But the vertiginous reality is that now, in the 2020s, we are once again living through the 1970s. Since the Dobbs decision was handed down in 2022, women’s bodily autonomy is in a grave state of peril. Because of that decision, now, again, American women live in a political reality in which their reproductive agency is under systematic threat.
Whether you believe unflinchingly in a woman’s right to choose, whether you believe that a fetus is ensouled as soon as its heart beats, or whether you are somewhere on the complex spectrum that separates those two positions, it should be terrifying that governments, rather than a woman and her doctor, are making lifesaving or life-threatening medical decisions on a woman’s behalf for the foreseeable future.
Before abortion was decriminalized, as we will see in this book, many, many American women simply died during their pregnancies. We’ve forgotten that history; weve forgotten what it was like to read newspaper articles about young women being found dead through botched, illegal abortions. But we’re living through our own version of that era now, with death rates of pregnant women and babies climbing again, since 2022.
The return to the ’70s isn’t only about reproductive rights, either. The numerous laws that passed in the 1970s and 1980s to protect women from violence in the home are gradually being undermined by complex legal and social forces; on top of that, the modes by which domestic violence takes place are ever evolving and are getting harder and harder to detect and prosecute.
Very, very few states in the US have laws capacious enough to protect women – particularly married women -from things like cyberstalking, hacking, cyberbullying, surveillance, technological abuse, sexual violence, or other controlling and dehumanizing behaviors that a domestic partner may inflict upon them. On top of that, women still haven’t won equal rights under the law: Despite the fact that the ERA came before the Senate again as recently as 2023, it still failed to be made into law. Joe Biden’s Hail Mary proclamation that the ERA should be considered ratified does not, in fact, have the force of law. And the ERA seems unlikely to get ratified by the current legislature.
So now, again, American women live in a reality in which their political, physical, medical, and legal equality are under threat. In truth, they have always been. But now, we’re looking at a regression to an environment the likes of which we haven’t seen since the early 1970s.
That is precisely why, in the past few years, we’ve seen a resurgence in domestic horror genre. The penultimate chapter of this book will analyze the bridge films that bring ideas of domestic horror into the twenty-first century – Paranormal Activity, Creep, and Creep 2 – showing how, by holding misogynist filmmakers accountable for their exploitation of women in situations of domestic peril, they helped make room for a new generation of powerful feminist domestic horror directors.
The final chapter will examine the three thrilling domestic horrors of 2024: Immaculate, The First Omen, and Apartment 7A. Each of these films either explicitly or implicitly remakes at least one of the original six domestic horrors from the 1970s, and all of them inspired by the 2022 Dobbs decision -centrally address reproductive rights.
These three films recognize the weird cultural vertigo we’re all living through right now: Our calendars tell us we’re living in the 2020s, but our political discourse feels of a different era.
My greatest hope in writing this book is that I can impart some of the horror I felt watching and teaching Rosemary’s Baby in the spring of 2022, when I realized my students won’t grow up confident that women have autonomy over their own bodies, when I realized that they will likely grow up reading newspaper articles about young women dying from illegal pregnancy terminations.
We are descending into a new, twenty-first century domestic horror.
As an educator, a scholar, a mother, a woman, and a feminist, I will be damned if I let that happen without making some noise about it. And that, of course, is exactly what these films have trained Americans to do. They have trained us to scream at the horrors inflicted on women’s bodies. So come: Scream with me
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