Of witches, manananggals, and ghosts: Why the monster is always a woman

THEY warned us about the monsters hiding in the dark. Sharp teeth. Red eyes. Long nails. But no one said that the real monster would look just like us. 

Or worse— that they would be us. 

We’ve always known what to fear. The creature that slithers, stalks, and feasts on flesh. But somehow, the scariest stories are the ones with the woman as a monster. Beautiful, deadly, vengeful. Hungry. Women who take up too much space. Women who want more than they are given. Women who are not afraid to bloody their hands once you dare touch them without permission. 

Because in horror— and honestly, in life— nothing is more terrifying than a woman who refuses to be caged. 

Across centuries, across cultures, the most enduring monsters all start with the same thing: a woman. A woman who said no. A woman who said yes to the wrong thing. A woman who has too much. Too much desire. Too much ambition. Too much rage. 

And just like that, she’s no longer a person. She’s a story. A warning. A nightmare with a name. 

This phenomenon is what we call ‘The Monstrous Feminine’— this aching, ancient tradition of turning womanhood into something horrific. 

And once you start noticing it, you see it everywhere. On screen. In folklore. In the news. In the mirror. 

Too Sexual, Too Angry, Too Powerful

Although the phenomenon of the Monstrous Feminine already existed during the ancient times (think Medusa), the term was not fully coined until 1993, when film feminist scholar Barbara Creed fleshed it in her book, ‘The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis’. 

In it, Creed explains how horror, especially in films, often uses women— their bodies, desires, and roles— as sources of fear and terror. 

Photo from The Exorcist (1973)

Creed’s point is not just women’s constant appearance in horror— it’s that womanhood itself becomes the horror. The female body, its functions (like menstruations, pregnancy, and childbirth), its sexuality, its power, and its rebellion all get framed as something that is unnatural, terrifying, and monstrous. 

But why is that? Why do we keep turning women into monsters? What is it about their bodies that stirs something fearful deep within us?

Like many of her predecessors in film analysis, Creed’s idea of the ‘Monstrous Feminine’ was built on the foundation of psychoanalysis, particularly the concept of the ‘abject’— the things that disturb boundaries (most likely cultural ones). 

To better understand the concept of the abject, imagine this: when we are born, we are free from the social and cultural constraints that bind adults. For example, drinking milk from our mother is not icky nor is it looked down upon— because that’s what babies are supposed to do! There’s nothing inherently sexual or inappropriate about the act. 

But as we grow and have our own sense of identity, we are put in a box by society. This box has walls that tell us what to do and what ‘not’ to do. What’s acceptable, and what is prohibited. And the window from this box colors the way we perceive things outside our confinement. 

Through this lens, the mother’s body transforms. It’s no longer simply a source of nourishment. In a patriarchal society, the female body—breasts included—becomes sexualized, scrutinized, and weighed down with meaning. What was once natural becomes taboo. It becomes abject—something we push away because it makes us uncomfortable, blurring the lines between what we consider pure and impure, acceptable and forbidden.

And this is exactly why the Monstrous Feminine unnerves us. These figures don’t just break the rules—they cross the very boundaries our culture works hard to keep in place, especially when it comes to women. 

In a world where the male body is treated as the default, the female body becomes othered. Strange. Alien. Monstrous. They bleed, they desire, they devour. They refuse to stay in the box society built for them—and that’s what makes them terrifying.

When Horror Wears a Filipina Face

You know these women. 

The one who waits by the balete tree at night, crying for the injustice done to her. 

The one who flies through the dark, her torso severed from her legs. 

The one who curses under her breath, blamed for every misfortune that befalls the village. 

In the Philippines, not all of our monsters are women. But the ones we fear the most, the ones we still whisper about, almost always are. Women who crossed a line. Women who wanted too much. Women who refused to stay quiet. 

So we turned them into cautionary tales. Dressed them up in wings and white dresses. Gave them teeth and curses. 

And just like in other cultures, our fear of them stems from the fact that they refuse to be what we expect. 

But it wasn’t always this way. In pre-colonial Philippines, women stood as equals to men—at times, even holding greater power.

Take the Babaylan, for example—a spiritual leader, a healer, a woman whose authority commanded the respect of datus. Back then, knowledge of the body, of nature, of the divine—these were not seen as dangerous traits. They were sacred. They made her essential.

Which, of course, made her a threat in the eyes of the colonizers.

A woman with power, influence, and knowledge that couldn’t be controlled? There was only one way to deal with that: turn her into something to fear.

Some scholars argue that the figure of the aswang became gendered as part of a colonial strategy—to demonize and dismantle the influence of powerful women like the babaylans. 

In her study “Performing the Body in Filipino Narratives: The Manananggal (Viscera Sucker) in Colonial Literature,” Hope Yu of the University of San Carlos explains how the manananggal—a woman who splits her body in half, grows wings, and preys on pregnant women—was created to undermine and delegitimize the authority of babaylans in pre-colonial Philippines.

“Where the babaylan was formerly held in esteem for her skills as a midwife, healer and prophet, as the asuang she now “drains the fetus out of the womb” and kills infants in her desire for flesh. This ‘opposition between life taking and life giving, between killing and birthing, is underscored by the self-segmenting process in which the reproductive half is left behind while the upper half is engaged in death-dealing activity.’”

Hope Yu, Performing the Body in Filipino Narratives: The Manananggal (Viscera Sucker) in Colonial Literature, p. 90

Behind the image of the manananggal lies the colonial idea of what a woman should—and shouldn’t be. As Yu puts it, the batlike wing of manananggal is a symbol of “isolation, independence, and non-conformity”— things that only turn dangerous in a woman’s hand. 

The splitting of her body is more than just an unnatural distortion of anatomy—it becomes a symbol of her willful rejection of motherhood, a refusal to be confined by the roles expected of her. In a society shaped by Christian ideals of womanhood, where the Virgin Mary embodies purity and maternal sacrifice, the manananggal stands as her dark, defiant opposite.

We see the echoes of this defiance in other figures of the monstrous feminine, from other eras of Philippine history. 

The mangkukulam and mambabarang—our local witches—are women persecuted for wielding powers that come not from a divine male god, but from nature itself. They draw strength from the primal and the untamed, echoing a time before man claimed dominion over the natural world. Their knowledge stands outside patriarchal control, making them dangerous in the eyes of those who seek to govern both women and the wild.

Even the white lady, a ghost doomed to wander in her flowing dress, is often the tragic result of resisting power. More than just a spirit, she is frequently imagined as a woman wronged—assaulted, betrayed, silenced—and in death, her lingering presence becomes a form of vengeance. She haunts not just the streets or the trees, but the fragile peace of a society that failed to contain her in life.

Turning Horror Into Her Story

They called her a monster— so she became one. 

For centuries, women have been cast as creatures of fear— witches, manananggals, angry ghosts.This was the patriarchy’s way of punishing them for stepping outside the line. 

But what happens when women stop running from these labels and start wearing them like armor? 

Across movements and media, the monstrous feminine has been reclaimed— especially during the start of the second wave of feminist movement in cinema in the early 2000s. The once figure of terror was revolutionized by women directors, who recognized that the ultimate abject is not the women’s power but the male aggression and violence that suppress them. 

Once the figure of terror, the Monstrous Feminine is now the symbol of resistance. 

Photo from Promising Young Woman (2020)

We see it in films like Promising Young Woman, where the femme fatale isn’t the horror—she’s the reckoning, reclaiming power in a culture that protects abusers.

We see it in Jennifer’s Body, where monstrosity doesn’t arise from the girl herself, but from a system that punishes her for existing outside the bounds of heteronormativity.

We see it in The Babadook, which exposes the weight of motherhood, unraveling the myth that women must suffer in silence and saintliness.

So maybe the real fear was never the monsters themselves, but what they represent—women who refuse to shrink, who dare to hunger, who take up space in a world that prefers them silent, small, and obedient. 

And if being monstrous means reclaiming that power, maybe it’s time we stop running from the creature in the dark and start becoming her instead.