What Book Femgore Is, and the Issues It Raises
When a woman becomes the monster.
A girl runs from a monster, with no one nearby to protect her, and only a miracle or a 'handsome prince' can save her. This is the standard female character in horror. In stories like this, the woman is always the victim. But there's a new subgenre that turns these rules completely upside down. This is femgore — horror where women don't run from monsters, because they are the monsters.
Femgore in Literature
The term 'femgore' combines two words: feminine and gore. It's a new term, recorded in the Cambridge Dictionary Blog in June 2025. It's defined as 'horror stories centered on female characters who commit acts of violence, rather than becoming victims.'
Unlike traditional horror, where the woman is passive and helpless, femgore offers a radical perspective, in which women's experience becomes a source of strength and rage. Here, menstruation can take the form of a monster, pregnancy can appear as a dangerous parasite, and beauty can become a reason for self-destruction.
This subgenre doesn't avoid 'forbidden' topics — on the contrary, it puts them at the center of the story. Femgore lays bare fears women face every day: bullying over appearance, the devaluation of selfhood, violence, forced silence — and does so in the sharpest possible form, through images of blood, transformation, and aggression that turn personal pain into universal horror.
Main Directions Within the Subgenre
Although the core definition limits femgore to a subgenre where the lead characters are the villains, its boundaries are actually broader, encompassing several distinct directions at once.
The first of these is body horror. This direction focuses on physical mutation, bodily decay, and painful transformation. In stories like these, a woman's body becomes a battlefield, where inner pain erupts outward as horrifying metamorphosis.
Maternal horror shifts that fear into the realm of motherhood. Pregnancy and childbirth are depicted here as an experience of losing control, when one's own body stops belonging to the woman. Revenge horror, meanwhile, tells of anger and vengeance, when a woman answers violence with even greater cruelty. Here, the woman becomes the one who dictates the rules of the game.
Domestic femgore explores horrors that grow out of family and psychological trauma. They unfold in what look, at first glance, like ordinary domestic settings — but it's exactly there that the most terrifying conflicts arise. Grotesque or aesthetic femgore, meanwhile, combines bloody scenes with unexpected beauty. These are the cases where pink, glossy, or doll-like imagery intertwines with the brutal and the cruel.
Why Femgore Matters
Femgore works with real fears: being controlled, devalued, forced into silence, or stripped of one's own body. In this subgenre, every fear gets 'teeth.' That's exactly why femgore hits so hard. It makes you flinch at just how close these themes are to everyday female experience. Blood and scenes of cruelty only heighten readers' emotions.
Book Examples
Bunny, by Mona Awad
This book is one of the most popular femgore titles translated into Ukrainian. There's no overly graphic horror here, but there is intense psychological pressure, a strong sense of physicality, anxiety over beauty standards, and fear of failure.
In the plot, Samantha Heather Mackey studies literature at the prestigious Warren University — an institution that gleams with a luxury entirely out of place in the small town where it's located. The university space is also shared by the so-called 'Bunnies' — girls from wealthy families who always stick together, wear flawless dresses, hug each other too tightly, and project perfection in every gesture.
Against them, Samantha seems like their complete opposite — a gloomy intellectual who keeps to herself and finds comfort only in her friendship with Ava. But when the Bunnies start drawing her into their dazzling yet unsettling world, the line between reality and fiction rapidly begins to blur. For Samantha, this game becomes a dangerous trap, in which it's hard to tell her own fantasies apart from someone else's hold over her mind.
My Sister, the Serial Killer, by Oyinkan Braithwaite
This novel shows the other side of femgore, where the woman commits physical violence. Ayoola is a charming, carefree, and outwardly flawless young woman. But behind this mask hides a serial killer who has already taken the lives of three of her partners.
Every time, she calls her sister, Korede, to help cover up the crime. Korede is her opposite: reserved, responsible, prone to self-sacrifice. Yet blood ties force her to cover for Ayoola, even when the life of someone Korede herself loves hangs in the balance.
It's exactly in this conflict — between loyalty and justice, fascination and horror — that true 'femgore' tension is born. Braithwaite's novel shows that the most terrifying things can hide within the people we love most.
Motherthing, by Ainslie Hogarth
A UK bookshop has quoted the New York Times describing the book as 'a terrifying, darkly comic, wholly original feminist horror story,' quoting the New York Times, a UK bookshop notes.
Hogarth's work is exquisitely dark and psychologically dense, playing on readers' nerves. Protagonist Abby makes compromises for love of family: she moves with her husband, Ralph, into his mother Laura's house, hoping to build a relationship with her. But Laura is a toxic maternal figure from Ralph's past — a woman whose unresolved life and psychic wounds turn her into a source of poisonous power.
When Laura dies by suicide, Ralph falls into depression, and Abby begins to teeter on the edge: the spirit of her late mother-in-law won't let her rest, and her emotional pain becomes destructive. Abby is forced to choose: protect the people she loves, or destroy what's pulling her toward the abyss. There are scenes where the psychological backdrop gradually bleeds into reality — with ghosts, a past that comes back to life, and horror that isn't always visible. This is a novel where death, family trauma, and the desire to be accepted all converge within a single house.
Femgore is a mirror of the fears women face every day. The subgenre shows that horror can be born not just from outside, but from within — from bodily experience, trauma, and unspoken thoughts. Femgore gives voice to emotions once silenced, and in doing so, opens a new chapter in the development of horror and feminist literature.