Exclusive with Dr. Eleanor Johnson

Interview by Sarah Cassell

ABOUT THE BOOK: In May 2022, Columbia University’s Dr. Eleanor Johnson watched with her students as the Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade. At the same time, her class was studying the 1968 horror film Rosemary’s Baby, and Johnson had a sudden epiphany: horror cinema engages directly with the combustive politics of women’s rights and offers a light through the darkness—an outlet to scream.

With a voice as persuasive as it is insightful, Johnson reveals how classics like Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist, and The Shining expose and critique issues of reproductive control, domestic violence, and patriarchal oppression. Scream with Me weaves these iconic films into the fabric of American feminism, revealing that true horror often lies not in the supernatural, but in the familiar confines of the home, exposing the deep-seated fears and realities of women’s lives.

While on the one hand a joyful celebration of seminal and beloved horror films, Scream with Me is also an unflinching—and timely—recognition of the power of this genre to shape and reflect cultural dialogues about gender and power.

What exactly about your theory of domestic horror, how did that come to fruition for you? What were the learning curves and shifts in mindset as you wrote this book?

Yeah, that’s a great question. So the book was born, as you know from the introduction of the book, because I was teaching this class on Rosemary’s Baby to my big lecture on the History of Horror and I taught Rosemary’s Baby, and I still teach Rosemary’s Baby when I teach it, as a horror film that is basically a parable about the dangers of denying women reproductive autonomy. And I gave that lecture and it was, you know, the lecture was really good. It landed really well. You can kind of tell when a lecture is landing well, this one landed really well. And then the very next day, the Supreme Court decision to reverse Roe v. Wade was leaked.

So my students got all activated about it. We had extra sessions. I got really activated about it.

And then the following semester, which would have been Fall of 2022, I had some time off. And so I, you know, I had tenure. I had written three books of medieval scholarship. I didn’t really need to do that again. And I thought, you know, maybe I’ll use this time to see if I can grow this Rosemary thing that I’m doing. And so I just started doing research.

And I, you know, this was one of those things where like all my training as a medievalist really paid in huge dividends because I’ve been around, and I just read everything. So I believe that I have read every single article, for example, in the New York Times published between 1965 and 1975 that includes the word “abortion”. So that was over a thousand articles and I learned about the story of how abortion was legalized in the state of New York and I’m a native New Yorker and I had not known a thing about this, okay. But like in the late 60s, like in 67, 68, there were votes taken in the New York Senate, New York Congress, to liberalize abortion restrictions, which were very severe in this period. And all they wanted to accomplish was to allow basically rape victims to terminate pregnancies. It was not legal to end a pregnancy when it was a rape pregnancy in the 1960s in the state of New York. The liberal, my home state of New York. And it failed, like the measure absolutely crashed and burned. Rosemary’s Baby was released in 68 and was in theaters for a really, really long time. Now in 1970, New York State over-skipped the liberalization of abortion law and went straight to legalization.

And I thought to myself, my gosh, how did that happen? And of course, it has to do with grassroots feminism, it has to do with advocacy groups, it has to do with changes in the law. As I was reading the New York Times articles, you can very clearly see that during that same time period, there’s lots of major institutions that are realizing that abortion should not be criminalized.

Organizations of synagogues, organizations of churches, medical doctors, everybody is slowly coming out at an increasing rate during this period saying this should be not just liberalized but in fact probably legalized. But there’s this shift in the discourse that takes place toward the end of Rosemary’s Baby‘s run when people start talking not about, we need to have fewer women winding up dead– which traditionally was the argument for liberalization. But rather that women had a right to self-determination about their body. And really that’s at the heart of Rosemary’s Baby, that issue, right? Rosemary’s problem is that she doesn’t understand what’s happened to her.

And so as I was doing this research, I started to realize that this was more than a one-off article, that I could do a whole project on this. And then I took a moment and I thought, is this the only film from this time period that’s tackling women’s rights?

And almost as soon as I asked the question, The Exorcist popped into my mind, which is a film that I know very, very well. Right. I was like, god, that movie’s definitely saying something about domestic violence. So I went and I read everything I could find about what the status of domestic violence law was in the early 70s and, no surprise, there wasn’t any basically until 1973 and there were very few domestic violence shelters. The Exorcist comes out. It’s in theaters for two years and by the end of that period, there’s all sorts of legal and structural change in motion, and I don’t want to say, and I’m clear about this in the book, that horror films were the sole cause, but one of my own theoretical commitments is to the idea that art both reflects and accelerates social change, and horror movies in the 70s are a great case of that. And so, you know, I started working on [Domestic Violence] Law and The Exorcist. And then I started reading a ton about the Equal Rights Amendment, and I thought about The Stepford Wives, I thought about the movie It in those contexts.

And so it was just a project that evolved very, very organically. And I made the decision to follow every lead. So anytime I hit something that seemed interesting, I went and read everything I could read about it. I saw loads and loads of movies from this time period, and I kind of cherry picked the ones that were the clearest, the best, the most high budget because I just wanted to focus on films that had real cultural penetration. Not total like B-list, some of the movies that came out in the 70s that are like B-list movies are fascinating, but I wanted to do movies where I could credibly say: this had an impact. Right? People saw this film. They talked about this film. This film was reviewed in, like, notable places. So that was kind of how I chose the quarry. And then eventually, while I was writing the book, in the wake of the reversal of Roe, I was like, someday there’s going to be a bunch of feminist horror film writers, and it’s going to be soon, who reboot exactly these films and do it with a real sharp, clear focus on abortion.

And lo and behold, 2024 was like a bumper crop of that exact phenomenon. With Immaculate, The First Omen, and Apartment 7A, and you know, you may well have seen all of them, but they all are real specific in tagging abortion. reproductive autonomy as the thing that they’re the most worried about. And so, you know, that’s kind of how the project got born and how it evolved. And, you know, I feel now, living in 2025, like we’re in an emergency. We’re in an emergency for women’s rights in this country. And so I had a particular way of speaking about a historical moment that has very, I think, frightening resonances with our own. And I thought, I’m going to do this as a trade book. I’m not going to do it as a scholarly book. And it kind of went from there.

Yeah. Well, that’s awesome. And actually a follow up question to that. Were there any movies that you were kind of afraid to talk about? For example, you mentioned The Shining, and I know that’s the last movie that you cover of the six before we get into modern times. The Shining, obviously, is a huge cult favorite, with a very, very dedicated fan base. Were there other movies of those six that you were just kind of hesitant to talk about or afraid of backlash?

No, not really. I was not. Maybe because I’ve been a professor for over 16 years, I genuinely welcome encountering other opinions. I love to teach material that other people have a view on, that have a strong fan base. I came up working on Geoffrey Chaucer. Everyone who works on the Middle Ages has a Chaucer that they believe is the “right” Chaucer. And I’m like, ooh! I’ll jump into the deep end of that swimming pool and swim right alongside you because it’s fun to be in a pool with other people.

So I love working on works where people have strong views. I love working on complicated works.

I’ve been asked many times by particularly my more feminist leading students, which I have a lot of, “why do you write about a film that was made by Roman Polanski?” Because that’s the opposite of, right, there’s Shining fans who might be like, oh my god, don’t make this political. But on the other hand, there’s, like, hardcore, totally justified, in my opinion, Polanski dislikers who are like, why are you glorifying, as a feminist, a film made by a predator? And the answer for me is that, you know, art does the best and most powerful work for society when we take it seriously on its own terms. And art is not reducible to the intention of one person. And we can use art as a way of thinking about our own historical moment in an open, clear, suggestive way. So I think it’s very important to take art seriously for its political possibilities, always being aware that there are multiple ways to read any given work of art and that’s why it’s a work of art. So I don’t want my The Shining to overwhelm or invalidate somebody else’s The Shining, right? But I do hope very much that people who like that film or like any of the films in here will read this and be moved by it to think differently about the capacity of horror as a genre to do really important political work. Because to my mind, horror is the most important political genre we’ve got right now.

You look at works like the work of Jordan Peele, for just one example. Horror is really where resistant politics is happening right now in cinema.

So this is a question that I was going to ask later but while you bring it up, again I’m a student, so I really respect how much you value the thoughts and feelings of your students. I guess what are some conversations that you’ve had with students specifically that you think have impacted your research project? And similarly, I know you talk to a lot of survivors of domestic abuse throughout the novel, and I was wondering if there are any specific conversations you could share that were impactful?

Oh my gosh, so many. I mean, I’ve had conversations with students who noticed tiny dynamics in a film. that I hadn’t totally noticed that prompted me to think really differently about that dynamic in the film. So I had a student who worked on the lullaby opening song from Rosemary’s Baby and that made me listen to it again and think about it differently.

I have talked with numerous survivors of domestic violence and reproductive coercion and control. And when I’ve talked to older survivors, like people who saw these films in the theaters when they came out, they routinely will say, “oh, I wasn’t scared of the demon, I was scared of some actual human person in the film.” Or, “oh I wasn’t scared of the satanic neighbors who live next door to Rosemary, I was scared of Guy, her husband.”

Right, and for me, Guy really is the epicenter of the fear. And maybe Satan is like almost a distraction, right? Guy is really scary because he’s tormenting her and he’s using her and dehumanizing her. That’s where the fear is in that film. So, you know, talking with survivors, hearing what they found scary about particular films, that was interesting.

And then, you know, the other thing that I’ve come to understand in my work is that the fear of saying something is one of the most debilitating legacies of being abused, whether that abuse is physical, psychological, technological, sexual, or any other format. You know, the fear of some kind of retaliation if you speak up, the fear of being disbelieved if you speak up. I just wanted to say something, right? I wanted to say something that would hopefully represent and be a cipher for the experiences of many, many survivors that I’ve talked to that people who maybe aren’t even inclined to listen to survivors’ narratives might still hear.

It’s one thing to be told, “hey, domestic violence is a really big problem in this country.” Which it is, right? And it’s another thing to be told, why don’t you go watch The Exorcist again and tell me what you think about how the character of Chris is represented over the course of the film. Right. Because I mean, Sarah, you read it. Once you’re like, oh, Chris is a paradigm of domestic abuse, you can’t unsee it. And I’ve stressed that idea with students. And they’re always like, oh, oh, my god, because you don’t notice it straight out of the gate, because, of course, the man who’s abusing her is a demon, not her human husband. But I think that’s sort of the film’s point, right, is that there’s like this demonicness to the dynamic of domestic violence. And once you see that dynamic, you kind of can’t unsee it.

So I am so painfully sensitized. to this problem of voicelessness that I just wanted to kind of make some noise. I talk about this a lot in the epilogue and this is part of why I called the book Scream With Me. Because I think that the greatest vulnerability that we as a society have toward the dehumanization of women is our tendency to become silent when we’re afraid.

And that’s a basic human tendency, and there’s nothing one can do about it on an incident-by-incident basis, but I’m in a position to make some noise, and I want to get other people to make some noise with me. So that’s kind of the strongest way that my experience of working with survivors affected my theory of what I was doing.

You talk a lot about language and the importance of language. Something that really stuck out to me was in The Exorcist, how you mentioned that it was the first time that we get an F-bomb in mainstream media from a child. Can you expand a little bit on vulgarity in these films and why it’s relevant to the genre as domestic violence?

Great question. Yeah, The Exorcist is the first F-bomb by a woman or by a girl. Right, Nash had the first F-bomb, but this one, like, it’s everywhere, right? If you’ve seen the film recently, Regan swears like a sailor times fifty.

And I think that, you know, it’s a really sophisticated question. I’m glad you asked. Part of the effect of vulgarity is to, like, set people on edge, to make people feel a little startled, right? Because everybody knows it’s breaking the normal rules of what can happen on the silver screen.

Nowadays, not true anymore, right? Like people use the B word on network television, which I’m like, really? But they do. So nowadays we’re all desensitized, but back in the 70s when these films were coming out, profanity on screen was startling. And part of what makes horror effective in changing how people think and feel about a topic is kind of breaking into them a little bit, by creating a kind of dynamic of shock, because when you’re shocked your psyche is sort of transiently cracked open a little bit and you become receptive to things.

This, I think, is part of why people like horror paradoxically. People like to be made vulnerable and to be kind of cracked open in that way, in a way that’s limited, right, in a way that they can control. They go see the movie, they’re a little out, they’re a little hyper vulnerable, they’re a little hyper cracked open, open to new things. And then by the time the film ends, they still feel creeped out, and that’s this idea of the “horror hangover” that I talk about a lot in the book, but they are able to go home and function in their daily life. So they don’t have to like… carry some profound trauma with them forever, but they do carry like a little scintilla of the memory of feeling startled into a new state of understanding. And I think profanity is kind of a small mechanism that helps to do that.

So with the rise of streaming as a huge form of movies now, there are a ton of movies that obviously debut on Netflix for the first time and then come out in theaters. What do you think is the big impact going forward about the genre of domestic horror from receiving it in theaters versus receiving it on your screen at home?

This is such a good question, too. It saddens me. I am a big streamer. We all are. I don’t think anybody who waded through the mirage of COVID managed to not be an habitual streamer. But having said that, streaming culture does really sadden me, because as I talk about in the book, part of what’s powerful about going to the movie theater to watch a horror movie is even if a particular scene doesn’t scare you, you can look around and see people around you bugging out and that can have an effect on you.

The same is true of comedy, by the way. Comedy is another genre that really suffers from being streamed only. So I worry that horror films lose a lot of their edge when people are watching them in isolation at home because there’s none of that collective response, right? I saw the movie Nope, Jordan Peele’s movie Nope, in a theater and I was utterly electrified by how and when people responded to various things and I was so aware that it was influencing the way I experienced that film. So that concerns me.

I do have a ray of hope, though, which is that there are emergent community dynamics that survive even with the era of streaming. So just to give one kind of really random example, have you seen the movie K-Pop Demon Hunters?

I have!

And everyone has. And that movie’s a musical. So like my kids have memorized those songs. As a result, I have memorized those songs. Our friends in California have memorized those songs totally independently, right? Not in the same theater. And when we went to California a couple weeks ago, all the kids were like in the van singing the K-Pop Demon Hunters songs, and then the grown-ups realized, oh, we all know it, too. So, with the advent of streaming, filmmakers need to think about different ways to create communities that can withstand distance. So, musicality is one, that’s a tough landing to stick in horror, although K-Pop Demon Hunters is in fact a comedy-romance-horror spoof. It is not not horror, it’s a film about the demonic overwhelm about human society.

So I anticipate that creative filmmakers will find ways to actually leverage streaming technology as a way of creating new kinds of pop-up communities, whether it’s through song like in K-Pop Demon Hunters or through some “now you have to click this link to watch the last third of the movie” and it puts you in some kind of chat room with the other five hundred people that are in the room at that time. And suddenly you’re face-to-face with four hundred and ninety-nine other people in their pajamas alone on their couch, and forming a community. So, I am worried about streaming, but I don’t think it’s going to be catastrophic for the efficacy of the genre. I just think the genre is going to have to evolve with the tech.

I mean, again, as a medievalist, I study the other prior historical period in which the techniques of producing literature were in massive flux, right? Most of the books I study were written by hand, by scribes. But in 1450, you get the printing press and suddenly, people can own books. There hasn’t been as massive a change in how people consumed literature since then until, of course, the internet, right?

And what ends up happening in eras of massive technological change and how art propagates itself is that the art evolves. And so that’ll happen, too.

Yeah, it’s funny you mentioned K-Pop, Demon Hunters. I worked as a camp counselor this summer, so all of the kids had it memorized.

It’s unbelievable, right? That’s apparently the most lucrative film that Netflix has ever released, and it’s a children’s animated spoof horror. Crazy. Who knew? But believe it or not, not to dwell on it forever, but-

No, keep going!

But that film does have a really interesting politics to it, right? It’s the idea that you cannot heal the rifts in society, literally the rifts, the tears in the honmoon, you can’t heal those rifts unless you accept yourself. That’s like not a bad cultural critique, right? It’s pretty compelling, which is a lot of why kids like that movie so much. Anyway, I’ll move on.

So on that note, about the horror bending of genres, I think that’s super interesting. For many, the horror genre, myself included, can be very difficult to watch. But the message of domestic horror is super important. How do you think the themes of domestic horror can apply to other genres? I know you mention it with kid’s movies, but maybe going into other genres, like how you mentioned comedy.

Domestic horror, a lot of the mental habits I picked up while doing this book are very easily transferable to other horror subgenres. The one that’s the most interesting for me, although I’m not the right person to write an analysis of this, is race. And again, Jordan Peele, sub-theme of this conversation, Jordan Peele’s absolutely magnificent film Get Out.

That film is like specifically citing numerous aspects of Rosemary’s Baby and The Stepford Wives, and Peele has been very candid about that. So that film is taking a genre, the domestic horror genre, that’s normally about the oppression of a woman who’s entrapped in domestic space and making it about the oppression of a black man, trapped in domestic space but it turns out that the dynamics are all similar. He’s gaslit in ways similar to how Rosemary’s gaslit. His girlfriend, Rose, not accidentally named Rose, she like gaslights him, she entraps him there. His technology is taken away, much as Rosemary’s not allowed to make phone calls until she leaves the house and goes to this phone booth. The grandfather figure in the film, Get Out, is named Roman, same as Roman Polanski. So there’s a lot of explicit shout-outs there. And I think the reason is that the dynamics of dehumanization, the dehumanization of women, as they get articulated in horror transfer really nicely to thinking about other kinds of dehumanization; race-based dehumanization, class-based dehumanization.

The film Parasite, a Korean film, which won like a bazillion awards. It’s an amazing film. That’s a film in which the horror is definitely domestic, but the nature of the interpersonal violence is much more about class than about gender per se.

So that’s the easiest way to lateral, conceptually, away from domestic horror about sex and gender, is to lateral to race and class. And also nationality, there’s many other ways to do it.

In terms of leaving the horror genre altogether, I mean, as I say in the book, horror and tragedy are very closely related genres. So, you know, films that are about domestic violence, reproductive control, lack of equal rights for women, that are dramas, I expect to see more and more of that work coming out too. And I tried to gesture toward that in the epilogue when I talk about the wonderful film, Women Talking from 2022, which nobody talks about as a horror film, right? And I’m being a little bit polemical when I talk about it as a horror film because I don’t even know if Sarah Polley would talk about it as a horror film, right? It’s a drama. And yet, it’s absolutely horrific. I’ve not seen a movie that frightened me to my bone marrow more than that film. And that’s because tragedy, which is I think what that film really clearly is, and horror are very very very close genres in a whole number of ways. The primary ones are that both tragedy and horror are based on the possibility of making a viewer feel empathy for the protagonist and deep bodily fear of what’s going on on screen.So drama, specifically tragic drama, is another area in which I think we should expect to see domestic stuff getting worked through.

And then, you know, comedy, as I alluded to before, is kind of like the flip side of the coin of horror in some ways. Both genres are meant to give us a physiological response. Horror makes us cringe and shudder and feel fear. Comedy obviously makes us laugh. Both horror and comedy work a little bit by making us unsure of what’s going on, right? Comedy is funnier when you’re like, what? And then something resolves. Horror is scarier when you’re like, what? And then something resolves. So I think we’re going to see more and more comedies that are about this too. But that will be interesting to see how it evolves because what I do not want is to see a bunch of comedies that kind of make us laugh at the dangerous circumstances in which American women find themselves now because of our laws, our norms, our cultural practices, et cetera. But I mean I do think there’s space for really, really powerful feminism in comedy and I mean I could list any number of female comedians who embody that. So I do think there’s a way to do that, too.

Yeah, and I know the book really just focuses on American film and American domestic horror alongside American political movements. But you did briefly mention Parasite. I’m curious if you noticed any patterns, if you checked out any other international films and if you have any knowledge of those political movements that were going on, I guess anything else similar to Parasite.

Yeah, I have. So, I have a substack, which is called Eleanorshorrors.substack.com, and I have like this month, September, and all of next month, which is National Domestic Violence Awareness Month, I have a theme on all of my posts for those eight weeks about domestic violence horror and many of them are not located in America. So one of the older really interesting places to look for that is the film Possession, which is like a Franco-Polish film from 1981, I think, and Possession is hugely about domestic violence. I find that film enormously hard to watch. It’s also got a very strong supernatural element to it in which Isabelle Adjani is sort of like mating with this weird alien gross thing. It’s really very body, you know, body horror for that time period. But that film is a very interesting foreign domestic horror.

Even earlier, Roman Polanski’s film, Repulsion, from 1965, is definitely also within the genre of domestic horror. Catherine Deneuve, a very young Catherine Deneuve, gets repeatedly sexually assaulted in her own home, and that’s kind of the point of departure and the point of conclusion, actually for that film. It’s a brilliant film. It’s actually part of– so Roman Polanski made a trilogy Repulsion, Rosemary’s Baby and The Tenant. Rosemary’s Baby, people almost always think of that in isolation but it was actually part of a trilogy that Polanski called The Apartment Trilogy.Those films are about domestic violence and and gender-based violence that happens within the home. In one way or another, that whole trilogy is interesting to look at more recently.

There was a film, Winter Sleep from 2014, and it won the Palme d’Or. It’s a Turkish film. And it didn’t get billed as a horror movie, it got billed as a drama, but it is absolutely a domestic horror film. Like, no question about it. And it is brutal. There’s very little physical violence in it, although there is a little bit, it’s mostly about psychological torture. And I have a Substack coming out on that. So you see this genre popping up, kind of like all over the place, and you even see some counterexamples. There’s a great Iranian horror movie called A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, it’s a vampire film that’s doing a lot of pushback against the possibility of domestic violence by having a woman in this highly predatory, empowered role.

So yes, to your question, yes, there’s stuff coming out kind of all over the place. England produced the film Men in 2022, which is an amazing film about domestic violence, but my Substack about that I think went live today. So it’s happening. in a lot of different places, for sure, including Central and South America also.

Yeah, and I really love how your ending explores current examples of domestic horror films, bringing back the reader to why this is a relevant theme today. What are some themes that you hope to see more explored in the domestic horror genre? What really intrigues you? What do you hope that filmmakers talk about in the future?

I hope they get more into the psychology of the abuser. I think that’s a really, really interesting place to go because I think there are a lot of people out in the world who do not think of themselves as abusers who nevertheless commit atrocious acts of abuse. And the more that gets exfoliated, and the more that people can be made aware of what abuse looks like, how it starts, that it starts really small and it tends to get really big later on, I think that would be great.

I think leaning more and more into the dynamics of tech abuse is very important, right, since physical battery was essentially criminalized in the U.S. in the 70s, right, not totally decisively, but pretty decisively. What’s happened is that domestic batterers have just evolved. So many batterers, whether they’re male, female, or otherwise, know that you can’t just beat the snot out of your partner and get away with it. So they do other stuff. They use the internet to stalk and threaten, right? They might hijack somebody’s diary off of their computer and go publish it to terrorize their partner. So the modes in which you can abuse someone are evolving. There needs to be more films about that.

The movie Creep is very much about that, like the ways in which technology can work in the service of violent abusers and violent stalkers. Paranormal Activity has some of that energy too from 2009 and in the subsequent iterations as well with all the camera work dynamic. So I’d like to see that more explored.

If we are leaving the realm of domestic violence, violence against women, to think more broadly about women’s rights. My other desire, and I actually have a book that I’m finishing up about this topic, totally different book. I want to see more films that explore, that invite people to imagine the demonic power of women. Like, let’s get some women villains on screen, just to think about things from another angle. Not because I want women to run around doing bad stuff. I don’t. I don’t want anybody to run around doing bad stuff. But there is an interesting attrition of depictions of women as powerful in any way in contemporary American culture.

Like in the chunk of the last works we’ve seen, and there have been some, like Ginger Snaps is an interesting one. Teeth is a really interesting one. Jennifer’s Body is kind of a cult classic, really interesting film. There have been a number of these. I’d like to see some more interesting variations on that idea because, of course, in most of Western history, this has been like a go-to misogynist trope, the idea of the demonic woman. That’s what the witch trials at their core were about, right? This idea that there was something evil in women that needed to be systematically persecuted and ultimately executed. So I wanna see some kind of “take back the night” energy around that. Like if we wanna depict women as bad, let’s do it in an interesting way. Not in this hamstrung old crone witchcraft kind of way. Let’s make it interesting. So I’d like to see that too.

And I just have one final question and then I’ll give you the opportunity to say any final words, but can you, and you do talk about it, in the book about the horror hangover. Why do you choose to focus on film? What about film do you think is so terrifying compared to other mediums of storytelling?

Great question, too. It’s partially that collective dynamic, and this is why the stream-o-sphere makes me a little bit sad, right? It’s one thing to read Rosemary’s Baby. You’re gonna have a certain level of physiological response based on who you are, what your wiring is, past history, whatever, to reading a novel.

If you’re in the theater, and you’re watching Rosemary’s Baby, and you feel fine, but the woman or man sitting next to you is losing their mind, you’re going to have a bigger reaction to it. So the volume control on drama for how afraid we get is just bigger, like it’s got bigger, it’s calibrated to make more sound, as it were, in the mind than novels.

I think cinema is a more powerful vehicle for creating fear as a genre than the written word usually can be. And even if we think back to the earliest horror art that we have in the Western tradition, for example, we think back to Ancient Greek tragedy, like The Oresteia, The Fury is the third part of The Oresteia, is a wonderful, wonderful, fascinating horror play, as is Euripides’s The Bacchae. Those were plays. They were performed in public. Nobody was sitting around reading those texts alone in their beautiful house in Santorini. They were with a couple hundred, maybe more, maybe thousands of other people who were also bugging out.

So there’s a long history in the Western tradition of experiencing horror, like, as a group, right, in a communal way. And I think that it has always been and remains a very, very powerful vehicle for doing this kind of thing.

I wanted to give you the opportunity to say anything that you would like to to readers after reading this book or just about going on and watching and consuming domestic horror films.

That’s great, thank you. I guess the one final thing I’d say is that one of my hopes with writing this book this way was to encourage people who might not self-identify as feminist to go ahead and take on that mantle. Because the reality is that feminism is not, like, it’s not a political stance that’s just for women or just about women. It’s for everybody.

The kind of violence, the kind of dehumanization that get performed in these films radiates out to loads of other groups, like racial groups, class groups, as I talked about, but really feminism should be a mantle that everybody wants to wear. And I hope that by looking at issues of women’s rights through the highly popular lens of the horror film, more people will feel comfortable saying, like, oh, you know what? I can get behind that.