Forests, Fear, and Femicide: Images of Unbelonging in Rural Noir Visuals

by: Trish Black , March 24, 2026

It’s No Walk In The Park…

Several years ago, I relocated from an English coastal city to a semi-rural market town in South Wales encircled by mountains, hills, woodlands, and fields. After settling into my new location, I was keen to explore my surroundings and decided to visit a local stretch of woodland to create photographic work for my research project. As I ventured farther away from the public car park, I felt a sense of unease. My sightlines diminished as the light became slightly more subdued, and the exit routes I initially identified became less visible as the foliage thickened. Burdened by heavy camera equipment, I realised that I would be at a disadvantage if I needed to make a hasty retreat. Feeling apprehensive and agitated, my body tensed and my heartbeat quickened as the leaves above me danced in the wind, and the creaking of the branches swaying and moaning intensified. I froze and instinctively scanned my surroundings for both real and imagined threats. I held my breath listening intently for the presence of a man, any man who may have been out walking in my immediate vicinity. Fortunately, I was alone. While driving home later that day, I contemplated why being a solitary female in a forest or woodland elicited a sympathetic response known as hypervigilance. The following morning, upon further examination of my research, I came across the tragic case of Jane Marie Prichard, a twenty-eight-year-old student pursuing the final year of her master’s degree in botany. During her studies, she embarked on several research field trips to Blackbird State Forest in Delaware, United States, but on 19 September 1986, while undertaking a solo field trip, Jane Marie Prichard was brutally murdered, and her partially clothed body was discovered by hikers in the forest (Partington 2021). To date, the perpetrator has evaded capture and prosecution.

Forests: Malevolence and Murder 

Attitudes towards forests in the Western hemisphere have become a cultural dichotomy, fluctuating between ‘contrasting images of the natural and supernatural, places of refuge and ambush, of purity and defilement, good and evil’, as described by Ghazoul (2015). Forests are often regarded as enigmatic and unstable environments that can elicit feelings of both dread and awe in those who venture inside. Tales of the deep dark woods linger in the recesses of our collective imagination, invading our wildest dreams and haunting our darkest nightmares, and as Morrison (2017: 260) states, it is landscapes that are ‘a work of the mind, and thus any consideration of forest history, from the scientific to the humanistic, contends with rich cultural imaginations of forests.’  Elizabeth Parker (2020: 13) reveals that ‘…our imaginations through the centuries provide us with an extensive history of tales to fear the woods’, and Sarah Maitland (2013: 200) adds that deep within the minds of most adult rational human beings, there is a child who is terrified by the wild wood.’  Fear of the forest gradually permeated collective consciousness as humans increasingly distanced themselves from nature, a process that intensified during the eighteenth century, when workers relocated to expanding industrialised cities. The shift from an agrarian economy to a manufacturing economy fundamentally altered the social and economic landscapes of Great Britain. As Annabel Abbs (2021: 270) notes, for most of our evolutionary history, we thrived in natural environments, but the Industrial Revolution abruptly relocated millions of poor labourers from rural areas to dark, dirty, cramped, and dangerous inner-city factories, and consequently, we have ‘forgotten the deep physiological need of our bodies to be in nature.’  Subsequently, our inherent apprehension of the dark forest endures, and this vestige of a long-obscured primitive experience currently manifests as what Hackett and Harrington (2019: 27) describe as a subterranean terror that associates the forest ‘not with those who have died naturally or peacefully, but with those who have been murdered.’  Contemporary culture has effectively capitalised on our innate fear of the untamed wilderness by perpetuating and immortalising the forest as an archetype. Media representations propagate and showcase fictionalised narratives that depict the forest as a place of danger and threat, thereby rekindling our fear of that very space. This phenomenon, as Parker (2020: 13) elucidates, can be understood as a ‘symbiotic connection between our “natural” fears of the woods and our fictional creations about them.’ (2020: 13).

Forests and woodlands are often utilised as settings for a wide variety of contemporary crime thriller stories, functioning as a sinister backdrop for acts of brutality, violence, and murder. The rural nature of a setting is a crucial element in the classification of crime narratives known as rural noir, a subgenre of the noir category that has emerged as a descriptor for stories primarily set in non-urban spaces (Bell 2000). Many aspects of early noir narratives, particularly the portrayal of everyday life as harsh and violent, have been integrated into the aesthetics of green spaces. In these stories, crime scenes are relocated from bustling concrete cities and towns to dense forests and secluded woodlands, which prove as menacing and dangerous as poorly lit urban underpasses, dark alleyways, and desolate car parks (Fine 2019). The conflation of murder and malevolent forests prevails within a literary genre that proliferates the gender-specific configuration of public green spaces. Recurrent themes depicting graphic and sensationalised narratives of femicide persist alongside portrayals of forests and woodlands as killing grounds, where female corpses are unceremoniously discarded, concealed, or buried. By way of illustration, in 2015 Greg Olsen released a crime thriller novel titled The Girl in the Woods, which features the murder of a young girl whose corpse is stuffed into a garbage bag and discarded in the woods. The murder mystery author Marguerite Mooers published a crime novel in 2017 titled The Girl in the Woods, which recounts the tale of a young woman whose brutally murdered body is found in a woodland. The Swedish crime author Camilla Läckberg’s 2018 book The Girl in the Woods contains a plot that centres around the disappearance of a four-year-old girl, who goes missing in the woods from the very same spot where a young child was found murdered thirty years before, and Chris Culver’s 2019 book The Girl in the Woods describes how a young woman’s body is found at a camp site deep in the woods, while detectives are searching for two missing teenage girls. Jim Riley (2020) also released a crime novel titled The Girl in the Woods, which tells the story of a young woman named Rachel Chastain, whose corpse is discovered in the National Forest. The Girl in the Woods by American fiction author Patricia McDonald (2021) focuses on the unsolved murder of a young woman whose battered body is found in the woods, and the crime thriller The Girl in the Woods by A.J. Rivers (2021) describes how a young woman’s body is found in the woods, frozen to the ground. Book publishers often capitalise on the prevailing cultural climate by utilising popular marketing tactics to attract potential readers. Front book covers frequently repeat specific catchphrases or slogans, employing analogous images, styles, and colour schemes to emulate the commercial success of similar titles. Language can be used as a tool to infantilise, patronise, and deny women’s adulthood. The use of the descriptor ‘girl’ in each of the aforementioned book titles underscores this point, as Sood (2017) notes, it is the puerile representation of femininity that has ‘led to a stereotype of women being vulnerable, weak and childlike: thus, undermining them as adults and altering their position in relation to power in society.’

Fictional narratives that primarily concentrate on male violence against women and girls (abbreviated as ‘MVAWG’ hereafter for brevity) persist and thrive in the commercial book industry (Hannah 2018; Flood 2020). Crime fiction in particular features stories that depict graphic serial femicide, yet paradoxically, female authors not only dominate the crime thriller genre (LeBor 2020) but also constitute a larger proportion of its target audience (Vicary & Fraley 2010; Tuttle 2019; Talbot 2021). Women’s fascination with crime narratives has, in recent times, become a subject of online media and academic discourse, and various hypotheses have been proposed to explain why women are often described as avid consumers of crime fiction and true crime. In particular, true crime podcasts have attracted a predominantly female audience over the past decade, and in 2018, Boling and Hull (2018: 101) published research findings that revealed 73% of true crime podcast audiences were female in composition, adding that women were ‘significantly more likely than males to listen to podcasts for social interaction, to escape their daily lives, and because they have stronger voyeuristic tendencies.’  Diverse opinions infer that some women consume crime narratives to gain knowledge on self-protection and survival techniques or to evoke empathy by connecting with a woman’s shared susceptibility to male violence. Dickson (2019) and Cheng and Cait (2023) provide evidence to support this claim. Kuhn (1992: 31) suggests that women are either ‘adopting a masculine subject position [or] identifying with rather than objectifying the woman in the picture,’ and Bonn (2023) posits that female fans not only aim to humanise serial killers in an effort to comprehend their motivations, but also deliberately dehumanise them to establish a clear distinction between good and evil, human and monster; a dichotomy that is often present in sensationalised news media reports of real-life femicide. The growing fascination with visual crime narratives among female consumers exemplifies the contradictory nature inherent in these texts. It implies that the crime genre paradigm has fostered a distinct female gaze that draws women to engage with narratives of sexual violence and femicide as forms of popular entertainment and spectacle.

Do Judge A Book by its Cover! 

‘What if we really were supposed to judge (to acknowledge, to evaluate,  to define, to experience) books by their covers?’  (Alworth 2018: 1124).

In 2021, the book Industry in the United Kingdom published approximately 180,000 to 200,000 titles (Martin 2021). It is widely acknowledged that front covers are a vital element in the sale of books as they play a crucial role in attracting readers and influencing purchasing decisions (Stokman & Henrickx 1994; Leitão et al. 2018). Book covers have evolved into ‘highly visual and conceptualised means of communication’ (Drew and Sternberger 2005: 20). Consequently, innovative and diverse marketing strategies have become indispensable for the continued success of book-publishing companies in the current market, which is characterised by oversaturation. The front cover of a book often contains genre markers that visually represent the themes and content within, which are then communicated to the target audience. Furthermore, Schwark (2017: 1) maintains that ‘a simple image can convey more meaning than a written or oral account.’  Visual markers not only reflect the social currents of the time but also help sell books by creating a first impression that sets expectations for the ensuing narrative. However, as Lahiri (2016) observes, the front cover may not always accurately reflect the book’s tone and perspective. During a 2007 seminar titled All Points to the Arts held to commemorate the retirement of Sir John Tusa, writer and broadcaster Jessica Mann (n.d.) shared an anecdote involving the British author Joanna Hines. According to Hines, her new book featured a female corpse on the cover, which confused her because the murder victim in the story was a man. Her publisher explained that ‘…dead men don’t sell books. Dead and brutalised women do. In fact, readers gorge on the mutilated female body.’  Additionally, in an online newspaper article written by Lucy Crossley (2014), the highly acclaimed crime writer Val McDermid was quoted as saying, ‘publishers who used images featuring female victims on their front covers were merely doing what was necessary to attract readers.’

To date, I have amassed a collection of 500 book titles that feature paratextual art, characterised by a photographic composite or stock image on their front covers. These covers commonly depict a solitary female figure against a green space backdrop, portrayed as either fleeing towards or passively gazing into a nebulous abyss. These representations convey a gendered rhetoric designed to depict the violable individual as female, as illustrated in Figures 1 and 2.

Many current crime narratives are inspired by fairy tales, and rural noirs are no exception to this trend. Figures 1 and 2 show additional book covers that prominently feature female actors in red clothing, thereby establishing a visual connection to the character of Little Red Riding Hood from the traditional fairy tale. Fairy tales have evolved over time, influenced by the pervasive impact of popular culture, and have become firmly entrenched in the collective consciousness of contemporary society. As a result, they have become not only universally recognised archetypes but also powerful socialising narratives that shape our perceptions and beliefs (Orenstein 2002).

The Female Rückenfigur: There’s No Place Like Home!

Notably, Figs. 1 and 2 depict a female actor positioned in the central frame of the cover, her back turned to the viewer. These images have been reconstructed as a modern-day Rückenfigur, in which the actor is deliberately arranged either in a static pose facing a liminal landscape or in motion, running towards a vanishing perspective. The Rückenfigur motif is a compositional device dating back to the fourteenth century, employed to foreground a rear-facing figure who acts as a proxy for the viewer. Viewed from behind, the Rückenfigur serves as a metaphorical bridge, inviting the viewer to enter the frame and gaze upon the expansive landscape enclosed within the image. The Rückenfigur motif is typically associated with the renowned German Romantic era painter, Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840). Friedrich is celebrated for his portrayals of male Rückenfigur’s, who are often positioned within expansive, brooding, and sublime landscapes. His painting Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog (1818) is widely regarded as an exemplary representation of this particular German Romantic aesthetic. However, Friedrich also incorporated a female Rückenfigur within several of his paintings, namely, Woman on the Beach of Ruegen (1818), Woman Before the Setting Sun (1818 – 1820), and Woman at the Window (1822). Woman at the Window is a significant work due to its importance as a precursor to subsequent artworks by renowned artists such as Fritz von Uhde (1848 – 1911), Vilhelm Hammershøi (1864 – 1916), and Salvador Dalí (1904 – 1989), who all created female Rückenfigur’s relegated to carceral domestic spaces. Spellerei (n.d. 7) underscores the relegation of Friedrich’s isolated female Rückenfigur to a ‘tame and bounded environment.’ This is emphasised by the framing of the small window, which confines the Rückenfigur within a myopic view that serves as a symbolic threshold between the private and public realm. Additionally, Koerner (2009) suggests that the painting’s pictorial symmetry does not signify a connection with or immersion in the landscape, but rather a separation from it. Contained within a liminal domestic space, the female Rückenfigur is reinterpreted as a ‘classic Gothic trope of the imprisoned woman’ (Fahey 2016: 74), and as she gazes out onto the world from within a ‘heterotopia of confinement’ (ibid.: 75), her perspective is shaped and defined by the constraints of her surroundings; thus, the Woman at the Window becomes the antithesis to the heroic posturing of Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog (see Fig. 3 and 4).

Within the realm of contemporary culture, the female Rückenfigur motif has transcended the limitations of its historical domestic setting and is now featured in works by artists such as Elina Brotherus’ Der Wanderer, 2003, and Helen Sear’s Inside The View, 2005. However, with this newfound freedom, the female Rückenfigur has been appropriated by popular crime fiction and placed within the central framework of book covers and immersed in a myriad of gendered landscapes of fear. Exemplified as a violable woman and depicted as prey, the female Rückenfigur is reimagined as everywoman representing you, me, and all women. Subsequently, as both Rückenfigur and consumer, female readers are enticed into images that foster a voyeuristic connection between themselves and the unseen malefactor.

 Lights, Camera, Action: A Potpourri of Femicidal Entertainment

‘Images specifically of violence against women provide contradictory and problematic material. Are they evidence of the misogyny of a mainstream cinema that revels in the subjugation of women? Or are they graphic and honest depictions of the reality of violence against women?'(Jermyn 2004: 153).

The dominance of the visual is not only socially and culturally reinforced by how Western societies are designed to function, but has become more pronounced since the advent of visual technology. Television has become the predominant storyteller of the modern era and has consistently broadcast ‘a system of messages that provides patterns of images and repetitive stable ideologies that are practically unavoidable’ (García-Castro & Pérez-Sánchez 2018: 2). Tapping into the zeitgeist of the last two decades, streaming service providers have broadcast rural noir dramas that have cultivated the corpse as female and effectively utilised forests as archetypal cinematic backdrops to aestheticised acts of femicide that have become increasingly graphic and eroticised in nature. The use of visual rhetorical elements in rural noir narratives frequently portrays the forest and the female body as a locus of fear, where depictions of the forest’s wilderness and the wildness of female sexuality become intertwined, manifesting as abstract concepts to be conquered, tamed, consumed, and discarded. According to Parker (2020: 28), there is a recurring tendency to ‘situate our monsters amidst the trees—to fill the forest’s depths with hideous forms of flesh and blood.’  This, she explains, constitutes a standard pattern of ‘monstrous geography.’

In the United Kingdom, both Netflix and Amazon Prime have aired numerous highly acclaimed crime dramas including Dark Forest (2015), Jordskott (2015), Black Spot (2017), The Invisible Guardian (2017), The Forest (2018), The Mire (2020), and The Chestnut Man (2021), all of which have successfully fostered established forest tropes as primaeval places of danger, particularly for young girls and women. Many rural noir dramas employ recurring visual themes in trailers and opening sequences, including aerial views of extensive, dense forests, which help establish the ambience and tone of the narrative and often serve as indicators of the genre. Another recurring motif is the depiction of a solitary road extending through an extensive forest, which emphasises the isolation and remoteness of the setting. According to Bell (2000: 227), this specific visual archetype is replete with meaning, particularly within the context of rural noirs, where it ‘tends to represent the only course, a preordained destiny from which no escape is possible.’

The opening title sequence of The Mire (2020) commences with a tracking shot that gradually moves across the forest floor, followed by a wide shot that reveals a female Rückenfigur in a white gown whose lower limbs have transformed into a tree trunk adorned with thick protruding roots. This opening passage is reminiscent of the story of Daphne, a mythological figure who appears in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, an ancient Latin poem dating back to 8 CE. In this narrative, Daphne is pursued through the forest by Apollo, the Greek God who intends to rape her. Seeking rescue, Daphne entreats her father, Peneus, the river God, who responds to her cries by transforming her into a laurel tree. This metamorphosis imprisons Daphne within the forest, effectively silencing and containing her. The opening montage of The Invisible Guardian (2017) presents an aerial view of low clouds hovering above the forest canopy. As the camera tracks downwards, it focuses on a diverse range of forest flora and then slowly lingers on a trickling stream before finally revealing a wide shot of a naked female corpse sprawled out on the forest floor, with her genitalia covered by a small stone-like object. Designed to function as an enduring sexual simulacrum, the cinematic female corpse within the realm of rural noir narratives is depicted as mute, docile, and compliant, eternally inscribed within a historical discourse that characterises women and nature as passive and submissive (Merchant 1983). Subject to an unceasing procession of cultural and representational codes of pornography that influence other realms (Schroeder and McDonagh 2012), the visual composition of crime narratives routinely employs camera techniques and shooting styles, including, but not limited to, hypersexualised poses, choker shots, extreme close-ups of body parts, and indexical marks of violence on the actor’s body, which are designed to objectify and sexualise fictional depictions of the female corpse. Several contemporary feminist film theorists argue that representations of the female corpse have become ‘vehicles for fetishisation and spectacle’ (Louise 2013: 89), whereupon the cinematic embodiment of femicide as spectacle has transformed the female corpse into a necrophilic fantasy. Consequently, the pornographic presentation of the female body extends beyond the margins of online pornography websites and is now regularly streamed into our living rooms. Rather than critically examining the broader societal concerns surrounding MVAWG, we, as avid consumers of popular crime entertainment, embrace the mainstream media’s commodification of violent crime (Binik 2020), which renders visual narratives of femicide as normative (McCarry and Lombard 2016; Plata 2018; Varman et al. 2018; Rodelli 2021). As willing ‘spectators, viewers and users of images’ (Pollock 2003: 174), we tune in and turn on night after night to a veritable smorgasbord of spectacularised and eroticised female death(see Figs. 5 and 6).

Women’s Fear of Male Violence: A Landscape of Unbelonging

We change ourselves, subtly, slightly. Small decisions to limit the chance.

Sometimes, screw it, we choose to act differently. Take the shortcut.

Stay and loiter. All of us just trying to find the right amount of panic.                                                                                                 

(Vera-Gray 2018: 6).

Fear is a primal emotion that wears many faces, shapeshifts and takes countless forms. It can emerge from perceived threats, result from mental health issues, or surface due to the impending danger to one’s life. Fear can be employed as an instrument to manipulate and dominate people, groups, communities and sometimes entire nations. Moreover, it demonstrates disparities in terms of gender and spatial aspects, which often result in heightened vulnerability for women in specific locations and time frames (Valentine 1992). Women’s apprehension regarding male violence in public spaces has been extensively researched, and findings indicate that females frequently experience what is often considered a disproportionate and irrational degree of fear of male violence, especially in cases of stranger danger, even though statistical data reveal that men are far more likely to be attacked by strangers in public spaces (Riger & Gordon 1981; Smith et al. 2001; Mellgren & Ivert 2019). However, numerous studies have yet to fully account for the lived experiences of young girls and women who frequently encounter unwanted male attention, intrusions, sexual harassment, and threats in public spaces. According to Condon et al., studies that ‘take into account the sex variable do not always assume a deconstructive posture. In many cases, the fear that women say they feel is considered obvious, an effect of their “nature”.’ (2007: 102)  Research findings suggest that the majority of women have experienced intrusive behaviour from men at some point in their lives, and as Whittaker-Leidig (1992) asserts, females are subject to what is described as a continuum of violence, a theory initially proposed by Liz Kelly in 1987. According to Kelly (1987: 149), ‘violence against women can be conceptualised along a continuum of intensity, from least to most destructive.’  The present discourse delineates the spectrum of male aggression directed towards women in the public sphere as a gendered power dynamic, encompassing a range of offensive and threatening behaviours, from sexist jokes and derogatory comments to unwanted attention, street harassment, the use of demeaning language, invasion of personal space, indecent exposure, violent threats of rape or murder, and ultimately, actual sexual assault, rape, and femicide. Jill Radford (1987) concludes that when a woman is subjected to harassment or threats by a male in a public space, she is unable to predict or control the outcome of the situation. Only after she has escaped unharmed does she convince herself that nothing happened and decides not to report the incident to the police. As Radford (ibid: 36) asserts ‘in that phrase, ‘nothing happened’ women’s experience of terror is negated’, and accordingly Scott (2003: 203) contends ‘The hidden nature of women’s victimisation necessarily means that there is much about violence against women that we do not understand.’  In 2014, the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA 2015) conducted a comprehensive survey of 42,000 women across the twenty-eight member states of the European Union. Female respondents were questioned about their experiences of physical, sexual, and psychological violence both in their childhood and adulthood. As highlighted by Vera-Gray (2016), the FRA report revealed that over 50% of the women surveyed ‘experienced sexual harassment at least once in their life, and that almost half had restricted their freedom of movement based on the fear of gendered violence.’  Young girls and women experience and navigate public spaces differently from most males (Gardener 1990; Divine 2023). According to Koskela (1999), women’s fear of violence is a consequence of the existing gender inequalities that influence mobility patterns, leading to spatial exclusion. Women’s experiences of male intrusion, aggression, and violence are not isolated events but exist within a continuum that occurs at a specific time and location. As Valentine (1992: 25) notes, ‘Women therefore remember where they occurred and reassure themselves they can stay safe by avoiding particular types of places.’  Burgess (1998) highlights that women’s apprehensions in public spaces are primarily focused on male sexual harassment and threats; consequently, women’s responses to woodland environments reflect their practical understanding of how to remain safe in urban areas and open spaces. Divine (2023) describes how this sense of unbelonging in public space originates in a young girl’s formative years and persists into adulthood. During childhood, we are exposed to stories of malevolent figures hiding in the shadows and are cautioned by our parents not to interact with strangers. As teenagers, we amuse and frighten one another by recounting tales of deranged psychopaths slaughtering young women in eerie forests. As we mature into adulthood, we are groomed to become receptive to the influence of multimedia narratives, which instil a fear of being assaulted, raped, or murdered in specific public spaces. Over time, we learn through personal experience that accepting a lift from a male stranger, walking home alone at night, taking a shortcut across a field or public park, or strolling alongside a canal are risky activities to be avoided. We modify our behaviour, circumvent dimly lit areas, refrain from wearing headphones when jogging alone, place our keys between our fingers, lower our gaze, and quicken our pace if a male is walking closely behind us. During our evenings at bars and clubs, we make sure our drinks are always within reach and hope the male taxi driver driving us home in the early hours is trustworthy. Furthermore, we ensure we carry a mobile phone to keep a partner, family member, or friend informed of our whereabouts and of our safe arrival. As females, we learn to limit where and when we walk, and in order to feel secure, we alter the way we act, make compromises in what we want to achieve, and pay – on many levels- for a perception of safety’ (Trend 2007: 59).

A Never-Ending Story

The dominant rise of visual culture has infused images into the very fabric of our existence. Every day, millions of images are disseminated, and their meanings are contested based on the location, culture, and power structures in which they are inhabited (Sturken & Cartwright, 2018). Images possess the ability to convey a vast array of meanings that are contingent upon their interpretation within the public domain. According to Da Rosa (2011), once an image has been internally processed, it can occupy a space within our subconscious minds, which can subsequently influence our imagination. Despite the existence of diverse and contradictory opinions regarding the extent and nature of media influence, Shanahan and Morgan (2010) propose that prolonged exposure to violent images may play a role in shaping our perception of the likelihood of encountering violence in the world. Custers and Van den Bulck (2013) contend that exposure to sexual violence on television may engender a culture of fear among women, and Madriz (1997: 342) maintains that ‘fear is exacerbated by images and representations of crime,’ a view shared by García-Castro and Pérez-Sánchez (2018: 2), who argue that the ‘association between crime and perceived victimisation has been linked to media consumption, especially watching TV.’  In a study analysing the consequences of repeated exposure to documentaries and dramas that primarily feature the rape and murder of young girls and women, psychologist Chivonna Childs revealed that certain viewers may exhibit psychological symptoms akin to post-traumatic stress disorder (Cleveland Clinic 2021). Cameron and Frazer (1987: 64) argue that manifestations of MVAWG collectively have the propensity to ‘undermine our self-esteem and limit our freedom of action.’  This assertion is supported by various research findings suggesting that a considerable proportion of women are reluctant to venture alone into a forest or wooded region (Virden & Walker 1999; Shores et al. 2007; Wilson & Little 2008). In her book Windswept: Why Women Walk, Annabel Abbs (2021: 80) describes how ‘Being alone in remote places makes us feel vulnerable. It’s one more anxiety we juggle, as we walk, another emotion in a complicated series of emotions peculiar to women.’  Public green spaces have come to be perceived as dangerous by many women, and as Pain (1997: 235) so astutely observes, ‘most women hold powerful concepts of public spaces as dangerous and private spaces as safe.’  The Office for National Statistics findings on homicide in England and Wales for the year ending 2023 state that ‘Female homicide victims were most likely to be killed in or around a house or dwelling, and male victims in public places’ (ONS 2024: 17), and concludes that women are more commonly murdered by male partners, ex-partners, or family members as opposed to strangers. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC 2023: 6) indicates that ‘while the overwhelming majority of male homicides occur outside the home, for women and girls the most dangerous place is the home,’ and as Cameron and Frazer (1987: preface x) highlight, ‘no one tells wives to keep an eye on their husbands, but their mutilated bodies turn up anyway.’  England (2018: 161) suggests that ‘Media coding of spaces tells viewers how to act in particular settings, how to interact with others, and how to formulate one’s own identity,’ and Valentine (1992: 27) adds, ‘by disproportionately publicising attacks committed in public places rather than domestic violence, the media place the dangers women fear into the public environment.’  Therefore, mass media are complicit in promoting a visual narrative that reinforces the traditional gendered divide between public and private spaces, as highlighted by Cucklanz and Moorti (2007). The ongoing discourse regarding sexual violence and femicide, as presented in news and popular media, continues to focus on specific spatial aspects that typically characterise MVAWG as a rare event originating from unhinged assailants lurking in public green spaces (Condon et al., 2007), rather than acknowledging it as a pervasive social problem, as indicated by global crime victim surveys (Easteal et al. 2015). The transition of real-life and fictional representations of femicide from private to public settings indicates the presence of a narrative transfer process that operates as a culturally and spatially encoded system embedded within the visual language context of mainstream media. I suggest that this phenomenon is not only attributable to the deeply entrenched nature of MVAWG existing predominantly within the personal and private sphere, wherein a woman is killed by a male she knows every three days in the United Kingdom (Femicide Census 2021), but that highlighting the pervasive nature of MVAWG would call into question, challenge, and thus undermine the fundamental tenets of an androcentric culture that has been steeped in gendered violence for millennia. The profound influence of visual culture on the process of normalising MVAWG is substantial, and the recurrent use of conventional visual stereotypes embedded within rural noir imagery serves as a foundational strategy to reinforce the idea that women are not safe in public green spaces and, consequently, do not belong there. The creators and disseminators of both factual and fictional crime narratives persistently perpetuate and promote voyeuristic viewpoints that normalise MVAWG (Boyle 2005), thereby actively contributing to the gentrification of femicide. Crime dramas, true crime documentaries, and rural noir fiction promote and elevate harrowing and spectacularised portrayals of young girls and women being stalked, kidnapped, hunted, shackled, maimed, mutilated, sliced, diced, strangled, raped, murdered, and set alight. Significantly, renowned British film director Alfred Hitchcock once stated, ‘I always believe in following the advice of the playwright Sardou. He said, ‘Torture the women!’ (Boyle 2005: 128). Bronfen (1992, p. 146) contends that ‘visual representations of death, specifically those of dead women, drawing their material from a repertoire of common cultural images, can be read as symptoms of our culture,’ and Vera-Gray (2021) argues that if MVAWG is to be seriously addressed then we need to question the culture we live in, because as women, how we look and ‘what is done to us is more important than who we are.’  Optimistically, she adds, ‘We could be the generation that ends violence against women and girls, if we start with changing not women’s behaviour, but the stories we tell about them.’