We’re over halfway through Women in Horror Month, but that doesn’t mean the fun is over yet! Today, I’m thrilled to spotlight nine amazing female horror authors. We talk all about their work as well as this year’s Women in Horror Month theme: villains!
So let’s take it away, shall we?
Please tell us a little about yourself and your writing.
LIZ KERIN: I’m a spec fic, horror, and fantasy buff with a background in film and TV. I’m obsessed with super dark female-driven narratives (particularly coming of age stories) that have something important to say about the world we live in. I’m the author of the NIGHT’S EDGE duology (those sad mother/daughter vampire books), and THE PHANTOM FOREST (my debut, a dark fantasy that’s being re-released this spring!).
SHANTELL POWELL: I’m an emerging author based out of so-called Kitchener, Ontario, Canada. I’m a Two Spirit Indigiqueer swamp hag and elder goth. I was raised by a nomadic family in an apocalyptic cult on the land and off the grid. My writing reflects my upbringing. Frequently ecologically-based, it plays with religious themes in a sacrilicious way. I also write through a decolonial lens while I work at Indigenizing myself. I don’t have any books (yet!), but my work has been published in a wide variety of magazines and anthologies.
JENNY KIEFER: As a Kentucky native, most of my work is set in Kentucky–at least all of my novels. It’s not just because I’m familiar with the state (the summer after high school, I traveled around the state working as a mascot for the state fair!), but because Kentucky has such a strange history and varied geography. There’s rolling hills, giant rock columns, cave systems, sinkholes… there was even a meat shower. A lot of my writing also involves body horror, whether it’s someone’s body transforming into something it shouldn’t or just visceral descriptions. I LOVE doing research and often find that there’s always something weird that really happened that I would have never thought to include on my own.
ZIN E. ROCKLYN: My name is Zin E. Rocklyn and I write dark fantasy and horror stories. I mostly enjoy writing the dark works, works that make people uncomfortable, make them think about their role in the world and how insignificant it may be.
MAE MURRAY: I’m Mae Murray, and I’m the author of I’m Sorry If I Scared You, which was released in November of last year. I’ve also edited two anthologies, The Book of Queer Saints Volumes I and II. The first volume was nominated for a British Fantasy Award, and is definitely what I’m best known for. My work focuses on queer, working class stories, mostly set in the American South. I also like to write Indigenous stories that deal with the loss of identity that comes with being part of the Indigenous diaspora.
FRIDAY ELLIOTT: Hello! I’m Friday (she/her/ella), a Seattle-based Chicana newbie horror author originally hailing from the Motherlode in central California. While I often joke that spanglish is my first language, I really think flavor is! My lexical-gustatory synesthesia gives me a unique relationship with words, as I’ve tasted them all since birth. I’ve used this superpower for fifteen years to make immersive teas inspired by pop culture, art, books, music and more in my day job as CEO & Head Tea Witch at Friday Afternoon Tea. For the past few years, I’ve been exploring the other side of that superpower in writing sensory-forward melancholia cusp with heavy influence from Mexican horror, folklore and magical realism. I’ve had a few short stories published here and there and currently have three fairly experimental, ambitious, hopefully tasty full-length writing projects on my table!
CARLIE ST. GEORGE: I’m Carlie St. George. I’m from Northern California, and I primarily write contemporary dark fantasy and horror short fiction. I’m particularly fond of ghost stories, fairy tales, weird slashers, and playing with unusual narrative structures. My story “Forward, Victoria” was nominated for the Shirley Jackson Award, and my debut collection YOU FED US TO THE ROSES came out in 2022 from Robot Dinosaur Press.
SONORA TAYLOR: I have been writing and publishing for almost nine years. I write both novels and short stories. My horror tends to be quieter, dark, feminist, and twisty.
CYNTHIA GÓMEZ: I write horror and other types of speculative fiction, set primarily in Oakland, where I make my home. I mostly write feminist horror and I especially love themes of revenge, retribution, and resistance to oppression. Sexual harassers or greedy developers or brutal cops facing consequences, etc etc. My work has appeared/will appear in Fantasy Magazine, Strange Horizons, Luna Station Quarterly, Nightmare Magazine, and numerous anthologies. My first collection, The Nightmare Box and Other Stories, was released from Cursed Morsels Press in July 2024.
Our theme for this year’s Women in Horror Month is all about villains. How do you craft villains in your own work? In your opinion, what makes a good villain?
LIZ KERIN: Wickedness takes root in people when their fears and insecurities start running the show. They fear this person, or this entity, or this horrible outcome… and they’re willing to eradicate that fear by any means necessary. When I sit down to write a villain, the first thing I ask is what they fear, and why. If that character’s anxiety feels grounded and realistic – even if we’re dealing with a WORLD that’s anything but – then I believe that villain will come to life on the page. For example, in the NIGHT’S EDGE books, you might say there are actually TWO villains because there are two characters infected with this vampiric illness who live in fear of being caught and hospitalized. One of them depends upon her daughter to survive and spends years draining her lifeblood (both literally and figuratively), and the other keeps purposefully spreading the disease in order to find safety in numbers. Both of which are totally villainous, but also totally understandable reactions to a horrific situation.
SHANTELL POWELL: I don’t often use physical villains in my writing. In a lot of my stories, the villain is colonialism or capitalism. Drunken white men with untreated PTSD are villains in a couple of my stories, but the real villainy is the system which chews up people and regurgitates them as monsters. I think the best villains represent things/people who have terrorized you personally. I guess that means I need to hurry up and write scary stories about corrupt cops and vicious teenage girls.
JENNY KIEFER: I think the best human villains have a complex motivation and the best non-human villains have an unfathomable motivation–or maybe no motivation. In This Wretched Valley, you could almost argue that I explored both. The cursed/evil/malicious earth itself is unknowable and mysterious, purposefully left a little vague in its workings and intentions. But the humans who go to this space are also villains, in a sense — every human who ends up there wants to use the land for their own gain, whether it’s colonization, murder, or fame and fortune. My next book, Crafting for Sinners, is about a bisexual woman trapped in a craft store owned by a religious cult who wants to use her for a ritual. It has human villains and it took a few edits to get it right and make them into a villain that wasn’t one note or “cartoony”. I hope I hit the right chord.
ZIN E. ROCKLYN: I LOVE VILLAINS. they’re my absolute favorite to write. Villains have the same goal as I do: to think about your place in the world and how it affects others. I craft them from experience and from my own dark side. A good villain makes you challenge the status quo.
MAE MURRAY: The villains in my work tend to be people who wield their power in cruel, destructive ways, and they’re often rooted in real-world issues. My villains are colonizers, white men, police officers, rapists. Sometimes my villains are the philosophy of a place. Lack of education, lack of resources. For me, the best villains are the villains we encounter every day, who are allowed by society to commit atrocities and thus normalizing them.
The other side of that coin is the villain that is fashioned by society because of the normalized atrocities. The villain who isn’t really a villain, but a person or creature out of place, out of step with a strange and violent world.
FRIDAY ELLIOTT: I haven’t put a lot of thought into villain craft in my own writing (though I sure will after this conversation), but I can speak to this idea in my tea work! My synesthesia associates complex and distinct flavor profiles with archetypes, feelings, characters, and so on. I’ve found a villain-inspired tea will always have three dimensions to my palate: smoothness, depth, and bite. In my mind, a good villain must be enticing or intriguing (a smooth texture with floral aroma), must have something ugly hidden inside of them with an edge of uncomfortable relatability (depth and complexity of flavor), and they must shock you in some way (a surprising counternote with a biting edge to break the line of the flavor profile). Now that you’ve asked and I’ve had the opportunity to dissect this, I’ll definitely be reverse-engineering the flavor structure to match villains in my own writing and fill them out as characters!
CARLIE ST. GEORGE: I don’t necessarily subscribe to the notion that every villain thinks they’re a hero, but I do think that villains who believe themselves to be reasonable can be extremely effective—even when they’re absolutely not. It’s not about thinking that their actions are righteous or correct, only that they’re understandable, rational. What anybody in their position would do. A villain who’s convinced that everything they’ve done is reasonable can be—depending on the story—tragic, hilarious, or deeply creepy.
My own villains tend to be manipulative and possessive, convinced of their own entitlement: they want, therefore they deserve. Or I’ll write girls seeking bloody revenge … but are those girls really villains? Like the good meme says, God forbid women have hobbies.
SONORA TAYLOR: A good villain is someone or something that’s scary because they seem unbeatable or only able to be taken down with the utmost effort of the protagonist or, more likely, their own folly. In addition, a great villain is someone the reader empathizes with and is subsequently horrified that they empathize with them.
CYNTHIA GÓMEZ: I think there’s room for different kinds of villains in fiction, because in real life there are different kinds. Sometimes they have all kinds of complicated architecture to their motivations and this whole story that they’ve twisted so that they’re the good guys. Take somebody like Ronald Reagan. He caused tremendous damage and death and destruction while justifying every one of his actions, twisting them into a story where it was fine to let people with AIDS waste away and die because his God had cursed them with this affliction, and it was important to invade and destabilize countries because capitalism was supposed to be a force for good. (Spoiler: capitalism was not, in fact, a force for good.) It’s always interesting to engage with how our fictional villains justify their actions to themselves, because fiction is about empathy, and when we see the ways that fictional villains justify the horrible things they do, it can help us to recognize that same kind of justification when we see it around us.
But then there are times when we want our fictional villains to be violent and power-hungry because they like violence and power. Nothing more involved than that. Because sometimes our villains are like the ketamine-guzzling black hole in the White House and the orange shitstain who just got elected. They’re not complicated; they’re cartoons. And in fiction and art, it’s fun – and, paradoxically, realistic – to have some plain old cartoonish villains. Especially when you really give them their thorough comeuppance.
In the novella I’m editing now, I gave my readers one of each. And I have another character who… let’s just say I’ll let the reader decide if they’re a villain or not. This character was absolutely my favorite character to write, because what can be fun with fictional villains is the way they act more freely than most of us ever do. This character does not give one solitary fuck about being kind or being good or whether they hurt other people or not, and that gave an energy and a fire to their dialogue that were so freeing to me. And terrifying.
Since it’s Women in Horror Month, let’s talk about female villains in particular. Who are some of your favorite female villains in the horror genre, and why do you love them?
LIZ KERIN: I think female villains work best when they get to be the protagonist of their own story – an anti-hero. For example, I never considered Carrie White to be a villain, but technically I guess she is. We see her FIRST AND FOREMOST as a traumatized, outcast young woman. We understand her pain and what motivates her violence, so that when said violence descends, it feels so deeply justified and visceral. Another one like this is Ji-won from Monika Kim’s THE EYES ARE THE BEST PART. We say, “Go off girl, eat those juicy blue eyeballs! F*ck your mom’s godawful boyfriend.” On the opposite end of the spectrum, though, you have a character like Maeve from CJ Leede’s MAEVE FLY who tells the audience right off that bat that she doesn’t NEED a traumatic reason to be violent, thank you very much. That’s equally subversive and intriguing!
SHANTELL POWELL: I grew up infatuated with evil queens, whether from old Hercules movies or Disney cartoons. Maleficent is a were-dragon. How awesome is that? And although I don’t consider her a villain, Medusa’s ability to turn her attackers into stone with a single glance is delicious. And then there’s Annie Wilkes from Misery. She crosses the line from fanatical devotion to violence in a believable and unforgettable fashion.
MAE MURRAY: The first female “villains” I love that come to mind are Dark Willow and Vampire Willow from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I remember being obsessed with those sides of Willow when that show was airing. Dark Willow had a rage I could relate to as an adolescent growing up in an abusive household, and Vampire Willow was funny and seductive, and maybe one of my earliest crushes. Currently I love the titular character Abigail. I think that performance was very underrated; you could really believe this centuries-old vampire was trapped in the body of a little girl, and making the very most of it. Similarly, Claudia from Interview With the Vampire. Has it become clear yet that I love vampires?
JENNY KIEFER: Maybe it’s because I love Ruth Gordon, but I love Minnie Castavet in Rosemary’s Baby. I think this character is very well crafted; she’s not pure evil. She does actually care about Rosemary and respects Rosemary’s role in her schemes.
I also love Jennifer from Jennifer’s Body. I love that this film plays with the roles of victim and villain, of which Jennifer Check is both. Plus, it’s just really fun!
On a side note, why do so many call Carrie the villain? Maybe she’s in the same boat as Jennifer, but her carnage seemed more than justified.
ZIN E. ROCKLYN: Hands down, Ursula. She was that bitch. King Triton was a hater.
FRIDAY ELLIOTT: My favorite female villain is absolutely Villanelle from the TV show Killing Eve. She’s the rare example of a sociopathic character with an emotionally complex inner world. I love her shameless hedonism and attachment to luxury by her own definition, and she’s a totally unique take on the “sexy evil assassin/spy” archetype. I also have a deep love for the unhinged fangirl villain archetype (hello, Misery). The intensity, obsession, and delusion of a Swimfan type villain tickles me in a way I can’t quite put a finger on. Somehow I find them intriguing, terrifying and kind of funny all at once? There’s even a little bit of relatability there I don’t like to look at too closely…
CARLIE ST. GEORGE: Oh, Margaret White has gotta be pretty high on that list. Piper Laurie is creepy as hell in Carrie, and—judging from a few other notable favorites, like Pamela Voorhees in Friday the 13th (creatively violent, obsessed with avenging her dead son), Bev Keane in Midnight Mass (religious zealot, ruthless and ruthlessly competent), and Mommy in The People Under the Stairs (racist abusive zealot/horrifying maternal figure), I … may have a villainous type here.
Some other favorite villains: Oh Yeong Sook in The Call, Patricia Bradley in The Frighteners, Nancy Downs in The Craft, Rose the Hat in Doctor Sleep, and Rose Armitage in Get Out.
SONORA TAYLOR: The mother in Flowers in the Attic. Imagine being such a monster that you literally leave your kids to rot, starve, and assault each other so you can earn the approval of their bigoted grandmother and start a new life without them, all while pretending they’ll get out soon, promise! I also like her as a villain because she’s only revealed as one in the second half of the story.
CYNTHIA GÓMEZ: The image that pops into my head is that infamous leg-crossing scene from Basic Instinct. Catherine Tramell treats every person in the world as an object, even herself, and everyone she comes into contact with is her toy. She’s a classic example of a villain who gives herself complete freedom to be as destructive as she wants, and it’s fascinating. Of course, she’s written to be pure wish fulfillment: she’s beautiful, she’s rich in that convenient movie way, and she’s so cunning that we can’t help but watch in admiration as she runs circles around everybody else. She’s fun because she’s a complete fantasy character in a movie that thinks it’s doing cold procedural realism.
On a completely different angle, there’s Annie Wilkes, who gets no joy from the hurt she lays on people. She also gets scandalized if people swear around her and she’s a Church Lady about casual sex, but she’s fine with the whole torture and murder thing. (I bet Annie loved old Ronald Reagan.) Those characterizations are fascinating to me, as was the gruesomeness of the scenes with Annie and her implements. I first read that book at age eleven, so you can imagine it was pretty indelible. Only later did I come to explore how much misogyny is woven into her characterization; Meg Elison’s essay “All the King’s Women: Annie Wilkes is the Mother Goddess of Cocaine” is a great place to start exploring that question.
Oh, and I have to give a shout-out to Aunt Helene from Ready or Not. Sitting there at her nephew’s wedding just giving this absolutely acidic stare to the goddamned bride. Later on, with her quips, like “Brown-haired niece. You continue to exist.” Wielding that axe like she was born for it. (In a way, she kind of was.)
And that’s part one for our Women in Horror Month roundtable! Please join us next week as we delve into even more horror with this fabulous group of female authors!
Happy reading, and happy Women in Horror Month!
CAROL GYZANDER: Annie Wilkes, in Stephen King’s Misery: A Novel, is hands-down my favorite female villain. After all, she totally supports her author and encourages his writing because she is his ‘NUMBER ONE FAN’! So I axe you, isn’t she awesome?
KYLE TAM: My favorite female villain in horror is a bit of an off-kilter one – the villainess protagonist of Torture Princess, Elizabeth le Fanu. She has a bloody history behind her, a villain who is deployed to destroy other villains. Both noble and violent, both monstrous and almost heroic, she’s a controversial figure both in and out of universe and I love her to bits!
ANGELA SYLVAINE: My favorite female horror villain is Jennifer Check from Jennifer’s Body, the sacrificial victim turned monstrous demon. I love her because she uses her sex appeal to lure men, only to feed on them. She’s also, in my interpretation, a messy bisexual who is complicated and imperfect. She clearly loves and is attracted to her best friend, Needy, but is also jealous and wants to hit her where it hurts.
FRANCESCA MARIA: Lilith. I love Lilith because she was born equal to man, not made from a portion of his being. She is completely independent in her thoughts and acts solely based on her own will and needs.
MORGAN SYLVIA: I have to go with Nancy from The Craft. Not only was this one of the most iconic performances ever, it’s also a fascinating take on the perils and repercussions of using power for greed.
L.E. DANIELS: After a hot tip from Geneve Flynn, I’m preoccupied with Lady Maeda, played by Claudia Kim, in the South Korean Netflix series Gyeongseong Creature set in Seoul during the Japanese occupation in 1945. Lady Maeda is complex, cunning, and utterly spotless in her silk couture as she quietly rules this male-dominated era. Through horror, the series is a social exorcism of the real-life war crimes committed to the Korean people during this period by the Japanese and once again, shows us how emotionally informed and truthful horror can be. Even the conclusion to Lady Maeda’s character arc is surprising and achingly beautiful, and she will inhabit me for some time.
CATHERINE JORDAN: My favorite female villain is the female cenobite, a former nun—Sister Nikoletta—who became obsessed with sin. Her character is dark and mysterious and there’s so much about her that I want to know. As a writer, there’s more that I’d like to explore.
KRISTINA GRIFANT: The Xenomorph Queen in Aliens. She is ruthless, intelligent and resourceful. And she’ll do whatever it takes to ensure her offspring survive!
EMMA MURRAY: Cathy Ames from East of Eden by John Steinbeck. On one hand, she’s a fascinating portrait of psychopathy: unable to feel the normal depth of emotion but learned to imitate them to manipulate others, always behaving callously selfish, and utilizing her beauty and ability to charm to use then discard everyone around her. On the other hand, she’s a force of feminine rage in a patriarchal saga, and though she definitely acts malevolently, I’m always impressed with how she goes against everything a woman is expected to be in that time and place.
DESTINY KING: Annie Wilkes defies Stephen King’s stereotypical female roles, acting as a dual-sided figure who challenges gender norms and Gothic conventions. While she exhibits nurturing and even wife-like traits, she is also dark, abusive, and dangerously volatile. Her history as a serial killer, revealed through a chilling scrapbook, culminates in one of horror’s most iconic torture scenes.
JAN STINCHCOMB: It’s a tie (if that’s allowed) between Mrs. Danvers of Rebecca (1938) and Mary Katherine Blackwood––Merricat––of We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962).
ABIGAIL WALDRON: Countess Marya Zaleska is the protagonist/antagonist of Dracula’s Daughter (1936). Despite being written in the 1930s, her character remains complex to this day and is a vessel for queerness. Sadly, the Countess is quite self-loathing, wishing away her vampiric urges. However, by film’s end, she becomes a true antihero for spooky lesbians everywhere. Long live the Countess!
MAY WALKER: Typically, I’d follow the rules and choose one character, but these characters have decided to hold hands in my mind. I love a good backstory, but in the case of Virginia Merrye from Spider Baby, and Elaine Parks from The Love Witch, it’s all about performance, and the shift from prey to stalker. These enchanting women stand out for the unapologetic pursuit of their desires, of which one is love, ranging from romantic, to the unconditional familial variety, to the glee of playing spider.
CLAIRE L. SMITH: I am team ‘Carrie White did nothing wrong’. I watched (and later read) Carrie when I was first getting into horror and it was the first instance I’d seen where the villain of a horror movie wasn’t some masked killer but a victim that flipped the tables on her abusers. The moment she finally snaps after one last brutal act of humiliation from her peers is so horrifying but oddly vindicating in a perfect ‘good for her’ moment that will forever stick with me.
CHLOE SPENCER: Jennifer Check from Jennifer’s Body! One thing that I love about Jennifer is that although she uses her powers to terrorize and murder others, in a way, she’s also reclaiming her autonomy. Jennifer takes her beauty, which has been weaponized against her, and turns it into her own weapon in order to take down her prey.
