Between 1980 and 2009, the domestic horror genre went into hibernation.
In fact, even though these classic six films were sequeled —multiple times in some cases— the domestic horror element of the remakes was either severely diluted or, more commonly, entirely absent (see appendix A for a survey of the sequels).
During this same time period, however, the horror genre writ large absolutely exploded.
Zombie horror, sociopathy horror, slasher horror, sci-fi horror, and serial killer horror all had their day in the sun, but there was next to no filmic action involving domestic horror. So what happened?
I have two necessarily speculative answers. First, things got better for American women between about 1980 and 2000. Not fixed, by any means, but perceptibly better.
The ERA never became law, but women were able to advance in the military and in the workplace more generally.
Opposition to Roe seemed, for a couple of decades, to level out, and, more important, the Supreme Court seemed disinclined to reverse it – until 2022.
Domestic violence became a better-known phenomenon, both in the public eye and in the procedures of the American criminal justice system.
Police, judges, lawyers, advocates, women’s groups, shelters, and activists worked together to intensify consequences for abusers and to lower the threshold not only for criminal prosecution, but also for divorce, obtaining restraining orders, and entering into shelters.
Marital rape was criminalized in a landmark decision in New York State in 1984, and nationally by 1993. Sex offenses across the board became more readily prosecutable. Sexual harassment was tackled as a social ill.
Things got better for women—or, at least, they seemed to. With that seeming improvement, the demons, monsters, and abusers of the glory days of domestic horror seemed more like bad dreams, and less like reality. So, fewer domestic horror films.
The other reason—an extremely dark one—for the somnolence of the domestic horror genre has to do with the bench of directors who were making them.
Half the directors of the original films—namely, Roman Polanski, William Friedkin, and Stanley Kubrick – were abusers of women themselves, students of how much strain and agony the female body and mind could take before crumbling.
Everyone (1 hope) knows about Polanski: In 1977, he was charged with five counts of sex abuse against a minor girl and an additional count of drugging a minor.
When Polanski filmed the scene of Rosemary being drugged and raped, it felt so real and so powerful in part because Polanski was filming out of his own hoard of abusive desires. Polanski was a student of the vulnerability of women, and he made an excellent film about it. It’s a revolting paradox, but that doesn’t make it false. Sometimes very bad people make very good art.
The circumstances of the filming of The Exorcist typify this paradox in particularly excruciating ways.
Indeed, there is a complication in calling The Exorcist a feminist masterpiece. That complication has to do with the physical risk and abuse that its actors—mostly Ellen Burstyn and Linda Blair—were subjected to during its filming.
No matter how feminist the upshot and impact of the film, no matter how iconic the portrayal of Ellen Burstyn as a domestic abuse victim and survivor, director William Friedkin was not himself straightforwardly an ally of women. If he had been, surely, he wouldn’t have subjected Blair and Burstyn to such striking and damaging physical trauma.
Ellen Burstyn, who plays Chris in the film, was not warned about many of the special effects that would happen in the film. In one scene, Burstyn was attached to a rig, which would yank her to the ground. In between takes, she told Friedkin that the crew needed to go easier on her, or she would be injured by the rig. Friedkin agreed but secretly signaled to the crew to yank Burstyn harder. In the next take—which was ultimately included in the actual film—she is jerked violently to the floor, grabbing her back in what she herself later called “horrendous pain.” Her screams in that scene are real screams of pain and fear and shock.
Friedkin also put Linda Blair, who plays Regan, in a body harness to make her body appear to swing around wildly in the bed; the harness did significant harm to Blair’s body, causing enduring spinal damage.
So, William Friedkin’s movie about domestic violence also enacted that violence. Friedkin took Alfred Hitchcock’s oft-quoted dictum to heart: When making thrillers or horror films, “Torture the women! The trouble today is that we don’t torture women enough.”
Friedkin tortured the women plenty. In doing so, he made a ton of money, got wildly famous, and, paradoxically, helped teach Americans to question the ideology that a woman should be “possessed” by the man she lived with.
So, when we watch—and feel horror at—Chris’s battery, we are simultaneously watching the actual physical battery of the body of Ellen Burstyn.
In the story of The Exorcist, the demon hurts Regan’s and Chris’s bodies. On the set of The Exorcist, William Friedkin hurts Linda Blair and Ellen Burstyn.
William Friedkin is in parallel with the demon, just as Roman Polanski in Rosemary’s Baby was in parallel with Roman Castevet—and likely also with the devil – even while he used all the devices of cinema to garner sympathy for Rosemary herself.
One can make the claim that, perhaps, Friedkin just wanted the violence to seem as real as possible; and, indeed, it seems all the more real because it actually was real. The excruciating paradox is that, to witness the film’s staging of the horror of domestic violence, audiences had to witness real-life and real-time violence against Ellen Burstyn and Linda Blair. Ebert notes this in an early review, saying, “Linda Blair, as the little girl, has obviously been put through an ordeal in this role, and puts us through one.” That’s exactly right: viewers are made to empathize with and even feel the suffering of the women on the screen, but it does come at a cost.
Although differently from how Friedkin had tormented Burstyn and Blair, Kubrick tormented Shelley Duvall in the making of The Shining. He kept her in a state of constant anxiety during filming. He verbally abused her, and he criticized her performances brutally, so that she was in an actual state of fear and insecurity throughout the film. The psychological torture to which he subjected her is palpable in her performance. It is not only true that Wendy is terrified of Jack (Torrance), but also that Shelley Duvall is terrified of Jack (Nicholson) and, likely even more, of Stanley Kubrick.
When we watch Duvall/Wendy in a state of palpable horror, we feel along with her the unthinkable chaos and agony of domestic violence, but we also, by praising the film, sanction the kind of psychological violence that male directors enacted on their female stars.
Watching this film, like watching The Exorcist, isn’t just watching a film about abuse – it’s watching actual abuse, however attenuated and ultimately escapable it was, both for Burstyn and Duvall.
When Roger Ebert interviewed Duvall ten years after the release of The Shining to ask her what it was like to work with Kubrick, she said, “Almost unbearable.”
But long before that, back in October 1980, the short documentary film Making of “The Shining,” as discussed in the last chapter, clearly showcased Kubrick’s cruelty toward Duvall.
Ironically directed by Stanley Kubrick’s own teenaged daughter – seventeen-year-old Vivian Kubrick – this film records the manic brilliance of Kubrick and his actors, but also immortalizes scenes of Shelley Duvall lying disconsolate on a floor, being verbally abused and mocked by Kubrick himself. Since this documentary aired on television rather than on the silver screen, it enjoyed a far narrower audience than the film.
Even so, the documentary was significant, in that it gave the public a vision of director as cruel, abusive, and tyrannical. This happened very soon after the scales had fallen from the public’s eyes about Polanski, as well, in the wake of his 1977 arrest for the rape of Samantha Geimer and his 1978 flight from the United States to avoid prison time. These directors, people had to acknowledge by the end of 1980, weren’t slam dunk feminists by any stretch of the imagination. Their films might have been, but they weren’t.
Now, I’m not in a big hurry to say that, since 1980, Hollywood directors have treated women well, or even consistently as human beings. We have plenty of data to the contrary. But I do think that the extremity of the torture to which directors subject their female leads has waned – much more slowly than anyone would want but waned nonetheless—in the past fifty years.
Part of the reason is that the feminist activism works: we have names for all these things now and awareness about them. We know about sexual violence, reproductive violence, domestic violence, gender-based abuse, and that has made many, many women much safer than they used to be—both in their homes and in movie studios. Or, at least, has made some women somewhat safer. Things got a little bit better for women—again, not fixed, just better— which made it harder to pull off the kinds of on-screen cruelty that typified half of the domestic horrors in this book.
It took about thirty years for filmmakers to start to register, thematize, and scrutinize the kinds of cruelty and dehumanization that went into the making of many domestic horror films in the 1970s, but the day did come. When it came, a group of new and very important domestic horror films were made:
The first was Paranormal Activity (2009), the second was Creep (2014), and the third was Creep 2 (2017). These films come charging headlong at the slumbering domestic horror genre and wake it up.
Paranormal Activity and Creep 1 and 2 all reanimate and reimagine the tropes of horror and domestic violence that had specifically animated many of the original domestic horrors of the 1970s. Put otherwise, they bring the 1970s into the 2010s. But interestingly, they do so in large part as an indictment of predatory directorial practices and of their tendencies to dehumanize and endanger the people they cast in their domestic horrors.
hexafu 