5 Reasons a Tradwife Makes a Great Horror Villain

My upcoming novel, The Ravine, started with one image: a tradwife horror villain.

Before plot, before setting, before I even knew who was getting sacrificed and why, there she was—radiant as a sunrise, drifting through my imagination in her long prairie dress, blond braid swinging.

(The Challenges of Balancing Character With Plot.)

Holding an axe.

This wasn’t a random aesthetic choice. It wasn’t, “Oh, it’d be so cute to give the bad guy a sourdough starter, two goats, and a bunch of little kids.” No. My entire book grew around the bitter little pit of that image because it just felt... right. That image was the engine for a story exploring themes of motherhood, tradition, and vicious betrayal, and it never budged.

Love them, hate them, or love-to-hate them... tradwives have become a cultural fascination. They’re all at once sickening, enviable, infuriating, and magnetic.

They are also, I submit, creepy as hell.

Maybe we’re just jealous. Maybe we want a big, thick slice of whatever they’re having. Or maybe we feel weird about their seemingly boundless fertility. Our culture has always been terrified of female reproduction, and tradwives’ pregnant bellies and still-damp newborns and “placenta rituals” are disquietingly on display.

Or maybe we’re all just annoyed by tradwife hypocrisy. Despite the claims about being submissive homebodies, they’re brands—oftentimes with enormous net worths and social reaches that outpace small news outlets. We’re not supposed to think about that, though, in the same way we aren’t supposed to think about the camera operator in a wildlife documentary.

It’s also a fact that gothic horror fiction, since its birth, has loved to dress a girl in something ankle-length, drop her into a castle in a rainstorm, and call it a day. But those gothic girls are heroines. They’re victims. The tradwife in my mind’s eye, on the other hand, was no victim—and she was definitely up to no good.

Fiction writers try to craft villains who electrify their stories, and there’s even a list of screenwriters’ Epic Villain Traits that I refer to when I’m stuck. As I wrote The Ravine, it dawned on me: Tradwife influencers have all the qualities that make for an amazing villain.

First off, a great villain needs to be the hero of their own story. They need to fully believe they’re the good guy. And isn’t the trademark of a social media tradwife her unwavering lack of doubt about the One True Way to be a woman?

It’s a steely self-assurance that’s been marinating in a brine of algorithm echo chambers, holier-than-thou religiosity, and, often, a spotty education. She delivers lectures about “rejecting capitalism” as her content keeps TikTok and Meta running. She tells her audience of millions that she’s “anti-feminist” and that it’s best to be a quiet, stay-at-home kind of girl.

That lack of self-awareness, combined with inflexible belief systems, is one of the most terrifying traits a villain—or anyone—can have. It makes them remorseless. Which makes them unstoppable.

Second, great villains kind of maybe have a good point. And so do tradwives. Housework is undervalued. Gender dynamics are a mess. Modern life is an existential crisis, in the special way that makes you scour Zillow for cabins in remote mountain towns. So yeah, it’s tempting to look backward and wonder if things were better long ago.

Third, a great villain is smart and capable. Social media tradwives may turn their noses up at college educations for women. But when it comes to pulling those algorithmic levers? Selling colostrum protein powder for 40 dollars a pound? Convincing millions of women it’s safe to drink raw milk while pregnant? They’ve got this.

Fourth—and this is specifically about folk horror stories like mine (think The Wickerman but with tradwives in the woods)—the villain has an unwholesome obsession with the past. Tradwife discourse frames the past as something idyllic and pure, but the past has its grubby flip side: questionable hygiene. Irrational rituals. Uncharted wilderness. Forgotten gods. And awful things buried in the dirt you wish you could unsee.

Last, all great villains have a fatal flaw that leads to their undoing. Bonus points if it’s the sinister underbelly of one of their more positive traits. Once again, social media tradwives have got it covered. Because what’s the dark side of that steely self-assurance? Delusion.

If a tradwife villain can’t fathom being wrong, what happens when she actually is? How far down the wrong path will she go? A woman who never questions her worldview doesn’t course-correct; she doubles down. Then doubles down again. Her confidence becomes a runaway train, her mistakes become doctrine, and her conviction becomes the engine of the total and complete disaster she’s about to unleash.

Which is exactly why nothing feels more deliciously terrifying, more culturally relevant, or more inevitable than a tradwife with an axe. She’s the perfect villain for right now.

Actually—and as ever—she’s just a little too perfect.

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