She Can Have Some Murder, As a Treat: 10 Killer Women and Girls Who Get a Pass
Women in horror don’t always have it easy. But more often than not, they pick themselves up and exact sweet, bloody revenge. In the words of Lady Gaga: “I don’t believe in the glorification of murder. I do believe in the empowerment of women.” That’s why we’re looking at ten killer women in the horror genre who get a pass.
Happy (Killer) Women’s History Month.
Carrie White (Carrie)
Sissy Spacek (1976)/Chloë Grace Moretz (2013)
We’ll start with a classic of killer women. Carrie White is the target of vicious bullying at school at the hands of her classmates and witnessed by teachers and administrators—who are (mostly) unsympathetic. At home, Carrie is emotionally, physically, and spiritually abused by the religious fanatic who bore her, Margaret. She also discovers that she has telekinetic powers.
Carrie is invited to the prom by the boyfriend of one of her tormentors, Sue Snell, who asks her beau to be Carrie’s date to alleviate her guilt over being a jerk. But OG Mean Girl Chris Hargensen teams up with her own boyfriend for a final act of cruelty.
After suffering this latest humiliation, Carrie snaps and proceeds to use her powers to trap her classmates and teachers in the gym, where she kills them. Then she goes on a bit of a righteous rampage and destroys some buildings and gas stations in town. And then she goes home and has a showdown with Mommy Dearest: Margaret stabs Carrie, Carrie kills Margaret by stopping her heart. In the film adaptation, Carrie uses telekinesis to stab her with cooking utensils in an arrangement inspired by Christian imagery.
Did Carrie commit mass murder? Yes. Can we excuse her actions? Absolutely. Carrie is a teenage outcast who has been victimized by basically everyone she’s ever interacted with. The prom night massacre was impulsive, sure, but in her defense, she had just been soaked in pig’s blood.
As for Margaret…well, that was clear-cut self-defense. Even if Mags hadn’t stabbed her, it would still be self-defense because of the lifelong abuse.
Charlie McGee (Firestarter)
Drew Barrymore (1984)/Ryan Kiera Armstrong (2022)
Another Stephen King creation. He loves killer women, don’t you think? Charlie McGee’s parents Andy and Vicky participated in a secret experiment run by a governmental agency known as The Shop in which they were injected with the chemical Lot 6. The chemical gave both of them psionic abilities. Later, when they get married and bring Baby Charlie into the world, they learn that these side effects were passed down to their daughter.
Eight-year-old Charlie has the gift of pyrokinesis, although most of the time, it feels like more of a burden. Once she sparks a flame, it more often than not results in catastrophe.
After agents for The Shop torture and kill her mother, Charlie and her father lam it. Of course, they can’t hide forever. The agents catch up to them and hold them captive to study their abilities—Charlie’s in particular.
Firestarter doesn’t end in a bloodbath. It ends in a conflagration orchestrated by Charlie. She destroys The Shop’s facilities and incinerates a ton of agents.
All of them deserve it. They killed her parents. They imprisoned, isolated, and manipulated her. The agents quite literally played with fire and, boy, did they get burned.
The final scenes in the 1984 film adaptation were enjoyable, but they’ve got nothing on the novel. Those pages are brutal in the best way.
Pamela Voorhees (Friday the 13th)
Betsy Palmer (1980)/Marilyn Poucher (1982)/Paula Shaw (2003)/Nana Visitor (2009)
Pamela Voorhees didn’t have an easy life. She had a baby when she was 16 years old (in the 1940s). Plus, she was a young single mother with a disabled child in a time period that wasn’t exactly kind to women, single mothers, or people with disabilities. Pam got a seasonal gig at Camp Crystal Lake and her 11-year-old son, Jason, was enrolled as a camper. Bullied and harassed by his peers, Jason snuck out of his bunk one night to try to swim and ended up disappearing in the lake, presumably to a watery grave. His body was never recovered.
Why wasn’t anyone watching him? Where were the counselors?
They were partying and having sex.
The camp didn’t close for the season and reopened the following summer. Furious and distraught, Pam murdered two of the counselors who were supposed to be on duty the night Jason drowned. Four years later, she learned that the owners of Camp Crystal Lake were back in business. Desperate to prevent another child from dying due to staff negligence, she set some fires and poisoned the lake, causing the camp to shut down again. Then, 16 years later, Crystal Lake is set to reopen under new management. Driven mad by the loss of her child and the lack of justice, Pam sets out for a final kill spree.
Most of us would probably agree that killing the newbie counselors was uncalled for. They had nothing to do with Jason’s death, after all, and they were probably not even born yet when it happened. But Pam’s earlier actions—killing the people who essentially let her son drown and trying to destroy the campgrounds—are totally understandable. You’d be hard-pressed to find a parent (of any gender) who wouldn’t want to do the same.
Jennifer Hills (I Spit on Your Grave) and Mary (American Mary)
Camille Keaton (1978)/Sarah Butler (2010); Katharine Isabelle (2012)
Jennifer Hills, an author renting a cabin in the woods to focus on her writing, is gang-raped by four local men. Mary, a medical student and (unlicensed) practitioner of extreme body modification, is invited to a party under false pretenses by a mentor, where she is drugged and raped by a former professor.
Jennifer systematically and brutally slaughters the men who assaulted her. Mary commissions the abduction of her own assailant, holds him hostage, and uses his unsedated and unanesthetized body to practice her surgical skills. Mary doesn’t kill him (she does, however, kill a man who tries to free him), but by the end of the film, his survival prospects are low at best.
Isn’t it the general consensus that in rape-revenge films, the survivor has carte blanche to carry out as many murders and mutilations as they deem necessary?
Red and Adelaide (Us)
Lupita Nyong’o (2019)
Adelaide revisits the site of her childhood trauma, Santa Cruz, for a family vacation only to face even more danger: a prolonged attack carried out by non-verbal doppelgängers of her husband and children, plus a raspy-voiced body double of herself named Red…who she first encountered as a kid. If that isn’t freaky enough, the entire town is soon overrun with doppelgängers.
Known as the “Tethered,” the clones are revealed to be the products of a failed and abandoned government experiment. Red has been organizing a rebellion for years and now the Tethered are carrying it out.
Adelaide and her family fight like hell and come out on top, killing the Tethered versions of themselves. But of course, nothing could be that simple. A final twist reveals that the Adelaide we’ve been rooting for was really the Tethered Red. During their first meeting as children, Red choked and incapacitated Adelaide, dragged her underground to where the Tethered live, and took her place as a normal person living a normal life.
Honestly, both of these women are justified in their actions. Although she used a malicious method (and come on, she was a kid), Original Red wanted to escape from an existence ruled by oppression. Likewise, Original Adelaide was fighting that very oppression.
The real villain in Us is the U.S. government.
Jennifer Check and Needy Lesnicki (Jennifer’s Body)
Megan Fox and Amanda Seyfried (2009)
Teen queen Jennifer is sacrificed by an indie band during a ritual to bring them fame, fortune, and critical acclaim. Jennifer doesn’t quite fit the criteria for a successful human sacrifice and is transformed into a succubus. She gleefully uses her beauty and charisma to lure her male classmates into secluded areas where she proceeds to eat them.
Jennifer’s BFF Needy finds this morally objectionable. After Jennifer kills Needy’s boyfriend, the two have a final, friendship-ruining fight, culminating in Needy piercing Jennifer’s heart with a box cutter, killing her. During the fight, Jennifer bites Needy, transferring some of her powers to her. At the end of the film, Needy breaks out of her court-ordered psychiatric hospital to track down and kill the members of the band that started it all.
Jennifer doesn’t get the chance to kill her attackers. Instead, she focuses her rage and hunger on the boys at her school. As far as we know, her victims never hurt her or anyone else. However. It’s safe to assume that Jennifer has been objectified by men during her entire adolescence, if not her whole life, just like countless other women and girls before and after her. Jennifer may not have been able to get revenge on the men who tried to sacrifice her, but perhaps in her mind, killing her male peers was close enough.
They didn’t deserve to die, but we can still sympathize with Jennifer.
As for Needy, killing Jennifer was unfortunately the only way to stop the carnage. Plus she ate her boyfriend. Not cool. The execution of the band was totally reasonable.
Hayley Stark (Hard Candy)
Elliot Page (2005)
14-year-old Hayley is a budding vigilante with a penchant for punishing pedophiles. After flirting online with 30-something photographer Jeff, who is fully aware of her age, she meets up with him in a café and then lets him take her to his house. There, she mixes screwdrivers, dances to some music, and waits for the drugs that she slipped into Jeff’s drink to kick in.
Hayley reveals that she targeted Jeff because he’s a sexual predator…and she believes that he was involved in a local girl’s disappearance. Photos of the girl that Hayley finds in Jeff’s safe confirm her suspicions. Hayley spends the rest of the day psychologically torturing Jeff, staging a fake castration, and ultimately forcing him to confess his crimes and kill himself.
Hayley is cold, calculating, and sadistic. But let’s be real: who hasn’t wanted to see a predator meet a horrifying end at the hands of a would-be victim?
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