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If art is a mirror of society, there is perhaps no more perfect medium to reflect the current struggles of women in America than classic horror films—a notion that the author and Columbia University professor Eleanor Johnson has fully taken on board.
In her new book, Scream With Me: Horror Films and the Rise of American Feminism 1968–1980 (Atria Books), Johnson adeptly analyzes how six classic horror movies—Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist, The Stepford Wives, The Omen, Alien, and The Shining—map onto real-world topics like domestic violence, bodily autonomy, and the oppression of women, forcing the viewer to be horrified by what they see. We sat down with Johnson to discuss her illuminating survey.
Vogue: What led you to write this book?
Eleanor Johnson: I was teaching Rosemary’s Baby in a history-of-horror class. I was saying, at its core, what this film is about is the denial of a woman’s reproductive autonomy. In 1968 in New York, when this movie was released and filmed, abortion was not legal. This was a really hot issue. Abortion is explicitly discussed in one scene in the film because it recognizes that women in the late ’60s sometimes were getting abortions, just very unsafely. The reason Rosemary’s Baby is so interesting is that even those who, for religious reasons, feel opposed to the idea of terminating a pregnancy should want Rosemary to terminate that particular pregnancy because she’s pregnant with the Antichrist. So there’s no Christian justification for maintaining that pregnancy. I taught that class and said, “The horror here is about reproductive non-freedom.” The next day the Supreme Court leaked its decision to reverse Roe v. Wade, and I thought, We are living in a feminist emergency in this country.
In the book you write about art as a means to process and work through trauma. You could have chosen any artistic medium to illustrate that point; why did you specifically choose horror films?
I believe that horror has a very specific capacity, which is that it can make us feel very afraid and highlight what we don’t understand. Horror is a genre that relies on the emotion of fear and the mental status of confusion, and it’s in that confusion that we can learn new things. Horror is an extremely politically and culturally powerful genre because we get afraid and that makes us feel vulnerable. Once we feel vulnerable, we feel open to learning, and then the film starts pummeling us with different kinds of ideas, and we have to stop and think about them.
It’s interesting that you choose to center the movies rather than the novels many were based on, especially as a literature professor. Why focus on the films?
It’s partially because of the audience-impact dynamic. If I’m sitting there watching Rosemary’s Baby in 1968, and I’m a man, and I’ve never thought about coercive control or reproductive violence or any of the things that are going on in that film, and I’m thinking, This is a movie about satanism. This is a movie about witchcraft. But there’s a young woman next to me who’s crouching down and covering her face only when watching the scenes between Guy Woodhouse and Rosemary Woodhouse. Suddenly, I’m realizing that something I might not have noticed as a man is looking scary to me because of the people around me. Cinema is a uniquely interesting form to look at when considering how art can both reflect and accelerate social change, because it’s happening in the moment of the film. So cinema is like a laboratory for seeing what kinds of things will scare all the people around you in your culture, this microcosm of the world. I wanted to think about these stories in their most public format.
When I was reading the section of your book about The Shining, I kept thinking about the differences between the book by Stephen King and Kubrick’s movie. In King’s book Wendy is no wilting flower. In the movie, Kubrick made Wendy, played by Shelley Duvall, a quivering, terrified, unsure woman. Her performance is very powerful, but by what means? Kubrick destroyed her psyche and her confidence. I love how you address that in your book, because there is such a disconnect between some of the writers of the novels and the movie directors. What do we do with the fact that some very good movies were made by very bad men?
Exactly. And in the Ira Levin books [Rosemary’s Baby and The Stepford Wives], he’s obviously a devout feminist. His books are very pro-women, and then who does his movie? Roman Polanski. Does it get much worse than that? One of the more uncomfortable paradoxes, as I wrote this book, was realizing that predatory men have a lot of experience thinking about the vulnerability of women. In some cases, that makes them very good at depicting it. These sort of predatory, cruel men wrung performances of intense vulnerability out of their female leads at, in some cases, a very great cost to the women. Duvall has spoken numerous times in interviews about how adversely affected she was by Kubrick’s directing.
In the book, you talk about how the films were released during the women’s rights movement in the late ’60s and ’70s, and then the prequels and reboots started coming out around the time when women’s rights were being threatened again in the 2020s. What are your thoughts on that timing?
It’s definitely not accidental that three reboots of the six classic films from the late ’60s and ’70s were all released in 2024, two years after the reversal of Roe v. Wade. There’s no question in my mind that those three films, Immaculate, The First Omen, and Apartment 7A, are responding to the attrition of women’s rights around their own bodily autonomy in this country. I also think it’s significant that two of the directors of the reboots are women. Women directors came to these older films in the wake of Roe v. Wade’s collapse and said, All right, what can we do here? How can we leverage some of what’s going on in our current politics to reanimate these classic horror films with some contemporary political teeth? You could watch the six films that are the main part of the book and miss the fact that they’re partially about domestic abuse, reproductive coercion, or women’s rights. You couldn’t possibly miss it in the 2024 reboots.
Why do these movies make the message of women’s rights more accessible than simply stating the terrifying reality of the situation?
At the risk of generalizing, I think that people learn better through story than through almost any other medium. In storytelling, ethical messages are offered up as things we can enter into imaginatively and then sign on for or not. Movies aren’t coercive. Art is a meditative space that invites us to participate imaginatively. And if we decide to do that, then we are located empathically in parallel with some protagonist and we’re along for the horrifically scary ride with whatever their journey might be. The reason it is more accessible is that it isn’t a lecture.
Your analysis of The Omen was enlightening. Robert Thorn, played by Gregory Peck, seems like a kind man who only wants to save his wife from the grief of losing a child. But in doing so, he takes away her agency. When he makes decisions for her, thinking that he knows best, he ultimately causes her suffering and death and his own death.
The Omen is a little rough around the edges, and at the same time, it has some of the most sophisticated feminist politics of any of the films because it’s the only one that sits down and says: Abusive men are not good, but what about benign men who think they’re doing what’s right for the woman? The Omen is an absolutely brilliant work of feminist cinema, frankly, because it casts Gregory Peck. When that film was released, nobody expected Gregory Peck to be a bad guy. And of course, he isn’t really a bad guy in the film, but he thinks he knows best. It’s the confusion of the patriarch, an ostensibly benign patriarch who can’t allow a woman to live in her own truth.
I love that you include Alien in your book because Sigourney Weaver’s character, Ellen Ripley, is one of my favorite final girls. She uses both her physical strength and her technical cunning to survive. You discuss how, in these films, in order for a woman to rise above these kinds of abusive situations, she has to be some mythical warrior. And in reality we are only human. We are strong, smart, and able, but at the same time, we are not all Ellen Ripley, right?
That movie is extraordinary. One of the things I find so powerful about it is that if you watch it, paying attention to the specific things Ripley does that would have fixed the situation, it is stuff any woman could do. She’s like, “Maybe we should obey quarantine protocol.” If they had done that, no problem. But none of the men listen to her. The men in the film feel emboldened to rewrite the rules on their own terms. She’s the one who wants to keep separate zones in the ship, who thinks that they should have carefully delineated protocols for everything. And in the end, when she decides to blow up the ship to kill the alien, once again, she’s following the self-destruct protocol. So one of her powers is that she understands protocol and how stuff works, and she’s able to exploit that. Some of the film’s most interesting engagements are about her being special because she’s a pragmatist. She’s a tactician. It’s actually quite empowering. I find her both an unparalleled kind of heroine figure and, weirdly, a good template for resisting certain kinds of tyranny: by knowing the protocols, how to exploit them, how to do your own thing, how to protect yourself and those you love.
How do you think new horror movies can help shed light on the horrible injustices that women are facing?
It has a lot to do with empathy. By writing female protagonists that people can watch and identify with, and getting people to realize the kinds of dangers that women are exposed to only because they’re women are dangerous, horrible, frightening, and should be resisted. Getting people who aren’t women to realize that the dangers that face women are everybody’s problem. Nobody benefits when women are oppressed. This is a core delusion of the patriarchy. The patriarchy builds itself up on this idea that the oppression of women is a categorical win for the patriarchy. But in fact, everybody suffers. Those are the things that I think our art should focus on and try to highlight.
A hundred years after the Equal Rights Amendment was proposed, it still hasn’t passed. Women are not making the same salary for the same job, getting the same health benefits, or being given the same liberty of choice about our bodies and lives that men have. Women have worked so hard for independence and bodily autonomy, and now we are going backward in this great country. That is devastating and unfathomable in this day and age.
I agree. It is a very sad commentary. And we are in a moment as a nation-state right now where a lot of the mechanisms that we’ve historically relied upon to promote any one group’s rights are failing. They’re buckling under certain kinds of pressure. I am here to say that a system that won’t fail is art. It has the power that no other discourse has because it changes the way people feel in their minds and bodies. I am super disappointed at the way that the legal system in this country has evolved around women’s rights in the last several years. But I have faith in the United States because we make incredible art—filmmaking in particular. But it doesn’t just have to be film. Whatever your art form is, go make your art. A lot of the other institutions we have that are supposed to keep people safe are failing, but our art will not fail us. So lean into that strength, and let’s try. Our power is in our voices and in our collectivity, and we do have that power.
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