"Good For Her" Horror - Why We Love to Watch Women Kill
A trend has emerged the past couple of years in horror that when a film features a violent, murderous woman the audience no longer reacts in fear and disgust. Instead, her actions are often met with a resounding “Good for her.” So what is it about watching a woman covered in blood, murdering those around her, that makes us say, “Hell, yeah. Good for her!”?
Well let’s first explore the purported origin of this phrase. “Good for her” first sprang up in pop culture around 2005 in a scene from the show Arrested Development. In the scene Lucille Bluth, the matriarch of the show, is watching the news with her son. The anchors are reporting on a story of a mother who snapped and killed her entire family. Instead of reacting in horror or with sympathy for the murdered family, Lucille simply says “Good for her,” much to the horror of her son in the background.
Although this scene is from a sitcom and played for laughs instead of horror, I feel it speaks to the burden society puts on women and the joy we feel when we see someone react to it, albeit violently. Now I’m not saying I would react positively to an actual news story of a woman killing her family the way Lucille does, but there is something so satisfying about seeing a fictional woman break free of her chains and go a little murderously insane for once.
Based on amateur online polling, women make up anywhere from 40 - 60 percent of horror fans. That’s a sizable chunk and personally I know significantly more women who are fans of the genre than men. So why are we almost always portrayed as the victim? Throughout the course of horror history, women have ranged from fainting or screaming damsels in distress - Frankenstein (1931), House of Haunted Hill (1959), Dracula (1931) - to full on torture victims faced with unthinkable brutality - Terrifier (2016), House of 1000 Corpses (2003), The Hills Have Eyes (1997 or 1977), Last House on the Left (1972 and 2009), I could go on and on.
There are also of course the final girls where if the character does everything right and remains the perfect, virginal, good girl you get to survive. But only after being traumatized from being chased, beaten, and watching all your friends die. It wasn’t until relatively recently that women have taken on the role of despicable, grotesque homicidal maniacs. And boy isn’t it fun to watch them unleash their wrath on society in ways we never could?
So the “Good for her” reactions come in part from the novelty of seeing a woman finally play the perpetrator rather than the victim of horror, but why do we say it’s good for her? One reason could be that these characters are often killing men. Films like - Jennifer’s Body (2009), The Love Witch (2016), A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014), Teeth (2007) - depict women who have broken out of their “place” in the patriarchy and get to take their revenge (other than Love Witch that girl is just killing men for the love of the game and I adore her for that).
And it’s no longer enough to watch a character reject the sexist expectations of the men around her. We want to watch her rip out their freaking throats.
