deal with issues through passive aggression or repetitional attacks. The spaces can greatly inform how women believe they should behave, and unrequested feedback is often given to young girls and women. Feminism is another through-thread of modern womanhood that prescribes not only individual lifestyle directives but greater womanhood ones as well. As feminism became a more solid ideology represented by organizations and centralized beliefs it became easier to identify what you were quote-unquote "supposed to do" as well as what would fall outside that norm.
Britannica defines feminism as, "-the belief in social, economic, and political equality of the sexes...manifested, worldwide and... represented by various institutions...on behalf of women's rights and interests." With equality being defined as equal treatment, status and/or freedom from discrimination. Four distinct waves of feminism are identified on History.com as the First, Second, Third, and Fourth Waves. The First is thought to be from the 1800s through the 1920s and centered around women's suffrage. Following that the Second Wave from the 1960s to 1980s became a notable time of women pushing back on the confines of gender roles as wives and mothers.
Once women's issues turned from basic rights and respect to issues that thrived in the shadows like the patriarchy as a system, sexual assault by members of the government like Anita Hill's testimony against Clarence Thomas who went on to become a Supreme Court justice. This era is marked by Riot Grrl music, girl pop artists, and eras of fashion aesthetics like grunge that attempted to take attention away from women's bodies. The fourth wave is more nebulous and less defined as of now, but the #MeToo movement of 2017 is mentioned as a shift in women's issues, which I'll discuss more about later.
...rage expressed by women in media like movies and television shows. This rage is seen as more shocking because it is the opposite of women being stereotypically more docile and agreeable. The rage brewed from learning that who you are doesn’t fit who the world expects you to be is persistent throughout the movies in the series.When horror is added to this formula, we get new insight and indie stories with creative horror elements, like the rad special effects throughout Ginger Snaps and the CGI-prosthetic combination for Jennifer’s jaw in Jennifer’s Body. Based on the movies in part one of this series the takeaway is that being a woman is heavily tied to one's relationship with other women.
What those women think of characters and how they speak about them plays an important role in your outcome during the movie, improving odds for those more pious and damaging odds of those more hedonistic. Womanhood was also heavily tied to sex, including the onset of puberty and the sometimes out of control hormones associated with it. In addition, the process of discovering sex and even sex as a tool in society is embarked upon by more than one main character in this series.
As a central theme that appeared in every movie, sex, specifically hetero-normative sex, and the losing or taking of one's virginity is also central to womanhood. Seen as a rite of passage the rules associated with this aspect of young women’s lives vary widely across cultures and even across small cliques within the same community. At times the exploitation of women or trauma incurred by them is central to a horror movie’s plot, whether it is the beginning of a revenge plot, or a cruel act committed by a masked killer, it is included in an array of horror subgenres.
While oftentimes exploitative in itself that isn’t necessarily the case with coming-of-rage movies, as the female characters often possess means of revenge and deeper or more comedic meaning than shock factor to inclusion of sexual topics. Having horror coming-of-rage stories about young women can also be beneficial for exhibiting common experiences taken to the horror level's extreme that can help people see past their own biases and provide comfort to those who might feel confused, unseen, or unheard.
In the 2000's however more women became interested in true crime, finding comfort in the stories that could serve as warnings. Others opted for learning how to cheat the maze, and ultimately how to have it all, finding the secret key that the successful women must be hiding.
The base challenges of the past didn’t change after the turn of the century for young adults of that time, many of those still existing today. Those challenges include but aren’t limited to: social feedback, childbearing or childrearing, household chores, emotional regulation, knowledge pursuits, aspirations, sexuality, and opportunity. Each having an impact and needing to be balanced, discarded, or maybe even replaced.
Modern life however added more challenges including high cost of living, prevalence of dating apps, influence of social media, and political shifts that can change rights. The more women grow and learn through personal experience the more the prescribed path or paths morph and change to fit the needs of the time and individual. With added challenges of modern life, the pressures on the young women in coming-of-rage stories is stronger than ever, morphing into a more self-aware narrative style.
Despite the made-up aspects like the name, the collection of movies covered in both videos are often linked together by the same criteria I'd use to define the horror subgenre.
Female lead character or characters, conflict with other female characters or women, critique of women, feminism, society, patriarchy, etc.,
About the onset of puberty and/or adulthood either by age or circumstance
Life threatening criminal or supernatural elements
Includes an important, large life event like prom, graduation, or going to college, and financial romantic relationship or awakening to sexual desires.
Synopsis and Reviews of Carrie (1976) & Heathers (1988)
Synopsis and Reviews of The Craft (1996), Rage: Carrie 2 (1999), Gingersnaps (2000) & Jennifer's Body (2009)
Synopsis and Reviews of Totally Killer (2023) & Lisa Frankenstein (2024)
Multiple posts and opinion pieces on Jennifer's Body that also address rage from and between the characters.
Carrie, Heathers, The Craft, and Carrie 2 all picked up feminine coming of rage story elements and wove them together into somewhat unique horror movies. Powers are a major through thread in this subgenre, many stories having the central focus of gaining power, liking it, and being easily corrupted by it or not being responsible with it. Part two movies are Jennifer’s Body, Tragedy Girls, Totally Killer, and Lisa Frankenstein, all four also including power struggles and supernatural powers similar to the movies in part one and also movies that fall into the Feminine Coming of Rage Horror genre. Womanhood in the part one movies also heavily relies on relationships with other women to indicate whether someone is an example or a cautionary tale. It’s tied to sex as mentioned earlier as well as the onset of puberty and that specific time period in a woman’s life plus the struggles she may face during it.
Society benefits from a large variety of portrayals of stories as well as exhibiting common experiences that most of us share and in the horror genre specifically showing how an array of things can be horrifying and fantastical. On the flip side these portrayals of women and specifically female coming of rage horror can be alienating to some audiences as a wide swath of people have limited if any experience with the gender specific occurrences like periods and friendships between women. In addition to this drawback these movies can also play into stigma if misunderstood or done poorly.
It’s a genre that I have loved enjoying and have always been interested in exploring more, even just to understand my own high school obsessions with some of them. In the next article I’ll be doing an analysis of each movie similar to this article and write a summation of what I found out about the feminine coming of rage genre and if it’s even enough of a thing to warrant a sub genre of its own.
So much change has occured in the last 2 decades that I don’t think we’ve fully caught up yet. Despite this the change has ushered in new hopes and possibilities like that of a Kamala Harris president following Brat Summer when we all binged Love Island USA. In many ways the rage now is like that of Totally Killer, more focused and controlled, moving towards a purpose rather than the wilder stories of Ginger Snaps and Jennifer’s Body.
Rage and horror will always go hand in hand, the horrifying occurrences often inciting righteous anger from those experiencing it. But the brand of rageful horror in the feminine coming of age horror stories is an especially thought-provoking subgenre to enjoy. The stories of young women finding themselves not because of but in spite of awful events is a testament of the power we see in real life young women and their stories. Right now, in the US women’s issues are focused on restoring the right to reproductive freedom which is very much on the ballot this November, which BTW if you aren’t registered to vote, please do, and please vote, no matter whom you vote for.