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.

Works Cited:

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.

Works Cited:

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 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 to 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).

Works Cited:

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.

While public discussions regarding on the job sexual harassment weren’t especially frequent in 1991, images of successful working women were not at all uncommon. And these images, which were largely white with a specifically middle-class consciousness, created a pop cultural template for what it meant to be a woman in the workplace. Because let’s be real. Women have always worked outside the home but this reality didn't become part of the cultural zeitgeist until it became middle class, white women working outside of the home. As men shipped out to fight, women took their places. In her book The Home Front and Beyond: American Women in the 1940s, Susan M. Hartmann writes that between 1940 and 1945, the number of women in the workplace grew by 50 percent with homemakers now a presence in the workforce. But this presence didn’t last. With the war’s conclusion, the men returned home and this new workforce of women was no longer needed. And so despite polls showing that women wanted to keep these jobs and continue working, realizing the autonomy a paycheck provided, most were given a hearty slap on the back with thanks for a job well done and then were dismissed.

As pop culture media markets started to expand out in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, the image of the working woman expanded from plucky ingénue and work-obsessed spinster to now include the career woman who was also a wife and mother and who did all of those jobs to perfection. The Superwoman was a model of perfection that no actual human could ever attain. So it’s perhaps not all that surprising that the 90s also saw negative depictions of working women increase, a phenomenon famously explored in Susan Faludi’s award-winning Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women.

It was in this environment, with an escalating culture war over whether mothers belonged in the home or the workforce,  that horror films started to take the workplace seriously as a site of cultural critique. As sexual harassment is one of the more prevalent threats faced by women in the workplace, it makes sense that horror films would begin to explore how these experiences represent a very specific type of terror and how this violence expands traditional notions of monstrosity. These films, arguably more than any other sub-genre of horror, are a direct reflection of a form of violence that is commonly experienced.

But beyond the 'message imparting' logs, fish in perculators, and slices of cherry pie is a devestating portrait of the effects of childhood sexual abuse. Surprisingly, Twin Peaks was not the first time television grappled with this heinous act. Six years earlier, ABC aired the made for tv movie Something About Amelia and started an important cultural conversation that Twin Peaks would later expand upon.

The revelation in the original series that Laura was killed by Leland, her father, is horrifying enough. But the film's expansion of Leland's motives and its deep dive into the tragic consequences of such abuse is soul crushing. Although Lynch is notoriously reluctant to discuss the meaning of his work, others involved in bringing Laura to life provide insight into how Laura's journey is intended to be read.

Laura's story matters because it is grounded in reality. According to RAINN, "One in 9 girls and 1 in 53 boys under the age of 18 experience sexual abuse or assault at the hands of an adult. And the perpetrator is known to the child in 93% of the cases. But as experts frequently note, this is a seriously underreported crime and so exact data is not known. What is known is that since the country has gone into its COVID caused lockdown, reports of childhood sexual abuse is on the rise.

In its video exploring Fire Walk with Me, Lost in the Movies notes that the film "places the pain of the victim at the story's dead center. No intermediary figures like Cooper, Donna, or Jacoby can mute Laura's agony. The film privileges direct perception over clinical observation. This is trauma without filter."