Why Is Horror So Afraid of Female Friendship?

This is Women Watching Horror Films, a column by Heather O’Neill on gender and horror cinema.

In the 2021 Showtime series Yellowjackets, a girls’ soccer team is flying to a championship when they suffer a plane crash. They end up somewhere in the Canadian Rockies, where they are forced to survive on their own for nineteen months. We are introduced to the characters many years later, as adult women, who have each decided to never speak of what went on during those months. Through flashbacks, we see the girls in the wilderness become progressively more ferocious, superstitious and bizarre. They seem to be shifting towards an ancient matriarchal society, filled with blood sacrifices and a coven’s energy. But even as more is revealed to the viewer, there is something being withheld—some event that is so horrific that none of the survivors are willing to speak a word of it to outsiders.

This sense of anticipation is what is so amazing and delicious about Yellowjackets. Whatever we try to picture of these unspoken horrors—which we know involve hints of murder and cannibalism—we imagine the reveal will be worse than anything we can dream of. We want to see them be gruesome. The show dives into the realm of the unknown violence that women are capable of when they are in a group. This space of the unknown yet familiar is the source of horror’s power. We do not experience creeping and terrifying tensions when we watch films set in the fantastic realms of dragons and monsters. We become terrified when a family beach becomes a shark’s cafeteria; when a strange child appears without a parent; when we sense a strange presence in a home. Then these familiar, comforting spaces and beings begin to exercise their unknown powers.

And what is more unknown than the power of a society of women?

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There are no rules for female friendship. Although there are countless manuals about how to have heterosexual relationships with men, no one gave me any lectures on relationships with girls. No one told me to make friends who might help me later in life, or inspire me. Female friendships weren’t seen as significant.

Recently, I was speaking to a male acquaintance about the #MeToo movement. In a brief outburst of misogyny, he exclaimed that there was nothing more terrifying and irrational than a group of young women who had power in their hands. Yes, I thought. When girls do begin to work in groups, their latent potential can be the stuff of horror films.

There are no rules for female friendship.

But as we see in Yellowjackets, that same power can also turn them against one another, a consistent theme in films. The cult classics Heathers and Mean Girls are prime examples. People keep returning to these movies because they speak to the frantic ways girls attack and are hard on each other. But to me, this seems like a tired trope, reinforcing the idea that girl groups ought to be dismantled before adulthood. Focusing on their negative aspects refuses to acknowledge their latent power and instead infantilizes it. These films are often set in high schools because it is the last time in life that girls find themselves in isolated groups. Afterwards they will enter the world of dating, never to bond in the same way again.

When I was in high school, there was a sense of urgency to having a boyfriend, as though it was a game of musical chairs and everyone had to hurry up and find one, or they would be left alone and single for the rest of time. I didn’t like anyone in the entire male population at my high school. I tried dating a boy that asked me out, but I was disgusted by making out with him and having him fondle me. He was constantly pressuring me for sex, but the very thought of it seemed repugnant.

From what I could tell, dating seemed to involve a lot of standing around. And the thing I hate most is standing around. It also involved girls watching boys. You sat on a bench and watched them skateboard. They told all the jokes. They were the entertainers and the girlfriends were the audience that followed around after them, like a gang of groupies. It all seemed so passive.

Around this time, I signed up to audition for the school play and won myself a small speaking part. It was there I met a girl who was brand new to the school, Sabrina. I was immediately smitten. Sabrina was dressed in an eccentric manner, wearing a black jacket with tails over a t-shirt and a pair of tights. She had a pair of Victorian lace-up black boots and a black hat over piles of greasy red hair. She was a sort of clown, acting as though she was a Vaudevillian who had been transported to the 1980s. She was like the characters in a Fellini film that I watched at the repertory cinema. When I asked her why she wasn’t wearing a skirt over her tights, she said a skirt would be redundant.

We became instant friends. I adored her ideas. She would say the most outrageous things that came to her head. She seemed hellbent on discovering new ways of thinking about things. And we loved performing in skits together.

I broke up with my boyfriend, the reason being that I needed to spend more time with Sabrina. I simply had so much more to learn from her. My ex-boyfriend scowled at her in the hallways, but that just pleased us both.

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In Carol Morley’s 2014 film The Falling, set in a girl’s school in England, the protagonist, Lydia, is absolutely bewitched by a rebellious and popular girl named Abigail. After Abigail has anonymous sex with a boy in a car, she begins to feel ill. She faints in the school hallway and dies. Lydia cannot recover from the death of her friend, or deal with becoming a sexual being herself in a world where the rules for sex are imposed by the patriarchy.

Abigail’s sexual adventure shatters the girls’ Edenic, virginal state. The rest of the girls in the class begin fainting, as if they’ve caught Abigail’s mysterious disease. But the film remains ambiguous on this question—Are they actually ill, are they all pretending, or they suffering from hysterical contagion? The teachers become livid trying to force the girls to admit they are feigning their distress.

When groups of girls come together, they are suggestible to one another’s ideas. There is a male terror of what girls will come up with on their own. They will question the patriarchy. They will wonder about why they are treated the way they are and influence one another to question their role in society. But this same suggestibility has been portrayed as hysterical and dangerous. Their conclusions are thus suspect and products of their imagination, portrayed as crazy and vindictive so that women’s testimonies—especially as a group—will always be doubted.

Naming a character Abigail in this context can’t help but evoke the Salem witch trials, which were started by the accusations of a teenage girl named Abigail Williams.

Williams, along with a growing number of girls in her village, began to accuse elders of causing them to be physically ill and tormenting them through witchcraft. The Salem Witch Trials have been used to undermine women who come forward with allegations of sexual assault, as it gets cited as an example of women lying about abuse. But, in truth, none of the girls in Salem made allegations of sexual assault. In fact, many of the accusers were victims of very real emotional and physical abuse in their ordinary lives, from their male employers and guardians, independent of witchcraft. They were, by and large, a group of orphaned servants who lived in difficult circumstances. They had no agency over their time, working ceaselessly since they were little girls. They were filled with rage. They were complaining about being mistreated, which they essentially were.

The school in The Falling becomes the site for piles of young bodies, lying like piles of pretty corpses. The girls seem to be actively resisting the social restraints put upon them and the scrutiny of their sex lives. It is a passive resistance to the reality of being young girls.

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Of course, the girls at Salem were capable of great cruelty. Groups of girls are not, by nature, good or innocent. Sometimes they can be downright horrible. In Sofia Coppola’s The Beguiled, something sinister is afoot among a group of outwardly lovely women.

Coppola’s 2017 film is set during the American Civil War in a plantation home that has been turned into a school for girls. These women are all beautiful and young and living in an environment of unease. The violence of the war is all around them. They seem to have lost sympathy for either side. They know that, with the country at war, they are at the mercy of any man who might find them off the main road. In wars, women are the spoils of victory.

The youngest girl finds a Northern soldier wounded in the woods. She brings him back to the school to be taken care of. The source of the film’s tension is the fact that he is a man, and thus, they have let the most dangerous sort of animal into the house. They know they are foolish to trust him. But their own desires cloud their judgment. He is so handsome and charming.

As he recovers, the soldier decides to pretend to be in love with several of the women in the house, openly taking advantage of their isolation—their previous marital prospects are all being blown up in the woods.

But he underestimates the women. He thinks the affection the women have for him is a delicate, girlish thing and doesn’t realize he is poking a hornet’s nest. How does he think he can enter a house filled with Southern Belles, raised to be slave owners, and come out alive? They look at him as though he is a piece of meat that they want to consume. Instead of being victims, they are filled with festering sexual desire that acts as a sort of madness—and he is at the mercy of it. They don’t even seem to understand its power themselves.

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As a young teenager, I began to receive constant lectures about sexuality from my father. Every time I came home, he would accuse me of having been out being a whore. I wasn’t entirely sure of what it meant, I still don’t. But the word made my whole body cringe in repulsion, as though I was being spit on. His lectures about sex were always about how disgusting and degrading it was for a girl. How it decreases a girl’s status in the world. Once you had sex with a boy, you would be trash. He told me that if you have sex when you are young, then when you get married, you will know too many tricks, and it will intimidate your husband.

Groups of girls are not, by nature, good or innocent.

The lectures were never about how to understand one’s own desires, only how to increase your estimation in the eyes of boys. Messages like this are why girls can be so confused about their own sexual impulses. So much of civilization is built on the backs of women’s free labor. Men look at women’s bodies as the reward and proof of their success. If women’s bodies are the spoils of male success, then girls must learn at a young age that they cannot have possession over them. You are taught to see yourself as an object, to be acted upon by men. Most women I know have stories about having sex when they were younger that they did not enjoy whatsoever but felt pressured into doing in order to appease a man and the social pressures to have a boyfriend. These lectures don’t stop us from having sex, but from enjoying it and having the power to actually refuse it. They take away women’s actual ability to say no.

There is great power in understanding one’s sexual desires. No wonder society tells women that desire is a force that is much stronger in men. To have control of your own id leads to success and motivation in all walks of life. But in The Beguiled, this unknown repressed sexuality becomes a monstrous, devilish thing.

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In Luca Guadagnino’s 2018 film Suspiria, a young woman gives up her family in America to join a prestigious all-women ballet company in Berlin. The woman, Susie, comes from an Amish family that wants her to accept the traditional, self-sacrificing roles of daughter and wife.

The company immediately becomes a new sisterhood for her. The older women in the company, the choreographers, refer to one another as “Mother.” These mothers have other values to impart to Susie, ones that entail absolute devotion to one’s craft. One of the choreographers, Madame Blanc, tells her the point of her dances is to “break the nose of every beautiful thing.” Art is the ultimate selfish act. It involves a woman putting herself first, thinking that whatever she has going on in her head is important.

This could have all been a powerful and warm experience for Susie, finding herself under the guidance of these older women artists, until it is revealed that the older women in the company are sacrificing the young ballerinas in order to expand their power.

The rift between older and younger women is a common trope in fairy tales. Witches go around trying to destroy the younger girls, as though they are afraid they will take their place, when instead they should be mentoring and passing on knowledge.

We saw this schism in the Salem Witch Trials. When Abigail Williams and her gang of girls began to spew their rage, the targets of it were largely older women. We also see it in the world around us. If girls are ritually harassed in school, female teachers are complicit when they don’t step in and speak out and make it stop. Older feminists can particularly harsh and unaccepting of younger ones, seen in their stubbornness around more inclusive definitions of “woman.” They refuse to allow young women to create their own space.

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I never had any older women step in and offer to mentor me, and I felt this absence profoundly. My first years spent trying to become a writer were characterized by incessant sexual harassment by older male writers. It made me so frustrated. I didn’t know why I couldn’t just have professional relationships like the young male writers did. They seemed to all be acquiring mentors and getting job offers, and I seemed to be only be rejecting sexual advances. These men could not take the fact I wanted to have a career seriously. And I couldn’t help but ask why there weren’t any older women who rallied against this behavior. Shouldn’t there be a group of old raging witches to protect me from predatory men?

In most of my own life experiences, as a young woman, I was left with only other girls for guidance. I adored so many of the girls I met at McGill University. I had studied so hard to get to university and I had been rewarded with access to this coven of women. The girls at McGill were so magical and outrageous and funny. There were more Sabrinas than I could count. We would sit around tables and discuss the books we had read into the morning hours. We critiqued the world gleefully and angrily. We planned revolutions. We read each other’s cards and performed magic spells we found in books.

Activities that young women have traditionally participated in have always been denigrated. Artistic practices such as embroidery and pottery are regarded as “crafts.” Tarot readings and seances are dismissed as crackpot activities. Feminism is the realm of bitter women. But as a group back in school, we gave each other the confidence to celebrate and reclaim all the characteristics that are looked down on and use them as sources to bond and network and grow.

I began writing plays for my friends to perform in, and poetry to read out loud at events we organized. Writing was like comparing magic spells all day long. Conjuring weird creatures into being. Once your spells start to work, you become addicted to that feeling.

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In Yellowjackets, the events in the wilderness take place in the nineties and the characters are played by young actors. When the show returns to present day, the adult cast is comprised of actresses who were cultural icons in the nineties, particularly Juliette Lewis and Christina Ricci. These were actresses who had to put up with the sexism of the times, playing roles that catered to the male gaze. Juliette Lewis was cast as a sexpot at fourteen and made to play roles where she dangled her adolescent body before grown men. Christina Ricci stars in movies like Buffalo 66 where she falls in love with her kidnapper, tap dancing for him and trying to win his love. Living through the nineties was more or less akin to surviving a plane crash in the wilderness. This makes it especially exciting to see these same actresses in Yellowjackets, playing independent, strong, sometimes psychotic characters.

If people are terrified of groups of young women wielding power, they should recall that these girls had no other option than to stand up for themselves. They were so marginalized that they were left to create their own language and modes of fighting back. Femininity is too often characterized as duplicitous, chaotic, shallow, and destructive by nature. We need to change that perception and accept the view that femininity is creative, just, empowering, and strong. Imagine what the conversations between young women would be like if they were allowed to continue them into adulthood and old age, uninterrupted. If men were not afraid of what we would come up with, our collective power might no longer be the stuff of horror films, but a new dazzling and magical light to illuminate the world.

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