Image: Isabel Peppard’s Butterflies is a very fine work.
Although yet to receive the final, lethal stake through the heart, the idea of horror as purely the domain of black t-shirted teenage boys with mummy issues is certainly in its death throes. Once assumed to be purely the domain of hypermasculine sadism, horror’s long history of exploring the feminine – be it through women themselves or via the feminized Othering of non-white bread figures like Bela Lugosi or Boris Karloff – has in recent decades come increasingly to the fore.
