CUriosity: What can horror films teach us about society?
In CUriosity, experts across the CU Boulder campus answer pressing questions about humans, our planet and the universe beyond.
This week, in honor of Halloween, sociologist Laura Patterson takes a stab at: “What can horror films teach us about society?”
The 2025 Norwegian film "The Ugly Stepsister" examines beauty standards facing young women, with grisly results. (Credit: Marcel Zyskind/IFC Films/Shudder)
Laura Patterson loves a good scare—turning the lights down, popping on a horror film, and watching the blood splash across the screen.
But the scholar, an assistant teaching professor in theDepartment of Sociology at CU Boulder, believes that horror movies can do more than just creep you out. The genre also reveals a lot about the world we live in.
“I like horror movies, on the one hand, just because they're fun, and I think being scared is really fun,” she says. “Horror films also let us discuss some of the hardest things that we go through as people.”
Laura Patterson
Patterson may be one of the university’s biggest horror buffs.
She teaches a class for undergrads called “Gender, Race, and Chainsaws” and co-hosts the horror movie podcast “.” She’s also tried her hand at making her own short horror film. “Silent Generation” tackles the terrors of growing old and will appear later this month at the Denver Film Festival.
“They act as a mirror and can reflect back to us the societal biases and stereotypes that we have,” Patterson says. “We can look at, for example, who is a victim and who's a villain, who gets to live and who deserves to die, who can save themselves and who can't.”
Speaking of stereotypes, the horror genre has had a long and complicated relationship with women.
In the early days of scary movies, women were usually portrayed as victims. They screamed. They fainted. They got rescued by men.
Slasher flicks of the 1970s and 1980s, however, gave rise to the “final girl.” That’s the name for female characters (almost always innocent and chaste) who find their inner strength and stop the killer. They include Laurie Stode in the “Halloween” franchise, Nancy Thompson in “A Nightmare on Elm Street” and Sidney Prescott in the “Scream” films.
But that trope still has issues.
“You have certain women who are picked and chosen as special and deserving protection, and it doesn’t matter what happens to every other woman,” Patterson says.
More recently, a new generation of women writers and directors has emerged in Hollywood.
They include Mimi Cave, director of the 2022 film “Fresh.” It follows a young woman who goes on a weekend trip with a man she just started dating—with predictably gory results.
“It helps now that we have more women writing and directing horror films because we get to see the stories being told from their perspective,” Patterson says.
She adds that horror fans can still enjoy movies even if they don’t agree with their messages. Patterson sometimes has more fun watching movies she doesn’t see eye to eye with. They include this year’s “Weapons.” At its start, the film hinted at tackling big questions around school shootings, Patterson says, but never wound up delivering much of a point.
She urges her students to think critically about the films they see, and to be aware of the lessons the filmmakers are passing on, whether they mean to or not.
When it comes to 2025, Patterson says it’s been a great year for horror.
She recommends “Sinners,” a film about the blues, vampires and much more in Jim Crow Mississippi. Also on her list is a gruesome take on the Cinderella fairy tale called “The Ugly Stepsister.” This slept-on Norwegian film follows the titular ugly stepsister as she goes to increasingly twisted lengths to make herself more beautiful. It’s not for the faint of heart.
What about the squeamish out there, those who watch scary movies with their fingers over their eyes?
If they consider the underlying themes in horror films it can sometimes make them a little less frightening—at least in the usual sense, says Patterson.
“I’ve had several students come up to me and say, ‘I used to think that the guy chasing somebody with a knife was super scary. But now I realize that the patriarchy—that’s what’s really scary.’”