Women in Horror: An Interview with Professor Aalya Ahmad

Horror can be an uplifting and challenging genre, and keeping things accessible for everyone requires consideration and critical thinking. Driven by a passion to bridge the gap between academia and fandom in horror, Dr. Aalya Ahmad is an independent scholar, contract instructor, and former adjunct professor who taught at Carleton University, in Ottawa, Ontario. Ahmad has spent much of her career teaching students from a variety of backgrounds about what the genre has to offer, as well as diving into the intersection of feminist theory and horror.

Previously, Ahmad developed and taught a course called “The Monstrous Feminist”—a voyage into the representation of women and gender roles in horror, among other subjects. Over the course of her career, Ahmad has published a number of articles on the social and political bearing of zombies, vampires, and other creatures, and has also done research on Canadian and Indigenous horror. 

I recently had the opportunity to speak with Ahmad about her own passion for horror, the intersection of the genre and feminist theory, and how studies interact with activism.

What initially drew you to horror?

At around the age of eight, I wandered into a bookshop and picked up a Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, opened it to “Descent into the Maelstrom,” read that and “House of Usher” in the shop on the spot, and couldn’t put the book down. My basic horror foundation was Poe, Doctor Who, and the Hammer House of Horror films I would sneak down to watch on late-night television, even though they frightened me horribly—I often had nightmares. As I grew older, I began to wonder why people like me loved being scared, and my university training as a critical thinker just sent me further in that direction when it came to graduate work.

How would you say the field of horror studies has changed over time?

It’s certainly much more respected than it used to be! Although film studies have always made some room for horror, there was very little being done in the field of literature when I was in graduate school. I found that in order to gain approval for my topics, I always had to refer back to “The Gothic” because that was the only acceptable framework at that time for understanding literary horror. I think that cultural studies had a huge impact on making horror in all its modes and permutations more open to academic research. I still think the contributions of the fandom and horror artists themselves are somewhat neglected by academics. But it’s wonderful to see so much being done—new essays, theories, books, documentaries—and much more attention paid to intersectional theories and international horror in what used to be a white male-dominated field. There are also far more courses devoted to horror—my initial Monstrous Feminist class was a bit of an oddball, but there are now rich discussions about teaching horror.

What are some of the critical ways feminist theory and horror intersect?

Oh, in so many ways! I began with a feminist approach to horror because I felt strongly about the unfairness of women being constantly dissuaded from centering ourselves as fans, originators, and creators of horror. There’s a strong Anglo-American tradition of women writing horror; in fact, Ann Radcliffe’s Gothic novels were some of the very first bestsellers—so popular in their day that, of course, Jane Austen famously made fun of those types of “horrid novels” and the ways in which female fans became obsessed with them in Northanger Abbey. So there’s always been this interaction that horror plays with between women and monsters, women and Gothic, women and danger, women and taboos… and some really good arguments from many corners that this can be a positive and empowering playfulness, rather than typecasting horror as simply about “let’s torture the women.” Some still fixate on that very narrow “torture porn” angle, but it’s harder to do that when you have a wholesale blossoming, as we do nowadays, of folk horror, family horror, horror that operates as a subversion of patriarchal cultures. I often go back to the late Robin Wood’s theory of monstrosity as being the “return of the repressed” in which whatever is oppressed can emerge as a disruptive force and, as feminist critics argue in different ways, women becoming monstrous figures or being adjacent to monsters in some way, can be powerfully unsettling to normative structures. I particularly love studying representations of monster-women from folklore all over the world. There are fascinating similarities and differences, and especially interesting are the ways in which cultures adapt each other’s monsters.

What inspired the creation of your Monstrous Feminist course?

It was my way of bringing my passion for the power of horror to feminism and kind of laying it open to students for further exploration. I was very fortunate to have a supportive department that allowed me to develop this course originally as a summer course, but then I was able to teach it occasionally during the regular terms as well, since it became popular. I have heard from students that they’ve waited for years for it to be offered, which is gratifying. I’ve always taken a more popular education and radical pedagogical approach to it—it was crucial to me to have the students pick it up and handle it, turn it this way and that, and come up with their own ideas about what horror was and what it did or could do.

You mention… you've adapted it for different disciplines. How have these adaptations changed the focus of the class?

Students from many different disciplines tend to take this course as an option and I’ve always tried to incorporate different media in it so it’s always been fairly interdisciplinary. I’ve taught versions of this course in Women’s and Gender Studies, in Film Studies, and in English and General Arts. I found that in the non-WGST courses, I definitely couldn’t take a feminist or a politicized approach for granted—there were fewer students who had had any 101-type education in feminist or queer issues, or gendered perspectives and the ratios of male to female also shifted significantly depending on where I was teaching. Some disciplines were much more resistant to the group presentation assignment I built into the course—it was easier to get creative group presentations in the Women’s and Gender Studies classes and they really ran with it. Film students are trained to look at formal aspects of horror films so I tended to spend more time on those things in the film classes, and in English literature, you also pay more attention to the language of the text and the way it’s structured. However, I also encouraged that type of analysis in the WGST courses—as mentioned above, all the versions of the class were extremely interdisciplinary and attended by students with very diverse backgrounds, including from STEM disciplines. Horror is a big draw, regardless of what you’re studying!

Have the changes circled back to influence your own research and work at any point?

I began with an almost exclusive focus on written horror as an English and then as a Comparative Literature major, but teaching horror across genres has really expanded my horror-horizon. There’s great work being done on genres I haven’t even really looked at closely, like radio, music, and gaming. I’m interested in everything to do with horror, but you realize that the field is so huge and, moreover, expanding daily, you’ll never get around to all of it.

Has your activism influenced your research and approach to horror?

Absolutely. Going back to Robin Wood and his theory of the radical “apocalyptic” horror film such as Romero’s zombie movies, I find the most interesting aspects of horror to be their life-changing, world-changing qualities. Horror speculates on radically altered and transformed, mutated, realities, bodies, genders, and futures. As an activist, I see great potential in that. Horror can also be extremely funny and that is a great relief to activists who are often caught up in overwhelm about social injustices and crises. People ask what horror can be in a world of real-life horrors. It’s one way to deal—one way to see past it, in the way in which headlights coming at you from the opposite direction may dazzle you so you look over them into the darkness. I’m also mindful, however, of the ways in which horror might mirror and reproduce real-life traumas and of the different ways in which it may be received and interpreted according to culture. Describing something as a work of “horror” is a political act: We need to heed that when we are writing, teaching, or offering our opinions.

With regular movie watchers in mind: What are some of the assumptions the horror genre makes about marginalized groups?

There’s a lot of tokenism in horror films and critics are getting more aware when characters from marginalized groups are the first ones to be killed, when they’re the ones portrayed as stupid enough to go into that basement, when they suffer more or endure worse deaths, when they are stereotyped and so on. Even though many contemporary horror films mock or seek to defy stereotypes, they do persist. The frail damsel-in-distress trope is still very much a thing even though there are many more examples of tough fighting-back Final Girl-type women nowadays. Horror is at its best when the characters are complex and sometimes horror texts are so plot-driven, they don’t bother much with fleshing out their characters and so you get these banal dichotomies or stereotypes. But I wouldn’t describe the genre as a whole as doing that.

What would you advise viewers to critically consider when they encounter these assumptions?

As with any other form of media, be aware of who’s being represented, who’s shown as relatable, who’s being silenced, who’s being demonized—sometimes literally with horror—and who’s not even there.

Do you have any words of wisdom for those interested in pursuing horror studies, whether on a personal research or academic level?

I don’t think it’s the kind of research that’s ever going to get you a fat grant or a tenured job, although there are a fortunate few who have made it their specialization in the academy. Although you might get sought out around Halloween, the rest of the year, you’re a bit of an outlier. You’re like the goth kid sitting in the back of the class—you might look very cool to some folks, but they’re a bit unnerved by what you’re manifesting. Primarily, I think you should undertake horror research because you love it or are fascinated by it, as I was, but please, please, for the love of Poe, make sure you’ve paid your respects to the great artists and creators in the field by reading their work with care. In my travels through the field, I’ve found WAY too many examples of a sort of parasitical academic criticism that latches onto one or two horror texts, penetrates them with whatever trendy buzzword or theory is most current, and takes away what it wants without really situating that work in important historical, social, or intertextual contexts. Horror is and always has been highly intertextual. It’s still deeply bound up with oral traditions of storytelling, and it’s constantly under the influence of other works of horror, whether it’s quoting, paying tribute to, or otherwise drawing meaning and reference from major tropes in the field. Here’s where I think the importance of fandom comes in. It’s easy to tell who really knows their stuff from who’s just zooming in for a hot academic take because of some fashionable concept of “high horror” or whatever.

---

Interview by Laura Kemmerer

Laura tuned into horror with an interest in what these movies and books can tell us about ourselves and what societies fear. She is most interested in horror focused around the supernatural, folklore, the occult, Gothic themes, haunted media, landscape as a character, and hauntology (focusing on lost or broken futures).