Stephen King has never shied away from talking about how much he dislikes Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of The Shining, King’s novel about a writer possessed by malevolent forces at an isolated hotel in the Colorado mountains. Kubrick’s 1980 adaptation, King has argued, is “totally empty” and a “great big beautiful Cadillac with no motor inside,” a film much more interested in the conventional awfulness of a man terrorizing his wife and child than in the uncanny suspense of the book. “Kubrick just couldn’t grasp the sheer inhuman evil of the Overlook Hotel,” King explained to Playboy in 1983. “So he looked, instead, for evil in the characters and made the film into a domestic tragedy with only vaguely supernatural overtones.” The movie, he insisted, “never gets you by the throat and hangs on the way real horror should.”
With the greatest respect for an author who’s had to see someone else’s vision of his work become culturally indelible, I think King is wrong. But he’s wrong in a fascinating way—one that speaks to how little ownership artists have over their work as it goes out to the broader culture. Kubrick’s The Shining isn’t a domestic tragedy. It’s a domestic horror. The movie’s premise is that a woman and her young child are trapped in a remote setting with a man who, from the outset, seems to resent and even hate them; their forced confinement together over a long winter puts the woman and child in mortal danger. The Overlook Hotel is, yes, sinister and even demonic, taunting Jack Torrance with bizarre visions that Kubrick manipulates to create a mounting sense of dread. But Jack is also a man who, before he ever sets foot inside the property, once dislocated his son’s shoulder in a drunken rage; his wife’s hands visibly shake every time she lights a cigarette. Prolonged isolation simply unleashes Jack from the moral strictures holding him back.
How much The Shining is intended to be an allegory about domestic violence is unclear, but, as Eleanor Johnson points out in her convincing and illuminating new book, Scream With Me: Horror Films and the Rise of American Feminism (1968–1980), it doesn’t actually matter. In feeling out what really scares us, horror often connects with its cultural moment by accident, she contends; art forms like it help an audience process social anxieties “long before a culture is fully prepared to grapple with those problems and traumas in mainstream public discourse.” And because it triggers an intensely physical response and denies viewers the catharsis of a happy ending, horror imprints its imagery and ideas on us long after the movie ends.
Scream With Me – Horror Films And The Rise Of American Feminism (1968-1980)
By Eleanor Johnson
In the 1950s, horror movies about giant sentient blobs and gruesomely distorted creatures channeled anxieties about nuclear radiation; a spate of slasher movies during the ’70s and ’80s reflected fear about rising crime rates and serial killers. And a handful of standout horror films from around the ’70s, Johnson argues, specifically mirrored and even accelerated feminist flash points at a moment when public opinion regarding the roles and rights of women was wildly in flux. Rosemary’s Baby, she writes, made literal the terror of reproductive violence and coercion; The Stepford Wives considered the cost of women being prized only as housekeeping drones and sexual objects; The Shining immersed viewers in an environment of stark marital terror.
The biggest accomplishment of these films and others like them, Johnson contends, is that they made women’s suffering inescapable, particularly for people who were inclined to look away. Intentionally or not—the main works she discusses were all directed by men—these movies tricked viewers into absorbing much more than just schlocky thrills. Scream With Me makes the case that horror has long been aligned with American feminism on some of its most pressing questions, and that it continues even now to refract women’s experiences through a lens that can make them seem wholly monstrous.
The most pivotal scene in Rosemary’s Baby disguises a supernatural atrocity as a much more familiar one: About a third of the way through, Rosemary (played by Mia Farrow) wakes up in her sunny yellow bedroom, groggy and apparently hungover, as her husband, Guy (John Cassavetes), unceremoniously shoves her, then suggests she go fix his breakfast. Sitting up, Rosemary realizes her back and sides are covered in bright red scratches. Guy confesses to having had sex with her while she was passed out. Rosemary is stunned. “It was kind of fun in a necrophile sort of way,” Guy says, shrugging. “I dreamed someone was raping me,” Rosemary says, plaintively, rubbing her eyes. “I don’t know, someone inhuman.” “Thanks a lot,” Guy shouts from the bathroom. (Viewers by this point have watched her—drugged, terrified, and surrounded by onlookers—be forcibly held down and assaulted by a sinister figure with glowing red eyes.)
According to the movie, closely adapted by Roman Polanski from a 1967 novel by Ira Levin, Guy has colluded with the neighbors to have Rosemary raped and impregnated by Satan. Rosemary will unwittingly give birth to the Antichrist; as a trade, Guy’s woeful acting career will take off. This is all in the script. The subtext, though, is that Rosemary’s marriage is fundamentally abusive, and her husband is subjecting her to coercive and reproductive control. “Whatever supernatural horrors may arise in this film, there is an acutely interpersonal domestic horror at its heart,” Johnson writes. “Guy is a betrayer, a liar, and the facilitator of acute sexual violence toward his own wife.” In the very first scene of the film, Guy attempts to lie to the couple’s real-estate agent about his career, before Rosemary twice interjects with the truth. Innocent to a fault, Rosemary doesn’t see the resentment clouding her husband’s face. But the moment sets up a particular dynamic: Guy despises his wife for refusing to let him obscure his failures, and he will eventually punish her for it.
Levin intentionally set Rosemary’s Baby in 1965, the year he began writing it, out of a desire to ground it as much in realism as possible. He was struck, he noted in 2003, by the suspenseful potential of pregnancy as a condition, particularly “if the reader knew it was growing into something malignly different from the baby expected. Nine whole months of anticipation, with the horror inside the heroine!” Polanski—who, a decade later, would plead guilty to unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor—makes clear all the ways in which Rosemary has been cornered: Following their casual discussion of marital rape, Guy leaves, and Rosemary is shown sitting at her kitchen table, tiny in a white robe and fluffy slippers, framed between two forbidding doorways as if the apartment is already encroaching on her. As Rosemary’s pregnancy develops, she suffers excruciating pain and becomes pallid and frail. When she breaks down in tears at a party, her friends tell her that this kind of suffering isn’t normal—that she needs to get a second opinion. “I won’t have an abortion,” Rosemary says, a statement that nevertheless raises the prospect for the audience that her survival might require one.
Johnson contrasts her analysis of Rosemary’s Baby with attitudes toward reproductive choice in the late 1960s. In 1968, when the movie was released, abortion was still illegal in New York (where the story is set), but a growing number of activists were campaigning to decriminalize it. According to one estimate, more than 800,000 illegal abortions were performed in the United States in 1967, a statistic that can feel abstract in its extremity. Rosemary’s suffering, though, is as plain as it is terrifying: Because of the movie’s success, Johnson writes, “tens of millions of Americans—male and female alike—watched Rosemary get raped and forced to maintain a pregnancy at extremely high physical and psychological cost.” What could they have taken away from the movie, she asks, other than a visceral awareness of the horror of an unwanted or coerced pregnancy?
Scream With Me expands on this argument with its analysis of The Exorcist, a movie that Johnson interprets as a parable about physical abuse; its male demon torments and beats a single working mother and her child. The movie was released in 1973, as the first shelters for battered women were opening in the U.S.; by 1978, according to Johnson, more than 150 were open nationwide, signaling a sea change regarding what had previously been thought of as a private matter between husband and wife. And 1976’s The Omen, she notes, doubles down on the insight of Rosemary’s Baby by acknowledging that even a loving husband and father could endanger his wife by “denying her reproductive agency,” in this case by allowing doctors to switch out Katherine Thorn’s stillborn baby for the orphaned—and, it turns out, demonic—son of a woman who died in childbirth. The Omen is extremely hammy, with its clunky synthesized score and melodramatic shifts between cameras, but its point is nevertheless clear: None of this should have been allowed to happen.
Scream With Me reads urgently in other ways: Johnson’s chapter on 1975’s The Stepford Wives refers directly to the ongoing fetishization of domestic life on social media 50 years later. Tradwife culture, she writes, celebrates “female sexual pliancy and physical beauty as things that married women owe to their men, as a constitutive part of their contribution to the functioning of the family.” The roboticized wives of Stepford, soft-spoken and be-aproned, devoted to their baking and their homes, would have done numbers on TikTok; the husbands, only too eager to trade their free-thinking partners for obsequious sex dolls, would absolutely be drawn to the one-sided erotic subservience of, say, ChatGPT. The technology imagined in The Stepford Wives—based, again, on a novel by Levin—hasn’t yet come to pass, but the desires it gratifies on-screen are affirmed freely on all of our modern platforms.
One of Johnson’s timeliest essays, though, is about Alien, Ridley Scott’s 1979 sci-fi horror about an extraterrestrial creature that forcibly impregnates a member of a commercial hauling ship, killing him when the alien fetus bursts out of his abdomen. The movie, Johnson writes, forces male viewers into an empathetic thought experiment; within its cinematic boundaries, they, too, can be assaulted, impregnated, and killed during “birth.” It does this while creating a fictional universe that’s suffused with metaphors for fecundity: The ship’s computer is named “Mother,” the crew sleep in stasis pods that look a lot like amniotic sacs. Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), the warrant officer who eventually battles the alien, also came along at a moment when America was fiercely divided over whether to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment, Johnson writes, a debate that hinged in part on whether women should have an expanded role in the military. Ripley—smart, strong, powerful—suggested that women absolutely could be warriors, and her judgment and pragmatism in Alien serve her infinitely better in the movie than any other qualities could.
Spoiler: America did not, in fact, certify the Equal Rights Amendment as part of the Constitution. Roe v. Wade has been overturned. The number of working mothers ages 25 to 44 with young children dropped, in the first half of this year, to the lowest level in more than three years, in part because of the challenges of combining full-time employment with maintaining a family. In one of her final chapters, Johnson observes how recent horror films such as The First Omen and Immaculate have revisited reproductive-coercion stories through a post-Roe lens. But I’ve been thinking, too, about movies like 2024’s The Front Room, in which Brandy Norwood’s Belinda faces the burden of caring for her husband’s horrifying elderly stepmother while pregnant, or 2025’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, starring Rose Byrne as a mother subsumed with the needs of her sick child. Both seem to be responding to a culture in which women’s caregiving is extracted until nothing is left. They’re domestic horrors about burnout. The message of the genre, though, remains consistent, regardless of plot or theme: The home, the place that women are repeatedly told will reward and sustain them, is not the refuge it’s supposed to be. It may, in fact, be deadly.
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