Just when you thought it was safe to venture into the murky depths of horror fiction again, back comes the re-animated, shuffling monster of a problem that seems to be dogging the genre at the moment: accusations of sexism.

The latest broadside against the lack of acknowledgement given to the role of women in the horror field is levelled against SFX magazine, one of the longest-running and most successful SF/fantasy glossy magazines on the UK market.

The magazine has just published a special horror-themed spin-off. "Our first special edition of the new decade is SFX COLLECTION: HORROR," it proclaims: "your ultimate guide to the dark side of the imagination. It features a beefy 14-page news section, oodles of in-depth new features, and six great free gifts." It also features, unfortunately, a distinct lack of female practitioners of the dark art, resurrecting an argument from five months ago that prompted an internet flurry when the British Fantasy Society published a book entitled In Conversation: A Writer's Perspective, Volume One: Horror.

Then, as with the latest row, it fell to blogger, screenwriter and poet Maura McHugh, who blogs under the name Splinster, to highlight that there was not a single woman featured in the piece, despite the genre having a huge female presence, especially in books – Charlaine Harris, Sarah Pinborough, Kaaron Warren, Cherie Priest, to name just a handful.

Now McHugh is on the warpath again, over the SFX special edition. She quotes the magazine's editor Ian Berriman's editorial: "You see, some people think horror is a limited one-dimensional genre, but I don't see it that way. Horror is a broad church. It encompasses everything from the classy chillers produced by Val Lewton through to the likes of Saw and Hostel. It comes in an almost infinite variety of forms, and I love nearly every single one of them."

McHugh responds on her LiveJournal: "Except those created by women, it seems."

She goes on: "I doubt I would have noticed a bias in the SFX horror edition if it wasn't for the seven-page article "Horror's Hidden Treasures" smack in the centre of the magazine. That was when I realised women did not register on SFX's horror radar. In the article the magazine asked 34 directors, screenwriters and authors to name an obscure or under-rated cult horror that deserved better recognition. Yup, you guessed it, not a single woman was asked for her opinion." What's more, in a plot twist worthy of any novel of the genre, the SFX publication comes smack dab in the middle of Women in Horror Month, set up to raise awareness of and give recognition to the genre's many female creators.

Allegations of sexism are perhaps unfounded when levelled at the industry itself: the sheer numbers of women working not only as authors but also in the film industry and in publishing – Julie Crisp at Pan Macmillan, for example, or Bella Pagan at Orbit - suggest there is no glass ceiling on the creative side.

It is rather the fans that comes under scrutiny when such rows break. Of course, any "best of" list or collection is always going to be subjective, and in the wake of the British Fantasy Society incident there were many who said that it was all merely a matter of opinion: if those who decide the criteria for such publications really do find all their favourite work is by men, that's just how it is.

But it does seem a very archaic mind-set to create a work devoted to such a wide-ranging genre as horror that excludes a huge portion of those who create it, whether wittingly or not. That kind of attitude and response should have been left in the days when horror was in its infancy, and women were simply there to scream.