For millennia folk horror has drawn its power from the whispering depths of forgotten lore and the dread of what lurks beyond the firelight. Within the soul of every chilling legend lie women—not as passive victims, but as ancient powers, the wrath of the wronged, or guardians of sacred knowledge. In the cry of the Irish death-messenger to the shape-shifting boogeyman of Eastern European tales, women have long been the vessels through which fear is expressed, often because their power defied patriarchal comprehension.

The banshee, for example is not a monster to be slain but a herald of the grave. Her cry is not an attack but a lament, a reminder that mortality cannot be escaped. In many versions of the myth, she is a soul torn from life too soon and now wanders the earth, her pain vibrating in the wind. She is not evil. She is the weight of loss made flesh. And yet, her presence alone is enough to freeze the blood in veins, because she represents the inescapable, the feminine emotion that society has long tried to silence.

Similarly, the figure of the witch in folk horror is not a fairy tale bogeyman but an embodiment of self-determination. In stories throughout the forgotten hamlets of Europe, women accused of witchcraft were often healers, midwives, or those who lived outside the norms of village life. When they were vilified, they became monstrous—not because they were evil, but because they answered to no man. The witch in folk horror does not need a secret sisterhood to be terrifying. She is the one who speaks to the earth and hears its answers. She is the woman who speaks too freely. Her power lies in her rejection of societal chains.

Though often imagined as male has roots in the shadow of the caregiver. In some traditions, the creature is a distorted version of a caregiver turned predator to keep children from wandering. The fear of being taken by the dark is often tied to the primal dread of being left alone. When the mother becomes the monster, it reflects a deeper anxiety: that safety can become captivity.

Today’s chilling tales continues this legacy. Films and novels now revisit these figures not to mock them but to reclaim them. The women in these stories are not simply scares—they are survivors of centuries of persecution. They are those silenced by fear, condemned by faith, erased by power. Folk horror gives them voice again, not as demons, but as survivors.

To understand women in folk horror is to understand how fear is gendered. Society has long associated the feminine with the irrational, the uncontrollable. And so when the night refuses to yield its secrets, the answer is often the female figure. But perhaps the true horror is not in her presence—it is in the truth that we turned her into a fiend to avoid facing the truth she carries.