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.

As Trump’s numbers rose, so too did his penchant for incendiary rhetoric. Like the chicken or the egg analogy, it’s difficult to pinpoint what came first with Trump’s rise in base popularity. Were conservative Republicans responding to his often marginalizing rhetoric or was the rhetoric itself a reflection of what the base was demanding? Or possibly both? Throughout his campaign, there was a succession of moments that historically would have ended any other presidential run. These include, but are not limited to, mocking disability, dismissing Senator John McCain’s war service, othering Hispanic voters, calling then President Barack Obama the founder of a terrorist organizer, and making xenophobic comments about Muslims.

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. Backlash from feminist circles was swift and pointed with some groups adopting Trump slurs, such as his criticism of Democratic nominee and opponent Hillary Clinton as a “Nasty Woman,” as their rallying cry. A contentious election even by Washington standards, Trump’s campaign was a clear indication 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 very obvious political divide.

Certainly, popular culture reflecting the mood of the country is nothing new. Horror, in particular, tends to have an especially subversive history when it comes to social criticism. From zombies being a commentary on consumerism to Godzilla reflecting nuclear proliferation worries, horror films are by their nature uniquely positioned to make controversial cultural critiques because they are so easily dismissed outside of horror circles as schlock and gore. Despite Stephen King’s often quoted and ultimately misunderstood comment that horror films are essentially conservative in nature, the essential aim of horror is to show trespass of some sort against cultural norms and that has made it the perfect vehicle by which to dissect what it means to be a woman in Trump’s America.

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).

In the early 1930s, the United States was still recovering from the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and its devastating economic impacts. In response, films began to explore the seedy underbelly of an American culture turned on its head. Known as pre-code films, these movies depicted everything from killers with a fondness for meat suits to maniacal scientists hell bent on playing God to overt, non-punitive sexuality, and were a showcase for cultural taboos that frequently left audiences clutching their pearls. Consider the 1933 film Baby Face, a story about female sexual agency, that really leans into its titillating subject manner when the main character, played by Barbara Stanwyck, rails against her father for selling her to men when she turned 14 to pay off his debts.

As a reaction to these films, the Hays Code was a voluntary standard of ethics created in 1930 by the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America. 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.”^[i] Although it was officially in effect from 1930 until 1968, the Motion Picture community did not immediately adopt the Hays Code. Horror, in particular, initially pushed the boundaries of good taste by creating storylines extreme enough to interest a cash strapped audience and in doing so, caught the attention of moral watchdog groups, chief among them the National Legion of Decency (LOD)- an organization closely affiliated with the United States Roman Catholic Church.^[ii]

By threatening boycotts en masse if filmmakers didn’t eliminate depictions of immorality, the LOD was the power structure needed to actively enforce the Hays Code. Led by Roman Catholic Joseph Breen in 1934, the Production Code Administration mandated that the board must approve all films prior to their release. It also amended the original Hays Code to include stringent guidelines as to what constituted moral and immoral behavior.^[iii] Chief among the list of immoral behavior banned in films was “any inference of sex perversion” an umbrella phrase that the LOD used to erase any and all depictions of homosexuality on film.^[iv] This new rigid enforcement resulted in filmmakers finding creative ways to express homosexuality while seemingly adhering to the Code.

As a means of projecting homosexual subtext, “coding” became the way in which films could be read as both heterosexual and homosexual narratives.^[1] Just enough homosexual signifiers were included in films so that audiences open to a homosexual reading of a film were rewarded while those looking for a heterosexual reading were also pacified. Horror, especially, proved a genre especially adept at offering up coded narratives.

^[i] Jon Lewis, Hollywood v. Hard Core: How the Struggle Over Censorship Created the Modern Film Industry (New York: NYU Press, 2000), 300-302; 312.

^[ii] Thomas Patrick Doherty, Pre-Code Hollywood: Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema 1930-1934 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 6-9.

^[iii] Ibid., 107

^[iv] Mick LaSalle, Complicated Women: Sex and Power in Pre-Code Hollywood (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 20.

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."