Recent female characters

I have found that in most of the recent films that we have watched, the female characters leave something to be desired. Judith O'Dea's character in Night of the Living Dead is laughably bad, as is the young female that is killed with her young husband in the exploding truck. In Nightmare on Elm Street, the female protagonist simply screams the whole time and becomes indignant with Johnny Depp's character. There are two likely reasons for the lack of strong female characters. First, the movies that we have watched recently fall in the slasher genre of film. These movies typically don't just have bad female characters, they have almost no character development at all. Most slasher film characters are stereotyped in to their roles, whether they be male or female. The second reason could be that these female characters are intentionally supposed to be bad. They may be trying to comment on some social commentary or they may just be secondary to the horror in the films and the monsters that many slasher films have.