I'm t T and I'm Zakiyah and this is Dope Labs. Welcome to Dope Labs, a weekly podcast that mixes hardcore science with pop culture and a healthy dose of friendship. We are in the thick of spooky season, and this I think is one of our favorite times of year in our friendship, don't you think. Yes, yes, I mean bring on the fall fashions, yeah, turtle nicks and leather jackets, but also bring on the scary movies. Absolutely. I feel like we bonded over scary movies very early in our friendship.
You got me hip too, the insidious movies, and those are still some of my all time favorites. Like It scared me so much. There's something about dreaming. Y'all need to watch it. Y'all gotta watch it. I think so it feels good, But that's an old well, I don't know if I would say it's an old scary movie. But there's been a new wave of scary movies like
Get Out Us and most recently we've seen Centers and Weapons. Yes, and I like this genre of scary movie because it feels like we've moved from gore and blood and all of that to like some symbolism and it's a little new ones do you know? And that's not a new thing. So you know, we've seen a little bit of symbolism here there, and when you go back and look, it's like, what do they say, hindsight is twenty twenty? Lit'll make you start asking some questions, right, So before we jump
into anything, let's go into the recitation. So what do we know? I feel like we know horror films have been around for a long time, and some people hate them, some people love them. I know your mom is one of the folks that doesn't like horror films. No, no, no, she doesn't want to be scared. Life is scary enough. We also know that there are some similarities that we've seen in these movies, so like witches, Satan and exorcisms, ghosts and zombies, right, And I feel like that is
truth for a lot of different horror films. So what do we want to know? Well, I think my love for horror films started early. So there are some classics that I've seen, but I saw them with like an immature mind, if that makes sense, Like before I knew what I was looking for. So I want to look back and say, like, what are some of the blind spots? What are some of the classic cases of like symbolism that I don't even recognize? Yes, and I want to know how horror films because we might not think of
it on its face, but it's art, you know. And I want to know how this form of art is a commentary on the times that these movies were released, you know what I mean. Yeah, we think about it forget Out and us, but you don't look back at Alfred Hitchcock and say, oh, yeah, he was really talking about what was going on there. You know, it's so true. And I also want to know how recent horror films
are stacking up against the ogs. You know. I feel like when we're talking about horror films, we talk about the same ones. We talk about Carrie, we talk about Friday the Thirteenth, Nightmare on Elm Street, we talk about the Shining, you know, all of the same ones. But I want to know, like how the present day horror films, how they match up to some of the ones that are stuck in our minds. Yeah, I think that's good. What's going to be on your mount rushmore of horror films?
If you can't tell by now. This episode is all about horror films, and I love what you said, t T. There is an art to this. It is art, and sometimes we overlook that. And so we said, who can help us unpack it? You know, who can help us find the science behind it? And so for this episode we pulled out the really big guns and we have doctor Eleanor Johnson.
I'm Eleanor. I'm a professor of medieval literature and horror films at Columbia University and my new books, Scream with Me, was just published by Atria Books in September of twenty twenty five.
Your book Scream with Me introduced us to the concept of domestic horror, and domestic horror is where you have stories where the terror come from within the home instead of like external monsters. So tera from within the home would be abuse, control, bodily violation, and routines of violence.
And also in your book, you focus on six movies, so Rosemary's Baby, The Exorcist, The Step for Wives, the Omen Alien, and The Shining And you also focus on a specific time period nineteen sixty eight to nineteen eighty. Why was that time period so important to you?
Several reasons. One, I was interested.
In writing a book that would look at horror during the period in which sort of feminism was really really surging into the public consciousness and was worn with women's bodily autonomy and so through obviously in Roe v. Wade passed in nineteen seventy three, the Equal Rights Amendment, which didn't pass, but was on the docket for like almost that whole entire decade, and also the early laws and social changes that tried to remediate mess violence or what was then called wife battery.
So you mentioned the Equal Rights Amendment, and it was first introduced in nineteen twenty three, and it proposed to make changes to the US Constitution that would make sure men and women are treated equally under the law. Now, Congress approved it in nineteen seventy two, but not enough states have agreed to it yet for it to officially become law. That's wild to me.
So there were three really really big movements around women's rights in the nineteen seventies, reproductive autonomy, safety in the home, and equal rights before the law, and they were all kind of getting cooked simultaneously in the public eye. And I thought, you know, the nineteen seventies is a really, really important moment because it's analogous to the twenty twenties, for better or for worse, Like, there are huge backslides
happening right now in the avenues. Women have to extricate themselves from domestic violence situations.
As we know Roe v. Wade has been reversed.
So whatever protections the American public believed that Rowe conferred, those are gone. And the Equal Rights Amendment, like fifty years later, has not passed, right, Like, I am not an equal person in the eyes of the law, neither of you, and we just go around and live our lives.
Women in the seventies had to live in this crazy roller coaster where they were held out the carit of equality repeatedly, and it kept getting yoinked back, and I think that caused a cultural trauma unto itself that our popular culture has not metabolized. Well, so instead we've just suppressed it. We've forgotten that fifty years ago there was an intensive effort to recognize the full equality end of the law of women, and it failed.
Right.
That's embarrassing, right, And instead we sort of try not to think about it.
And I thought, I want to think about it.
I want other people to think about it, and I want other people to recognize that the twenty twenties are looking way too much like the nineteen seventies for my taste, right, except, if anything, the trajectory's worse now. At least in the seventies, the general pitch was shallowly up. Women did get reproductive autonomy, they did get relatively secure protections against violence in the home. It got easier to end, for example, an abusive marriage.
But at the same and now all those things are declining. It's getting harder and harder for women to extricate themselves, for anyone to extricate themselves from an abusive situation. So that was the reason I wanted to look at these two periods, is because of the very uncomfortable resonances between the nineteen seventies and the twenty twenties.
In your book, you talk about how art often reflects what's going on socially within our worlds. Can you talk about how horror films, how art in general does that, and how you see horror films doing that.
Yeah, art often receives these impressions from us that we can't fully articulate and then the art of repactes them so that we can see them. And because of that, because of art's capacity to do that, art doesn't in fact just reflect cultural reality. It can accelerate cultural change
and cultural understanding. And I think that is really part of what I wanted to convey and scream with me, is that these works of art, these films, are receiving a lot of input about women's rights and the status and level of freedom of women's bodies in America in the nineteen seventies and are reflecting that back and thinking about it, and also trying to accelerate a certain kind
of social change around those dynamics. Part of the power that horror has, and that horror cinema has even more than like say a horror novel, it's that horror kind of hits us in our heart. It hits us where we feel, It hits us where we fear, and it also hits us where we think about who we are and how we occupy our bodies. So we watch a horror movie and for let's just say, for example, Rosemary's Baby, right.
For those who haven't seen Rosemary's Baby, it's a psychological horror film that centers around a woman who is experiencing her first pregnancy, and she starts to suspect that her neighbors and even her husband are part of a satanic cult that are plotting to use our baby for dark purposes. I highly recommend watching this.
You're watching Rosemary's Baby.
You're gonna identify with Rosemary, I don't care who we are or where you're from. Causes us to feel her agony at becoming pregnant in a way that she was not even understanding at the time, and then it came excruciating pregnancy to term. So horror films because they activate our fear, because they activate our feelings, because they activate even our confusion and our panic, are very powerful ways
of making us empathize with a protagonist. And that empathogenic element, the capacity to make us feel empathy, is part of what gives horror, if anything, extra purchase on both explaining and accelerating social change, because if you can be made to feel compassionate empathic identification with someone unlike you, right, that's a very powerful engine for social change and social movement.
Can you think of some scary movies where you felt some type of compassion for the protagonists absolutely. I mentioned Insidious and not start of our conversation, and in that one, I feel like who I felt empathy for like shifted with each film. So at first I was feeling really scared and a lot of empathy for the little boy. Then I was feeling a lot of empathy for the dad. Then you get this backstory on like who that demon.
I don't know who that demon person was. You were feeling bad for him split second, you know, because you find out like their villain origin story and what led to them doing all of these things, and you're like, dang, it's so wild how these movies can really like shift your compassion for a person where you you might have a moment where the villain you're like, oh, how this might happen? So just think about society in general and the patriarchal society that that we exist in the lens
through which you're watching these horror films through. It's a feminist lens, right, Like, how can we if we're going to think along that same train of thought, like how does the male gaze play into all of this?
Yeah, such a great question, right, And in the book, I have this chapter called bad Men Making Good Art because of course, So you're raising a really important question, right when we watch Rosemary's suffering in that film, we feel along with Rosemary, the question of what exactly we feel during the rape scene a little more ambiguous, right, And remembering that that scene was shot by none other than Roman Polanski, legacy as an abuser of women is well established, right.
Okay, So a little bit about Roman Polanski before we keep going. Roman Polanski is a famous film director known for films like Rosemary's Baby and The Pianist. And in nineteen seventy seven he was charged with sexually assaulting a thirteen year old girl in Los Angeles, and then he fled the country before he could be sentenced. And ever since then he's been living outside of the US and
continuing to make films. And so there's this ongoing controversy surrounding Roman Polanski, which complicates things.
Yeah, it does, and it should complicate things because for us to have the capacity, for any individual viewer to have the capacity, in effect, to code switch between identifying with a predator and identifying with a victim, that's an important part of how we think about it violence and how propagates itself. To realize that it's a hair's breath that separates any of us from transitioning from having power to having no power at all.
One that after reading your book that kept popping into my head was No. Sfaratu, the original and the remake, and the violence against women in No. S Faratu as like one of the first horror films back in I think nineteen twenty two, And so it seems like this has always been a through line in horror films, and I'm not really sure why that is, Like, what do you feel like artists are trying to reinforce by having this narrative that exists throughout history.
I think that our culture has been aware of and anxious about predatory masculinity for a very very very long time, like since way back before second wave feminism really even coss the ground in the nineteen fifties.
And I think that.
We see that anxiety reflected much more clearly in cinema than anywhere else.
And this is such a great point because as a society, predatory masculinity is a shared fear amongst all people. That's why when we go into a movie theater, we all scream when the man appears in the corner exactly. Okay, it's not just women's screaming, it's not just what set of people screaming. Exactly, everybody's screaming.
If we go way back, and I'll sort of join you. In the nineteen thirties, I was just teaching in a class I'm teaching this semester called the History of American Horror Cinema. I was teaching a set of films called White Zombie, I Walked with a Zombie, and then the
film Gaslight. And in all three of those films, the core dynamic is that there's a controlling, abusive man who dehumanizes a woman in one way another, either by actually turning her into a zombie, or psychologically abusing her so that she's vulnerable to becoming turned into a zombie, or by gaslating her so badly this is the case in the movie Gaslight, that she becomes effectively mentally ill and
thus subject to his whims. What's special to me in part about what happens in the Hayday of Domestic Horror in the nineteen seventies is that the first of all the women either do not get saved, as in the case of Rosemary, or they save themselves, as in the case of Ellen Ripley from Alien Right.
And on top of that.
It's very clear that the cruel, predatory masculinity is giving the monster direct access to the women in the film, so there's no instrumental purpose to it. And that sort of dynamic is true in almost all of the films, with the possible exception of The Shining, where Jack Nicholson really does seem to derive wrecked immediate pleasure from worsering and dehumanizing.
Shelley Duvall who plays Wendy.
Yes, I love The Shining. This is another classic horror film and it follows Jack Torrance, which is played by Jack Nicholson. He's a writer who takes a job as a winter caretaker of this isolated hotel in the middle of nowhere. There's all this snow, and his wife Wendy and his son Danny, so they're with him, and as they're getting settled in this hotel, Jack starts to some starts to happen to Jack and he starts to lose
his mind. Jack started adding strange and very strange. But his son Danny has psychic capabilities, which is called the Shining, which is where the name of the film comes from and it's a tale of Danny and his mother just
trying to survive their father and husband. It's another film that I feel like is etched in the memories of all people, Like we all remember Red Rum and the Blood in the Hallway and everything like that, and when we think about Wendy and what she went through in that hotel, we fear for Wendy a lot, and so understanding that Jack Nicholson could go from a guy who's a husband that we father that we're just going along with and then something switches, but there's no switch with
Wendy and so she has to endure. Essentially, it really changes what you're scared of when you think of it in that way. When you add this lens of feminism to these films, it really makes you think of them differently, Like it was scary a little bit before, yeah, but then like put yourself in those shoes exactly like I mean, it makes you think that you might not have to think far, you might be right next to your foot.
One of the sort of I don't know if this was like a designed choice on the part of Stanley Kubrick and everyone, or if it was an accident, but I'm going to make something.
Of it regardless.
I think it's so important that the main character, the main malicious evil character in the film is named Jack Torrance and the actor who plays that character is named Jack Nicholson, because it highlights that what's being described in the film is fiction, but it's not fiction. This really happens.
And I think part of the reason that Shelley Duval's performance is so frightening is like in the scene when Jack Nicholson as Jack Torrance is battling her up the staircase and trying to kill them, and she's sort of like Jack. No, Shelley Duvall is like talking to a real person named Jack. So you know, when when horror depicts violence against women, it often does so allegorically, like in the Exorcist, right, it makes the evil man in the house into a demon.
Their Exorcist is an oldie but a good Oh yeah tells the story of Reagan, and she begins to show some disturbing and violent behavior after becoming possessed by a demonic force. Now her mom is like, somebody got help me with this child. We've seen them, We've seen a helpless mother before. You know, and so she seeks help from two priests and they're trying to get the demon out of her through an exorcism.
And to your other point, that like, once you have this lens fitted to your eye for thinking about domestic horror and the men in a domestic scenario as the source of the evil, you kind of see it everywhere. I talk about some contemporary reboots of the original films from the seventies in the book, like Immaculate, the First Omen, Apartment seven A. But if you count a wider kind of net, there has been just a ton of domestic
horror in the last few years. The movie Speak No Evil, which came out as before the movie Weapons, Yes, a very interesting variant on domestic horror, where like children prison in a basement by this old witchy woman and the language she uses to keep her the child who's kind of like her lackey if you tell anyone, I will kill your parents. That happens to be a well established ruse that abusers use to keep children afraid to disclose
what's going on in their homes. So that film is absolutely about domestic violence and domestic abuse of absolutely ridden right, you see it, It's all over the place, right, It's like happening constantly. The movie Heretic that was definitely a variation were kind of genre. The only difference is that the two girls that he abuses are strangers to him
until they get into his home. But once he's in, they're in his home, they're every bit as subject to him as Wendy Torrance is to Jack Torrance and the Shining Have.
You seen weapons? I've seen weapons, and I actually really liked it. I thought it was such a smart movie, in a very well done movie. It really makes you think about a lot of things. And one thing that I through our conversations with you, Eleanor that made me think about something is that there are always witchy women and not any witchy men. What is that about?
Because in history, like I'm a medievalist by training, I study medieval history, in medieval literature, I do a lot of early modern literature and history. In the actual witch hunts that took place in Europe and the United States, men were witches too, not as frequently, but it was well established that a witch could be male. We've lost that cultural vocabulary over time. When we say which, I think the default assumption is that we mean female, right in terms of dark magic or whatever.
And I think you're right.
I think that when a female character in a film is cast as really bad, she often gets monsterized in a supernatural way, whereas men often just are monstrous, like in a sort of daily quotitian like, oh, I.
All murder my wife kind of a way. So I think there's.
Laytan misogyny baked into that, right, like that a woman is bad, She's not just a bad woman. She's a monster, right, airwolf like in Jennifer's body or in apps, or she's like a vampire, or she's like a witch.
Right.
So I think that that's very much in play. I also think the other thing that's interesting about the gendering in that film, and it's related to the way that film is mobilizing an awareness of how domestic abuse, and in particular, the sexual abuse of children works.
Right.
Children statistically are far more.
Likely to be sexually abused by someone they know and are relating than by a stranger. Right. Growing up's parents, they go around the world sort of afraid of the kind of like iconic man in the van who grabs their kid off the streets. When that happens. That's a calamity. It's extraordinarily rare. It's much more different for a known relative to say, molest a child than anybody else. And so the fact that she's related to him, like his mother's aunt, I guess that is what creates the condition
of vulnerability. So the film is I think doing really important consciousness raising work around abuse of children, particularly the sexual abuse of children, which isn't really in the film. The other film, if I may, that I think is a brilliant exploration of that dynamic is the absolutely outstanding twenty eighteen film by a twenty four hereditary.
Yeah, great about it.
Yeah, Like, part of what's so interesting in that film is that is very clearly a domestic horror film. But the Tony Collette character, who's bad, and she's bad in spite of herself. She doesn't want to be bad. She's bad because her mother was bad. So that film is exploring how there can be not only patriarchal and patrilinear forms of violence in the home, but matriarchal and matrilinear
forms of violence in the home. And it's so important that in that film, the progenitor of evil is the dead grandmother transmitting the evil through her daughter and in some ways also through the granddaughter and definitely the grandson. So that film, I think, is exploring the same or at least an analogous thing to what Weapons is exploring, which is what do we do when the violence is coming from a woman or from any really unexpected corner?
Right, So the.
Film invites us into this realm where we're imagining a world in which, like the mom is bad, the grandma is bad, but the person who is really the ultimate driver of all this evil is the male demon. So like this idea as in the Exorcist, And I have to say I think that they had the Exorcist in mind.
So when I think of other movies where we have a woman who is the main character and there is all of this awfulness happening around her and she wins prevails at the end, can you talk a little bit about what that is trying to signal? And then I had a specific question about a more recent film Midsommer, where we see that happening. Could you talk about that a little bit?
Yeah, I'd love to.
So as to the women kind of winning in the end, I don't have an answer that I'm totally satisfied with for that question, because I ask it to myself often. My provisional answer is, I think that you know, American film goers are like everyone living through the twenty first century, really tired. No matter what your politics are, no matter how to vote for, I think we can all say
that were exhausted, emotionally exhausted. Our culture has been in a state of embattled fighting for a really, really long time, and I think that we as a culture need both to continue to practice the kind of vulnerability that horror teaches us to practice, and we sometimes need to win. One of my absolute favorite horror movies of all time a minute ago, Jordan Peel's perfect film Get Out. Yes, that film, as you may well know, had an original ending.
Jordan Peel changed the ending specifically because he felt that they needed to get He needed to get them away. He wanted to land the film on a happier note than what the original film ending was. And for those who don't know the originally shot ending to the film, the main character doesn't get away and winds up getting the rest of his life in prison. Right if there's like a truly brutal ending to a horror film like
that one. That's it right. Not only did he have to deal with this horrific violence that people try to perpetrate on his body, he then spends the rest of his life in the penal system, which is all too often a reality for black Americans anyway.
But Peel shot that ending and you can see it. You can see it on YouTube. It's really interesting.
Yes, I the theatrical release is very very different, and he has said, and I think this is right.
You know, sometimes we need the win.
I think that filmmakers who are doing domestic horror are feeling some of that energy. Sometimes we need the win. Sometimes we want the girl to get away in the end. So but then you do you get other movies like the movie Men, oh.
Oo, Men that came out in twenty twenty two, and it follows Harper and so Harper is a woman who goes to the English countryside to deal with her grief and heal from trauma after her husband's death. Now, once she's there, she begins to encounter a series of strange and increasingly threatening men who all share the same face,
and they're reflecting her fears and guilt. So the film kind of blends like psychological horror and body horror to explore these themes of grief, gender violence, and the lingering effects of abuse.
It's a great fath and I have a substack about that actually on my substack Eleanora's horror dot substack dot com. And I love that movie because I think that movie is a beautiful meditation on how patriarchy itself is to
blame for domestic abuse. It's not one individual man, it's the fact that all quote unquote men are animated by this predatory spirit of patriarchy, and we'll just do what they want to a woman and to her body, into her space and to her home, into her mind, etc. And the fact that in the end, the character of that film survives, and the last shot of the film was like her kind of perched on a wall, she's got blood on her and she's waiting for her girlfriend,
her friend who's a woman, to up and be with her. That is like the happiest ending to a horror film.
Really, really long time think it.
Is because they want the answer to be this is what survival looks like. There is the way of surviving in which the victim of violence is not like a broken shell of a person like Rosemary at the end of Rosemary's Baby. Nor is she as like fantasy impossible, as like an Ellen Ripley, like jetting away from the exploding spaceship alien movie.
She's like a real person.
She still got blood on her clothes, so she's not it's not pristine, it's not astheticized.
But she's there sitting and waiting for her friend.
And I think we are going to see more sort of experimental horror that looks at gender and thinks about what does survival actually look like, what does it look like to be at the end.
Of the story.
Are there any little nuggets that you're noticing in recent horror films that you feel like, ah, yes, they are speaking specifically to this. I know that we talked about weapons, but are there any other films that you can cite?
First of all, I'm very pleased to report that I think that the horror industry, such as it is, is getting braver and bolder, claiming political relevance for itself.
And I think that's a good thing.
And I hope that anyone who listens to this, who might be an aspiring filmmaker go make horror movies. Because it's a good avenue for change, positive change. Twenty twenty four was the year in which women's reproductive coercion was horror. That was a really, really important year. I think we're
going to see more work like that. I really have no doubt, because I think that filmmakers have realized this is a powerful vehicle for trying to inspire social change and changes in public consciousness about many different dynamics, one of them being the status of women.
You know, it's so interesting. I've been playing around with this idea of dilating my pupils. I got it from Moonless, not physically dilating my pupils, but metaphorically like sitting with things and looking at them. You know how when your pupils are dilated is like you can't really see well, but you just take some time and really look at things and it kind of comes into focus. I feel like this lab did that because I'm a horror lover.
But what I've pulled out the feminist angle, the feminist lens here and seeing all of those patterns without doctor Johnson explaining it to us like that, absolutely not. I feel the same way. I mean, I even just recently watched this movie called The Oddity, and it's a scary film, and I was glad that I watched it after reading this book because it let me come into it and be like, oh, patriarchy, that is what is driving this
whole thing. And it's such a refreshing way to consider this art form because it helps with us our understanding of what we are currently experiencing in real time. And Eleanor brought up how all of these things very nicely parallel with what's going on present day with women losing their bodily autonomy, with the rollback of Roe v. Wade and all these different things like that, and so it's showing up in film makes complete sense, you know what
I mean? Yeah? Absolutely, if you are partaking in spooky season, particularly if you are celebrating by watching scary films, I hope you take something away from this lab to help you kind of reflect and look at your favorite horror movies. And even if you don't have one, think about one. Okay, try them all out and see if you don't see some of these themes that we talked about today in them.
Boo boo. You can find us on x and Instagram at Dope Labs podcast ct is on x and Instagram at dr Underscore, t Sho, and you can find Zakiya at z said So. Dope Labs is a production of Leimanada Media. Our supervising producer is Keegan Zimma and our producer is Issara A. Sevez. Dope Labs is sound designed, edited and mixed by James Farber. Limanada Media is Vice President of Partnerships and Production is Jackie Danziger. Executive producer
from iHeart podcast is Katrina Norvil. Marketing lead is Alison Canter. Original music composed and produced by Taka Yasuzawa and Alex sugi Ura, with additional music by Elijah Harvey. Dope Labs is executive produced by us T T Show Dia and Zakiah Watki