Although this sub-genre is known by other names such as hag horror, psycho-biddy horror and Grande Dame Guignol, these films all follow the same template: an aging woman, often financially independent, who ebbs between hysterical and batshit crazy, is either the victim of or the perpetrator of gaslighting. It often stars an aging movie actress who has not previously been known for horror films and who has a certain acting style that lends itself to campiness. These films also draw upon the history of exploitation cinema in which films are specifically designed to be particularly salacious in the hopes of piquing the interest of ticket buyers.

But screen subgenres don’t simply emerge and the same is true for hagsploitation. 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. 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. 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 outside the home opportunities for women 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 Friedan’s book, 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 but I contend that these films are actually subversive warnings of what happens when women don’t support other women.

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.

And yet, what makes a good mother is explicitly connected to decade specific cultural norms. In the 1950s, women were cast to be the heart of the nuclear family. But in the 1970s, this construction of motherhood was blown apart by second-wave feminism thinking that advocated largely for women to have increased employment opportunities outside of the home and more importantly, an increased authority over their own reproductive decisions. In the 1980s, popular culture was actively reflecting mothers working outside of the home while simultaneously balancing the demands of family and marriage.

In light of this image of mothers as superhuman beings of perfection pervading television and film, it was inevitable that a backlash would ensue. But the backlash didn’t come in the form of demonizing motherhood, but, strangely, as an amplification of motherhood. In 1990, Foster Cline and Jim Fay introduced the term "helicopter parent" to describe parents, although typically mothers, who were overly invested and involved in the lives of their children. These mothers not only filled their children’s every waking moment with activities, but also provided a near-constant level of supervision. These generational fluctuations in what an idealized form of mothering should look like demonstrate that motherhood is not a fixed construct, but a fluid one. Further, as noted by Jodi Vandenberg-Daves in Modern Motherhood: An American History, “These idealized concepts were invented by white, middle-­ class Americans on the East Coast at a time when most of the American population could not afford such a neat division of labor and approach to mothering.”

And while most popular culture maintained a privileging of her children’s needs over her own as central to motherhood, there was one genre that actively resisted defining motherhood in such pure and sacred terms. In horror films, the association of motherhood with monstrosity is so pronounced that it has become an acknowledged trope. Because horror films typically trespass against cultural norms, it is not at all surprising that one of its favorite targets is motherhood. Overbearing, and often homicidal, horror film mothers come in all forms. There’s the perverted religious zealotry of Margaret White in Carrie that manifests itself in the extreme psychological and physical abuse of her daughter. The disturbingly intimate relationship between mother and son in The Killing Kind that sees Thelma cover for and facilitate her son’s bloody crimes. And the psychological torment of mothers like Grace in The Others whose own psychotic break is both the cause of filicide and a reaction to it. But with the emergence of so-called “elevated” or “prestige” horror, some have noted a move away from bad mothers toward grief-stricken ones. But what is fueling this centering of maternal grief and how does it reframe conventional depictions of motherhood in horror films?

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."