Since Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), the modern horror genre often crafts stories that address themes related to gender and sexuality.
In the post-#MeToo era, it follows that horror filmmakers would set their sights on interrogating gender relations in this new social and political context. In this article, I identify a new horror cycle for the present era. I look to two recent films in independent Anglophone cinema: Carlo Mirabella-Davis’s Swallow (2019) and Emerald Fennell’s Promising Young Woman (2020). I make the case that these films fall under the psychological horror and slasher categories but shift the respective sites of the threats. In these two films, the protagonists are not confronted by a singular external threat to evade, escape from, and triumph over, as in early slasher flicks; rather, these films depict female subjectivities existing under the heavy forces of patriarchy, forces that operate from all directions and no one point in particular. I conceptualize the two films as part of a woman’s horror film cycle, combining the woman’s film and horror genres, respectively.