Taken together, these three films embody a sudden, emergent awareness among filmmakers in the 2010s that something was seriously wrong with having predatory men make movies about the entrapment, torture, and dehumanization of women. That awareness likely emerged from sociocultural changes taking place in the United States.
First, of course, was the advent of the #MeToo movement.
Social activist and sexual assault survivor Tarana Burke coined that phrase in 2006, and by 2009, when Paranormal Activity hit theaters, it was widely known that male filmmakers had been exploiting and mistreating their female leads for a long time, as well as the women they were partnered with, and the girls they sought out socially.
In fact, as it happens, Roman Polanski was detained by Swiss police – under pressure from US lawyers—for the 1977 rape of Samantha Geimer on September 26, 2009, exactly one day after Paranormal Activity hit theaters. This, of course, is a coincidence, in the sense that nothing about Paranormal Activity caused the arrest of Polanski. But it’s much more than a coincidence in the sense that both the arrest of Polanski and the release of the film body forth an emerging cultural awareness that male filmmakers – even very talented ones—were altogether too often also predators and dehumanizers, and that they should be held accountable for that.
Ironically, Polanski was caught because he was en route to accept a lifetime achievement award at the Zurich Film Festival; the award was conferred on him, ultimately, in 2011.
Were the filmmakers of Paranormal Activity consciously thinking about Roman Polanski? Possibly, but it doesn’t matter. This film and the Creep films embody a cultural shift—a shift toward holding predators accountable for how they used their directorial privilege to abuse women.
Not only did these films embody that cultural shift, they also helped to accelerate it, highlighting the dangers of giving a camera to a selfish (Micah) or outright psychopathic (Josef/Aaron 2) man and letting him aim it at women to make horror films. This on its own was an important contribution to the horror genre because it coincided with and likely amplified the sudden inrush of women directors into the horror genre—a genre historically almost totally dominated by male directors.
In the 2010s and 2020s, that changed dramatically, so that some of the most renowned horror directors working now are women: Issa Lopez, Ana Lily Amirpour, Coralie Fargeat, Julia Ducournau, Karyn Kusama, Nia DaCosta, Sarah Polley, Natalie Erika James, and Arkasha Stevenson have released brilliant, searing, and searchingly feminist works of horror in the past fifteen years.
In 2024, two of those directors – Natalie Erika James and Arkasha Stevenson-made new domestic horrors for the twenty-first century, and specifically for the post-Dobbs era. Both James and Stevenson deliberately styled their films as prequels to one of the original horrors in this book:
James’s film is the prequel to Rosemary’s Baby; Stevenson’s to The Omen. Their films are brilliant, excruciating feminist revitalizations of the domestic horror genre. Taking them alongside Michael Mohan’s Immaculate (also 2024), we can see a new heartbeat in the domestic horror genre, one that has everything to do with the collapse of reproductive agency in the United States in 2022.
hexafu 