I still vividly remember the first time I watched a horror movie. I was the kind of kid who gave herself hand-blinders in Blockbuster so I didn’t have to see the VHS cover of The Ring, and by the time I grew out of that, contemporary horror was mostly torture porn, deeply unappealing. I made it into my twenties before I willingly consumed my first scary movie: It Follows. I remember it was 2016—because my now-husband was shocked I’d gone two whole years since its release without seeing it—and summer—because the air-conditioning in our Philly apartment had two settings, all or nothing, and it was freezing when I jerked awake that night, sitting straight up in bed at the creak of a floorboard in the upstairs apartment that my hindbrain knew without a doubt was the creeping sexually transmitted demon coming for
me at last.
These are my clearest memories from the summer of 2016: watching It Follows; getting the notification on my phone that Trump had received the Republican nomination for president; and that, on my drive to work, I passed a homemade billboard on fifteen-foot stilts that said Trump-Pence Makes Sense!!! (Yes, three exclamation points.)That summer, I was transformed overnight into someone who devours horror films. I partook in endless marathons of monsters looming over me on our projector screen. I remember putting terror into my body, and liking it, and not knowing why.
I know now. Horror concentrates fear, gives it a set reason, source, and end point. Even at its best, when a film’s fear lingers with you, you know why you’re scared, what you’re scared of, and that the fear will end. That sort of surety is a luxury, especially now.
The seed of Scream with Me was planted when, one day after author Eleanor Johnson had discussed the reproductive politics of Rosemary’s Baby with her class at Columbia University, Roe v. Wade was overturned. This “regression to an environment the likes of which we haven’t seen since the early ’70s” compelled her to look at the other horror films of the Rosemary’s Baby era through new eyes. Johnson realized that “without half-trying,” she could call to mind five other horror classics made between 1968 and 1980 that focus on women’s oppression: The Exorcist, The Stepford Wives, The Omen, Alien, and The Shining. Johnson categorizes these films as “domestic horror” and sets out a four-point criteria: (1) The film must be set in a “confined dwelling place, in which a female protagonist has restricted freedom,” and share that space with a male antagonist who “cannot easily be removed.” Its horror must (2) be centered on children, reproduction, or sex; (3) include some element of physical battery toward the female protagonist; and (4) “either explicitly or implicitly [think] through contemporaneous legal conflicts in the United States about women’s rights.”
In Scream with Me’s ten essays, Johnson compellingly outlines the ways in which these six core films fit into domestic horror—even Alien, which takes place as far away from any human home as possible. The Nostromo’s crew bickers like family and calls the ship’s computer Mother. Secret-android Officer Ash is certainly an immovable male antagonist, the chest-bursters a reproductive horror show of the first order. The only potentially disqualifying factor is Alien’sfinale: Ripley, having slain the alien at the expense of ship and crew, launches her escape pod into open space and puts herself into cryosleep in a desperate bid to survive long enough for rescue. This ending, Johnson says, is “the most optimistic—naively optimistic, even” of all the domestic horror films. Ripley gets what every woman wants: she grappling-guns her tormentor through an airlock and sets them on fire.
In other words, Alien’smost significant difference is not its absence of home, marriage, or anything close to a human pregnancy. It lacks instead what Johnson calls the “horror hangover,” when a film ends “messily, bloodily and chaotically, with a sense that the horror hasn’t ended—and that maybe it never will.”
While not included in Johnson’s official domestic-horror qualifiers, the horror hangover was the concept that stuck with me long after I finished the collection. That hangover is where we live, no matter what sort of media we consume. It is all too easy for a woman to end messily, bloodily, and chaotically.
The Alien essay is a microcosm of Scream with Me’sbiggest potential sticking point: the films’ content and context resist some of the assertions made about their engagement with contemporaneous cultural and legal battles. Johnson suggests that Ripley’s role as a military woman reflects 1970s-era fears that the Equal Rights Amendment might send female soldiers into front-line combat. But the Nostromo is not a military ship but a commercial one, making Ripley basically the high-risk, sci-fi version of an Amazon delivery driver. You can argue that the crew’s sheer firepower and use of naval rank communicates “military” strongly enough to render this distinction pedantic, but the repeated referral to Ripley and the crew as not just warriors but soldiers will rankle horror-movie nerds.
Another source of this dissonance is when Johnson refers to these six films as feminist. Of course, she doesn’t argue that these movies were created with feminist intent by their auteurs. In fact, she states the opposite, explicitly and often. In the chapter, “Bad Men Making Good Films,” she outlines the many ways these films’ directors abused their female actors. When filming the scene in The Exorcist where the demon throwsReagan around her bedroom, William Friedkin gave thirteen-year-old Linda Blair permanent spinal damage. Stanley Kubrick psychologically abused Shelley Duvall while filming The Shining, supposedly to make her fear more realistic. Roman Polanski is Roman Polanski. Johnson argues not that these men were secret feminists but that the films “wind up meaning more and different things than their creators intended, because art, once it escapes the artist’s studio or writer’s pen, goes on to interface with a broader culture.”
Still, it can be hard to hold that distinction in your mind when Johnson calls The Exorcist’s “energy” “pro feminist and extraordinarily sophisticated in its feminist critiques.” It’s difficult to watch Katherine in The Omen get pushed off a balcony by her son, hospitalized, then defenestrated, and see a “scorching feminist critique of Catholic dogma.” You can certainly study Alien through the lens of feminist critical theory, but when you call it “a radical feminist film,” that invites a very different conversation. Instead of “How are these films in conversation with issues of second wave feminism, and what can we learn about our current horror show?” I more often asked myself, “How can these films possibly be feminist?”
I’m still thinking about it weeks after I closed the book. I have a feminist-horror-interpretation hangover. I’ve watched all the films mentioned in the book now, and Rosemary’s Baby twice—once with my husband and once screen-shared with a group of female friends who sent KILL GUY WOODHOUSE in the chat frequently enough to activate Discord’s spam-bot protections. Afterward one of them said, “Maybe feminist horror is like body horror, like how nothing good ever happens to the body.”
In that context, these are the most feminist of films. Feminism is, after all, a response to the structures that enable the male antagonists to bring about next-level horror. Without Guy Woodhouse’s willingness to drug his wife and facilitate her rape, there would be no spawn of Satan, no Damien without Robert Thorn’s reproductive coercion. These films do not end well for their female protagonists (or, at least, the ones not floating through deep space), as things often don’t for victims of reproductive or domestic violence. They leave us with an unending, ambient dread. That’s being a woman or a femme person after the repeal of Roe. We remain in the horror hangover, anticipating the monster that we know is there but will scare us anyway, even now, when it barely bothers to hide.
