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.
