How Horror Movies and Women’s Rights Have Been ‘in Lockstep’ Since the 1970s

The surprising part was when I started thinking about the aftermath of the 1970s, with both horror and women’s rights in lockstep with each other. I realized that, right now, we’re in another uptick where horror is taking an acutely feminist stance since 2009 [when Johnson argues domestic horror returned to cinemas with Paranormal Activity], which coincides with an attrition of women’s rights in the U.S. 

You use the term “domestic horror” throughout the book. How do you define it?

Horror comes in many subgenres. Some of them are obvious, like slasher movies. Others are obvious when you think about it, like psychopathy horror like The Silence of the Lambs. “Domestic horror” is a genre label that I devised to describe horror films in which the nature of the horror may be supernatural in part, but it has to do with a female protagonist who triggers empathy in the audience who is trapped in the domestic space and is unable to leave. It’s the domestic space itself that produces the conditions of horror and danger, not exclusively whatever the supernatural externality. Yes, Rosemary is raped by Satan, but the knock on effects of that is that she’s effectively kept in a house arrest by her abusive husband and her insane neighbors. 

There is also always at least one male malefactor, usually human but not always, like The Exorcist, who is enacting violence against an imprisoned victim of domestic horror.

How did you settle on the six films you focused on in this book?

I knew I wanted to write about Rosemary’s Baby, but I didn’t realize I was writing a book for a while, I just thought, “This is an Atlantic article.” Over the course of drafting that chapter, I realized that I wasn’t just talking about reproductive control, I was talking about coercive control. Once I realized I was talking more broadly about domestic abuse and domestic violence, The Exorcist just flashed in my mind. I had long had a sense that that movie was an elegy to victims of domestic violence even though it wasn’t read that way. 

Rosemary’s Baby is very closely based on the novel by Ira Levin, so I thought, I wonder what his other novels look like. I read The Stepford Wives and I was like, he’s thinking about the Equal Rights Amendment. 

The reason I decided to include The Omen is because it was considered to be a direct inheritor to Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist because Catholicism is immediately on deck as the driver of the horror.

As soon as I knew I was talking about domestic violence I knew I had to talk about The Shining, because it’s the only one in which the male perpetrator of violence is scarier than the supernatural elements. 

The only one whose place in the book was hardest to figure out was Alien. Every other female protagonist in these films is coded as very passive. Ellen Ripley is not. She’s a fighter, she survives, we think that she wins, even though later films in the franchise reveal that she doesn’t. As I was researching the ERA for The Stepford Wives chapter, one of the things I observed that really bothered people wasn’t the idea that women should have equal rights, it was that that would entail lifestyle changes and women working outside the home. People who didn’t support the ERA said they were worried about women in combat situations, because they didn’t want women coming home in body bags and they didn’t think they were physically up to the task. Alien centers on a woman who is utterly capable from a military standpoint and, critically, doesn’t have military training. She’s a badass, not because she’s burly, but because she’s smart. I was going to bring Alien in to flesh out my argument about the ERA and The Stepford Wives, but the rape dynamic in Alien is super important. That’s been pointed out in previous analysis of the film. What hasn’t been pointed out is that the film discusses the idea of not forcing anybody to carry a pregnancy to term that’s inflicted upon them by rape.

Could you elaborate on what you write is the “extraordinarily sophisticated way” Rosemary’s Baby deals with abortion rights?

In New York state in 1968, there was a move to liberalize, not legalize, abortion in instances of rape and the health of the mother, and that motion failed catastrophically. It was not close. Then Rosemary’s Baby hit theaters, and they see this woman who was in fact raped and whose life was in danger. I don’t think it’s possible to watch that movie and not align with Rosemary. It made people feel that sense of entrapment and estrangement and peril and danger when women all over the United States were raped or their lives were in danger and they became pregnant because there was very little they could do about it. In 1970, New York state skipped over liberalization and went straight to legalization.    

Mia Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby. Photo: FilmPublicityArchive/United Archives via Getty Images

I get very choked up when I talk about this part of my research, but the discourse evolved from doctors being penalized to, in 1969 after Rosemary’s Baby had been in theaters for a year, abortion bans being archaic, cruel laws, and the concept that there’s something morally wrong about putting women’s bodies in danger by not letting them have abortions. We’re heading in that direction again.

The film is doing a sophisticated dance around the conversation of reproductive rights: Rosemary desperately wants a baby, she just wouldn’t have wanted this baby if she was able to choose. It’s dangerous not to allow women bodily autonomy, because in the logic of the film, the result is that the antichrist takes over the world.

You contend that The Exorcist is an allegory for domestic violence, despite there being no male perpetrator in the home. Or is there…?

I started with the iconic scene of Ellen Burstyn looking like a battered wife in a headscarf and big glasses hiding the bruises on her face, asking the priest for help. Even though, in principle, it’s her 12-year-old daughter hurting her mother and herself, it’s not really her. It’s this male demon who has possessed her body and is calling her to hurt her mother and herself. So really, there is a male actor in the home who’s assaulting these women. 

Ellen Burstyn grabs Linda Blair in The Exorcist. Photo: Warner Brothers via Getty Images

The film sets 1970s viewers up to have mixed feelings about Chris (Burstyn). She’s beautiful and stylish but she’s a single working mom who swears a lot and she’s a little bit of a ballbuster. Viewers might like her, and they might not, but by the time the demon is attacking her, they definitely like her and want her to get out. It’s a litmus test: How strong is your aversion to liberated women? Do you hate them so much you want them to get hurt? 

Also, men were basically understood to own their wives and children for most of legal history. So the demon is possessing Regan and by extension, Chris. The possession narrative isn’t supernatural, it’s just a literalization of the ideology that supports domestic violence—i.e. the man owns the wife and children and can do with them as he wishes.

And then we have The Stepford Wives and the ERA.  How does that film speak to that movement?

This film is pretty obviously asking, what do we really want from women if it’s not equality? The politics around the ERA in that film were pretty explicit at the time. What took a little bit longer to see is how that is tied to the film’s idea of domestic violence. The author of the novel, Ira Levin, was thinking about how denying women rights more broadly contributes to domestic violence and what it says about men who do that. Men don’t want a human partner, they really want an automaton.

A publicity still for The Stepford Wives. Photo: Silver Screen Collection via Getty Images

You connect The Omen to the “nice guy” phenomenon and how “nice guys” can be abusers too. Could you talk more about that?

The casting choices are interesting. Why would you cast Gregory Peck, who was famous for his role as Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird, which is to say, the nicest guy ever, as Robert Thorn? Nobody hates Gregory Peck. In this film you don’t hate Gregory Peck, even though it is his fault that his wife Kathy eventually dies. He deliberately decides to lie to Kathy about her child, who died at birth, and he doesn’t believe she’s strong enough to withstand that kind of news. He colludes with a priest to give Kathy a foundling child who—surprise!—turns out to be the antichrist whom she unknowingly raises as her own. Throughout the entire film he never reveals that to her, even though he has numerous opportunities to do so. His desire not to be the bad guy keeps him silent.

He tells her a million times in The Omen how much he loves Kathy—and he means it and we believe him because he’s Gregory Peck. That does not undo the film’s very subtle claim that a benign, loving, devoted husband can still deny a woman access to her own reproductive life, which is an act of violence. Lying to a woman to preserve your own reputation at the expense of her sanity is a form of abuse. It makes us tolerate this extremely uncomfortable paradox where he doesn’t want to be the driver of the violence but he is and yet we like him. The Omen is very eager to indict not only very terrible men, but also men who would never hurt their wives, but also  don’t really see them as fully fledged human beings.

Could you talk more about your thesis of the responsibility of men or the person who impregnates and their vulnerability to unwanted pregnancy in Alien?

One of the things that film does that’s so powerful is that the first victim of rape is a man. As a society we should reflexively be asking, what if men could get pregnant by rape? What if men ran the risk of dying from pregnancy complications, like John Hurt’s character does in Alien? I think our political discourse around this would be radically different if male bodies were on the line in the way that female bodies are. 

The optics of that birth scene are really interesting: This man lays on his back like any number of people in the delivery room. The alien is remarkably anthropogenic: It’s bipedal, it has a head that’s larger relative to its body, it has two upper limbs that are smaller than its two lower limbs, it has a double-hung jaw, it has two eyes in the front of its head. All of these things are consistent with human fetal morphology. You’re not seeing a blob emerge from John Hurt’s body; you’re seeing something that looks like a really messed up fetus. 

And then of course we have The Shining, which is perhaps the most obvious depiction of an abusive relationship in all of the films you write about.

Part of the reason I was so ready to hit the ground running when Dobbs was announced was that during COVID lockdowns, I had done a lot of reading about what causes domestic violence and what forms it takes. The Shining is an extremely powerful treatment of domestic violence because it raises one of the questions that bedevils survivors which is, why does he do that? Is it because he has an alcohol problem, is it because he’s mentally ill, is there something more nefarious at work? For Wendy Torrance (Shelley Duvall) in The Shining, the answer is yes, yes and yes. Stephen King is very interested in how the psychiatric vulnerabilities of Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) tee him up to be vulnerable to the possession dynamics that are present in the Overlook Hotel.

Jack Nicholson in The Shining. Photo: Sunset Boulevard/Corbis via Getty Images

The causal link is not as present in the film as it is in the novel, but the film is a really interesting epistemological study about how confusing abuse can be for the victim. Reviewers hated Wendy and Shelley Duvall. They thought she played Wendy as weak and pathetic. But her performance of how survivors muddle through abuse from being completely gaslit to a place where they understand what’s happening to them is messy and there are regressions.

You write about how there were largely no domestic horror movies between 1980 and 2000 because things got better for women. Do you think we’ll start to see the resurgence of the genre now that things are getting objectively worse for women?

I do think we’ll see more of that. 2024 was a bumper year for that with Immaculate, Apartment 7A, and The First Omen, but those haven’t been the only domestic horror in the 2020s. Heretic was a fascinating take on domestic horror because they made a similar casting choice to Gregory Peck in The Omen with the cute and bumbling Hugh Grant who couldn’t possibly be a threat. Men from 2022 is very explicitly about the knock on effects of domestic violence. Weapons is also about domestic violence, primarily centered on children and child sexual abuse. 

The films I look at in the book have already triggered films in other areas as well, like Get Out. Jordan Peele saw the dynamics of dehumanization, risk in the home, treating other people like property, which applies analogously to people of color as it applies to women, and rewrote the domestic horror to make it about race. 

The core realization of the domestic horror genre is the idea that the domestic sphere is the safest place for women, children, and any kind of vulnerable population is not true. We’re going to see not just more horror but horror’s applicability to political injustice in the coming years.

Scarlett Harris is a culture critic and author of A Diva Was a Female Version of a Wrestler: An Abbreviated Herstory of World Wrestling Entertainment.

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