Gendered Terror: Women in Indian Horror

The way that women are portrayed in Indian media, especially in horror films, provides a prism for examining how gender, culture, and identity intersect. Deeply rooted in South Asian folklore, Indian horror blurs the lines between the real and the supernatural and frequently uses these tales to discuss contemporary concerns about power and gender roles. By looking at these stories, we can gain a deeper understanding of how horror, especially through themes of motherhood, monstrosity, and transgression, both reflects and changes how society views women.

Folklore has long been used in Indian horror films to craft stories that speak to the concerns and fears of the culture. In these tales, female characters frequently play the roles of both victims and fearmongers. The malicious ghost, the spiteful witch, or the haunted woman all serve as metaphors for cultural anxieties over feminine power and transgression. For example, Barbara Creed's concept of the "monstrous-feminine" offers a framework for comprehending how these characters represent anxieties related to female autonomy, power, and sexuality.

In Indian folklore, the chudail (witch) is a powerful character that personifies society's anxieties around women who don't fit in. In the Indian tale, the chudail represents the junction of terror and gender with her long, unrestrained hair, inverted feet, and unquenchable anger. As a direct result of social betrayals, whether through abuse, desertion, or not living up to maternal expectations, her monstrousness is strongly gendered.

Women who resisted essentialist roles—abstaining marriage and motherhood—were frequently viewed as strange, threatening, or deviant. When such women also possessed knowledge of medicine and herbs, leveraging their skills as healers, they were often vilified and branded as witches. This blend of independence and expertise with monstrosity highlights a cultural anxiety about women who exist and thrive outside patriarchal norms. The chudail, with her haunting presence and rage, embodies this fear, serving as a supernatural archetype that transforms societal unease into a chilling folklore figure. 

We also see the womb frequently occurring as a symbol of both creation and destruction in Indian horror. Julia Kristeva's concept of the abject, which describes things that exist on the border between life and death, purity and dirt, helps us better appreciate this disparity. The womb becomes a place of disturbing paradoxes since it represents both the ability to create life and the possibility of degradation or death. This is particularly noticeable in the necromantic horror subgenre, where concepts of fertility and reproduction are entwined with themes of death and resurrection.

When the womb resists patriarchal authority, it is frequently depicted as a source of anxiety and discomfort. Its ability to give birth also suggests that it has the ability to subvert norms of society and even take on the form of death. Films that depict parenthood, labour, or fertility as terrifying, weird occurrences reflect this paradox. Indian horror reimagines the womb as a liminal space—a place of both profound life-giving strength and unnerving terror—by obfuscating the distinction between the sacred and the profane.

For instance, depictions of horrific births or the cursed womb are a reflection of cultural anxieties around the reproductive autonomy of women. In horror films, the mother is frequently shown as both protective and menacing, representing the destitute by standing at the nexus of social norms and taboos. Such issues are explored in films like Kaali Khuhi (2020), which use a supernatural perspective to examine the atrocities of female infanticide and gender injustice, turning the womb into a battlefield for justice and retribution.

Indian horror changes the point of view to highlight the woman's experience—her trauma, fury, and salvation—subverting patriarchal storytelling and traditional gender norms. Laura Mulvey's notion of the "male gaze," which portrays women as passive objects of male fear or want, emphasises how the majority of visual media is designed with men's viewpoints in mind. Due to this this, women frequently grow up seeing themselves through the same prism, internalising the male gaze in their self-perception and self-presentation. But when done right, genre films offer a much-needed change of pace. The monstrous-feminine is transformed into a potent site of resistance and self-definition by these films' incorporation of the supernatural, which enables women to assert their agency and overcome social limits.

‘Genre’ in India are able to interact with social tensions and cultural taboos in ways that are both approachable and provocative by transforming oral folklore into cinematic stories. With its ability to both preserve and critique conventional beliefs, folkloric horror acts as a cultural archive. The cursed womb, the vindictive mother, and the chudail are all representations of how power and gender are negotiated in Indian society. 

Moving past simplistic assumptions and fully adopting the complexity of gender is essential as Indian cinema develops further. By doing this, the horror genre can develop into a potent vehicle for examining and honouring the variety of women's experiences in both society and on screen. Indian horror has the power to fundamentally alter our perception of the ways in which gender, culture, and identity connect through its distinct fusion of terror, empowerment and folklore. 

by Vinnie C