I Drink Of My Sisters
by Kim Morrison
There’s no denying that the horror genre can be a difficult place for women. More often than not, these films feature a male antagonist stalking and slashing groups of young people which frequently feature various women in states of distress and often undress. However, that’s not to say that women aren’t viewed as powerful elements of horror movies. While a lot of women may be taken down by the killer, it is usually the ‘final girl’ who defeats the baddie in the last act and survives to see the credits roll.
Horror has proved time and again that a single woman can be a movie monster’s worst nightmare, with characters like Ripley from Alien (1979), Laurie Strode from Halloweeen (1978), Jen from Revenge (2017), and Erin from You’re Next (2011) all taking down their attackers and coming out on top.
If that’s the outcome when one woman takes on the bad guy, imagine how powerful women who join together and fight can be? Women are a force of nature in horror films, and therefore the bonds of sisterhood between women, whether they are biological sisters, sorority sisters, or even strong friends, is one that should not be messed with.
Ginger Snaps (2000)
A perfect example of the sisterly bond in horror movies is Ginger Snaps, which centres around Ginger and Brigitte, two outcast sisters who rely on each other to make it through high school and embarrassing family dinners. However, when Ginger gets bitten by a werewolf and gets her period on the same night, Brigitte feels her sister pulling away from her for the first time.
Ginger and Brigitte don’t have the best relationship with their mother, even though she does try to talk to them about periods, and wants to be a part of their life. This is something else which pushes the two girls closer together, with Brigitte actually taking on the more motherly role to try and steer Ginger towards making better choices. Ginger, meanwhile, acts more as a protector towards Brigitte, using her strength and her aggression to get rid of people she feels are threatening her sister, such as their high school bully and the janitor.
The way Ginger begins to act towards her younger sister would be enough to push most people away, but Ginger and Brigitte’s strong bond and the fact they have been friends their entire life (with Ginger only a year older Brigitte) are what keep Brigitte fighting as hard as she can to save Ginger. Not only does she want to prevent her from permanently turning into a werewolf, but she needs to hang on to the only other person in this world that she feels understands her.
The Craft (1996)
Not sisters in the traditional sense, The Craft tells the story of a coven of teenage witches who welcome fellow outcast Sarah into their group when she starts at their high school. The girls all have very different issues to deal with, including racist bullying, body confidence, family issues at home, and grief over past traumas, and it’s the need for others to understand and support them through these difficulties that draws the girls together.
The truth is no one else in the coven can understand the problems the others are going through because each issue is incredibly specific to each witch. However, they support each other because they know what it’s like to suffer through something by themselves and recognise that having the support of their fellow witches will help ease the mental load of dealing with it alone. It’s this which brings them together and feeling safe in the surroundings of their coven; they turn to magic to try and solve the problems they are unable to handle by themselves.
Even though the coven eventually falls apart because Nancy, Rochelle, and Bonnie start to abuse their magic, there’s no denying how important the friendship of the girls is to Sarah. These girls allow Sarah to be herself for the first time and share details of her natural witchcraft, the death of her mother, and the struggles of her mental health issues in a way she’s never been able to before. This means when things do turn sour at the end of the film, Sarah can draw on her inner strength and power and remind herself that she strong enough to beat whatever is thrown at her.
Patchwork (2015)
Much like The Craft, not all examples of sisterhood in horror are perfect the entire time. In Patchwork, Jennifer, Ellie, and Madeleine are all attacked, and they wake up to find they’ve been sewn together into one body to create a sort of Frankenstein’s Monster-type creature. Understandably they have a hard time dealing with the trauma of what has been done to them and have to now share their body with two other people, with all three women wanting to deal with the situation in their own unique way.
While the women spend a lot of the film arguing and clashing over who gets to control their body, it’s when they start to work together as one being that the sisterhood angle really comes to the forefront. Each woman has past issues to deal with, which explain why they were alone and unhappy the night they were attacked. Sharing a consciousness which the other, very different women, allows each to see how they can tackle their problems and be happier in their existence. They also help each other through the newly-developed body issues they have to collectively deal with their newly stitched-together appearance.
Finally, the women work together as one being to hunt down the man responsible for their murders and stitching them together. They need to put aside all their past difference and form a succinct person in order to fight and defeat him, as any internal conflict at this point would surely see them defeated.
Practical Magic (1998)
In Practical Magic (1998), sisters Sally and Gillian have a strong bond after the trauma they faced as children when both their parents died. Gillian moves away from their aunts’ house to follow her heart and leave the more sensible Sally behind. However, before they part, the two share a blood oath to ensure that nothing affects their closeness. Even though Gillian is gone for a large portion of Sally’s life, Sally comes running the minute she senses her sister is in trouble. While Gillian seems to cause nothing but trouble for Sally, Sally is always there when her sister needs her.
That’s not to say that Gillian doesn’t add anything to the relationship. She allows Sally to see that she can’t let the grief from the death of her husband affect the lives of her two daughters. She also helps Sally embrace her witchy side, which she has been neglecting for years.
Practical Magic shows that the two sisters work best when they are together and supporting each other, and in the end, it’s their blood oath which saves Gillian from her undead boyfriend and breaks the curse that has been on the Owens family for hundreds of years. It shows us the love between the two sisters is much stronger and more powerful than anything else, and while Gillian may have been hunting for her one true love all these years, it’s really been waiting for her at home this whole time.
Jennifer’s Body (2009)
Jennifer’s Body is the story of a teenage girl who ends up turning into a succubus after a virgin sacrifice gone wrong, but the heart of the story follows the friendship of Jennifer and Needy. Despite seeming to have nothing in common, the girls have been friends since childhood. It’s a friendship that those on the outside, including Needy’s boyfriend, can’t understand and yet it endures through the murky waters of high school.
Needy takes on the sensible role in the duo, with Jennifer often talking her into doing things Needy wouldn’t choose to do by herself, like sneaking out on a school night to see the band Low Shoulder perform at a local bar. Jennifer is impulsive and decides to leave with the band rather than stick with Needy, despite Needy’s protests.
Much like Ginger Snaps, Needy is left to deal with the fact that her best friend is turning into a monster. Rather than turn her back on her, Needy does her best to figure out what is wrong with Jennifer and save her. The strength of their past relationship is enough to allow Needy to see past the monstrous side of Jennifer and try to do what she can to bring her back.
Even in her transforming state, Jennifer tries to keep herself tethered to the real world through her relationship with Needy. She goes to her for help when she is struggling and shares the story of what happened to her in the woods. However, Jennifer seems to recognise that not even Needy’s love can save her this time around, as she decides to fully embrace her new existence.
The Descent (2005)
The Descent follows a group of extreme-sport loving friends who meet up in America for a spelunking holiday. Things start to go wrong quite quickly after the women descend underground, as it turns out they are exploring an uncharted cave system which also happens to be home to flesh-eating creatures.
The bonds of sisterhood are stretched to the limit in this film. As the women struggle to survive, Sarah discovers that one of her closest friends, Juno, was not only having an affair with her husband before he died but also left fellow friend Beth to die, after Juno accidentally injured her during a fight with the creatures.
Juno kept her distance from Sarah after her husband and daughter were killed in a car accident, and this has already put a strain on their friendship. When Sarah finds out the real reason for Juno’s separating herself from the group, the grief is too much for Sarah to take. She also has to kill Beth after Juno mortally injured her and left her to the mercy of the monsters.
Beth’s death and Juno’s betrayal spurs on Sarah’s will to survive, and she proceeds to try and find a way out of the caves with renewed gusto. While Sarah may end up with fewer friends than she started with, it’s the effect these strong friendships have on her that allows her to escape in the end (depending on which version of the ending you’ve seen).
Psycho (1960)
Sisterhood in horror is something that has been a key part of the genre for decades and is a central part of the story in the classic slasher Psycho from 1960. While Marion is the main character for the first half of the movie, when she dies the torch passes over to her sister Lila.
Marion fled Pheonix because she stole a large sum of money from her workplace, and while a lot of people are looking for, Lila is the one pretty much leading the search. First of all, she heads across the country to where Marion’s boyfriend, Sam, lives to find out if he knows anything about the situation. When a private investigator tracks Marion’s movements to the Bates Motel, Lila convinces Sam into heading out there too so they can finally find out what happened to her sister.
Lila is incredibly brave and focussed when it comes to trying to find her sister. When the private investigator disappears, and the local police don’t think it’s worth going out to the Bates Motel to see what’s going on, Lila still decides to head to out there to look into things herself. While Sam distracts Norman, she even heads into the Bates’ family home to have a look around for herself.
There’s no one that can put Lila off her mission to find out what has happened to her sister, and she is willing to put herself in potentially dangerous situations when everyone else has failed her to ensure that she solves the mystery of what happened to Marion.
Black Christmas (2019)
The third entry in the Black Christmas (1974) series, and the second remake of the original movie, I believe the 2019 version of Black Christmas gives us the best representation of sisterhood of the entire series. Based around Hawthorne College’s Mu Kappa Epsilon sorority, a masked figure is stalking and killing sorority sisters as the Christmas holidays approach.
One of the sisters, Riley, is dealing with the fact she was sexually assaulted by a fraternity brother, who managed to escape any real punishment while she is accused of lying about it by everyone apart from her best friends.
When other sorority sisters start going missing, Riley has trouble getting anyone to believe her, including campus security and the faculty, so it comes down to her fellow sisters to investigate further and find out what is going on. When it turns out that this is happening to all the sororities across the college, the different groups of sisters bands together because they are the only ones who believe the situation.
The women know that they are the only ones that can do what needs to be done to find out what happened to their missing sisters and save themselves from a similar fate.
The Witches of Eastwick (1987)
The Witches of Eastwick is about a group of friends who perhaps have a bit more natural magical ability than they are aware of. When the three women get together for a night of drinking, they accidentally end up summoning the Devil in the form of Daryl Van Horne while talking about their perfect man.
Sensing their power, Daryl ends up seducing all three of the women, and not being shy about it either. This obviously causes a lot of conflict between the group of friends, but after they discover their impressive powers during a heated game of tennis, they agree to share Daryl and have a bit of fun.
However, things start to get dark quite quickly with Daryl, and the witches realise that they need to get rid of him in order to return the town to normality. Once the women are fully united in one cause, they team up and use the full potential of their powers to cast a spell to get rid of Daryl once and for all.
Daryl relies on the women either fighting with each other or seeing him as the only powerful one in the relationship to maintain his control over them. It’s the women seeing the power of themselves and each other that allows them to band together and defeat Daryl.
Raw (2016)
Raw is perhaps one of the most complicated examples of a relationship between two sisters. The film begins with Justine attending the same veterinary school where her older sister, Alexia, is currently a student and where her parents met when they were young. As well as the pressure of living up to her family’s impressive reputation at the school, Justine has to put up with a number of hazing rituals as a first-year student. One of these sees her having to eat a raw rabbit kidney despite the fact her entire family are lifelong vegetarians.
Unfortunately for Justine, eating a little bit of meat gives her the taste for it, and she finds herself craving raw chicken. After a bikini waxing accident which sees Alexia chopping her finger off, Justine ends up eating the dismembered digit, with Alexia catching her in the act.
However, it seems that Justine’s condition is not as unique as she first thought, with Alexia experiencing similar cravings. Rather than being angry or disgusted at her sister for eating her finger, Alexia instead takes Justine under her wing and gives her tips on how to control her cravings.
Alexia has clearly been doing this a lot longer than Justine, and so she tries to normalise it for her. However, the sisters’ differing personalities means this does create some conflict between the two. Despite this, they try to navigate this shared problem together, and their bond grows a lot stronger as things escalate quite wildly at the end of the film.
The Rage: Carrie 2 (1999)
The Rage: Carrie 2 gives a unique example of sisterhood in horror, as we look at the relationship between best friends and high school outcasts Rachel and Lisa. Lisa jumps off the roof of the high school when she discovers the football team have been playing a game with the female students in order to score the most points.
It’s this traumatic event which reawakens Rachel’s telekinetic powers, which she tries to keep under control as the movie progresses. Rachel spends the rest of the film trying to ensure justice for her friend Lisa while everyone else is quite happy to sweep her death under the carpet because she wasn’t popular. Rachel knows she doesn’t have much power within the school, and her family isn’t rich and powerful like the football players, but that doesn’t stop he fighting for her friend and trying to get justice for her.
As Rachel’s powers start to take over, her matching rose tattoo with Lisa starts to spread all over her body, with the vine crawling up her arms and face to represent her growing abilities. Even though we lose Lisa in the opening minutes of the film, the importance of her relationship with Rachel is felt right until the end, and including the tattoo in Rachel’s final transformation reminds us how key a part Lisa plays in the story.
Black Rock (2012)
Black Rock follows friends Sarah, Abby, and Lou as they head off for a weekend of camping in their hometown to try and bond again. Sarah arranges the trip, but after Abby and Lou fell out years earlier, they are less than keen to participate in the holiday. However, they end up agreeing to keep Sarah happy.
Once on the island, the women encounter three local men on a hunting trip that they knew from their youth and decide to spend the night hanging out together. When Abby heads into the woods with one of the men, he tries to attack her, and Abby ends up killing him.
Now stuck on a remote island with two men equipped with guns, the women have to fight for their lives in order to try and make it home alive. When the men kill Sarah, it means Abby and Lou are left by themselves to try and survive.
Their shared grief for the death of their friend and their joint will to survive brings the two women closer together. After they spend the night huddled together for warmth, and find a buried time capsule from their childhood, they air out their differences from the past and form a plan to take the men down.
Their situation allows them to see that their friendship is more important than an argument they had over a boyfriend when they were teenagers. They then join together to form one cohesive unit. The remaining men, however, argue over what to do, are overly confident about killing the women, and separate from each other, which ends up being their downfall.
Horror movies allow us an insight into various different types of sisterhood that characters can experience. They are not always perfect and may end up breaking down due to some of the terrible events which can crop up in the horror genre, but these relationships are vital to the journey that the characters need to take to tell these stories effectively.
These relationships are unique, even if they are not sisters related by blood, and give us an insight into the role of women in horror outside that of the final girl.
