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Horror Films And The Rise of American Feminism (1968-1980)

Eleanor Johnson

So I asked myself: Was Rosemary’s Baby the only horror film so clearly tied to the battle for women’s reproductive rights in the 1960s or 1970s? As I began racking my brain, I quickly realized the answer was no. Without half trying, I came up with a set of six films—all released between 1968 and 1980— that were inextricably linked with the fight for women’s rights in the United States.

All the films had in common a gut-twisting awareness of women’s vulnerability to physical, reproductive, and psychological torture in their own homes—an awareness that something was rotten in the state of American domestic life.

Those films are Rosemary’s Baby (1968), The Exorcist (1973), The Stepford Wives (1975), The Omen (1976), Alien (1979), and The Shining (1980).

These six films are some of the greatest horror movies in American film history-classics of the genre that have inspired countless subsequent films.

All of them have been sequeled, prequeled, remade, or reinvented more than once. Many of the originals were nominated for and awarded prestigious film awards. The blazing hot soul of horror in these films was the restriction and controlling of women’s bodies, minds, and rights. And in all these films, this restriction took place in the domestic sphere.

In fact, in these films, the supernatural-a mainstay of the horror genre-simply offered a lens through which to view the altogether too quotidian and too private realities of domestic violence and reproductive abuse. The true horror of the films was not ultimately otherworldly but domestic.

These films depict horrific acts-sadistic, predatory, dehumanizing acts— of violence against women. Violence against women, of course, is typical of the horror genre writ large: As Hitchcock himself famously said about how to make horror films, the crucial thing was to “torture the women!” Given that horror gleefully fetishizes the torture of women, it’s not obvious to think of horror as a feminist genre.

To be sure, there is some excellent feminist philosophy out there that teaches us to think about the “final girl” who survives to the end of a slasher movie in a triumphal light, and there is other work that teaches us to think about female monstrosity as something powerful and countercultural. But if you ask the average person—especially those who do not gravitate toward horror films naturally-whether horror is more feminist or misogynist, odds are high that they will say misogynist, and maybe even degrading. And with good reason: You do see a lot of torture of female bodies in horror.

But horror also has a deep and enduring relationship with American feminism. In fact, American feminism and American horror have been—for more than half a century—allies on issues of domestic abuse, reproductive control, and women’s restricted rights relative to men.

I say “allies,” though, with two qualifications: First, although the films in this book do make viewers witness, fear, and lament the entrapment of women in the domestic sphere, the directors of several of these films are notoriously misogynistic and predatory. This is an irony I’ll talk about in depth later, but for now, I simply want to remind us that a work of art should not be reduced to the intention of the person who made it. All works of art 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. In that environment, the work of art takes on meanings that far exceed the conscious planning of any single creator.

Second, in most cases, the female characters in the 1970s films are not resistant; they are victimized, usually unwilling or unable to fight back very much against the domestic horrors that consume or control them. Their power is generally not what we’re being invited by the films to witness. Instead, we’re supposed to witness their fear, their entrapment, their vulnerability.

And we’re supposed to witness those things as emergent properties of the domestic sphere. For centuries, the home has been set up as the safe place for women— safe from violence, safe from sexual assault, safe from danger. These films are all taking issue with that ideology. These films are all, in fact, centrally concerned with the home and the family as places of horror. For that reason, we should think of them as domestic horror.

We can all probably conjure up a list of horror subgenres, some better known than others: haunted house horror, sci-fi horror, serial killer horror, monster horror, slasher horror, and zombie horror, just to name a few. But domestic horror has consistent and particular characteristics that set it apart from many other modes of horror.

1. It takes place largely within a confined dwelling place, in which a female protagonist has restricted freedom.

2. There is at least one male antagonist who is also within the dwelling place, and he cannot easily be removed.

3. The horror that the film inflicts on its female protagonist centers on children, reproduction, or sex, and it includes an element of physical battery.

4. All the films are either explicitly or implicitly thinking through contemporaneous legal conflicts in the United States about women’s rights.

Indeed, the six films featured in this book reflect and seek to advance three intersecting legal and sociocultural changes that happened in the US in the 1970s. First, they are concerned with reproductive rights. In fact, these six movies—released from 1968 to 1980—neatly flank the passing of Roe v. Wade, in January 1973. Second, they are concerned with the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) and with the efforts throughout the 1970s to pass it.

Third, they are concerned with early legislation that criminalized domestic violence and with the change in American consciousness that made that possible. In fact, these domestic horror films highlight the deep, thrumming interconnection between these three bodies of law: equal rights, reproductive rights, and the right to physical safety. In the worlds these films create, if you deny a woman any one of these, you deny them all, and, in so doing, you create horror.

I’m throwing around the term horror here as if its meaning is obvious and well established. But in truth horror is a big, baggy genre with countless examples, and no watertight definition. Some critics say horror is about abjection; some say it’s about the experience of the uncanny. According to many critics and viewers, horror is closely linked with pornography, since both are designed to trigger a physiological response in viewers. I think that’s a fair baseline, that horror is defined in part by making us feel things in our bodies. But American domestic horror is a wonky subgenre. In my view, it is ultimately much more akin to tragedy than it is to something like pornography.

Aristotle defined tragedy by saying that it makes viewers feel fear and pity, so that they can experience a catharsis at the end. The Greek words for fear and pity are phobos, cognate with phobia, and eleos, which means “compassion,” “mercy,” and “clemency.” So, it’s not just straight “pity,” with all the condescending freighting of that term in Modern English. No one wants to be pitied; everyone wants to experience compassion, mercy, and clemency. Eleos is a social and interpersonal good, because it teaches people to feel empathic about and merciful toward their fellow citizens.

Tragedy makes you a better person and a better citizen. Tragedy is prosocial.

Domestic horror works similarly—as we’ll see. We feel phobos and eleos: fear in the obvious sense, and eleos in the sense of feeling deep compassion for the endangered protagonists. We feel not just pity for them, but actual compassion and empathy. Shared feeling. Like tragedy, domestic horror makes us experience another person’s vulnerability as our own, so that we wish for their suffering to end. Like tragedy, domestic horror trains us to care about people who are maybe not exactly like us but share in the commonwealth we recognize as our humanity.

But there is a crucial difference between tragedy and horror. Tragedies tend to end neatly. Sure, everyone dies, and there’s often quite a lot of blood on the floor at the end (think of The Oresteia, Hamlet, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, or The Atheist’s Tragedy), but there’s usually an accompanying sense that the violence is done now. The social order will be restored, maybe even improved upon, because of the tragic events foregone. Tragedy is defined, remember, by its creation of catharsis – purification, cleansing, or purging – in the audience. We have our catharsis, and we move on. We can release a hard-earned sigh of relief at the end of the play.

In horror, by sharp contrast, we do not get our catharsis. Instead, we get what I call the horror hangover. Things end messily and chaotically, with a sense that the horror hasn’t ended—and that maybe it never will. When we leave the theater after seeing a horror film, we feel nervous as we walk up the steps to our house. We wonder if someone is lurking in our apartment. There is no sense that order is restored, no sense that we are safe now; the unease lingers. Horror stays with you, keeps you hyper-vigilant against threats, keeps you in a state of activation and vulnerability, for some period after the film is over. And in some cases, the activation and vigilance and vulnerability stay with you a long time. That’s the point, in fact, of horror. And that’s why horror and tragedy, though analogous in so many ways, are radically different in ultimate effect.

What’s so important about the domestic horror films in this book is that they make viewers-whether or not the viewers are female-carry the fear and vulnerability embodied by the women in the films home with them. They center on a woman’s perspective, making audiences feel wracking physiological and psychological compassion for the women characters who are abused and terrorized.

The films, although they showcase women’s suffering, do not simply fetishize that suffering, but rather humanize it, make it palpable, exportable to the viewers’ own minds and bodies. They invite viewers into the lived, embodied experiences of abused women; women barred from power, barred from speaking for themselves, barred from defending themselves; women who weren’t taken seriously by the people from whom they sought aid-doctors, police, lawyers, psychiatrists, husbands, coworkers. These movies took what was going on in American cultural, political, and legal history in the late 1960s and 1970s, and they made those things feelable. They made women’s suffering come alive to viewers who might not otherwise ever have stopped to think about what or how women suffered in the United States, behind closed doors, in the twentieth century. They made that suffering seem like an emergency. And then they made that suffering follow viewers all the way home and nest there.

The original six domestic horrors in this book gave voice to kinds of domestic violence that pervaded American culture but were essentially unnamed and unspeakable in the 1970s, because the available language for describing domestic and reproductive violence then was far, far less developed than it is now. These films amplified the emergent political discourse around women’s rights to domestic safety, as well as to reproductive and bodily autonomy.

They highlighted and narrativized the power disparities between women and men, women and doctors, women and the church, and women and the patriarchy. In doing so, they turned isolated whispers and tense conversations into loud, public screams.

This is the great power of art: to give voice to those social and cultural problems for which a critical vocabulary does not yet exist.

But even within the wide-ranging category of “art,” there was something uniquely powerful about cinema in the 1970s. When you’re reading a book or viewing a sculpture at a museum, you’re doing it, in effect, alone. Nowadays, when we watch movies, we often stream them in our homes, also alone. But in the 1970s, when the films that are central to this book were released, when people watched films, they watched them together, in a pop-up community of filmgoers at a movie theater. When you watch a film in the theater, and you see someone next to you crying, it affects you. And when you watch a horror film in the theater, when you hear everyone around you screaming or groaning, or see them jumping around in their seats, that affects you, too.

Cinema has an amplifying effect on affect, on emotion, on an audience’s empathy with the main characters on the screen. So when I say that these six films turned whispers into screams, I mean it quite literally.