Splatterpunk! Extreme horror! Oh my!

Two subgenres broaden their audience to include more women and queer people

Story by Hope Rasa

Illustrations by Grace Matson

Walk around downtown or surf the web a little, and you’ll be inundated with ads portraying perfect, shiny people. They’re flashing flawless, white grins — just gleaming at the prospect of eating a soggy hamburger from Wendy’s or receiving half off on their first month with T-Mobile. This faux-happy narrative surrounding us has sent some people looking for counterculture.

Enter Splatterpunk. Coined by author David Schow in 1986 during the Reagan era, Splatterpunk emerged as a literary rebellion against growing conservatism, the glorification of “family values,” and the flood of cheesy 1980s horror films. 

Splatterpunk and extreme horror are two similar subgenres of horror. Extreme horror pushes boundaries with excessive violence. Splatterpunk does too, but with social commentary baked in. Both subgenres can be literature, films, video games — you name it. Books and movies are the big ones. 

Historically, women and queer people haven’t had a large presence in Splatterpunk and extreme horror. The often violent and gratuitous depiction of women in Splatterpunk and extreme horror is at least partially to blame. Women and queer people are different groups with their own individual histories and experiences of oppression. However, in Splatterpunk and extreme horror, they’ve both been excluded in much the same way. Now, more women and queer people are getting involved with these fandoms and emerging as prominent creators. 

Koda Loehrmann, co-vice president of Western Washington University’s queer horror club, Scream Queens, said there’s a massive community of queer horror fans. “A lot of it comes from the ‘othering’ and the queer-coding of a lot of horror movie characters,” Loehrmann said. In “LGBT History Month, Queerness and Horror,” a blog post from the University of Aberdeen, Lucy Holmes writes, “So many of us relate to the monsters of the horror world because at one point or another we too have felt ostracized by society simply for existing.” 

Loehrmann believes queer creators are also influential in horror. “The foundations of the genre were inherently queer,” Loehrmann said. “A lot of the early writers, directors, actors were Queer — of course, closeted at the time.” Despite how influential queer creators have been in horror, they remain disproportionately underrepresented in Splatterpunk and extreme horror. 

The genres are also male-dominated. Look at the Splatterpunk Awards — presented at Killercon — no women won any of the five categories in their first two years, 2018 and 2019. In 2024, two of the seven authors who received awards were women. Kenzie Jennings, author of the 2019 novel “Reception” and English professor at Polk State College in Florida, has received several Splatterpunk Award nominations. “Lately, we’ve had a number of women win Splatterpunk Awards; that’s been quite late in the game,” Jennings said. That’s despite women making up 60% of horror fans, according to a CivicScience survey. Yet from 1988 to 2017, only 5.9% of horror film directors were women. 

Women have influenced the genre from the start. Clara Reeve’s “The Old English Baron” in 1777 is often cited as the first horror novel written by a woman, just 12 years after “The Castle of Otranto” in 1765, considered the first horror novel overall. Regardless of their influence, women remain a minority behind the screens of horror films.

While they’re also in the minority, several LGBTQ+ authors have won Splatterpunk Awards as well. Eric LaRocca, a gay author best known for his book “Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke," which won a Splatterpunk Award for Best Novella in 2022. 

Jennings said preconceived notions of what Splatterpunk and extreme horror are like can keep some women and queer readers from exploring the genre. “There’s this idea that it’s only written by men — only a specific kind of men -– it’s got SA (sexual assault) in it and it’s just morbid, sick fantasy. That’s not the case at all,” Jennings said. 

Brutality against women is an issue many, not exclusively women and queer people, have with Splatterpunk and extreme horror. Even people who already consider themselves fans of Splatterpunk and extreme horror can have problems with the sometimes violently misogynistic themes. 

Jackson Prandy-O’Dell is a horror movie fan who dabbles in extreme horror, like the SAW series. Prandy-O’Dell watched the first two Terrifier movies and disliked them so much that he didn’t care to see the third. “It’s very aggressive toward women,” Prandy-O’Dell said. “The people who were writing it were just sadistic. There was no plot whatsoever; It was literally just kills.” 

Splatterpunk and extreme horror media like the Terrifier films, with extreme violence against women, are still around. However, Jennings believes things are changing. “But now, I think that those sorts of problematic themes are starting to go away,” Jennings said. “...We’ve got a gamut of authors now, it’s not just men who are writing this. I think that plays a big part in it.” 

When Jennings initially got into extreme horror, she read some of those books with violence against women in them, and she said that it wasn’t gratuitous. Jennings said it didn’t feel like that content was just there for shock value. “That’s always the debate, ‘Well, if it’s got SA in it, is it needed? Is it gratuitous or is it necessary to advance the plot?’” Jennings said. “Sometimes it isn’t.” 

She added that the women authors she knows deliberately stay away from themes of sexual assault and violence against women altogether. “It’s helpful that we have women and queer writers coming in now and saying, ‘we’re not doing this anymore. This is not representing what this subgenre (of extreme horror) is all about,” Jennings said. 

That may be why Splatterpunk and extreme horror have been diversifying lately. “People watching us write and put out work that doesn’t have SA in it — it broadens our reader base for sure,” Jennings said. She also said fewer depictions of gendered and sexual violence can make people feel safer reading these books. Splatterpunk and extreme horror are becoming more popular in general, which could be another reason they’re attracting a more diverse crowd lately. Terrifier 3, an extreme horror film, had the fourth-highest domestic box office performance in October 2024.

Women and queer people are still a minority in Splatterpunk and extreme horror, even though more are getting engaged. Queer people are especially underrepresented. “There aren’t enough Queer voices in the subgenre,” she said. “There are more women coming in, but I think there needs to be larger [Queer] representation.” The same goes for people of color, who have seen little representation in Splatterpunk and extreme horror up to and including now. You can play eeny, meeny, miny, moe with almost any list of Splatterpunk/extreme horror authors, and chances are you’ll land on a white person. You have to search for people of color in these spaces. 

There has been progress. The presence of people of color is growing as the scene evolves. Creators like Candace Nola, a two-time Splatterpunk Award-winning author and Black woman, getting into the scene might make more people feel comfortable as well. Lack of diversity in Splatterpunk/extreme horror and offensive themes in some of these works has cost the subgenres a lot of fans and creators. There are so many people of color, queer people and women who would love Splatterpunk and extreme horror, but haven’t gotten involved because they don’t feel welcome. That hasn’t been solved, but things are moving in the right direction