While hagsploitation examples can be found across the decades, their main era of popularity was the 1960s and 1970s, not uncoincidentally a time of great upheaval for women on the domestic front (Billson). Whatever Happened to Baby Jane, Robert Aldrich’s ode to an aging movie star and her paraplegic sister, debuted in October 1962 and is typically considered the first official hagsploitation film. Four months later, Betty Friedan’s groundbreaking book, The Feminine Mystique, was released and I would argue that both of these events tap into a cultural mood that contributed to the second wave of American feminism. A journalist who was fired after revealing she was pregnant with her second child, Friedan set about interviewing her former classmates in anticipation of their 15th college reunion. These interviews revealed the quiet frustrations of women who traded in their professional ambitions to become housewives and mothers. A year before, in 1961, President John F. Kennedy convened the President’s Commission on the Status of Women which looked at the ways legal inequality impacted women, particularly in the workplace (Cochrane). Kennedy also challenged the status-quo thinking that women’s value to society was limited to the home front and raising children. It was this same questioning of opportunities for women outside of the home that led Friedan to write about a sense of malaise she saw reflected in her life and the lives of her Smith College classmates when they discovered that, despite their stellar education, professional opportunities simply did not exist. Like these contemporaneous cultural events, hagsploitation pushes back against simply framing women as wives and mothers. Critics suggest hagsploitation is a cautionary tale of the madness that can befall a woman who is not grounded in home and family (Mortimer 156), but I contend that these films are actually subversive warnings of what happens when women don’t support other women. By imbuing youth with a specific type of cultural capital inaccessible to women over thirty, hagsploitation screams are a recognition of this chasm and the institutional forces invested in perpetuating it.

Hagsploitation screams code possibility for younger women living in the margins and looking for alternate ways of being. This is particularly important in our current cultural moment in which the act of natural aging is increasingly not the norm. Between Gen Z “voicing acute distress” regarding aging and Gen Alpha becoming the financial driver of sales in the skincare industry, social norms associated with aging have shifted dramatically (Holtermann; Cheong). Hags represent an alternate view on aging in which a woman’s power is not derived from the physical. Indeed, in many cases, Hags are only able to access their full autonomy once they have been divested from a sexualized gaze. Through their force, these screams counter notions of frailty stemming from physical presentation which typically are associated with age. They signal to younger women that without generational unity to support women stepping outside of prescribed roles, both physically and behaviorally, the Hags' fate will one day be their own.

On the surface, age and gender conspire in these films to position women who are middle aged and older as villains. Unlike other film genres that cast (equally problematically) postmenopausal women as founts of knowledge or eccentric foils, horror almost exclusively renders women of this age group as monstrous (Richards 119). From age-related disability in The Nanny (1965) to equating spinsterhood with mental illness in Misery (1990) to casting postmenopausal sexuality as abnormal in Ruby (1977), hagsploitation horror is rife with examples of aging women cast as threatening simply because they challenge cultural expectations about what it means to exist in the world as an older woman. In his exploration of the history of hagsploitation, Peter Shelley contends that these roles embody the “Woman in Peril” trope because they hinge on women being made vulnerable due to age (8). Sometimes this is the result of the natural decaying process that is part of aging, but other times it is the result of women having dared to live an unconventional life.

In the world of hagsploitation, women are expected to be wives and mothers – and those who intentionally eschew those roles cast as a threat (Young 3). This threat then magnifies depending on the woman’s age. As nothing disturbs the culture more than examples of people who are able to carve out lives living in opposition to societal norms, older women who have chosen not to enter into traditional marriage and mothering roles are viewed as dangerous. Pre-menopause, their age provides them enough of a history living in defiance of cultural pressures to demonstrate to younger women that such paths are possible. Post-menopause, their bodies become sites of defiance. Erin Harrington, whose excellent Women, Monstrosity and Horror Film: Gynaehorror explores female reproduction in horror films, explains how entering menopause positions women at the margins of cultural norms that are almost entirely predicated upon production:

The barren body refuses to ‘behave’ in a culturally-sanctioned manner, or to sit within the social categories that are made available to and that therefore construct the female body. The barren body, as a type of specifically female body, both signifies the potential capacity and refusal to reproduce. (234)

By violating cultural expectations of reproduction, the hags in hagsploitation operate from the margins. Women who defy the roles of wife, mother, and (re)producer simultaneously reflect and challenge our expectations of aging by offering an alternative way of being that directly challenges the status quo (Sharry and McVittie 80). And while it is certainly true that these films explore “anxieties about aging in an increasingly youth-focused postwar culture,” I contend there is another narrative unfolding in hagsploitation films parallel to these readings (79).

Stephen King’s argument that horror is “innately conservative, even reactionary” explains the positioning of older women in hagsploitation as monstrous and needing to be expunged, but only if you are reading these films from the perspective of a 1960s and 1970s dominant culture frightened by women’s growing political power and independence (390). I argue that the screams emitted in the hagsploitation films Whatever Happened to Baby Jane, Strait-Jacket (1964), Lady in a Cage (1964), The Night Walker (1965), Eye of the Cat (1969), and What’s the Matter with Helen (1971) carve out a space for older women that negates ageism’s cultural erasure by forcing audience engagement with their marginality; those screams also echo second-wave feminism’s concerns over aging, caregiving roles, threats of physical violence, income insecurity, and incarceration. Though reacting to different pressures stemming from societal norms, all of these screams quite literally give voice to women living in opposition to gendered expectations.

Billson, Anne. “‘Hagsploitation’: horror’s obsession with older women returns.” The Guardian, 18 Jan. 2018.

Cheong, Charissa. "Gen Alpha Seems Obsessed with Expensive Skincare – and Millennial Parents are Getting the Blame." Business Insider, 10 Jan. 2024.

Cochrane, Kira. "1963: The Beginning of the Feminist Movement." The Guardian, 7 May 2013.

Harrington, Erin Jean. Women, Monstrosity and Horror Film: Gynaehorror. Routledge, 2019.

Holtermann, Callie. "Why Does Gen Z Believe It’s ‘Aging Like Milk’?" New York Times (Online), 23 Jan. 2024.

 King, Stephen. "The Horror Movie as Junk Food." Playboy, January 1982, pp. 120-122.

Mortimer, Claire. Spinsters, Widows and Chars: The Ageing Woman in British Film. Edinburgh University Press, 2021.

Pahle, Rebecca. "A Primer for the Unexpectedly Awesome Hagsploitation Horror Subgenre." SYFY Wire, 13 Nov. 2019.

Richards, Jennifer. "“Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the ugliest of them all?” The Elderly as “Other” in Countess Dracula." Elder Horror: Essays on Film's Frightening Images of Aging, edited by Cynthia J. Miller and A. Bowdoin Van Riper, McFarland, 2019, pp. 119-128.

Shary, Timothy, and Nancy McVittie. Fade to Gray: Aging in American Cinema. University of Texas Press, 2021.

Shelley, Peter. Grande Dame Guignol Cinema: A History of Hag Horror from Baby Jane to Mother. McFarland & Co., 2009.

Singer, George HS, David E. Biegel, and Brandy L. Ethridge. "Toward a Cross Disability View of Family Support for Caregiving Families." Journal of Family Social Work vol. 12, no. 2, 2009, pp. 97-118.

Young, Caroline. Crazy Old Ladies: The Story of Hag Horror. BearManor Media, 2022.

From the outset, candidate Trump’s incendiary rhetoric fueled a succession of moments that historically would have ended any other presidential run. Whether mocking disability, dismissing Senator John McCain’s war service, calling then President Barack Obama the founder of a terrorist organization or advocating violence against protesters, Trump demonstrated early on that he was disinterested in participating in civil political discourse (“The 155 Craziest Things”; Neuman). As Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Doron Taussig note, Trump’s rhetoric created an immediate point of differentiation between him and the other candidates:

By offering apparently impromptu messaging in scriptless speeches and tweets at unusual hours, Trump broke with the sanitized, prepackaged rhetoric of his predecessors. His apocalyptic contrasting of demise and deliverance, parsing of individuals as winners and losers, and demonization of those with whom he disagrees also differentiate Trump's rhetorical repertoire from that of those who previously held the office (620).

While his approach drew criticism from both sides of the aisle, it elicited support from voters looking for a candidate they believed was not a Washington insider.

Trump was especially prone to making misogynistic comments about women. In October 2016, for example, an Access TV video surfaced of a 2005 conversation in which Trump joked about sexually assaulting women (Prasad). While he dismissed the incident as “locker room talk,” his behavior on the campaign trail – including criticizing female reporters for not adopting a feminine style of dress, calling women he disagreed with politically “fat pigs,” distributing campaign buttons that said “Trump that bitch” in reference to opponent former Senator and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and being accused of sexual violence by multiple women – suggested a disturbing pattern of behavior (see Elsesser; Filipovic; Levine and El-Faizy; Matthews; Time Staff). Backlash from feminist circles was swift and pointed with some groups adopting Trump slurs as their rallying cry, such as his criticism of Democratic Presidential nominee Hillary Clinton as a “Nasty Woman.” This verbal sparring between the candidates and their supporters signaled that the culture war – meaning those conflicts stemming from value- and moral-based judgments like abortion and immigration policy – was alive and well. When the dust of the election settled, Trump was declared the winner, and the country was left to grapple with its obvious political divide.

And yet, President Trump’s rhetoric was not that of a lone voice operating from the margins. Rather, he was part of a larger discourse critiquing women and their political gains. Men like Andrew Tate, an influencer who suggested women “bear responsibility” for their sexual assault (Radford), James Green, the vice chair of the Wasatch County Republican Party who openly criticized pay equity measure for fear it would mean “Mother” might not stay home to raise the children (Phillips), and Royce White, a Minnesota Senate candidate who believes women have gotten “too mouthy” (Jones) operated then and continue to act as a cacophony of voices undermining women’s political and economic strides. And yet, misogyny is not just the purview of the Right. The Left has also seen its own fair share of misogynistic moments including President Obama making note of then California Attorney General Kamala Harris’ physical attributes during a fundraiser introduction (Saenz), Chairwoman of the Pueblo County Democratic Party Bri Buentello being expected to perform administrative tasks not expected of her male colleagues (Buentello), New York City mayor Mike Bloomberg suggesting female employees offer a male colleague oral sex as a wedding present (Lee), and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders paying women less than their male counterparts during his 2016 Presidential campaign (Ember and Benner). The end result is a perilous political environment in which women’s access to political and social power is under considerable threat.

Within this pantheon of politics, auditory expressions of dissatisfaction have a long history. Frequently deployed in marches, sit-ins and picket lines, chants express community dissatisfaction and are designed to bring awareness to a particular topic. Often a clever play on words meant to be “short, percussive, and meaningful,” chants represent a somewhat intellectualized protest response (Anderson). Conversely, while screams are also about disruption, they transmit an explicitly guttural reaction to events and typically emerge with no pre-planning by the scream’s performer.  From Lia McGeever screaming during a San Francisco Board of Supervisors meeting as a “nonverbal expression of pain” in recognition of the treatment of trans people (Morris) to Jess, a protester at the 2017 inauguration who described her scream as a response to “that wellspring of agony of the millennia of people being wronged and nobody being there to say no or them saying no and nobody listening” and who instantly found her turmoil treated as a meme (Sivertson et al.), screams in public spaces are sometimes the only expression of agency a disenfranchised person can access. Horror films are the perfect vehicle by which to dissect what it means to be a woman in Trump-era America because the cornerstone trope of the genre– the screaming woman–reflects this history of protest by resisting the silence inherent in misogyny.

While popular culture as a whole has taken note of the shifting political landscape, horror films have arguably offered the most pointed critiques. Horror movies feel especially relevant in the age of Trump for how they crystalize cultural anxieties that have always been present but feel more resonant when framed by Trump’s rhetoric (Chang). Considering horror’s political underpinnings, this is not surprising. As Victoria McCollum argues in Make America Hate Again: Trump-Era Horror and the Politics of Fear, the Trump Presidency represents a specific cultural climate that makes it particularly well suited for interrogation in horror films:

The events, anxieties, discourses, dogmas, and socio-political conflicts of the thus-far short Trump era have already begun to seep into popular horror: context infecting text, moments of metaphorical contagion producing allegories that transform real anxieties into more or less palatable forms (12).

In the Trump political era, the scream is explicitly confrontational. It is a visceral way to underscore the perceived severity and impact of President Trump's actions on various communities. By daring to deploy one’s voice in an environment encouraging muteness, the scream makes “visible, not just a particular sound, but those invisible forces that make it come about” (Ospina 15).

I argue that the screams released in Better Watch Out (2016), Black Christmas (2019), Ready or Not (2019), and The Invisible Man (2020) are specific to a very specific brand of political misogyny represented by the rise of Trump and the MAGA movement. These screams represent an assertion of personal power in the face of oppositional, patriarchal forces that seek to render women silent.

Anderson, LV. “All the Chants I Heard at Saturday’s Anti-Trump Protest in NYC, Ranked.” Slate, 13 Nov. 2016.

Buentello, Bri. “Misogyny: A Cultural, Not a Partisan, Problem.” Pueblo Chieftain, 17 Dec. 2023.

Chang, Justin. “Has horror become the movie genre of the Trump era?” Los Angeles Times, 13 Oct. 2017.

Elsesser, Kim. "Trump Suggests Female Reporters Should Be More Like Donna Reed." Forbes, 5 May 2020.

Ember, Sydney and Katie Benner. “Sexism Claims From Bernie Sanders’s 2016 Run: Paid Less, Treated Worse.” The New York Times, 2 Jan. 2019.

Filipovic, Jill. "Trump's Stone-Age Views on 'Women's Work'." CNN, 19 May 2020.

Jamieson, Kathleen Hall, and Doron Taussig. "Disruption, Demonization, Deliverance, and Norm Destruction: The Rhetorical Signature of Donald J. Trump." Political Science Quarterly, vol.132, no. 4, 2017, pp. 619-650.

Jones, Ja’han. “Royce White's resurfaced remark about women being 'too mouthy' shows how MAGA recruits with misogyny.” MSNBC, 28 May 2024.

Lee, MJ. “Allegations of misogynistic and sexist comments loom over Michael Bloomberg’s first 2020 debate.” CNN, 19 Feb. 2020.

Levine, Barry and El-Faizy, Monique. All the President's Women: Donald Trump and the Making of a Predator. Hachette Books, 2019.

Matthews, Dylan. “Read every horrible thing Donald Trump has said about women and tell me he's not a sexist.” Vox, 16 May 2016.

McCollum, Victoria, ed. Make America Hate Again: Trump-Era Horror and the Politics of Fear. Routledge, 2019.

Morris, Kyle. “Pro-trans activist delivers blood-curdling scream at San Francisco Board of Supervisors meeting.” Fox News, 4 May 2023.

Neuman, Scott. “Trump Lashes Out at McCain: 'I Like People Who Weren't Captured.’” NPR, 18 July 2015.

Ospina, Gustavo Chirolla. “The Politics of the Scream in a Threnody.” Politics, edited by Stephen Zepke and Simon O'Sullivan, Cambridge University Press, 2010, pp. 15-33.

Phillips, Kristine. “Utah Republican argues against equal pay for women: It’s ‘bad for families’ and society.” The Washington Post, 19 Feb. 2017.

Prasad, Ritu. “How Trump talks about women – and does it matter?” BBC, 19 Nov. 2019.

Radford, Antoinette. “Who is Andrew Tate? The self-proclaimed misogynist influencer.” BBC, 12 March 2024.

“Saenz, Arlette. “Obama Calls Californian Kamala Harris 'Best Looking' Attorney General.” ABC News, 4 April 2013.

Sivertson, Amery, et al. “Memes Part 8: The Scream.” Endless Thread, 12 Nov. 2021.

“The 155 Craziest Things Trump Said This Election.” Politico Magazine, 5 Nov. 2016.

Time Staff. “The Anti-Hillary Pins at the RNC Are Even Worse Than You’d Imagine.” Time, 18 July 2016.

Like other forms of popular culture, horror is rife with examples of mothers who are framed through their innate need to protect and defend their children displaying what Erin Harrington calls a “spectacle of female ferocity” and a willingness “to sacrifice their own lives to save or seek vengeance for their children” (198). Chris in The Exorcist (1973), Karen in Child’s Play (1988), and Rachel in The Ring (2002) are all examples of mothers pushed to violence to protect their children but who never move into the position of monster. They reflect a standard of motherhood that “valorises self-sacrifice, selflessness and nurturance” and that equates those traits with being a “good” mother (Arnold 37). Conversely, other mothers, such as Ruth in The Girl Next Door (2007) The Mother in Barbarian (2022), and Ellie from Evil Dead Rise (2023) violate audience expectations by engaging in extreme non-normative behaviors that explicitly privilege their needs above those of their children.  Their violence and absolute disregard for the well-being of their children moves them firmly into traditional spaces of monstrosity. But what of those mothers who exist at the edges of the “good” and “bad” mother binary?

Grieving mothers in horror are neither good nor bad. Rather, they are abject. In her groundbreaking work Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, Julia Kristeva argues that the abject is a liminal space that disturbs “identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules” (4). In horror films, the grieving mother represents a violation of the cultural rules around mourning that privileges silence because her loss represents a violation of the natural order and because her new identity of being a mother without a child disrupts how her identity is perceived by others. She becomes, as Kristeva writes, “The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite” as her grief makes her both an object of sympathy for what she has endured and an object of discomfort for how her identity of a mother without a child troubles definitions of motherhood that hinge on both mother and child being alive (4). As Joseph Childers and Gary Hentzi note in their definition of the abject, it “possesses an uncanniness that is as tempting and fascinating as it is revolting” (1). Certainly, this is true for the grieving mother in horror as not just her pain – but the expression of her pain in ways that challenge cultural norms – catapult her into this fascinating and revolting hybrid.

Maternal loss separates a woman not only from her child but from other mothers whose children are still alive. When the death of an infant is not validated, the repercussions for the mother can be extremely isolating (Cline 167). Both her loss and the lack of community support create an additional layer of Otherness for a mourning mother that renders her suffering taboo. Drawing upon the work of French feminist Élisabeth Badinter, Sady Doyle notes that maternal instinct is socially constructed and that expressions of grief historically reflect these non-fixed definitions noting that infant deaths could be met “with wrenching grief or shrugged off” depending upon cultural norms (170). Certainly, horror interacts with both of these reactions, but it is the “wrenching grief” response transmitted through a scream that is our point of interest. Because it is overtly demonstrative, wrenching grief cannot be ignored. It is a performance that drags personal pain into the public sphere and forces those in proximity to engage with it, however uncomfortably. I argue that the screams released by a grieving mother are an acknowledgement of a liminal state of abjection and a direct renunciation of the silence that surrounds maternal loss.

Kristeva points to the corpse as the ultimate example of abjection but also lists bodily fluids such as pus, sweat, and blood as additional disruptors (3). I contend that screams unleashed by a grieving mother function in a similar way when they occur in a culture predicated on silence in grief. It is the ultimate “death infecting life” scenario for which there can be no explanation (Kristeva 4). Her trauma, coded by her tears, disrupts the natural order in which a parent should precede a child in death. As such, the grieving mother in horror is repellant precisely because her experience of loss reminds those around her of the fragility of the human experience. The death of her child also functions as the inciting event that triggers her monstrosity. Here, Barbara Creed’s discussion of the use of sound in horror as a means of upending the symbolic order is useful:

“Sound is a crucial dimension of the abject…The right sounds in horror can be very scary. Because the semiotic refers to the time of the mother-infant relationship, prior to entry into the symbolic and language, the maternal figure, particularly the monstrous-feminine, is associated directly with the irruption of abject sounds-grunts, howls, snarls and screams, and so on (101-102).

The grief-stricken mother’s scream reminds the audience of her abject state – of a state before language – even while engendering audience sympathy thereby casting her “monstrosity” in a unique light. Unlike horror movie monsters whose behavior or appearance violate norms, grieving mothers are pushed to the margins first and foremost simply by their experience of having lost a child. While classic examples of monstrosity such as killing or appearing decayed from emotional turmoil may-and often do- follow suit, their original trespass against societal standards is simply living when their child did not.

Amanda Greer has taken issue with the “privileging of abjection as the primary lens through which to view the horror film’s maternal figures” noting that this framework renders her “a vessel of blood and birthing viscera that cannot self-express” (18-19). But her screams render her more than a body by centering her interiority and granting her an agency within the abject that demonstrates the cultural constraints that surround maternal loss by “providing a temporary narrative structure to [her] emotional experience” (Millar and Lee 178-179). The films Who Slew Auntie Roo (1971), Friday the 13th (1980), Beloved (1998), Hereditary (2018), and The Curse of La Llorona (2019) explore this intersection of agency and the isolating sorrow that can permeate a mother’s psyche in the face of the unimaginable loss of a child.

Arnold, Sarah. Maternal Horror Film: Melodrama and Motherhood. Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.

Cline, Sally. Lifting the Taboo: Women, Death and Dying. NYU Press, 1997.

Creed, Barbara. “The Monstrous-Feminine, Then and Now: Barbara Creed in Conversation with Nicholas Chare.” Re-reading the Monstrous-Feminine, edited by Nicholas Chare, Jeanette Hoorn and Audrey Yue. Routledge, 2019, pp. 95-105.

Doyle, Sady. Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers: Monstrosity, Patriarchy, and the Fear of Female Power. Melville House, 2019.

Greer, Amanda. Mother Feels Best: Mobilizing Negative Maternal Affect as Postfeminist Critique in Contemporary Horror Cinema. 2017. The University of British Columbia, MA thesis.

Harrington, Erin. Women, Monstrosity and Horror Film. Routledge, 2019.

Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Columbia University Press, 2024.

Millar, Becky, and Jonny Lee. "Horror Films and Grief." Emotion Review, vol. 13, no. 3, 2021, pp. 171-182.

Sayed, Asma, ed. Screening Motherhood in Contemporary World Cinema. Demeter Press, 2016.

The silence of the closet has historically served as a method of marginalization for queer people. Although the 1920s and early 1930s offered LGBT+ people increased opportunities for community and visibility – most notably in the nightclubs and cabarets dubbed “Pansy Parlors”- this cultural openness was short-lived (Takach and Daniels 52). The economic collapse of the Depression coupled with an American religious revival that demonized homosexuality meant that for many queer people, existing in the shadows was the only way to survive. Predicated upon silence and a desire for hegemony, the closet symbolizes a space to which queer people have historically been relegated by a dominant culture that views “queerness as a threat to the status quo” (Russo 156). As a site of oppression, the closet renders those who challenge heteronormative identity invisible and, perhaps more importantly, quiet.

Unlike the screams that framed the Stonewall uprising in 1969 or the screams of protest that accompanied the first gay pride parade in 1970, the screams of the closet are inaudible to those who exist outside of it (Varga et al. 34; Bruce 27). Not surprisingly, this cultural queer silence often gave way to textual silence in which queer people were either ignored or framed in pejorative terms. As Isabel Corona Marzel notes in her work exploring textual silences and social construction in queer obituaries, it is not enough to know that non-heteronormative identities and relationships have been erased but “…to understand why the texts develop the way they do and what kind of social action they are performing with these ‘discreet’ textual silences” (77). Similarly, Stuart Hall argues that “meaning is relational within an ideological system of presences and absences” such that understanding what a community is silent about can elucidate its values as much as what it is vocal about (101).

Queer silence and invisibility in film can largely be traced back to the Hays Code. A voluntary standard of ethics created in 1930 by the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, the Hays Code was a response to public pressure levied against the film industry for its perceived celebration of immorality (Doherty 6-9). The Code as it became known, was guided by the principle that "no picture shall be produced which will lower the standards of those who see it. Hence the sympathy of the audience should never be thrown to the side of crime, wrongdoing, evil or sin” (Lewis 300-302; 312). In 1934, the Production Code Administration amended the Hays Code to include stringent guidelines as to what constituted moral and immoral behavior. Within this list of immoral behaviors to be eschewed was "any inference of sex perversion," which was added to erase the growing presence of homosexual characters on screen (Benshoff and Griffin 34). Queerness, especially, was a target of watchdog groups anxious to eliminate any non-normative gender portrayal that challenged the conflation of sex with gender.

In response, some filmmakers engaged in the process of coding, or subtly suggesting non-normative sexuality, in order to sidestep the restrictiveness of the guidelines. Horror films excelled at embedding just enough queer signifiers to suggest to the audience alternate readings of a film while also still seemingly adhering to the Code’s requirements. Darren Elliot-Smith notes, “Horror film’s allegorical and metaphorical values have long been utilized to symbolize heterosexual fears of homosexual Others” with the genre’s reliance upon forms of monstrosity making it particularly well suited to push back against the heteronormativity the Hays Code was designed to achieve (192). And yet, the templates established in these early, coded horror narratives didn’t so much challenge the status quo as much as they codified it. In Skin Shows: Horror and the Technology of Monsters, Jack Halberstam argues, “Monstrosity (and the fear it gives rise to) is historically conditioned rather than a psychological condition” (6). Such is the case with queer history in the United States in which both the popular culture and the political culture actively cast queerness in ways suggesting abnormality. As a response to the limitations imposed by the Hays Code, horror films began to rely upon homosexual signifiers as a means of conveying a threat to the (heterosexual) status quo. This coding resulted in a cultural shorthand that linked queer identity with danger and perversity.

Frequently only developed in relation to a narrative’s heteronormative characters, queer villains have a legacy of existing solely to fortify gender and sexual binaries (Vallese 3).  And yet, these characterizations have also offered queer moviegoers an opportunity to imagine identities beyond a rigid set of cultural norms that see gender as fixed and only in relation to physical/sexual presentation. As Heather O. Petrocelli notes in Queer for Fear: Horror Film and the Queer Spectator, queer spectatorship enables a reading of villainy beyond the obvious: “queers feel seen by horror because they recognize a kind of kinship between the trauma shown in horror films and their embodied queer traumas, as both societal victim and monster” (132).

In horror films, queer silence has a legacy of existing in concert with a scream. Particularly in the mid-1930s to mid-1960s, a number of horror films transmitted cultural associations of monstrosity to queerness by having a heteronormative character scream in fright and/or revulsion when confronted with the specter of queerness. I argue that by establishing screaming and silence as oppositional reactions, Hays era horror films codified deviancy in relation to queerness for the dominant culture while simultaneously coding possibility for queer audiences.

The screams heard in Dracula’s Daughter (1936), Cat People (1942), Suddenly, Last Summer (1959) and Homicidal (1961) render queer people as monstrous by auditory signaling to dominant culture audiences the presence of threatening deviance. As Anna Creadick notes in  Perfectly Average: The Pursuit of Normality in Postwar America, sexual terminology adapted to a binary to support the era’s interest in sexual and gender conformity:

The division of sexual identities into the homo/hetero binary coincides with the constructing of orthodoxies and the drawing of boundaries that are a sign of normality at work. Yet here again, as in other moments in this story, the politics of “normality” are complex in their effects, since the emergence of this binary with its homogenizing politics also coincided with the coalescence, organization, and politicization of gay and lesbian individuals and communities (91).

As such, the screams in these films – without exception performed by CIS white women – reinforce the structural silence of the closet by privileging the norms of the dominant culture and not the experiences of the oppressed subculture. And yet, for queer audiences used to existing in silence and invisibility, these screams also made queerness visible by reminding queer spectators they were not alone. And that they possessed the power to make people scream, turning the silence of “stigmatized otherness” into a potential source of strength (Chauncey 26).

Benshoff, Harry M. Monsters in the Closet: Homosexuality and the Horror Film. Manchester University Press, 1997.

Benshoff, Harry M., and Sean. Griffin. Queer Images: A History of Gay and Lesbian Film in America. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2005.

Bruce, Katherine McFarland. Pride Parades: How a Parade Changed the World. NYU Press, 2016.

Chauncey, George. Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940. Basic Books, 1994.

Corona Marzol, Isabel. "Coming out of the Closet ‘Six Feet Under’: Textual Silences and the Social Construction of the Family Stage in the Obituary Genres." Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses, vol. 19, Nov. 2006, pp. 67-82.

Creadick, Anna. Perfectly Average: The Pursuit of Normality in Postwar America. University of Massachusetts Press, 2010.

Doherty, Thomas Patrick. Pre-Code Hollywood: Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema 1930-1934. Columbia University Press, 1999.

Elliot-Smith, Darren. Queer Horror Film and Television: Sexuality and Masculinity at the Margins. I.B. Tauris, 2016.

Halberstam, Jack. Skin Shows. Duke University Press, 1995.

Hall, Stuart. "Signification, Representation, Ideology: Althusser and the Post‐Structuralist Debates." Critical Studies in Media Communication, vol. 2, no. 2, 1985, pp. 91-114.

Lewis, Jon. Hollywood v. Hard Core: How the Struggle Over Censorship Created the Modern Film Industry. NYU Press, 2000.

Marzol, Isabel Corona. "Coming out of the Closet" Six Feet Under": Textual Silences and the Social Construction of the Family Stage in the Obituary Genres." Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses, no. 19, Nov. 2006, pp. 67-82.

Petrocelli, Heather O. Queer for Fear: Horror Film and the Queer Spectator, University of Wales Press, 2023.

Russo, Vito. The Celluloid Closet: Homsexuality in the Movies. Harper & Row, 1987.

Takach, Michail, and B.J. Daniels. A History of Milwaukee Drag. The History Press, 2022.

Vallese, Joe. It Came from the Closet. The Feminist Press at SUNY, 2022.

Varga, Bretton A., Terence A. Beck, and Stephen J. Thornton. "Celebrating Stonewall at 50: A culturally geographic approach to introducing LGBT themes." The Social Studies, vol. 110, no. 1, 2019, pp. 33-42.

Conceptually and legally, the definition of what constitutes sexual harassment has historically been somewhat nebulous. Prior to the enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, there weren’t significant federal legal options one could pursue to address sex-based quid pro quo expectations within the workplace. But that would soon change with the establishment of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) under Title VII of this act. It was the EEOC’s opinion that Title VII provided legal protections from sexual harassment within the workplace, and while their power initially was only investigative, their broader interpretation of Title VII was foundational in providing women with legal recourse (Khaing 330). The mechanisms prescribed by Title VII were further strengthened by the Civil Rights Act of 1991 which mandated that “employers may be liable for compensatory and punitive damages up to $300,000 per plaintiff, depending upon the size of the employer’s workforce” in cases in which sexual discrimination was found to have occurred (Mead 813).

The screams heard in Office Killer (1997), The Belko Experiment (2016) and The Purge: Season One (2018) represent an assertion of agency often denied to women who have experienced workplace sexual harassment and are an explicit demand for justice. They challenge organizational silencing apparatuses by highlighting their ineffectualness and danger. These screams are a visceral reminder that the continuum of institutionalized violence can only be dismantled once it is confronted overtly and without apology.

Bain, Kristin, Kathryn Cooll, Tamar A. Kreps and Elizabeth R. Teney. “Research: Incivility at Work Silences Everyone, But Especially Women.” Harvard Business Review, 21 Jan. 2025.

Beaton, Erynn E., and Maham Ali. "Subjected to Harassment: Deconstructing Power in an Encounter with Workplace Sexual Harassment." Gender, Work & Organization, 11 Dec. 2024.

Dagunduro, Adebukola Olufunke, et al. "Exploring Gender Dynamics in the Workplace: Strategies for Equitable Professional Development." Comprehensive Research and Reviews in Multidisciplinary Studies, vol.2, no. 1, 2024, pp. 001-008.

Fitzgerald, Louise F. "Still the Last Great Open Secret: Sexual Harassment as Systemic Trauma." Journal of Trauma & Dissociation, vol. 18, no. 4, 2017, pp. 483-489.

Galdi, Silvia, Anne Maass, and Mara Cadinu. "Objectifying Media: Their Effect on Gender Role Norms and Sexual Harassment of Women." Psychology of Women Quarterly, vol. 38, no. 3, 2014, pp. 398-413.

Grosser, Kate, and Meagan Tyler. "Sexual Harassment, Sexual Violence and CSR: Radical Feminist Theory and a Human Rights Perspective." Journal of Business Ethics, vol. 177, no. 2, 2022, pp. 217-232.

Khaing, Hnin N. "Civil Rights in the Workplace: It's Time to Cut out the Excess and Get to the Truth." American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy and the Law, vol. 30, no. 3, 2023, pp. 321-341.

Lazard, Lisa. “Saying It like It is? Sexual Harassment, Labelling, and# MeToo." The Palgrave Handbook of Power, Gender, and Psychology, edited by Eileen L. Zurbriggen and Rose Capdevila, Spring International Publishing, 2023, pp. 461-475.

Lee, David, and Helen H. Yu. "Breaking the Code of Silence: Who are the Women Reporting Sex-Based Discrimination in Federal Regulatory Agencies?." Policing: An International Journal, vol. 43. No. 4, 2020, pp. 575-589.

Mead, Marisa J. "Taxing the Victims: Compensatory Damage Awards and Attorney's Fees in Sexual Harassment Lawsuits." Journal of Law and Policy, vol. 11, no. 2, 2003, pp. 801-860.

McLaughlin, Heather, Christopher Uggen, and Amy Blackstone. "Sexual Harassment, Workplace Authority, and the Paradox of Power." American Sociological Review, vol. 77, no. 4, 2012, pp. 625-647.

“Sexual Harassment.” U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, n.d. Accessed 10 February 2025.

Sexual Harassment in Our Nation’s Workplaces.” Office of Enterprise Data and Analytics (OEDA) Data Highlight, no. 2, April 2022.

A vocal countering of the historical silence surrounding the Black experience in the United States, horror film screams that engage with anti-Blackness have a legacy of both solidifying and challenging dominant culture norms wherein “[w]hiteness, masculinity, and heterosexuality function as transparent norms, in contrast to identities ‘marked’ as black, female, or homosexual” (Smith 28). The reverberations of anti-Blackness especially, are prominent in the cultural landscape with “manifestations of anti-Black racism (e.g., Jim Crow, redlining, mass incarceration, organizational discrimination) … [contributing] to current disparities in the health, education, and economic status of Black people in the USA” (King et al. 145). Consequently, combating these cultural norms that reinforce white supremacy requires adding voice where there have been historical silences, an advocacy horror films have not always been prepared to perform.

Early horror films like White Zombie (1932) and Black Moon (1934) depicted their Black characters as either savage menaces or bumbling cowards, erasing their humanity and positioning these characters on the cultural margins (Dewan). By deliberately exploiting racial anxieties and reinforcing fears stemming from eugenics, these films conveyed through their heroine’s screams an intensely damaging framework in which whiteness/purity is set in opposition to Blackness/monstrosity (Baines 131). While some films like Son of Ingagi (1940) attempted to offer a counter-narrative to the racist flat and stock characters populating the genre by showing middle-class Black characters engaged in professional roles, most horror films by major production companies continued to eschew Black characters who offered nuance, depth and possibility (Snead 3). Complicating this race-based good/bad dichotomy is the role white women played within these narratives. In writing about 1930’s “jungle films,” Rhona J. Berenstein argues that Ann in King Kong (1933) exemplifies how white women were positioned as both “victim and aggressor” (331). While Ann is stalked and suffers at the hands of Kong, she is also his double, “a result of their similar status as spectacles” (332). But while white women may have been connected with male Blackness in these films, the same cannot be said for female Blackness. White women (cast as the damsel in distress) in these films not only added to the erasure of Black women (cast as nameless “savages”) by being the ones allowed to scream, they also co-opted Black women’s actual lived trauma through these screams. Films like King Kong leverage the idea of the enslaved woman suffering at the hands of monsters, a historical reality for Black women during American slavery, and gives the experience to white women in a violent cooption of pain that reverberates in cinema for decades to come (318).

The 1960s and 1970s represented a sea change of sorts in which more and more films brought racial representation to the fore, allowing Black characters to assert agency, challenge anti-Blackness and push back against historical silencing practices. Some films, like Night of the Living Dead (1968), were subtle in their approach. While the film centers a Black man as its hero, Ben’s race is never mentioned signaling “a certain boundary of frankness and conventionality regarding racial representation that Night does not cross” (Lowenstein 162). Other films overtly challenged notions of racism, particularly those tied to masculinity. This was especially true of Blaxploitation films such as Blacula (1972), Ganja & Hess (1973) and Abby (1974) in which Black masculinity was celebrated and depicted as desirable. In her highly influential work Horror Noire: Blacks in American Horror Films from the 1890s to Present, Robin Means Coleman writes about the importance of Blaxploitation films in grappling with the genre’s depictions of race noting that “[t]he films were emboldened by Black Power ideologies—a range of belief systems espousing an awakening of Black pride, self-sufficiency, and empowerment which were prominent during the decade” (119).

In recent years, critiques of the United States as a “post-racial” society have seen horror films explore ways in which resistance can operate against “a cinematic apparatus that codes its viewer as white” while also engaging directly with white supremacy and anti-Blackness (Stewart 37-38). The most famous of these films is arguably Get Out (2017), Jordan Peele’s critical and commercial success. A film that “draw[s] attention to the continuity between the dangers horror protagonists often face and the endemic conditions of Black life or, more specifically, of an anti-Black world,” Get Out grapples with how white supremacy operates in a country where a large number of people believe racism was eradicated with the Barack Obama presidency (Gaines 255-256). Subsequent films such as Black Box (2020), Candyman (2021) and Soft & Quiet (2022) all confront willful blindness in white Americans by having screams make visible stories and experiences the historical record has long ignored (Bellott 50). With an impact that has led to more horror films centering the experiences of people of color, Get Out is an example of horror films in the future can combat cinematic anti-Blackness and create important cultural dialogues.

In examining how the screams in Chloe, Love is Calling You (1934), Play Misty for Me (1971), Poor Pretty Eddie (1975), Antebellum (2020) and Master (2022) frame race, I argue that these films demonstrate the importance of acknowledging and addressing historical silence in the pursuit of racial justice.

Works Cited

Baines, Thomas E. "White Terror, Black Threat." Albany Law Review, vol. 84, no. 1, 2020, pp. 131-158.

Bellot, Gabrielle. "American Horror Story." New York Times Magazine, suppl., 14 Nov. 2021, pp. 50-56.

Berenstein, Rhona J. "White Heroines and Hearts of Darkness: Race, Gender and Disguise in 1930s Jungle Films." Film History, vol. 6, no. 3, 1994, pp. 314-339.

Coleman, Robin R. Means. “The Enduring Woman: Race, Revenge, and Self-Determination in Chloe, Love is Calling You.” In Heroines of Film and Television: Portrayals in Popular Culture, edited by Norma Jones, Maja Bajac-Carter and Bob Batchelor, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2014, pp.163-176.

King, Danielle D., et al. "Research on Anti-Black Racism in Organizations: Insights, Ideas, and Considerations." Journal of Business and Psychology, vol. 38, no. 1, 2023, pp. 145-162.

Lowenstein, Adam. Shocking Representation: Historical Trauma, National Cinema, and the Modern Horror Film. Columbia University Press, 2005.

Miles, James. "Historical Silences and the Enduring Power of Counter Storytelling." Curriculum Inquiry, vol. 49, no. 3, 2019, pp. 253-259.

Smith-Ruiz, Dorothy. Amazing Grace: African American Grandmothers as Caregivers and Conveyors of Traditional Values. Praeger, 2004

Stewart, Jacqueline. Migrating to the Movies: Cinema and Black Urban Modernity. University of California Press, 2005.

Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Beacon Press, 2015.

Historically, what constitutes stalking has proven difficult to pin down. Referred to as an “old behavior, but a new crime,” the term only entered the national lexicon in the 1990s after a series of high-profile incidents involving celebrities (Meloy xix). Without one concrete, agreed upon definition, stalking is usually conceived of as representing a series of behaviors. Typically, the behavior can be broken down into two categories. Traditional stalking involves acts such as following or watching, harassing, showing up uninvited and entering a home or car without invitation, while stalking with technology includes acts such as sending unwanted phone calls or text messages, monitoring social media activity, spying through the use of technology and tracking locations with electronic devices or applications (Morgan and Truman). While the United States Department of Justice defines stalking as “engaging in a course of conduct directed at a specific person that would cause a reasonable person to fear for his or her safety or the safety of others or suffer substantial emotional distress,” what constitutes “reasonable” varies wildly (Alicke and Weigel 130)  The gender of the complainant, especially, can influence how certain behaviors are interpreted. One study found that in a “prototypical female victim/male defendant case,” men issued far fewer guilty verdicts than did women and had a more negative view of the victim (Dunlap et al. 414). Without one “operationalizing… definition of stalking,” news reports and popular culture have been left to mold the public’s understanding of what stalking looks like, resulting in the crime remaining amorphous in the minds of many (Quinn-Evans et al. 6980).

For better or worse, celebrity stalking incidents greatly inform how people perceive the threat of stalking. In 1981, President Ronald Reagan was shot by a man who wanted to get the attention of actress Jodie Foster; a woman he previously stalked while she was attending college (Perez 270). In 1982, actress Theresa Saldana was brutally stabbed ten times by a man who obtained her home address by hiring a private investigator (Holmes 322). Seven years later, actress Rebecca Schaeffer was murdered at her home by a man who had previously harassed her for years with threatening letters (Gilligan 285). In 1990, veteran soap opera actress Andrea Evans lost a significant amount of income when she was forced to quit One Life to Live after a man slit his wrists in front of her studio and threatened her life (Lang). In all of these scenarios, an explicitly violent event dominated news reports, rendering other behaviors like harassing phone calls and threatening letters as somehow less significant. Further, the undercurrent of institutional ineffectiveness and blasé dismissal of women’s trauma that connects these stories highlights how difficult it is for women to receive institutional support to address this type of crime. Because if someone in the public eye with access to resources is unable to define the impacts of stalking enough for outsiders to take it seriously, what chance do the rest of us have?

Often lost, too, in these stories is an understanding of how rage mingles with fear for women who have experienced stalking, an experience horror films are uniquely positioned to explore. From surveillance to unwanted communication to threats and manipulation, stalking behaviors are hardwired into horror film narratives. As a storytelling device, the act of stalking has traditionally served to inspire dread and to remind audiences that there is no space where danger does not lurk. By reflecting the “paranoid anxiety that a violent obsession lurks within the mundane exteriors of those ‘others’ with whom we share our world,” stalking in these films infiltrate spaces traditionally thought to be “safe” and highlight how the conceptualization of danger is frequently gendered (Nicol 53). For women, certain physical environments such as a darkened parking lot or an isolated pathway in the woods traditionally instill a greater degree of fear than it does for men (Valentine 289). Stalking removes those location limitations so that a person’s every waking moment suddenly reads as threatening. Horror films then mine this experience to explore how women’s trauma is normalized and often trivialized by institutions failing to offer critical support.

Far less frequent are horror films in which women stalk men. In these stories, men are depicted as being more readily believed. Certainly, the “woman scorned” archetype is a factor here since the idea of a woman responding excessively emotionally plays into culturally ingrained ideas about gender and behavior. Female stalkers are mostly depicted as being angry that a romantic relationship has ended, and so her rage is depicted through the prism of interpersonal disappointment rather than institutional injustice. Beyond that, the type of overtly, physically-threatening stalking presented in these scenarios are informed by “masculine ideologies” (Schultz et al. 9). In other words, the behavior of the stalking stems from patriarchal ideas of gender difference whether the perpetrator is male or female. This is not meant to suggest that the experience of being stalked is any less for men than it is for women but to underscore how significantly gender expectations play out in these films.

In all horror films that engage with stalking behaviors, fear is a natural consequence of stalking victimization. For films that are not expressly about stalking but reflect its behaviors, it is not uncommon for that fear to be reflected back to audiences via the killer’s POV. Here, screams become an expression of terror and a renunciation of the polite behavior women are often counseled to perform so as to not antagonize the men bothering them. But horror films that are explicitly about stalking tend to give women space to express much more nuanced responses to the experience. While fear is certainly present, it is the rage that comes from cultural dismissal of stalking trauma that is uniquely expressed. Reel-life affords women a space to get angry, something conspicuously absent from real-life where a woman’s response is often examined as intensely as the perpetrator’s motivations. Her screams delineate this anger by becoming as much about the lack of institutional support received as they are about the emotional toll of her victimization.

The fear that is transmitted by stalking behaviors is ultimately disembodied. While its tangible products may be evident (texts, photos, etc.), these are simply the means by which stalkers remind their victims that the threat they pose is not contained; it seeps into all spaces. This idea of a threat without borders has only been exacerbated in recent years as modern technology allows for an easier bypass of privacy safeguards. When a woman screams in these films, she is reframing the threat by giving it definition and crystallizing its danger. Screaming as a performance imbues the threat with an urgency that undercuts questions of the threat’s validity and seriousness making it impossible for observers to ignore. Films such as Fatal Attraction (1987), Ratter (2015) and Unsane (2018) return to traumatized women the authority over their own feelings and remind audiences that the standards for being believed are still different for women than they are for men.

Works Cited

Alicke, Mark D., and Stephanie H. Weigel. "The Reasonable Person Standard: Psychological and Legal Perspectives." Annual Review of Law and Social Science, vol. 17, no. 1, 2021, pp. 123-138.

Dunlap, Emily E., et al. "Mock Jurors’ Perception of Stalking: The Impact of Gender and Expressed Fear." Sex Roles, vol. 66, 2012, pp. 405-417.

Gilligan, Matthew J. "Stalking the Stalker: Developing New Laws to Thwart Those Who Terrorize Others." Georgia Law Review, vol. 27, no. 1, Fall 1992, pp. 285–342

Holmes, Ronlad M. "Stalking in America: Types and Methods of Criminal Stalkers." Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice, vol. 9, no. , 1993, pp. 317-327.

Ko, Warren. "The Cruelest Irony: Monica Seles and Her Struggle With German Justice." Berkeley Law, 2008, pp. 1-29.

Lang, Derrick J. “Dark Side of Celebrity Stalkers.” CBS News, 8 March 2005.

Meloy, J. Reid. The Psychology of Stalking: Clinical and Forensic Perspectives. Academic Press, 1998.

Morgan, Rachel E. and Jennifer L. Truman. “Stalking Vinctimization, 2019.” United States Department of Justice, Feb. 2022.

Nicol, Bran. Stalking. Reaktion Books, 2006.

Norris, Sarah M., Huss, Matthew T, and Russell E. Palarea. "A Pattern of Violence: Analyzing the Relationship between Intimate Partner Violence and Stalking." Violence and Victims, vol. 26, no. 1, 2011, pp. 103-15.

Perez, Christina. "Stalking: When Does Obsession Become a Crime." American Journal of Criminal Law, vol. 20, 1992,  263-280

Quinn-Evans, Leah., David A. Keatley, and Lorraine Sheridan. “A Behavior Sequence Analysis of Victims’ Accounts of Stalking Behaviors.” Journal of Interpersonal Violence, vol. 36, no. 15-15, Aug. 2021, pp. 6979-6997.

U.S. Department of Justice. “Stalking.” Office of Violence Against Women, 7 Nov. 2023.

Valentine, Gill. "Women's Fear and the Design of Public Space." Built Environment (1978-),  vol. 16, no.4, 1990, pp.  288-303.

To say that horror films’ representations of the lived experience of what it means to be a person with a disability are problematic is an understatement. Early horror films leveraged this association of physical difference to monstrosity by having the inner depravity of monsters reflected in their physical appearance. For example, the titular character in Phantom of the Opera (1925) begins his reign of terror upon being ousted as a lead violinist when he is unable to control the usage of his fingers. In the wake of his first murder, his physical body is further altered when acid is thrown in his face by a frightened assistant. The film implies that part of the obsession with Christine that drives the narrative stems from his coveting her physical ability to still perform and her beauty. This idea that monsters should be instantly identifiable to audiences via markers of difference is most clearly evident in the monster movies of the time in which makeup and prosthetics were widely used to quickly achieve Otherness in the eyes of the audience. The 1930s, especially, saw an increase in eugenics-based horror narratives steeped in ableism. Examples such as Island of Lost Souls (1932), Doctor X (1932), and Dark Eyes of London (1939) all revolved around the maniacal pursuit of physical perfection and rendered those with pronounced physical differences as monsters.

By the early 1960s, however, horror began to delve more into the interiority of characters such that physical difference as a signpost for monstrosity started to dissipate. Genre films began to leverage disability not as coding for evil but for implied morality in contrast to the monster. But this equally problematic switch toward framing disability as power/valorization still functioned to Other people with disabilities. The two disabilities most commonly foregrounded in this shift, deafness and blindness, are still physical disabilities but are not always mapped on the body in obvious ways. For instance, Wait Until Dark (1967), See No Evil (1971), and The Cat O’ Nine Tails (1971) all position blindness as an asset essential to defeating the monster. It is a trend that continues in modern horror with films such as Don’t Breathe (2016), Hush (2016), and A Quiet Place (2018). Interestingly, another shift shows signs of emerging in which disability isn't just valorized but becomes a preferred state. In Bird Box (2018), a post-apocalyptic horror film in which merely looking at the evil entities results in almost immediate death, survivors are forced to keep themselves blindfolded for protection. For the character Malorie, selecting to disable one of her senses for protection is a choice she makes begrudgingly and speaks to a cultural view on ableism that positions disability as a weakness. This plays out most notably when she visits a community that has elected to permanently blind its members. Her shock at seeing the choice made by this community is designed to be echoed by the audience and highlights just how deep ableist thinking is embedded in the cultural psyche. In her article “Blind Survival” Disability and Horror in Josh Malerman's Bird Box,” Laura R. Kremmel notes how the film “presents an optimistic glimpse of revised attitudes towards disability” via “the frequent punishment of Malorie’s ocularcentrism as she works to feel safe in this new world in which her greatest ability has become her greatest disability” (51). While it remains to be seen how these revised attitudes play out on screen, the current trend in horror persists as casting disability as a survival skill worthy of being celebrated, not demonized.

Still, to write off horror narratives that rely upon spectacle derived from physical difference to trigger an audience response does not give enough credit to these narratives. While these stories do engage with societal fears connected to physical difference, they also work to undo assumptions often made about those with disabilities. They also afford characters with disabilities space to refute embedded structural silences and reclaim the disability narrative. The films The Spiral Staircase (1946), House of Wax (1953) and AHS: Freak Show (2011) engage with silence rooted in systemic oppression by interrogating the ableism embedded in what a culture defines as monstrous.

Works Cited

Condon, Stephanie. “Pelosi Heckled at Liberal Conference,” CBS News, 8 June 2010.

Kremmel, Laura R. "Blind Survival: Disability and Horror in Josh Malerman's Bird Box." Studies in Gothic Fiction, vol. 6, no.1, 2019, pp. 43-52.

Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez, Columbia University Press, 1982.

Longmore, Paul K. Why I burned my book and other essays on disability. Temple University Press, 2003.

Rucker, Philip. “Pelosi Delivers Speech Over Screams of Health-Care Activists.” Center for Disability Rights, 8 June 2010.

Smith, Angela. Hideous Progeny: Disability, Eugenics, and Classic Horror Cinema. Columbia University Press, 2011.

Sutton, Travis. "Avenging the Body: Disability in the Horror Film." A Companion to the Horror Film, edited by Harry M. Benshoff, 2014, pp. 73-89.