Her breakout (and in my opinion best) role was Ree from the film Winter’s Bone (2010), which I’ve posted about as hardcore feminist horror.

As everyone knows, her earliest really big role in a big pricetag Hollywood blockbuster was as Katniss in The Hunger Games (2012). That film isn’t usually talked about as horror, but it (as well as the amazing allegorical novel on which it’s based) absolutely is horror: a bunch of kids murdering each other in a ring designed by abusive adults to cull the strongest of the strong? How is that not horror? And it was sequeled in 2013 and 2014

More recently, she had the lead in Aronofsky’s Mother! (2017), which I’ve posted about as Biblical, domestic violence, and eco-horror. In 2021, she played one of the two leads in the sci-fi horror Don’t Look Up (2021). And very recently, she starred in Die My Love (2025). And in 2026, she’s in filming for Martin Scorcese’s upcoming psychological horror, What Happens at Night.

That’s a pretty good case for Lawrence as a scream queen. Maybe like a super divine diva scream queen? Anyway. She knows how to horror.

This week, I’m going to talk about what I think is her most frightening horror film. Not the best (that would be Winter’s Bone), nor the most intellectually interesting (Mother!), nor the most self-aware, high-concept, and ironic (Don’t Look Up). Nor as moving as The Hunger Games. But definitely, and by far, the most frightening.

So, we have a mother-daughter duo, played by Elizabeth Shue and Jennifer Lawrence. They are moving to a new rental house out in the countryside to get a new start on their life together. They can afford a big, beautiful place because it’s next door to a house in which a notorious double-murder took place. They rented the place on the understanding that the murder house was empty. The daughter, Elissa (Lawrence), seems not fully to trust her mom, ostensibly because her mother has a history of working too hard, and leaving Elissa alone. There is no father in the picture, which is an important point that I’ll return to later. But briefly: horror loves a single mom backstory: what’s more vulnerable and scary than a woman without a man? Oh, swoon of horror.

Once they settle in a little bit, Elissa goes to a party several miles away, where she is very nearly raped by a self-described “horny” boy. She heads home. It’s a long, lonely, dark walk. A car approaches her, and she begins to panic—a kind of panic I would wager that every female reader of this substack has experienced. It’s the sudden awareness that there is someone nearby who might decide to harm you, just because you are female.

Having to write that line, and knowing that I’m right, knowing that—in all probability—every single female reader of this substack has had this experience, makes me sick to my stomach. But these are not times in which to hide from reality. These are times in which to face it, together. So here we go.

At first, Elissa rejects the ride. She knows she’s safer alone on the road at night than in a car with a stranger. But, eventually, she accepts the ride from this total stranger because it starts to rain, hard. I love this plot point, because it captures a horrific and brutally quotidian reality for many women who find themselves in mortal or sexual peril. They often get there by chance, by bad luck, by unforeseen circumstances. Literally and allegorically, by the weather. Geoffrey Chaucer recognized this dynamic 600 years ago, when he wrote his Troilus and Criseyde: in that poem, the titular female lead gets sexually entrapped and coerced because a bad storm winds her up physically trapped and compromised. I was sure that this guy would assault her. He turns out to be, as we find out quickly after she meets him, the surviving son of the two people who had been brutally double-murdered by their daughter four years earlier. Not good, I thought. We’re about to have Elissa bound and gagged in his basement or something.

But I was wrong. He doesn’t hurt her. Or trap her. Or threaten her in any way.

But he is also not a good guy. And I was also not totally off base with my gut instinct.

Very soon after he drops Elissa back at her home, it turns out that this guy, Ryan, is keeping his murderous sister under permanent house arrest in the basement of their home. Which, again, is right next door to the home Elissa and her mom are renting—close enough that he can hear her singing when she’s at home. Real close. When we learn this stuff about him, the film encourages us to see him as a nice guy. He brings her dinner, and he speaks softly to her, even after she attacks him and tries to kill him. He gives her some kind of powerful injectable antipsychotic, and she passes out. He asks her, gently, why she always has to do this. And while she’s unconscious, he tells her that a nice person has moved in next door, named Elissa. He asks her to leave Elissa alone. Seems like a sweet, well-meaning brother and decent neighbor, right?

No! Totally fucking wrong. Here’s why.

1. There are exactly zero situations in which keeping a woman under house arrest in a basement is an acceptable thing to do. IF she’s as mentally ill as he thinks, she should be in treatment, not in a makeshift prison and in de facto solitary confinement underground. Functionally, he has buried her alive. Not fucking fine.

2. Two, IF she is as dangerous as he and everyone else seem to think, telling her that Elissa exists and has moved in next door is the functional equivalent of putting a target on Elissa’s back. Pro tip: if you’re dealing with someone with known violent tendencies, never, ever give them the name and address of people you clearly think they might target. That’s called aiding and abetting murder.

3. No teenager in the universe should be in the habit of drugging women—or anyone, really—to keep them tractable. Nor should any adult. The only exceptions I can think of, and to me, even these are a really complex grey area, are when a woman is on the brink of self-harm or harming someone else, and in those cases, the medicine should only be administered by a mental health professional who understands about dosages, drug interactions, complications, etc.

Elissa’s next door neighbor is not alright. And it’s not just (or even primarily) the murdery one in the basement that Elissa and her mom should be worrying about. It’s this delusional teenager who thinks he’s doing the right thing by imprisoning, psychologically torturing, and drugging his younger sister. Whose name is Carrie Anne, in a nice shout-out to Carol Ann from Poltergeist.

Needless to say, Carrie Anne eventually escapes, and Ryan (her brother) sees her sprinting across the yard to attack Elissa. He shouts, “No!” and we are encouraged, again, by the movie to see him as the good guy, and her as the bad. But not me. I told myself that she was probably trying to escape him, not to hurt Elissa. When she arrives at Elissa’s house—the mom is out—she doesn’t cry out; I concluded that he had probably cut out her tongue.

Ryan catches up to his sister before she can either do harm or be saved. He grabs her, muzzles her with his hand, and we hear her grunting in pain and fear, while his face is streaked with sweat. Doesn’t much look like he’s trying to protect Elissa. Looks a lot more like he’s trying to control his sister.

This same basic sequence of events happens a second time, when it seems like Carrie Anne is aiming to murder a pair of teeangers necking in car. Just in the nick of time, Ryan catches up with her, grabs her, muzzles her with his hand. But this time, he uses just a bit too much force, and breaks her neck. She dies in Ryan’s arms, with him crying and saying, “Wake up, wake up, Carrie Anne! Oh, God, what have I done?” But his anguish passes relatively quickly; within minutes, he’s packing her still warm body into the trunk of his car.

As he prepares to dispose of her body, the soundtrack does its level best to make us feel sorry for him. Which I found ridiculous, though definitely not a laughing matter. Come on: someone who imprisons his baby sister in a jail underground and eventually murders her gets the emo-guy melancholic song when he ditches her corpse? No.

But things get weirder. It turns out Carrie Anne isn’t dead, as Elissa finds out when she inadvertently stumbles upon the makeshift prison in Ryan’s basement. Ryan “saves” Elissa from a raging Carrie Anne. Ryan assaults her, drugs her, speaks “gently” to her, straps her to her bed. All the while, she’s got a massive, brutal gag on her mouth. And as we see her passing out, it must be said: she doesn’t look exactly like the Carrie Anne whom Ryan murdered.

Upstairs, Elissa finds evidence that this girl in the basement is a college student named Peggy—specifically, she finds Peggy’s wallet in the trash. Uh-oh. It would appear that Ryan serially kidnaps women, pretends they’re his sister, and imprisons them in his home. He does this to alleviate the guilt he already shared with Elissa over his having—years before—been the occasion of the “brain damage” that Carrie Anne suffered, which in turn caused her murderous rages in later years.

Ultimately, Ryan decides to make Elissa his newest Carrie Anne. He is surprisingly aware of his dehumanization of women, surprisingly conscious that he’s simply pretending a series of women are his sister, because he “needs Carrie Anne” to survive psychologically.

In its heart, this film is a slant reboot of Psycho, in which a delusional sociopath assuages his guilt for killing his mother by keeping his dead mother’s corpse in the basement while running around impersonating her. Here, the delusional sociopath assuages his guilt for killing his sister (as it turns out, that’s what really happened) by keeping re-builds of his dead sister in his basement while running around pretending he’s an innocent victim of circumstances.

The film’s echoing of Psycho deepens in the end. Things get more and more haywire, until finally, Elissa and her mother team up to overpower Ryan. He is committed to a psychiatric ward, where we learn through flashbacks that, after he inadvertently killed his sister, his parents pretended he was Carrie Anne. They dressed him as her. They called him Carrie Anne. He was made to play the role of her, just as Norman Bates made himself play the role of his mother. But here, Ryan eventually rejected his parents’ fiction that he was Carrie Anne. He murdered them, to free himself from the fiction. But of course, he couldn’t abide by that guilt, either. Hence the imprisonment of all the subsequent Carrie Annes.

This film was built around the idea of big Reveal. A big surprise. Viewers were meant to be shocked that Ryan was the big killer all along. I admit, I didn’t see the Psycho resonances for a while. But I did see that Ryan was the ultimate bad guy, all along. Because of the above numbers 1-3.

The fact that people were pretty uniformly surprised by this film’s denouement, the fact that this film essentially worked on the American public scares the hell out of me. Much more than the film itself, to be honest. Because it tells me two things that the film “worked.” One, too many Americans are willing to get on board with the idea that imprisoning, drugging, and dehumanizing women is ever a reasonable thing to do. And/or two, too many Americans are willing to give abusive men way too much slack. Put otherwise, they are far too trusting, too naïve, and too willing to assume the best of men who are—patently, in this film—abusers.

I said before that I think this is Lawrence’s most frightening movie. And I do. Not because of the storyline, nor even really because of Lawrence’s acting (which is the best thing about the film, I have to say). Instead, it’s terrifying to me because the storyline convinced anyone of its own premises. And again, I’m not trying to blame viewers who didn’t see the “big reveal” coming; it’s not really anyone’s fault that our culture doesn’t teach us to assume the worst of obvious predators. But it really is horrifying that our culture has trained so many of us to have the capacity to see Ryan or anyone else like him as anything other than a monster.

Cabin in the Woods is a horror-comedy, directly in the lineage of Sam Raimi’s brilliant Evil Dead franchise of the 1980s and 1990s. The conceit is straight out of the first film of that series: a group of college students—white, heterosexual, horny—go to a remote cabin on holiday. The expectation is that there will be drinking and drugging, sex and tomfoolery. But as soon as they arrive, things are a little shady, a little funky. In Raimi’s film, the vacationers find a cassette tape that, when played, releases demons and monsters that attack and possess most of the vacationers, turning them into revenant monsters. In Cabin in the Woods, the vacationers find a diary in the basement that, when read aloud, unleashes a family of murderous undead people on a rampage against our poor and unsuspect protagonists. In both films, the basement of the cabin plays a significant role in spooling out the threat. So Cabin in the Woods seems almost a straight-up remake.

Or, at least, it seems like one until you start seriously considering the parallel plotline that powers Cabin and is absent from Evil Dead.

In Cabin in the Woods, it turns out that there is a top-secret, pan-national para-governmental organization of technicians who engineer horror stories that will engulf and kill groups of young people. The American organization, headed up by two jaded technicians named Steve (Bradley Whitford) and Gary (Richard Jenkins), has lured our friends to this remote cabin, ensnaring them in what is effectively a real-life choose your own (mis)adventure. There are a whole slew of plotlines that could ensue once the college kids find themselves in the basement; the possessed revenant redneck family that attacks them is only one of a myriad of possibilities. They could have landed on werewolves, zombies, witches, or any number of other supernatural threats, all of which are contained, managed, and released on the victims by the technicians.

So, this is a horror film in which the supernatural threat—while absolutely real—is engineered in the cold, clinical light of organizational conspiracy.

Steve and Gary are running the show in the secret organization, but they report out to other nation states and to their own governments; they get competitive with other nations, too, and they are constrained to follow certain rules in how the game plays out. First, everyone must die; the only possible exception is “the virgin” in the bunch, whose death is “optional.” This, of course, is the filmmakers’ contending with the argument—famous by 2011—made by Carol Clover in Men, Women, and Chainsaws that the “final girl” who can survive a slasher film is invariably a virgin; put otherwise, there is a certain moral requirement in the slasher genre that anyone who survives the serial killer must be young, female, and virtuous. The promiscuous girl, the jock, the nerd, and any other teenage or young adult social type among them must die. Steve and Gary work precisely with these constraints. If the virgin dies before any single other character, the mission is a fail.

So Steve and Gary’s jobs are hard. They’re under lots of pressure from their Director (Sigourney Weaver!) to get it right, and to be sure that all the blood that’s supposed to hit the ground has indeed hit the ground by the end of the session. Steve and Gary are amoral; they don’t particularly like or dislike the kids they exterminate. In fact, there’s a bizarre and nauseatingly plausible sense of ennui that oozes from both of them: they run a betting pool in their massive underground office so that people can wager on what particular supernatural horror the kids will unleash this time. They wear dorky button-up white Oxfords and boring slacks. They look like office cogs. They are office cogs. But their job is to kill people. Or, rather, to sacrifice them.

It turns out—**spoiler alert**—that Steve, Gary, and the Director, as well as every other nation’s underground organization, are sacrificing all these young people in order to appease the ancient gods of the earth, who are real, and who live underneath the ground. They lap up happily all the blood that flows down to them. But if the blood supply dwindles too far, they will rise up and destroy the whole earth. That’s what happens when our protagonistic virgin and nerd simply fail to die, and the virgin refuses to sacrifice the nerd. They wind up sharing a spliff while a massive CGI hand comes surging out of a pit and obliterates human civilization. (Turns out that almost every nation-state had failed in its murder ritual on this particular occasion.)

So this is interesting. And very 2026. Pan-national group of surveilling, murderous, dehumanizing bureaucrats who compete with each other to sacrifice the young? Sounds a whole lot like a prescient allegory for social media companies to me. Pan-national group of surveilling, murderous, dehumanizing bureaucrats who compete with each other to sacrifice the young? Sounds a whole lot like an allegory for our global war situation, aka the military industrial complex. And now, of course, we’ve got ICE and all the other para-governmental monsters out there, killing American citizens basically because they want to keep the monster appeased, its belly glutted with blood. Fifteen years ago, this was a genre-spoofing romp. Now it’s political allegory.

I’m just saying: I found Cabin about a billion times more frightening last weekend than in 2011.

But I also want to think a little bit with you about the ancient, divine being that drinks all that blood and—when frustrated—reaches up from underneath the ground to destroy the world. One could read that in a variety of ways. Maybe the old, angry gods represent something like a collective unconscious, aware of and chafing at the depradations and dehumanizations of Modern Technological and Military Life, that we work so hard—as a society—to keep repressed. On some level, all this technology, all this military, all this stuff, all this consumerism is a way of keeping a lid on our deep knowledge that none of it is worth what we act like it’s worth, what we pretend it’s worth. We are suppressing some part of ourselves, psychologically. We’re doing some kind of harm to ourselves as individuals and as participants in a social world. That part rises up at the end of the film to destroy the stupid, bloated world we’ve created. Ok, so that would be reading one. I find that reading only somewhat satisfying.

Reading 2: one of the core principles of modernity and contemporary social life—particularly in the West—is that the realm of the Supernatural doesn’t exist. I read about the history of this a lot; I’m particularly fond of the book Religion and The Decline of Magic by Keith Thomas and The Decline of Magic by Michael Hunter for thinking about the Early Modern roots of this “disenchantment” phenomenon in western culture. But you don’t need to go bone up on scholarship to understand the gist: most Americans greet belief in the supernatural—and here, I’ll bracket religion, because religious people typically don’t see their beliefs as “supernatural” but rather as “faith-based”—with eye-rolling and exasperation. “Don’t be superstitious!” is something teenagers say to each other all the time. We call things “spooky” or “woo-woo” or “out there” not just to describe but actively to denigrate ideas that don’t sort well with logical positivism or scientific provability. Reading 2 of Cabin would suggest that we’re simply sacrificing too much and risking too much by overfetishizing science and rationalism, while denigrating the “enchanted” realms of spirit and unknowability. The film, in this reading, is making an ambivalent defense of reenchantment. I say “ambivalent,” because, of course the gods wind up destroying the world. So even if we’re meant to come away from the film with an increased respect for the realm of the supernatural, it’s not a very comfortable respect. Even so, I like this reading more than the first one.

But my favorite reading is reading number 3.

In this reading, we take seriously the central conceit of the film, which is that the patriarchal world of government, technology, and big business are working in cahoots with and in hock to an ancient cosmology that they only barely understand, but on which they depend utterly for their ongoing power. I like this reading because it echoes loudly with my core argument in my forthcoming book Monstrous Bitch (from Princeton University Press; pub date 10/6/26). In MB, I show how patriarchy is—and has been for over 3000 years in western and near eastern cultures—built on a foundational ideology about violent monstrous entities (in my book, the central one is a blood-sucking monstrous female who keeps reverberating across the millennia) that must be suppressed. That is, Patriarchy consolidates power by keeping people in a state of apoplectic terror about monsters and/or gods who want nothing more than the taste of human blood. In this reading, Cabin is just literalizing and making delightfully mundane, quotidian, and bureaucratic this deep truth of western culture. Patriarchy feeds on the fear of the people it controls.

Part of what I like about this reading is that it dovetails nicely with the final girl and boy who make it to the end of the film. Dana the virgin (Kristin Connolly) and Marty the nerd (Fran Kranz) decide in the end not to play by the rules of the military-industrial-para-governmental playbook. Instead, they team up and smoke up together at the end of the world. This particular alliance is important. The film would have read differently if two women survived. Or the virgin and the jock (Chris Hemsworth). But with only the virgin and the nerd surviving, the film is pointing toward a potentially very powerful social alliance: one between young women and men who are alienated from traditional sites of “masculine” power. That is, non-jocks, non-alphas. Marty and Dana, because they stand outside of the system of heterosexuality that enforces compliance with what I’ll call here for short The Patriarchy, are in the best position to refuse its conditions. Yes, tragically, they die in the end, along with everyone else, when the Ancient Ones rise up to destroy the world. But, unlike literally everyone else, they see it coming and they die happy, together, and in truth.

Now, obviously, I want something way better than this. I want a world in which everyone—and I do mean everyone—gets a shot at a full, beautiful life, surrounded by people they love. I don’t want the Ancient Ones or any ones to unleash hell on anyone else. But I do love the idea of just refusing to play by the Patriarchy’s dehumanizing rules. I do love the idea of just sitting with a friend and refusing to engage in the game.

Ok, so let me give a real quick tour of the plot, because it—unlike the empathic alignments in the film—is easy. Three teens break into houses to steal stuff and make money. They get a tip on a job at the home of a blind man who’s daughter was killed in a vehicular homicide years before. They believe he has all the settlement money stored in his ramshackle house (they are right), and that it will be relatively easy to steal it, because he is blind (they are wrong). One of the teens is couched pretty clearly as a criminal; his name is Money (Daniel Zovatto). The other two are more empathogenic than Money, and are named Rocky (a girl played by Jane Levy) and Alex (Dylan Minette).

There is a racial dynamic here that I didn’t care for, which is that the one teen of color is both more “criminal” and less “empathetic” than the white teens, and he’s also killed off much, much sooner. But that’s a topic for another post.

So, Money, Rocky, and Alex break into this old, blind, grieving man’s house, to steal his settlement money. It’s wrong to rob a blind man, as Alex flags for us, but Rocky is hell-bent on the heist, because she wants to escape her abusive mother, taking her baby sister with her, so she needs the money, badly. Money just wants coin.

Once they break in, things go wrong very, very quickly. Money is shot and killed by the blind man (whose name we never learn.) Nothing about that scene makes us particularly inclined to be sad about Money’s death, nor to see the blind man—yet—as a villain. As the film goes on, however, and Alex and Rocky find themselves increasingly trapped and endangered by the old man, more elements of his own psychosis are revealed. Chiefly, he’s been keeping a young woman—the one who unintentionally killed his daughter with her car—prisoner in his basement as a baby-incubator for some period of time. He has impregnated her with his semen. She’s bound, gagged, atrophied, and malnourished when Alex and Rocky find her.

So, just like that the ostensible victim becomes the perpetrator; the person maybe we’d been rooting for—even if only a little bit—has become someone we’re decisively rooting against. Alex and Rocky, on the other hand, become saviors, and heroes—by the film’s logic—reassuring the captive young woman that they will help her escape. And they do try, but the blind man accidentally shoots and kills her, leading to a renewal of his intense grief; in his mind, he just killed his growing grandchild, whom he saw as a replacement for his dead daughter. We watch him hold the dead body and rock her, saying, “My baby! My baby!” but at this point, we feel no compassion for him. Nor, I don’t think, do we feel particularly afraid.

Like I said: the film is more discomforting and disgusting than terrifying.

Defying all odds (and logic), the blind man manages to capture Rocky and harness her into the dead girl’s pregnancy chamber. There is a truly outrageously revolting scene in which the old man, claiming ludicrously “I’m no rapist,” reveals that he impregnated his daughter’s unwilling slayer using a turkey baster full of his semen, not by inserting his penis into her. I know I don’t need to explain to anyone who reads this substack that this man absolutely is a rapist, despite his protestation to the contrary, as well as a reproductive abuser. But what’s interesting in this scene (which I found impossible to watch in one sitting, because it made me so intensely uncomfortable) is that the blind man clearly thinks there are gradations of evil, wrongdoing, and depravity, and that he’s still in a gray area. This, of course, is exactly what the thieving teenagers also think about their serial heists. What they’re doing is wrong, but they have enough need to do it, that it’s warranted.

As the blind man prepares to inseminate Rocky now, approaching her exposed (to him, not to the camera) genitals with a semen-filled turkey baster, he says something truly astonishing, which I believe to be at the epicenter of this film’s logic. He says, “There is nothing a man cannot do, once he accepts the fact that there is no God.” His view, then, is that absent a powerful mechanism for enforcing morality, morality becomes entirely subjective. We’re meant to understand that he used to believe in God, but lost his faith when his daughter died. One he lost the one person he truly loved, he decided to rewrite the rules of the moral universe in his own image.

A very, very interesting position for the film to take.

First, because it’s a terrifying reminder that no one wants to live in a world of totally subjective morality. Even though, increasingly, it appears that that’s exactly the world we live in, where the richest, most powerful, and best positioned people get to decide what’s allowable because they themselves are the gods of the 21^st century, in their own minds. Then they do horrible, brutal, often sexually violent things, and they get away with it.

Second, because of course, in the long sweep of Western history, the idea that there is a God has routinely been given as a justification of violence, particularly when that violence is perpetrated against women. God has been used as a pretext for the subordination of women under patriarchy. God has been used as a pretext for restricting women’s freedom of movement outside the domestic sphere. God has been used as a pretext for justifying physical and psychological violence in the home, where the man was seeking ostensibly to “correct” a misbehaving woman, a woman whose conduct didn’t befit God’s judgment, nor her husband’s. And of course, God has been used as a pretext for denying women autonomous control over their own bodies, control over reproduction and pregnancy.

Now I want to be clear here, I’m not saying that God is a justification for any of these things. All of these ostensibly holy misogynies emanate from misreadings of Scripture, or from how Scripture has been improperly translated into human law. But the fact remains that God is used as an excuse for misogyny by a whole lot of people.

So for this man, on the brink of raping and impregnating a young woman in a harness, whom he’s just beaten the living shit out of, to assert that he is going to go ahead and do this because there is no God is actually pretty surprising. Pretty weird.

What I take away from it is that Alvarez and Raimi are making a statement here—and throughout the film—about the dangerousness of total moral opportunism. That is why we don’t really like any of the main teenaged characters, and why their moral choice-making is shown to be so problematic from the start. Alex is someone who routinely lies to and defrauds his own father, to impress a girl. Rocky is someone who accedes eagerly to grand theft and larceny, to help herself and her sister. Even though each of them has a “reason” to do what they’re doing, the film is pretty clear that it’s still not ok. Robbing a grieving blind man is actually not an ok thing to do. It’s much less grotesque, vile, and dehumanizing than imprisoning and impregnating a woman against her will, but it’s still wrong. These kids are in the wrong. So is the blind man. And the film makes us feel all of that.

Because the real horror in this film isn’t the home invasion part. Nor the cat-and-mouse part. Nor even the reproductive violence part. The real horror this film asks us to think about is the idea of living in a world of total moral opportunism. There are no clear rules of right and wrong, no clear mechanism of enforcement. Indeed, in the end, Rocky does escape, along with her baby sister and $1 million of the blind man’s money. Not because she’s a better person, and not because she’s shown any remorse, nor even because she went through the worst of what the blind man had to offer. Alex dies, shot in the back by the blind man. Not because he deserved it, but because the blind man got “lucky.” And the blind man, whom Rocky leaves for dead when she escapes his house, winds up surviving: she sees footage about him on the news, and he’s lying in a hospital bed, recovering. He asserts, moreover, that his home was invaded only by the two young men he killed in self-defense. There was no one else; nothing was stolen. Evidently, he’s letting her go. There will be no vengeance, no prosecution. There is no consequence for her.

Nor, of course, for him, beyond his having been seriously roughed up in the last altercation between him and Rocky.

She will no more prosecute him for attempted rape and impregnation, nor for the kidnapping of the other young woman, nor for killing two people. She will not be punished. He will not be punished. In all probability, he’ll get out of the hospital and go right back to kidnapping and impregnating young women, in the interest of resurrecting his patriarchal line.

So in the end of the film, what I think we feel, as I said at the outset, isn’t fear. There’s no sense that the blind man will come find Rocky or her sister. How could he? He doesn’t even know her last name. She really has gotten away with stealing $1 million. There’s also no sense that Rocky will someday prosecute the blind man. How could she? She’s wind up in prison herself, for felony theft. We don’t end up feeling fear. We end up, I think, feeling grossed out. Sickened. Revolted. Disgust and discomfort. No one should want to live in a universe where all moral choices are justifiable, according to the lights of the person who commits them. That would be bad.

The film drives that home even more powerfully and trenchantly in one very subtle final dynamic. There’s no mention made in the news report of the dead woman who inadvertently killed the blind man’s daughter. She, along with untold hundreds of thousands of women in history, has been entrapped, assaulted, raped, impregnated, and now murdered by a man who felt he owned her. And she, in the end, is utterly, completely forgotten.

Among them are two children, a 12-year-old boy named Andy and his teenaged sister Tam. They rejoin their father, Don (Robert Carlyle), only to learn that their mother, Alice (Catherine McCormack) got bitten by an infected during the initial outbreak, and was lost. The father strongly implies that she died, and says he couldn’t save her, although we know, from an earlier scene, that he actually abandoned her to be eaten by the infected, in order to save himself. He watched her be overwhelmed by the infected in a house, and heard her screaming his name, while he ran to safety, alone. The children know none of this.

Bereft at the loss of his mother, Andy begins to be terrified that he will forget her face. So, eager to do something kind for her agonized brother, and going against all the mandatory safety protocols of the US-led mission, Tam takes Andy out of the safe zone and out into the countryside. They hope they can return to their childhood home to retrieve a picture of their mother. They do this believing—correctly—that all of the infected monsters have starved and died; they do not encounter any infected attackers, anywhere, nor any evidence that any remain. Back at their old home, Andy retrieves a beautiful photograph of his mother, just before discovering that she is still alive—miraculously—in a papered-over attic hideout. She is also severely traumatized.

The US-led soldiers quickly pick up Tam, Andy, and Alice, and Alice is subjected to harrowing, dehumanizing quarantining procedures, including being manhandled by masked me while being hosed down, naked, in sanitary showers. She is screaming the entire time, and in obvious pain. But once she’s settled down enough for the head scientist Scarlett (Rose Byrne) to examine, we learn that Alice was indeed bitten and infected with the virus, but that she is somehow unaffected by it. She appears to have some kind of natural, genetic immunity to Rage Virus. (Alice, it’s worth noting, is also the name of the heroine of the Resident Evil films—another series about raging, cannibalistic monsters caused by a viral leak from a military science lab.)

Don learns that Alice is still alive, and he uses his all-access pass in the safe zone facilities (he’s a site manager) to gain access to her after hours. He apologizes, crying, and tells her that he loves her. She, to my great surprise every time I see the film, says, “I love you, Don.” He runs to her, unaware that she is harboring live virus in her body, and kisses her full on the mouth. As soon as their saliva mixes, he’s infected. Within a half minute, he’s become a rage zombie, and he rips her limb from limb, while she remains strapped to a medical bed. So, if you’re keeping track, this guy has effectively killed her twice. But this time, she’s really gone. And Don triggers the rapid-fire reignition of the rage epidemic.

Because all the repatriated survivors and soldiers are in such close quarters in the “safe” zone, the disease spreads with savage efficiency. Even so, Scarlett manages to save Andy and Tam, believing that they may well have inherited their mother’s immunity, so that their lives, and their blood, are invaluable to the world’s efforts to understand this plague and stop it from destroying other countries.

I want to pause here to highlight what really went wrong in the effort to stop the Rage Virus after it ravaged Britain. What really went wrong was that too many people indulged in nostalgia and sentimentality. Andy needed that photograph; his sister needed to indulge him. Don, overcome by guilt, needed to kiss his wife, right away, without any thought for the possibility of safety protocols. And she, even though she had to have known she was exposed—she had a huge infected bite mark on her arm—was so eager to accept Don’s apology that she kissed him back. Nostalgia is the most dangerous thing in this post-Rage world. Sentimentality kills.

This is an important variant on the art of the undead. In most cases, one of the central philosophical points of zombie cinema is that, if we fail to remember the past, if we fail to recognize that the past is rolled up into the present and constitutive of it, we run the risk of creating a situation in which humanity itself is suddenly in peril. Here, in this film, the notion is instead that you have to treat your personal past as if it is over and done with, if you want the world to come back into alignment with what it used to be in the past. If Andy had accepted that he might forget his mother’s face, the world would never have seen another outbreak of Rage, and Britain would have gone back to normal. If Don had been able to tolerate his abandonment of Alice, and waited until the doctors came back before touching her, he would have been protected from the infection. If Alice hadn’t said, “I love you, Don,” but instead, “I need some time, Don,” the world would have been safe. Our individual memories (the photograph) and our individual desire (the kiss) must be subordinated to our awareness that any possibility of a future for humanity hinges on our ability to put sentiment aside, and to recognize that the Rage Virus has permanently altered the present, and it will be with us in some way, forever. We forget that—instead fetishizing a past that was happier, cleaner, safer, more secure, or easier—only at our greatest peril.

Indeed, in order to survive and save her brother, Tam winds up having to execute zombie-Don, her own father, before he kills her and Andy. Tam has to draw the line between their familial past and the new, real present, forever conditioned by the presence of rage. After that Andy panics that, because he’s been exposed to infected blood, he’s now “one of them.” Tam looks into her brother’s eyes and sees the telltale sign—their mother had had it to, in her eyes—of someone who’s infected, but asymptomatic. She looks at him, and says, “No, no you’re not.” She has learned the lesson that 28 Weeks wants to teach: if we can be in this terrifying new world without nostalgia and without sentimentality, but with love and a broader definition of what qualifies as humanity, we may yet have hope for collective salvation. (Though this specific hope will only really bear fruit in the last film of the franchise.) Tam and Andy, amazingly enough, wind up being picked up in a US military helicopter and whisked away to safety.

Although…

Even with that note of hope, the film ends very, very darkly. We move forward a month from the prior shot of Andy and Tam in the escape helicopter. The camera pans over what appears to be the wrecked cab of a helicopter. It’s the helicopter that Andy and Tam were whisked away in. We know, because two nostalgia articles belonging to the pilot are still visible, left behind. We hear a French voice transmitting over the helicopter radio, a voice asking for help, asking if anyone is out there, if anyone can hear. Before we even see the rage-infected, we know that France is under siege. We know that the helicopter was abandoned there. We don’t know if Andy or Tam has survived, maybe having run away with the pilot, who may have learned the lesson that his nostalgic photo of his wife and his son’s drawing don’t matter now, not in this raging world. That, of course, is the most optimistic reading possible to put on this scene.

And the film does try to tamp it down, leaving us much less room for hope. We cut to an image of dozens of infecteds racing through the chunnel from the UK to France, and up into the dawn light in Paris. The film’s final shot is of a group of them, raging, growling, screaming, and racing up toward the iconic Eiffel Tower. The Eiffel Tower, a symbol of French liberal democracy, Enlightenment, culture, and technological prowess, looks frail, vulnerable, and weirdly out of place with all those infected racing toward it. From this final shot—which could just as easily have featured the Washington monument in the background, or the Statue of Liberty—we’re meant to understand that the Rage Infection has now gone global, and that getting it under control is a whole different level of impossible now.

All because a little boy was afraid of forgetting his mother’s face.

Now, that’s a harsh note to land on, and it feels, like, really bad to blame a global zombocalypse on a completely understandable childhood human emotion. A need for connection with the mother one remembers. But the film’s point, I think, is that that mother—nice, fun-loving Alice—really is gone. The woman who remained was a terribly traumatized, broken, infected person. You can’t go back to some idealized, lionized, perfect moment in the past. It’s gone. The array of possible worlds, for Andy and everyone else along with him, is smaller now. They all have to accept that the world they knew and loved, and all the people in it, have been permanently affected by the cataclysmic overreach of the scientists and activists in the first film who engineered and unleashed the virus. You can’t just skip over one part of the past—the rage outbreak—and selectively choose only those past moments you like. It’s all one big sprawling mess. And if you forget that, or fail to understand it, like Andy and Tam did, you just invite the mess to come sprawling back at you to remind you.

The film opens with radical activists breaking into a research facility where biological research is taking place on caged chimpanzees. The chimpanzees are being forced to watch upsetting newsfeeds—bombings, violence against civilians, fires, other kinds of abuse—while being monitored for neurological activity. The activists are horrified by the Clockwork Orange-style torture of the primates, and they interrogate a doctor on the staff who tells them that the chimps must be caged, because they’ve been “infected” with “rage,” and that “the infection is contagious, it’s in their blood and saliva!” Evidently, these scientists have engineered a horrific bioweapon—one cured and perfected by exposure to violence—in the chimps, that makes them into horrific, yet perfect little autonomous bioweapons. Insensible to the panicked warnings screamed by the scientist, the activists release a chimp, who promptly rips into the neck of a female activist. Almost instantaneously, this woman transforms into a yellow-eyed rage monster.

Now, at this point, zombie purists will claim that these rage-monsters are not, in fact zombies. Nor even technically are they undead. The rage monsters are still living, highly infected people; they are people whose entire biophysiology has been irrevocably hijacked and completely colonized by a viral organism. But for two reasons, we’re going to treat this film as a major player in the art of the undead. First, the tropes and ideas laid down by this film and the franchise it spawned—Alex Garland and Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later became 28 Weeks Later, 28 Years later, and eventually Nia DaCosta’s amazing 28 Years Later: Bone Temple—have been so utterly influential to the 21^st century zombie genre as it’s continued to evolve in Anglo-American cinematic culture, that it’s hard to overstate.

Second, Garland and Boyle specifically conceived of this film as a riposte to and—if you’ll pardon the phrasing—revivification of the zombie genre. They felt that the usual tropes of zombie art were tired and played out, and they wanted to bring some life back into the genre, and were inspired by Romero’s Dead original trilogy, as well as by the film Omega Man. They wanted their zombies to be fast, aggressive, monstrous, and still living. Garland and Boyle wanted to revivify the zombie genre by making it about an infection that, while it didn’t decisively kill the infected, nevertheless left their humanity so compromised that they really couldn’t properly be thought of as human anymore. But, as we’ll see, in keeping with the precedent set down in Romero’s films, the infected in this film, however terrifying, largely serve to highlight the ongoing monstrosity of the fully “human” survivors.

So, the world is destroyed by the rage virus. 28 days later, a man—Jim (Cillian Murphy)—wakes up from a coma in a hospital. (Yes, this is where the creators of The Walking Dead got that idea for Rick’s resurrection from his own coma, after the zombocalypse had decimated the US.) Jim has no idea what’s going on, namely, that the world is destroyed by the rage virus, and that humanity has been converted into rapacious, murderous, raging animals. All he knows, at first, is that the hospital is empty, and trashed. He ventures out, to discover that the entire city is abandoned and trashed. He finds a kiosk papered over with desperate notes and drawings about missing family members; the iconography here is strongly reminiscent of the 9/11 drawings and postings that were all over New York in the wake of 9/11, despite this film being set in the UK. The wasted, garbage-strewn city also reminds me of New York in the immediate wake of 9/11, when people were too afraid to go outside, or even of the days of COVID lockdown, when people weren’t allowed to go outside.

Jim finds two other survivors—uninfected people named Mark and Selena. Together, the three go to Jim’s family home and find his parents have committed suicide, rather than face the plague. Jim is ravaged by grief and loss; Mark shares that he, too, lost his entire family. Everyone has. Everyone. This is a crucial moment in the plot, because it frontloads one of the key bequests of this film to later undead art: the genre is shifting to be less about existential loneliness, as was the case in Matheson’s novel and the cinematic reboots of it, and more human grief, loss, despair, and mourning. Putting a cap on those ideas, Mark dies almost immediately after his heart-to-heart with Jim.

After Mark’s death, Jim and Selena (Naomie Harris) then pair up with a father-daughter surviving pair, named Frank and Hannah. The four of them head for a military outpost they believe to be near Manchester. When they arrive, the father, Frank (Brendan Gleeson), becomes infected, and is killed by the army. Jim, Selena, and Hannah go with the army to their fortress. It’s a tightly run ship, well-armed, and stocked with food. But we quickly get the correct impression that these surviving soldiers are planning to use Selena and Hannah as sex slaves. Or, more precisely, reproductive slaves: as their leader puts it, “women mean a future.” All those surviving soldiers, it appeared, had been on the brink of suicide at the thought that there would be no future for humanity, in the wake of the rage. But their leader “promised them women” to keep them from despair. And the surviving soldiers are hungry to bring that promise to fruition; one of them keeps harping on how Selena is black, and that makes him extra eager to have her, possess her, and rape her.

Jim is confined to a cellar with the only soldier who protests the sex/reproduction enslavement plan. While down there, Jim hears that this other soldier—Sargent Farrell (Stuart McQuarrie)—believes that the rest of the world is fine, but that the UK has been “quarantined” and left to die, to burn out the virus. He believes there is a future, and that it hinges on securing international aid and rescue. Soon after, having narrowly avoided being executed by the insane, rapist, abusive soldiers, Jim sees that Farrell was right: there’s a plane flying in a straight line, directly overhead. There is hope. There is an outside of the contagion. Somewhere, there is order, regularity, safety. The rage virus is, so far, contained. There is a reason to keep fighting, to keep surviving. Jim manages to unleash a trapped infected on the soldiers, realizing that the humans are a far greater, more insidious, and more malicious threat than the infected to Selena and Hannah. This, again, is where we see some strong Romero influence coming in: it’s the humans, not the undead, in Romero films, who really destroy things beyond salvageability. The undead are bad, but it’s the cruelty, selfishness, abusiveness, and malignity of people that ultimately spells destruction for humanity. Precisely by weaponizing the infected against the abusive soldiers, Jim manages to save Selena and Hannah.

From 28 Days onward, almost every zombie horror film in the Anglo-American cinematic or televisual space in the 21^st century has been conceptualized as a disease that goes pandemic. To be sure, the virogenetic undead trope had been set down fifty years earlier by Richard Matheson, and then massively popularized by the Resident Evil franchise of video games and eventually also films. But this particular film was such an immense cultural, critical, and financial success that it stood in a category by itself for a good period of time, and became the standard by which undead cinema would be judged. It’s defining criteria—apart from the virogenetic part—are these. First, the infected/zombies are fast, effective predators, and they are hungry. Second, the zombification of the world highlights the underlying predatoriness that lingers in humanity; we saw that in the soldiers in this film; we’ll see it in the roving bands of sadistic cults in later films of the franchise.

Third, as in Omega Man, there’s almost always one savior figure, almost always male, who saves other survivors and himself, and who does so by clinging to a basic idea of human decency, reciprocity, and—in particular—autonomy and safety for women and children. That it, the savior figure will insist that, even if civilization is destroyed, basic human decency must be maintained. But in the 28 franchise, as in every subsequent zombie film that follows in its wake, that “last man” is generally a lot less revolting, narcissistic, and delusional than Robert Neville in Omega Man. And a lot less outright abusive of women than Robert Neville in I Am Legend. Fourth, the savior character here and henceforth (with one notable exception in World War Z of 2013) will be regular people—not elites, not geniuses, not wealthy people, not highly physically powerful people. They’ll be like Jim, who was a bike messenger before an accident left him in that coma, not like Robert Neville, the supergenius scientist. Survival hinges, then, not on superior training or know-how, nor on wealth, nor class, nor access to power. Instead, it hinges on a capacity for spontaneous strategy and a deep, overwhelming commitment to the idea that humanity itself is worth fighting for, because people are worth loving, mourning, and empathizing with. It also hinges on the idea that women, people of color, and children are autonomous, agential beings who should be taken seriously and welcomed into the fellowship of The Human.

I’ll end by noting that there’s a gorgeous, visual, extended homage to Blade Runner at the end of this film. Please recall (see my earlier post from this spring) that Blade Runner ends with the replicant Roy (Rutger Hauer), shirtless in a rainstorm, asserting his humanity to the well-armed mercenary Dekker (Harrison Ford), who’s desperate to kill him. Roy was unable to save his lover, but at least, in the film’s final act, he can assert the fullness of his own humanity, even as he dies. 28 Days Later ends in a protracted scene in which Jim, whose shirt has been torn off, runs around in a rainstorm, desperately fighting to save his lover (Selena) from an armed soldier. What he’s also fighting for, of course, in fighting to free her is his idea of what it means to be a human. Which is that you don’t treat other humans like objects for your own gain or pleasure. You treat them like people, and you fight for their autonomy and freedom. But where Roy dies asserting his own humanity, Jim survives by asserting not only his humanity, but that of Selena and Hannah as well. In the end, Jim, Selena, and Hannah are spotted by a roving rescue crew in a helicopter. We believe, indeed, that they will be saved, and will rejoin the rest of humanity, precisely because they fought so hard against those who would dehumanize them. Any of them.

And thus, 21st century zombie horror was born.

So, ok. How do you make an antiquated heroic culture, full of monsters, marvels, warriors, and royals, feel like something contemporary Americans can relate to, without totally sacrificing the original work itself?

Christopher Nolan’s new The Odyssey (2026) tries very, very hard to figure that out, and to do it resonantly and powerfully. And I have to say, despite the huge skeptical biases I had going in, and despite the fact that there are things about this film that made me want to bang my head into the seat in front of me, he more or less sticks the landing.

Yes, that’s right: I really appreciated The Odyssey. I think it works. To be clear, I didn’t love it; but it also isn’t a film made primarily for me—that is, it’s not made for people who teach the Homeric epics every year of their lives to very smart students, and who have very definite opinions about what the Homeric epics mean. Just who I think Nolan’s target audience is, I’ll get to shortly. First, let me talk through the movie, and what I think works about it.

1. Nolan’s The Odyssey is a horror film. No, I’m not just saying that because I study horror. It really is. At every possible juncture, he amps up the fear factor, tosses in a jump scare, or increases the monstrosity of the major players. I’ll give three examples. First, Polyphemus is pretty scary in Homer’s poem, but he’s downright petrifying in Nolan’s movie: not just a cyclops but a badly deformed cyclops—with his one eye running vertically in his forehead, and his nose twisted around at a horrific angle—he’s more or less nonverbal, only speaking a little bit once he’s been blinded, in an almost sing-songy and hard-to-parse way. He is a creature drawn from far deeper in the uncanny valley than Homer’s original monster: the uncanny valley, remember, is the place of terror between something human-like, and something non-human. Without a clear voice, without a readily legible face, Nolan’s Polyphemus is The Uncanny. Second, Circe, who is very scary in Homer, is a full-on horror-movie witch in Nolan’s film: she doesn’t just magic Odysseus’s sailors into pigs, she uses their faces and bodies like play-doh and forms them into pigs with her bare hands. It is very punk rock, and very horror. She doesn’t spend like a year hooking up with Odysseus to take the edge off her scariness, either: she’s mean, she’s sadistic, she’s someone who can physically mold your body into that of a porcine prisoner. Third, when Odysseus goes to the land of the dead to speak with the deceased prophet Teiresias, the scene culminates with a zombie horde—I kid you not—chasing Odysseus’s people back to their boat. So, that’s three separate and distinct monster modalities that Nolan is leaning into very, very hard. And he’s smart to do that, for two reasons. First, like I suggested, the original epic has quite a lot of horror energy in it already, so it’s a “strong reading” of the poem to put this stuff in there. Second, Nolan is reading the room in the American imagination: we like horror right now. A lot. More than maybe any other genre. It makes us park our attention-frayed asses in chairs for three hours in this case and watch a single, continuous narrative. Good call, Chris.

2. Nolan decided to have the entire cast speak with a recognizably American accent. If you didn’t notice that, it’s probably because you are an American. But if you think about it, the norm in Hollywood, when entering into almost any kind of epic discourse, is to have the major players speak with British accents. Why? Because we Americans still have a hangover from British colonial times, in the sense that we associate Britishness with fanciness and antiquity. But of course, when you hear someone speaking in a British accent, it also helps nudge you out of feeling like you are part of the film and into a greater awareness that you are witnessing a film. By making everyone conform to an American accent, Nolan makes the film seem more real, more immediate. At the same time, he also makes a very subtle claim that maybe ancient Greek imperialism—which is Homeric’s central narrative preoccupation in both The Iliad and The Odyssey—is best understood through the framework of American imperialism. Or, put otherwise, Nolan’s choice here makes us aware that contemporary America has something in common with the Ancient Hellenes: and it’s not good stuff. It’s that we, like the Greeks, have a nasty habit of waging brutal wars on innocent people for perceived slights to our honor. (Final note: if you doubt that this was a deliberate choice, ask yourself this: why does Tom Holland, an Englishman, who plays Telemachus not have his usual British accent? You know, the one he uses in all his interviews, because it’s how he actually talks? The answer is that someone told him to talk American. To sound more like Spidey than like Tom. This is a conspicuously American film.

3. Nolan takes out the all-important Phaiakian episode from the original poem. Entirely. So, in the poem, everything we learn about Odysseus’s fantastical exploits—Circe, the cyclopes, the Laestrygonians, the lotus-eaters, Scylla and Charybdis—all of that stuff, we learn from Odysseus’s own mouth, as he recounts his adventures retrospectively to the court of the Phaiakian king Alkinous and his wife Arete. This matters a lot, because it means that we, the audience, don’t actually see the magical stuff happening in real time; we only get it in his recollections. Which means he might, just maybe, be making all of that shit up, whole-cloth, to endear himself to the Phaiakians. See, Homer leaves the door wide open to the possibility (probability) that Odysseus is just an effing con man. This film, Nolan’s film, wants to close that door. So instead, we hear all about Odysseus’s magical adventures because he’s receiving psychotherapy for severe trauma from the beautiful fishernymph Calypso. She’s helping him recover all of his memories, and her role as de facto therapist has the effect of making all his stories, all his magical episodes, seem true, rather than myths that he made up to keep his head off the chopping block in Phaiakia. Nolan wants his Odysseus to be truthful and reliable. Which is, like, super orthogonal to what Homer wants. Homer wants Odysseus to be a trickster, a man-of-many-twists-and-turns (the Greek work for that is polytropos). Nolan wants Odysseus to be a good man. Not a twister of facts or teller of tales, but a stand-up guy. I find this choice, on the one hand, completely appalling. The entire point of Homer’s poem is to get us to think seriously about how much bad behavior, how much lying and tricking, we’ll tolerate from Odysseus before we decide that he’s not such a great hero after all.

4. Relatedly, at literally every possible turn, Nolan deemphasizes Odysseus’s badness, and emphasizes the badness of his opponents. I’ll give a few key examples. First, in the poem, Odysseus is pretty willing to sacrifice his men, if it gets him closer to his own personal goals. In the film, he’s desperate to avoid sacrificing them, and regrets when he fails to preserve them. Second, in the poem, Odysseus takes great pleasure in testing and kind of tormenting his loyal servants, his son, his wife, and even his own father (who doesn’t appear in the film at all) when he returns to Ithaca, because he’s so obsessed with being the Master of Games and Tricks. In the film, when Odysseus conceals his identity from his loved ones, it’s not because of his love of the game, but because he’s been prudently warned to avoid Agamemnon’s “tragic” fate. Nolan’s Odysseus isn’t a sadist, nor a bully—especially to the people he loves. The famous scene where he grabs his nurse’s neck is way, way tamped down in the film, reduced to a knowing smile and a nod, and a gentle hand gesture. Third, in the poem, Odysseus’s revenge rampage at the end is disgusting and dysregulated: he kills all the male suitors who were taking advantage of Penelope, but he also brutally executes all the servant women who had been working at the house while the suitors had been there. Why? Because he believes that many of them—not all, but many—had been sexually seduced by the suitors. Odysseus and his son string up these young women “like birds” and hang them all, after having forced them to clean up all the blood and guts on the floor from the suitors. Sadism. Gender-based violence. Bad. Cruel. Unnecessary. And Nolan trims out all of that. All. Fourth, the suitors in the poem are bad, but the suitors in Nolan’s film are ridiculously bad. They kick dying dogs. They try to murder Telemachus in a temple. So Nolan is taking all the ethical complexity of the poem and decomplexifying it. Odysseus is Good. His enemies are Bad.

So, like, I was watching this film, and I was screaming inside. You can’t just decide that Odysseus is a decent guy, honest and reliable, well-meaning and merciful when he should be. You also can’t add a huge montage at the end where we learn that Odysseus has been eaten alive by guilt, remorse, and unadmitted accountability over the part he played in obliterating Troy. You can’t have Odysseus, whom gifted Homeric translator Emily Wilson calls “the lord of lies,” just be all contrite and humble, all changed and full of regret for having occasioned the death of so many totally innocent Trojans. You can’t just rewrite the whole damn epic like that. The Greeks celebrated the Trojan War! It was a major victory. You can’t just grow Odysseus a fucking conscience like that.

But slowly, as I kept watching, what I realized is that you absolutely and totally can do that.

Maybe you should do that.

And Christopher Nolan did do that.

He decided to make a very solid, very Greek-feeling adaptation of The Odyssey, in which the main character comes seriously to rue his violent past, to pine over his overexercise of cunning in the service of Greek imperial ambitions. He decided to reimagine Odysseus as a hero not because he’s polytropos, the man of many twists and turns, but because he changes into a better kind of man. Kinder. Gentler to his son. Gentler to his wife. Gentler to his nanny. Warmer. More forgiving of his servants. Less vengeful. More accountable for who he is, and what he’s done.

Christopher Nolan took the ultimate alpha bro—violent, powerful, manipulative, greedy, vengeful, narcissistic—and he reimagined him as a real, genuine, three-dimensional person with a conscience and a sense of civic responsibility.

So now at last we come back to the question of audience. I said Nolan didn’t make his film for me, and he definitely did not. Christopher Nolan has made a Homeric film that is designed, I believe, to help silence the manosphere, and to clap back at the unthinking ideas of American masculinity that are surging essentially unchecked in our government. If even conniving, pillaging, murdering, stealing Odysseus can come to understand that there is a better way to be in the world; if he can come to understand that he is, in fact, to blame for much of the violence and horror that exists all around him, and that he must atone for what he’s done, maybe there’s hope for 21^st America yet. Homer’s Odysseus really is a dangerous icon for the manosphere: he’s a powerful man who genuinely believes he owes nothing to anyone, and that he deserves total power and control over other people, especially those who cross him. Nolan’s Odysseus believes he owes everything to everyone.

So Nolan played out Homer’s story for us in a way that, he hopes and frankly I also hope, we can actually take on board: a violent man, the cause of untold deaths, goes on great journey—partially of his own mind, partially of the world around him—during which he comes to grips with himself and with his past, and arrives at a new determination that he will let go of power, and that he will do right by all the people whose lives he’s taken, either directly or indirectly.

This was the release year for Hitchcock’s Psycho, which I’ve written about before on this Substack, a brilliant film that centers our sense of fear on how the male gaze systematically disempowers, controls, and eventually kills women. In this film, part of what enables the eventual killing of the woman in question (Marion Crane, played by Vivien Leigh) is that the main male antagonist (Norman Bates, memorably played by Anthony Perkins) makes himself up as his own mother. We learn at the end that Norman—in the grips of a psychopathological overidentification with his mother Norma—masquerades as her and murders Marion because he/she deems her to be a threat to the mother/son intimacy. Norman’s overidenfication with his mother is anchored, of course, by their having the same name: Norman and Norma. Part of the reason for the depth of Norman’s psychopathological overidentification with Norma is that he killed her, years before, in a jealous rage about a romantic relationship she had, from which he was excluded. Norman’s pathological pantomime of Norma is made all the more dire and grisly because the real Norma Bates is long dead, slowly mummifying in their house as he ministers to her, believing her still, on some level, to be alive.

So, the film is thinking through the contours of a pathologically intimate relationship between a parent and a child; it does so by having the son masquerade as the mother, attacking and killing other women. Meanwhile, the real mother is a faceless, horrifying monster, kept under undead house arrest so that Norman can maintain his fantasy that she still lives.

Bizarrely, Psycho is not the only film of 1960 to follow approximately this narrative line.

Eyes Without a Face was released in France in the same year—1960, and here’s how it works. There is a male plastic surgeon, Dr. Génessier (Pierre Brasseur) whose daughter Christiane (Édith Scob) has been horribly injured in a car accident she was in with him. Her entire face is “destroyed” as the film repeatedly reminds us; when we see it, she looks for all the world like a desiccated mummy, without a real face, though her eyes still shine moist and radiant from her wizened, hard flesh.

Génessier can’t live with what he’s done to his daughter, any more than Norman could live with what he had done to Norma. So he (remember, he’s a plastic surgeon) starts murdering young women and harvesting their faces, so that he can graft those faces onto this daughter’s “destroyed” face, hoping to give her a new life. In between surgeries, Christiane walks around with her face covered by a mask.

After she receives her face grafts, she looks healthy for a time

But her face always decays, rejecting the graft, so that she comes progressively to look more and more like an undead monster, a zombie, or a living corpse.

Eventually, she’s right back in her mask again, looking smoother than smooth, paler than pale, more corpse-like than a corpse. Indeed, her mask looks very much like a classical death mask. So, like Norma Bates, Christiane is constrained by a controlling, murderous male relative to live in a state of perpetual undeath. She notes that herself in the film, asking finally to be “allowed to die.” But of course, Génessier will no more willingly let her go to her death than Norman would let Norma: for both men, allowing their female relative to fully, truly die would entail their examining their own responsibility for that death.

Génessier effectively destroyed his daughter’s life, and he then constrained her to live under house arrest in a protracted state of undeath, cycling through mask after mask of living flesh and then dead flesh, living flesh and then dead flesh.

Norman murdered his mother outright, and he then constrained her dead body to “live” under house arrest in a protracted state of undeath, balanced between the living face of Norman Bates and her own very decisively dead face.

In both cases, a controlling male patriarch constrains a female relative to exist in a state of undeath through a sustained, dehumanizing act of masquerade. In order to sustain that masquerade, he kills other innocent women.

Something was clearly in the water. You know what I think it was? The beginnings of Second Wave Feminism, both in the US and in Europe. In early 1958, women were admitted to the British House of Lords for the first time; in mid-1958, Denmark passed an Equal Rights bill that guaranteed women equal pay and status in the workforce. Also in 1958, France entered into its Fifth Republic era, which granted voting rights to Algerian women, and the remarkable French women’s rights activist group, Union des Femmes Françaises, was active throughout the late 1950s. In 1960, President John F. Kennedy established the Commission on the Status of Women, chaired by feminist icon Eleanor Roosevelt; and in 1960 the birth control pill was approved by the US FDA, granting women unprecedented reproductive autonomy. So women were gaining huge ground, both in Europe and the US. At the same time, however, women in France, the UK, and America were still legally unable to open a bank account in their own names, without a male co-signer (father, husband.) So women were clamoring loudly for their rights, freedoms, and autonomies. Women were winning their rights in some cases, but they were remaining under the heel of patriarchy in many others. The 1950s were a decade of intense conflict and contradiction around women’s rights, women’s freedoms, and women’s autonomy. Eyes Without a Face and Psycho are both responding to that conflict and contradiction.

Both Eyes Without a Face and Psycho envision a world in which the Patriarchy—embodied in biological fathers and sons, who ostensibly “love” and want to do what’s “best” for the women in their lives—manages to dehumanize and destroy the very women that Patriarchy purports to want to love and protect. Although, in both films, we are made to see the female character as monstrous for most of the runtime of the film, in the end, we are made to recognize clearly that—really—it’s the male controller who’s the most monstrous all along. We all know how that plays out in Psycho: it’s revealed that “Norma Bates,” who murdered Marion Crane, is really Norman Bates masquerading as his own undead mother.

Things end rather differently in the end of Eyes Without a Face, and they end in a way that is nothing short of triumphal for Christiane, and all the dehumanized, destroyed, disempowered, faceless women whom the French Feminist movement fought for so tirelessly.

After Christiane’s face has rejected yet another graft, she ventures down into her mansion’s basement, where her father has a huge number of dogs in cages, as well as birds. This is significant: chienne (Fr: female dog) is a term of misogynist abuse in French, signaling that a women is a “slut” or “whore,” by signaling that she is like a dog. At the same time, cocotte (Fr: chic, darling girl) is a term of misogynist affection, signaling that a women is a cutie or a sweetie because of her bird-like-ness. Dogs and birds, that is, are slang substitutes for “women” or “girls”; needless, I hope, to say, the same is true in English: we have “bitch” on the one hand, and “chick” on the other; the two words function very, very similarly to how they function in French.

So, in Eyes Without a Face, the basement—ie: the foundation of the House of Génessier—is literally full of caged animals that function as proxies for women. The house is literally built on the idea of imprisoned women. In the film’s final, climactic scene, Christiane decides to put an end to her father’s abuse, dehumanization, and control, by freeing all the dogs and all the birds from their cages. The dogs proceed—immediately—to hunt down and tear to pieces evil old Dr. Génessier himself. Pointedly, they mostly target his face, leaving him as destroyed and flayed as Christiane herself. The bird, by contrast, kind of hover around Christiane, one of them perching gracefully on her hand as she walks out of her own domestic prison and into the darkness of the surrounding forest.

She will almost certainly die out there, given she’s wearing only a thin nightgown and is pretty nigh totally insane at this point in the film. But we don’t experience her end as sad at all; quite the contrary, she’s gotten what she wanted. Finally. Most obviously, she wanted to be allowed to die; she’s now pulling that off. Second, she wanted to be free from the house and its painful, repeated surgeries. She’s accomplished that, too. But most important, she wanted to destroy a Patriarchy—embodied in her father—that kept placing mask after mask on her, never allowing her to explore who she truly was, herself, no matter how burned and hurt and “destroyed.” The same Patriarchy that kept on sacrificing other innocent young woman to some unrealistic, distorted vision of who she—Christiane—was supposed to be. The same Patriarchy that kept her under lock and key, controlling where she went, what she ate, whom she saw, and whom she spoke to. Literally: at numerous times in the film, Christiane tries to call her beloved fiancé, who believes her to be dead. Each time, she’s stopped. Christiane, in the end, takes her bestial proxies—the evil bitches on the one hand and the gentle chicks on the other—and frees them, clearing a path for herself to retake control over her life, even if that control simply leads her into the woods, to die alone.

So, no: Christiane doesn’t emerge at the end of the film as the final monster. She emerges—clad in diaphanous white and surrounded by doves—as an angel, who takes revenge on a diabolical Patriarch, hoping to end any future violence done ostensibly in her name.

I love this angelic visual of the final scene, because it brings into focus the deep structural beliefs about the nature of women in the domestic space that this film is hoping to disrupt. Since Victorian times, the notion of a women as the angel in the house had been in active circulation throughout the UK, the US, and continental Europe. The idea of this angel, obviously, was that a woman’s natural place was in the home, and that she should behave, in that home, as a domestic angel: serving her menfolk, being meek and passive, gentle, loving, yielding, and modest. Earlier in the film, Christiane embodied these ethics, albeit with a tragic twist: she was sweet, gentle, passive, and yielding to the extreme, submitting to surgery after painful surgery. When we see Christiane embodying this “angel” at the end of the film, however, it’s pretty effing clear she’s transformed now into an angel of death. And the thing she kills is the abusive, patriarchal, dehumanizing father who forced her into the status of an imprisoned angel in the first place.

So, despite the similarities between Psycho and Eyes Without a Face, their endings are widely divergent: in Psycho, Norma Bates is long dead, having been killed and dehumanized by her son. In Eyes Without a Face, the “destroyed” and dehumanized woman stands up and unleashes her army of bitches on a cruel, controlling patriarchy.

Game, set, match: France.

So.

By the 16^th century, it was a broadly accepted idea that countless women, seduced by Satan and enabled to perform wicked magic in his stead, were freely running around Europe, making chaos. Witches were believed to be diabolically empowered to work all kinds of mischief and magic: killing people, causing miscarriages, triggering erectile dysfunction, causing plague, killing young people, slaughtering cattle. They could do just about anything. All a witch had to do was make an agreement with Satan, and she could imbibe of his power and deploy it against the unsuspecting populace.

This last point about making an agreement with Satan is super important. Witch status wasn’t something innate, nor something heritable. It wasn’t a disease or a curse or evidence that a woman wasn’t fully human. Quite the contrary, witchhood was voluntary; it was something you could simply opt into, simply by signing a contract with Satan. Witchcraft, that is, was a contractual relationship between two willing parties, one female and one devilish. A woman would enter into such a contractual relationship with Satan, typically, because she wanted some kind of revenge against someone in her life, or wanted the power and attention of Satan to flow through her otherwise weak body.

Supposedly.

Because, of course, there were exactly zero actual witches who actually did this. Zero.

But reality has never posed much of a problem for misogyny and femicide.

So Jean Bodin, author of the 1580s text Demon-Mania of Witches, insisted on all manner of atrocious forms of violence committed by witches, as justifications for hunting them down and killing them. One of the most common crimes of witches, according to Bodin (and others), was to murder their own children, before baptism.[i] They are also notorious, Bodin says, for murdering the babies and children of other women, in order to drink their blood and eat their flesh.[ii] Witches were baby-slayers, child-killers, and cannibals. Supposedly. So they had to die. And die they did, by the tens and perhaps hundreds of thousands.

But it wasn’t just the executions that were bad. The juridical mechanisms themselves—the “tests” and “trials” to which women were subjected prior to their convictions—were also absolutely wrenching.

Accused women were routinely stripped naked and shaved. Apparently, inquisitors often raped the accused to help determine whether she was a virgin—if she was, it pointed toward her innocence. Obviously, once the rape had happened, it would be much more difficult for a woman to claim she was a virgin, or indeed to prove she had been one before the rape took place. The accused were grotesquely tortured in other ways besides: They were pierced with needles or made to sit on iron chairs positioned over fires.[iii] The tortures were frequently either explicitly or implicitly sexual in nature, because at the root of witch persecution was the notion that witches’ sexuality was the thing most to be feared about them, the thing most urgently to be tested, chastened, and destroyed.

This appalling and dehumanizing torture wasn’t, moreover, limited to the accused herself.

Quite the contrary, witches were burned publicly, at the stake. The explicit point of doing so was to dissuade other women from being “bad” in the way that witches were “bad.” The daughters of burning witches were sometimes made to stand close to the pyre, being whipped by locals while watching their mothers die in agony.[iv] Take that in for a moment, because I’m honestly not sure I’ve ever heard anything more sadistic in my entire life. Seriously, let’s slow it down and think it through, because this really happened to many real, historical women.

When I think about the daughter of an accused witch, I imagine her horror and her wracking emotional pain at seeing her mother die in slow, brutal physical agony. I imagine her physical pain at being flogged, and her humiliation at being flogged in public. I imagine her watching her neighbors jeer at her mother and very likely mock her, too. Then I imagine the mental gymnastics she must have had to do in order to survive, both socially and psychologically, after watching her mother scream her last, agonized scream. She would almost certainly be an outcast: Who would go to play at the house of the little girl whose mother had been burned as a witch? To have any hope of being socially accepted, she would certainly have to disavow her mother—the mother who had birthed her, nursed her, fed her, and raised her, and whom she had watched being tortured to death in public. Very likely, the daughter would have to decide that, yes, her mother had been a witch, and she had deserved to die. If the daughter didn’t decide that, how could she possibly survive the chaos of her own mind, the implication that she would have to spend the rest of her life among people who had unjustly executed her totally innocent mother? She would probably have to decide that her mother was guilty. And deserved it. Which would entail the young girl acceding to a reality in which women sometimes deserved to be tortured to death. I cannot imagine surviving that kind of psychological injury.

If we assume that the vast majority of executed witches were women of reproductive age or older, we can assume that a substantial number of executed women had at least one daughter, so we’re talking about a truly massive scale of social trauma befalling young women—and this is beyond the immediate physical violence enacted on convicted witches themselves. Hundreds of thousands of little girls, in all likelihood, had to decide that sometimes women—including their own mothers—deserved to be tortured to death in public because of something a little wild or a little unruly about their sexuality or about how they talked. The church and state used the public execution of accused witches to inflict abject terror and trauma on helpless young girls, on the brink of losing their own mothers, who were told that their mothers had been too loud, too sexy, or violent toward unborn children. Witch fever, by this point in history, had become a mechanism for brutally regulating and disciplining female behavior, and doing so intergenerationally.

So, what happened here? What really motivated all this femicide and torture of women and girls?

As Silvia Federici has argued, the systematic persecution of witches is intimately tied to the consolidation of private property during the same period of early modern European history.[v] If you look at England in the sixteenth century, and focus on areas where there was a high degree of enclosed land—which is to say, land that was taken and privatized by a particular wealthy landholder—you find a high degree of witch persecution. If you look at areas where privatization wasn’t happening, you find almost no witch persecution.[vi] If people are trying to lay exclusive claim to land, they’ve got to have clear, absolute knowledge about the lines of inheritance. No bastards in households, sired by other men. No sterile marriages. No promiscuous women. To control the land, you have to control the women—or, more precisely, you have to control their uteruses. If Patriarchy can’t control the wombs, it’s got to demonize and kill the women who contain them, as well as those women who have the temerity to try to control wombs in a way that Patriarchy doesn’t approve of.

The persecution of witches accelerated in lockstep with the increasing privatization of property in the sixteenth century. In fact, the earliest law that made witchcraft punishable by death passed in 1532: the so-called Carolina, an imperial Spanish code. England made witchcraft punishable by death slightly later, but by 1604, a woman could be executed for witchcraft in England even in the absence of hard evidence that she had caused harm to people or damage to property. Scotland, the Netherlands, France, and Switzerland made witchcraft a capital offense around 1550.[vii] Hundreds of thousands of women were tried, tortured, and executed for witchcraft in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.[viii] Many of these women were midwives; many others used the services of midwives. Some were simply a little too sexy, or a little too loud. Maybe the men around them experienced erectile dysfunction and were looking for someone to blame. Maybe their neighbors had miscarriages or stillbirths. Someone had to take the blame for these reversals of reproductive fortune. And that someone was women.

Despite the rabid fury of witch fever, however, there were counternarratives, mostly in the form of treatises that sought to shake some sense into European populaces by reminding people that women were not simply conduits for diabolical interference. One of the most famous of these witch-skeptical treatises, from the sixteenth century, was Reginald Scot’s Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584), which forcefully denies the existence of witches.

Scot insists in his treatise that the making of contracts with the devil is a complete fiction. Witches, he confirms, do not exist and therefore cannot and should not be prosecuted for witchcraft. He goes yet further to argue that those who persecute and prosecute witches are themselves corrupt, preying on elderly, depressive, and superstitious people—and chiefly on women. Specifically, he points out that “manie poore, olde women” are disproportionately persecuted, and for no good reason.[ix] He refers specifically to Jean Bodin’s sixteenth-century Demon-Mania as “Bodin’s bables,” implying that Jean Bodin was a big, stupid baby, not an adult man capable of making anything like real, rational sense. Scot has read the same texts as everyone else, but he’s somehow not buying it. He’s not convinced that this vilification of women as predatory, hypersexual, baby-slaying, bloodsucking, loudmouthed monsters is warranted. Or justifiable. Or even tolerable.

In fact, he thinks witchcraft a fiction, and one contrary to proper Christian belief. Why? Because it arrogates too much power to the devil, this idea that Satan went around corrupting and empowering witchy women and witchy girls. The devil, in his view, is simply not that strong. He sees a belief in this kind of diabolical witchcraft as weak, and anti-Christian.

This is a very important point, and one that I want to highlight in the rapidly escalating cultural environment of misogyny that seems to be enveloping the United States. Over four hundred years ago, writers—male writers, I hasten to note—wrote whole books critiquing the demonization of women for exercising their reproductive autonomy. They wrote whole books defending women against charges of witchcraft. Scot’s book was an important one, but by no means the only one of its type. And these men, these men who took up their pens in defense of the innocent women—all innocent—who were persecuted, prosecuted, and all too often executed as “witches,” all used Christianity itself as their justification.

All of these men came out and said that the very idea of witchcraft was unchristian, because it gave too much power to Satan, and didn’t reserve enough to God. God, in their views, simply wouldn’t allow women to be demonized and corrupted in the ways the witch persecutors limned.

Or, put rather polemically but not inaccurately: institutionalized, femicidal misogyny struck many a serious Christian philosopher of early modern Europe as actively heretical and unchristian. There is, therefore, a long history of allegiance between radical Christian reformers and vilified, persecuted women. I guess what I’m saying here is that I’d like to see that long-standing alliance assert itself a little more vocally in public political discourse now. Before people start putting metal-seated chairs over fires and asking women to sit on them.

Friends! You can learn more about witches and their persecution in my new book, Monstrous Bitch, which you can pre-order NOW on Amazon! Here’s the link: Monstrous Bitch

[i] Bodin, Demon-Mania, 205.

[ii] Bodin, Demon-Mania, 206.

[iii] Federici, Caliban and the Witch, 185–86.

[iv] Federici, Caliban and the Witch, 185–86.

[v] Federici, Caliban and the Witch.

[vi] Federici, Caliban and the Witch, 171.

[vii] Federici, Caliban and the Witch, 166.

[viii] See Federici, Caliban and the Witch, 169. See also Ben-Yehuda, “European Witch Craze,” 1. Ben-Yehuda estimates that between two hundred thousand and five hundred thousand people were executed as witches by 1650; 85 percent of them were women. The mechanisms of execution were burning, drowning, strangling, hanging, and beheading (6).

[ix] Reginald Scot, The Discoverie of Witchcraft, ed. Brinsley Nicholson (1584; repr., London: Elliot Stock, 1886), https://www.gutenberg.org/files/60766/60766-h/60766-h.htm.

The list comports hilariously well with my own subjective experience. Sinister is ranked #1, a film that I used to think of as by far the scariest film I’d ever seen. Insidious, another film that scares the daylights out of me, is ranked #2. Most of my favorite classic horror films are also on there—the books I featured in Scream with Me (2025, Simon and Schuster), namely, The Exorcist, Rosemary’s Baby, The Shining, Alien, and The Omen.

But there was a film on there I’d never seen, and honestly never even heard of. It’s called Hush, directed by Mike Flanagan (bench director of Netflix big budget horror: Gerald’s Game, Haunting of Hill House, Fall of the House of Usher, Midnight Mass, Haunting of Bly Manor.) Now, I already know I like Flanagan’s work. Usually a lot. So I decided to watch Hush.

And I am here to tell you I have never been more scared (of a film) in my life. Way scarier than Sinister ever was. Scarier than Insidious. I had to turn the film off three separate times to get through it. I had to split it across two days. I had to turn the volume off in a few scenes. I had to talk to myself through one scene. And finally, I had to lift weights while watching—two separate muscle groups—to make it through. That is every single support mechanism I have for tolerating horror-fear, apart from “call a friend,” which I couldn’t do, because both times I was watching it after midnight. Rookie mistake.

Here’s the premise. Maddie (Kate Siegel, who co-wrote the script with Flanagan), a beautiful, single, deaf novelist lives alone in the woods in a beautiful house. She is close friends—and maybe a little in love—with her neighbor Sarah (Samantha Sloyan). The opening scene is of the two of them hanging out; Sarah is learning sign language, though Maddie can lip read well. They have a close, easy, flirtatious familiarity, though we learn that Sarah is married to a man named John.

Later on, after Sarah walks home through the woods, Maddie is cleaning up the meal she cooked (and burned). Suddenly, out of nowhere it seems, Sarah appears at her door, bloody, panicking, and panting. She’s banging on the door, trying to get Maddie’s attention. A man is pursuing her. She says, “Maddie, please see me! Please save me!” because she knows Maddie can’t hear her, so her only hope is that Maddie turns to see her, and lets her in. Alas, not hearing the banging and shouting at the door, Maddie remains turned the wrong way, and a masked man with a quiver of arrows approaches Sarah from behind, shoots an arrow into her, and then brutally stabs her to death, repeatedly, using his body in much the way a man might use his body while having sex with a woman against a wall. And against her will. The film suggests that he is stabbing her to death—in the back, in the sides—while also deriving a frotteur-like pleasure from the act. It is extraordinarily disturbing, and extraordinarily scary.

At times, the camera is with Maddie, inside, failing to see Sarah; at times, the camera is with Sarah, failing to be seen, or, of course, to be heard. Her death scene is agonizing, and protracted. And her murderer is terrifying.

Once Sarah is dead, he realizes Maddie, inside and oblivious to any of this, could be his next mark. He drags Sarah’s body off, and the rest of the film is a cat-and-mouse style home invasion horror between this guy and Maddie, who, as previously noted, is deaf and cannot hear or perceive him unless she’s looking straight at him.

It’s a brilliant conceit for a horror film, but it’s not coming out of nowhere. The classic 1960s thriller Wait Until Dark (1967) stars Audrey Hepburn as a blind woman who is stalked and endangered in her own home as well. That film, made 60 years ago, is far less brutal and violent than this one, and, as I’ll get into, much less brilliant. But it laid down the tropes for a home-invasion thriller in which the main dramatic amplifier is that there is a woman alone in her home, with a disability that makes her less able to perceive or respond to her assailant. And, as was also the case in Wait until Dark, the disability, which the film spends most of its runtime encoding as a disadvantage in the protagonist’s struggle to stay alive, winds up being an advantage.

In the Hepburn film, Suzy is able to leverage her keen hearing and her long-honed comfort moving around in the darkness in a way that kills her assailant and lets her escape. In Hush, Maddie feels a slight movement of the killer’s breath on the hairs on her neck; her tactile hypersensitivity and her knowledge that there shouldn’t be wind in the house allow her to reach around blindly and stab him in the kneecap. Soon thereafter, she deafens him by blasting her super loud fire alarm in his face, gaining just enough advantage over him to overpower and kill him. The alarm, of course, doesn’t adversely affect her at all: her “disadvantage,” as the film explicitly calls it, has become her advantage. I love about both of these films how they highlight a bodily difference as an asset for survival, a central aspect of the survivor’s resourcefulness.

There aren’t a lot of horror films featuring disabled people as protagonists, so I love that about these films, prima facie. I particularly love it in Hush, because Maddie is a badass warrior survivor strategist; even as her body gets broken by the assailant—who does eventually get into the house with her—she keeps right on fighting, thinking, pushing. Suzy from Wait until Dark, however brave she is, is ultimately far more passive than Maddie. Maddie is fucking fierce, and no matter how afraid and injured she is, she keeps playing mental chess, trying to figure out the best way to keep herself alive, until she realizes that killing the assailant is the only path she can be on.

But the representation of a disabled woman as a badass survivor is not my favorite thing about this film. My favorite thing about this film is how it theorizes the phenomenon of violence against women. I’m going to go through this step by step, because this film is meticulous in how it depicts gender-based violence.

When Sarah dies, she knows she’s going to die; she sees it coming. She knows this man is going to kill her, because he’s already been hurting her, and doesn’t seem in any hurry to lay off. This is the far, far too common reality for women in situations of severe domestic violence, edging over into femicide—the murder of a woman. Women often know they are in desperate, mortal danger, prior actually to their being murdered, but they often can’t do much to help themselves out of it. In fact, “danger assessment tools,” which have been designed by anti-DV groups to help assess the level of danger a victim is in, always ask the victim whether she believes she is in mortal danger, or whether their abuser seems capable of killing them. Often, she says yes; when she says yes, it’s tragically often true. The sad reality is that women routinely see their own deaths coming, and simply don’t have the power, backing, legal resources, police protection, wealth, or social supports to do anything about it. This film gets that. It makes viewers sit with the reality that Sarah knows she’s going to die before she dies, and simply cannot save herself.

When Sarah realizes how much danger she’s in, she realizes her best play is to seek help from a female friend. She goes to Maddie’s house and literally bangs on the door, trying to be heard, and begging to be seen: “Maddie! Please see me! Save me!” This is a gut-wrenchingly accurate rendering of what so many severe abuse victims face. They ask to be seen, they beg to be heard—by friends, by colleagues, by the criminal justice system, by police—and, way, way, way too often, they fail to be heard, they fail to be seen. Maddie, see me. See me. Hear me. Save me. This is, on its own, a very important public service announcement: we must do better at listening to and seeing women in dangerous, violent situations, and in intervening to help them. Even a little, quiet, barely audible cry for help is a cry for help, and intervention is required. Maddie, of course, cannot hear; we can.

Once the murderer has brutalized Sarah, he turns his sights on Maddie. His first move is to intercept and steal her cell phone. He cuts off, thereby, her access to the outside world. This is another terrifyingly realistic rendering of a real, pervasive problem in severe violence against women. Severely controlling abusers always want to cut off a woman from any kind of outside support—certainly the police, but also friends, family, colleagues, or the general public. Maddie’s primary connection to the outside world is her phone, which she uses to text and make video calls so she can read lips and sign with friends and family members. The murderer takes that away from her, fully isolating her in the domestic space of her small, rural home.

Immediately thereafter, he pops her car tires, so as to ensure she cannot flee him. This, too, is a common and very dangerous form of DV: vehicular control or sequestration. Abusers routinely damage, move, steal, or hide cars from their abuse victims, so as to restrict that victim’s freedom of motion. Such restriction presupposes a logic by which the victim is inhuman, and therefore not deserving of full autonomy or self-determination: She can’t move or leave unless I let her. So, yes, this guy is a crazy murderer, and the playbook he’s playing out of is the domestic abuser playbook. This is true throughout the entire film.

Maddie’s POV supports this narrative, setting her out clearly and deliberately as a victim of DV. Throughout the film, at any given moment, Maddie has no idea if the murderer is right outside a window of a room she’s in, or in the other side of the house. She never knows where the next assault will come from. He has the house—its perimeter, its windows, its doors—under his constant surveillance. She also never knows whether some sound she might make will trigger him to her presence in a particular room—she, of course, can’t hear any sounds she might make. So she is constantly broadcasting her presence simply by moving, living, and breathing, while he is constantly slinking around, surrounding her, delimiting her space and movements, controlling her from the outside, making her house into a prison from which she cannot escape. In one scene, she tries to string his crossbow, which she’s gained control of, and she can’t make the mechanism catch; as she does this, sitting in the dark on the floor of a room, he’s simply watching her, through the nearby window. She doesn’t know he’s there, but he is, right there, just taking pleasure in watching her try to outmaneuver him, all the while knowing that he has every possible advantage.

This is a film that’s reinventing the home-invasion horror film as a mechanism for thinking about violence in the home. At first, you don’t notice that dynamic, because of course the killer is a stranger to Maddie, an opportunistic killer rather than a known partner. But of course, the stranger leverages the same elements that a sexual partner will all too often leverage. He even resorts to one of the commonest modes of intimate partner lethality in the end: strangulation. Another public service announcement: strangulation of any length of time is a major lethality risk factor for women. This film braids that into its narrative.

But, in the end, Maddie manages to skewer the assailant in the throat with a corkscrew. She saves herself, summoning the police to her aid. And as much as I rejoiced in her survival—and I really, really did—I was also all too painfully aware that, with all these danger and lethality factors in play, Sarah’s outcome is the far more realistic of the two.

So, yes, this is the scariest film I’ve ever seen. And it’s scary not because of its supernaturalism—there isn’t any, not one iota. It’s scary because of its realism.

Note: if you or anyone you know is experiencing intimate partner violence, domestic violence, or stalking, please consult this danger assessment tool: https://www.dangerassessment.org/DA.aspx. It can save your or their life.

It resonates with how I felt reading CNN’s coverage of the rape academy back in April. CNN broke a story that a how-to-rape-your-wife-or-girlfriend website had 62 million visits in one month. 62 million visits to a site that trained men to sedate and sexually assault someone they knew and, in principle, loved. Terrifying: the monsters are everywhere, swimming all around us, simply blurred, or running too silent and deep in their monstrosity for us to see or swim away from until it’s way, way too late.

But the allegorical resonance of Jaws with what it feels like to live in modern western patriarchy as a woman—the monster is everywhere, yet too hard to spot to be able to protect against effectively—wasn’t the most powerful aspect of rewatching this film.

Instead, it was how the film explores masculinity, and, in particular, the possibility of profound friendship and nonsexual intimacy among men. Now, to be fair, I saw Project Hail Mary (2026) right before rewatching Jaws, so I was primed to focus on exactly this dynamic. (If you haven’t seen PHM, go see it immediately. Stop reading this post, put your coffee down, blow off work, and go see it. It is very possibly the most beautiful film—and I mean that both aesthetically and emotionally—that I’ve seen this decade.) But I think that the reason I felt called to watch Jaws after I saw Project Hail Mary was that the latter (perfect, splendid, beautiful) film triggered a vague, shimmering memory in me that Jaws was interested in exploring male friendship.

So, everyone knows the main storyline of Jaws. There’s a beachside town called Amity—which, I hasten to note, the mayor reminds us early on means “friendship,” so there’s a pretty loud shout-out to the importance of friendship in the film right there. Amity has a new and severe shark problem: there’s a Great White Shark attacking and killing people. The new police chief, Martin Brody (Roy Scheider), is forced to close down the beaches, and he goes on a desperate shark hunt with a devoted oceanographer named Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) and a manic fisherman named Quint (Robert Shaw). Most of the action of the film happens in Quint’s small boat—the Orca—out on the open water, as the three men attempt to kill the beast below.

Looping back for a second to my claim that this film is centrally concerned with variants of American masculinity, it’s worth noting that we’ve got three major archetypes of maleness on board this vessel: we’ve got the super masculine, rugged ship’s captain; we’ve got the nerdy, highly educated and (as we find out about Hooper) extremely wealthy and elite scientist; we’ve got the cautious, rational, measured, but also brave and protective police chief. Three traditional forms of masculinity: ruggedness, learnedness, and protectiveness. These three types must learn to work together to defeat the much larger, much more powerful, much older, and infinitely more rapacious Bad Boy who surges underneath them, threatening—literally—to consume them. By itself, that would be a somewhat high-concept horror allegory for the 1970s.

But that’s not all.

Early on in these three men’s interactions, they are competitive with each other, critical, sparring. But over the course of the voyage, they forge a fascinating intimacy; the film, really, is a bromance, at its beating heart. The three-way bromance starts with Quint and Hooper—who have the most animus against each other, because of their perception of educational and class differences between them—who are sitting at a table in the boat’s cabin, and they start comparing scars and injuries that they’ve incurred, primarily from hunting sharks. Hooper has a massive scar on his calf; so does Quint. They go back and forth, comparing; each one’s body echoes the other’s, until they’re both smiling and lauging and—shockingly—cuddled up intimately together on the bench. Their bodies wind up all but actually intertwined in this scene. And no one minds, no one flinches. It doesn’t read as an especially queer moment, either: just a moment of unthinking physical intimacy between men, the kind of intimacy that little boys engage in all the time, flopping into a pile underneath a jungle gym, or tackling each other playfully in the back of a school bus. This scene forces Quint to recognize that nerdy, bespectacled, wealthy Hooper might have more in common with him than he was ready to admit; it forces Hooper to recognize the same in reverse. These men, after all, have matching scars.

Later, on the same bench in the cabin, Hooper and Quint start singing together. They know the same words to the same songs, and they sound oddly good singing together. After a while, even staunch, stoic Brody joins in, and the three men sit at a table, singing their hearts out and drumming out beats on the table with their hands. It is—and here comes a word I almost never have occasion to use about a horror movie—adorable. Not nearly as adorable as Project Hail Mary, but there really is a similar vibe of initial skepticism being replaced by trust and closeness. So, yeah, Jaws is a bromance.

Nested into the bromance of Jaws is a very subtle and interesting secondary dynamic, which is that Quint wants to catch the whale himself, unaided by another boat, or by the Coast Guard; in fact, in one scene, when Brody tries to call the Coast Guard for back-up, Quint impetuously destroys the phone—interestingly, he uses a baseball bat, a symbol of classic American boyhood and acceptable forms of male-male competitiveness. But Quint’s maverick ways, his desire to be the man who bests the beast is ultimately going to kill him. However many times he—the man with the harpoon gun—lands a harpoon in Jaws’ flanks, Jaws comes back, unfazed. Quint is insane, manic, megalomaniacal, and in the end, he winds up getting bitten in half brutally and dragged into the abyss by Jaws.

As many critics have noted, Quint is a modern-day figuration of Herman Meville’s Captain Ahab, from Moby Dick, chasing his own great, white sea creature, though this time it’s a fish and not great white mammal. Like Ahab, Quint is ultimately killed by his obsession, by his manic need to be the one to kill the beast. He’s killed by his megalomania, by his maverick disposition. Ultimately, this kind of man, the manic captain archetype, is not saved by his bromantic allegiances with other men, because, in the end, his obsession to dominate and win and defeat the beast is all that he cares about. Indeed, in Jaws, Quint doesn’t just destroy the phone; he also destroys the boat engine, by knowingly pushing her too hard, too many times. No matter how Hooper and Brody try to rein him in, Quint can’t hold back his bursting need to prove his capacity to dominate the beast below.

So the film kills him.

Like I said: there’s a serious allegory going on in this film about versions of real, embodied, human masculinity, in relation to a lurking, monstrous, all-consuming version of masculinity that lies beneath. And in the end, the film decides that the Quintean model of masculinity isn’t the right one to defeat this beast. He’s too alpha. He’s too self-interested. He’s too hungry for power. He’s too domineering. He’s too bloodthirsty. He is too similar to the beast below to be able to defeat it.

But the film does offer up a vision of masculinity that can defeat the churning beast below. Late in the film, Hooper decides to lower himself into the water in a shark cage, so he can dose the shark with a drug that will sedate and maybe even kill him. While he’s down there, Jaws destroys the cage, and Hooper barely escapes with his life, swimming in his SCUBA gear down to a hiding place at the bottom where Jaws can’t see him or reach him. Brody is horrified when the cage comes up to see that it’s broken open; he assumes the worst about his new, nerdy friend. Scheider plays the scene subtly, and very well: he doesn’t talk about Cooper’s presumed demise, but you see Brody’s jaw lock, and you know that now, for him, getting the beast is partially about getting justice for his friend.

Brody, alone on the sinking boat, eventually kills Jaws by throwing a tank of compressed air into his mouth and shooting a gun at it so that the tank explodes, exploding Jaws with it. I love this choice, for two reasons. First, because the compressed air tank had been something Hooper had brought along, so Brody’s choice suggests he has internalized or taken on board some of Hooper’s more nerdy, scientific maleness. He can’t kill Jaws with a gun alone, any more than Quint had been able to kill him with harpoons; he needs to combine his skill (shooting) with Hooper’s skill (science and planning). Second, I love the air-tank slaying of the beast, because Brody realized that you can only kill the beast from the inside. You have to get inside the monstrosity, really deep inside it, in order to exploit its vulnerabilities and take it down. Or, rather, blow it up, in order to take it down.

To me, this offers rather a fascinating resonance with the kind of reporting that CNN has been doing about the rape academy website: you have to get in there to begin to dismantle the horrific monsters that lurk everywhere, just below what people—and mainly women—can actually see and defend against. You can’t hit it from the outside; you have to blow that shit up from the inside.

Better still, if you do manage to blow the fucking beast up from the inside, it creates not only safety for the women and children “back on shore,” but also a space for men—in this case, the rationalist, protective police chief and the elite nerd scientist—to forge new, stabler, and healthier alliances. Alliances in which they can take pleasure and pride. In fact, the last scene of Jaws shows Brody and Hooper paddling back to shore together, suspended on a blank that connects two floating barrels together. Brody asks if they’ll be able to swim back on it all the way, and Hooper instructs him to keep kicking. Neither is going to make it on his own; they have to be in close physical proximity, supporting each other and working together, in order to make it back to land, to a hero’s welcome. And, even more interesting, this final shot of them from behind, kicking to get back to shore, is mirthful, light, and happy. They crack jokes, and you can hear the smiles on their faces. Not only have they slaughtered the beast from the inside, they have come back to Amity, truly, as friends.

Last week, I talked about King’s scintillating exploration of the psychology of male domestic abusers. This week, I’m going to talk about King’s excruciating exploration of how communities quietly sanction the systematic abuse of children by simply not believing it’s happening.

Here’s the central plot conceit of It in a nutshell. There is a town in Maine called Derry. We are—for much of the novel—in the late 1950s. Children in Derry tend to vanish and/or turn up dead on a regular basis. Like, constantly. Like, 50+ cases of missing or murdered children per year. The cops, the parents, the teachers, and, of course, the children are well aware that this is happening. There are town-wide evening curfews for children. The police are exploring “leads” and trying to figure out who is committing these heinous crimes. And yet, there’s a strange denialism that goes around the town. The cops see that kids are dying left and right—violently—but they’re also insistent that most of the missing kids probably just wandered off on a walkabout, or decided to run away from home, of their own volition. As worried as they are about the clear murders, they’re weirdly unbothered by the simple disappearances. The parents, too, are worried, but not worried enough to really limit their kids’ activities. “Be home by dinner or I’ll call the police,” is a constant refrain of parents in the novel. Which, as a parent, I find surprising. I’d be like, “Pack your bags. We’re fucking moving.” So again, the parents are aware that something is awry, but they’re not bothered enough to really do anything to protect their children.

So the children die. Over and over, violently, horrifically, painfully.

They are killed, as even people who’ve never read the novel undoubtedly know, by a malevolent, demonic clown. He lures the children to him by offering them, most often, balloons. Once he has them in his clutches, he rips them apart, sometimes eating parts of their bodies. He often drowns them in the local canal in the end. One child, a younger brother of one of the protagonists, is pulled so violently into a storm drain that his arm is ripped clean off his body.

“Pack your bags. We’re fucking moving,” says literally no one in the film.

So I’m reading this novel, and my mental alarm bell for unrealism is going off. Sure, I study horror, so I’m pretty down, at baseline, with surrealism, supernaturalism, and the like. But, heaven help me: I want my horror stories to make some sense. And the weird stasis of the cops, teachers, and especially parents in this novel? I was like, Give me an actual break. This is unrealistic.

But almost as soon as I felt exasperated like that, everything clicked.

The novel is allegorizing child abuse, and especially child sexual abuse. And it’s allegorizing how adults’ needs to reconfirm norms, to act regular, to maintain routines, and to stay static in their lives and communities, is actually a big part of what perpetuates abuse. The clown is a figuration of a child molester. In fact, one of the ways he tries to kill one child is by “offering” to give the child—who is eleven years old—a blow job. The kid escapes. The clown is a child molester. What the novel is so intent on showcasing is how the other adults in the film just don’t quite react enough to the presence of child abuse in their neighborhood to really change things. Which, of course, makes the film, if anything, hyperrealistic, not unrealistic.

Take the Epstein files. We know that countless young women were molested, raped, assaulted, and abused on Epstein island. We know. The police know. But no arrests. No prosecutions, apart from Epstein himself, of course, who died in prison. Law enforcement is upset about it, I believe that, but not upset enough to actually do something about it.

Take online pornography. We know that many (most?) of the people filmed in pornographic films are under some degree of duress, be it financial, drug-induced, social, psychological, or otherwise. We know that the porn industry dovetails with the sex trafficking industry. We know. The police know. But no arrests. No prosecutions. No one is panicking.

Take the online rape academy uncovered by CNN in April, and its associated much larger porn site. What’s been all over the media is that 62 million visits to the rape academy were clocked globally in a single month. So that’s an average of 2 million visits per day. What’s been less reported in the media is that the larger site that allows a person to access this rape academy hosts content about the SA of minors. Openly. People advertise to other users that they have video content of the SA of children from 6-18. (See this article for more information: link.)

Take the undetermined but vast number of children who are sexually molested every year by a known and trusted adult. We know that the huge majority of cases of childhood sexual molestation involve a known person, and very often a family member. We know this. We know that these crimes are underreported. And yet, our laws on such things remain weak. Not just our criminal laws, but even our family laws. We know. The police know. Everyone knows. And yet, here we are, just kind of living our lives, looking away. Pretending the monsters aren’t real. Pretending that simple basic rules like curfews, or simple tools like cell phones and watches can keep children safe.

But they can’t. And here we are.

It is allegorizing a pervasive and deeply disturbing American social problem. Which is that, in the face of the rampant sexual abuse of children, most adults in this country—like, almost all adults in this country—are just going about their daily lives, hoping they don’t have to encounter such horror face to face. The weird, unrealistic feeling semi-indifference of the adults in It is troubling because, in fact, it’s not unrealistic.

The clown in the sewer system who seduces, abuses, and often kills children is real. In the novel, the clown shape-shifts, appearing as a syphilitic hobo to one child, as a raptor to another, and as an actual clown to some. He shape-shifts, I think, because King’s point here is to highlight that Childhood Sexual Abuse may take on many forms and may wear many different guises—family members, friends of the family, other known adults—but it is always, underneath, the same predatory monster at work, lurking in the sewers just below our feet. And he’s in the sewer system to allegorize that there are networks of underground, shit-filled caverns that connect American households together in a strange pact of near-silence about the pervasiveness of this kind of abuse. The clown in the sewer system is very real.

Equally real is our—and here I mean all voting-age adults—bizarre and morally impoverished collective decision to tolerate it.

To be clear, I don’t think most people would say that they tolerate childhood SA. But the fact remains: the Epstein files exist, the porn industry exists, child sex trafficking exists, and known-adult abuse exists. And here we are, doing our regular thing. What is that? Who are we? We are the blinkered, fearful but feckless, disorganized and scatterbrained adults of the imaginary town of Derry, Maine. What we need to be is the horrified and activated, organized and protective adults of the very real town of Wherever You Live, USA.

Stephen King is not the only horror writer to tackle—in barely veiled terms—the problem of pervasive childhood abuse. The recent film Weapons (2025) was another.

In this film, a known adult—the aunt of the little boy named Alex who is the central child character in the film—is eventually revealed to be a witch, who has called to her an entire classroom of young children. These children all ran mysteriously out of their own homes, seemingly voluntarily, in the dead of night, and disappeared to an unknown location. The teachers, parents, and police are all panicking. And yet also, feckless—particularly the police. It turns out that the evil witchy Aunt Gladys has summoned them to Alex’s basement, where she keeps them, essentially, as slaves: she drains their life force so as to keep herself young and vital. She sacrifices them, then, and their bodily autonomy to her own frail sense of self, her narcissism. Sounds a lot like another allegory for Childhood Sexual Abuse to me.

Amplifying that resonance is what was, for me, the most important dynamic in the film. Aunt Gladys is able to secure Alex’s silence about what he knows his aunt is doing with the children in the basement by threatening to harm his parents. Alex’s parents are in a kind of sustained vegetative state, under the magical power of Gladys. But she can make them do things to themselves. Harm themselves. Kill themselves. And Gladys knows something: if you want to gain the compliance of a child, threaten their parents.

This is something that clinicians who work closely with survivors of Childhood SA know well: abusers often secure a child’s compliance by threatening a parent. In fact, I’ll frame this as a PSA. Please make sure that every young child in your life knows that anytime a person says to a child, “if you tell anyone about this, I’ll hurt your mommy/daddy,” that person is lying and dangerous, and it’s extra important for the child to tell a trusted adult exactly what the abuser told them not to tell. That’s what Gladys tells Alex. And guess what? It works.

Sure, Weapons is a horror movie about witchcraft and how it tears through a community. In the same way that It is a horror novel (and movie) about a demonic clown and how he tears through a community. But both works are thinly veiled explorations—using horror as a medium—for the real-life situation faced by way, way, way too many children. Faced by even one child would be way too much. But the demographics of SA are terrifying. The numbers are staggering: estimates suggest that between 1 out of 6 and 1 out of 5 girls are molested in their childhoods. The numbers for boys are only slightly lower: probably 1 out of 7. (See graphic below.) And again, the vast majority of perpetrators are known adults.

If you want to read the actual scariest book I’ve ever read in my life, to learn more about this horror reality, check out Anna Salter’s Predators: Pedophiles, Rapists, and Other Sex Offenders (Basic Books, 2003). What you learn will scare the living hell out of you. And it should. We, the adults in the room, the adults in the towns and cities, the adults in the country, the adults in the world, we should be scared shitless about this. And we should march that fear right into the polling booths and change our leadership to one that will safeguard the bodily safety and autonomy of children.

People ask me, regularly, why I watch horror movies. Why, in a world full of real horror, I watch movies that make me feel yet more horrified. And my answer is always the same. I watch horror to practice feeling the vulnerability of other people, so that I can take that new, art-won bodily empathy into direct practice in the choices I make, the votes I cast. I believe that watching horror, feeling the fear of another person, makes us into better citizens and smarter voters. If our lawmakers aren’t doing a good enough job protecting kids—which they are not—I’m grateful that our filmmakers and novelists are taking some steps toward filling that gap.

So I read It. Which, it turns out, is only barely about the terrifying clown, Pennywise. It is much, much, much more deeply about human nature, and, specifically, it’s about moments when one person becomes so consumed by the desire to exercise power and control over another person that the first person becomes, in effect, a clownish fucking monster.

This happens repeatedly over the course of the novel, but I’ll focus on the scene that hit me the hardest. It is a scene of searing domestic horror, ala Rosemary’s Baby or The Exorcist, in being focused not just on some supernatural threat, but instead on a woman’s vulnerability to predatory masculinity exercised in a domestic and intimate context.

So. Pretty early on in It, we meet Beverly. But we meet her through the narrative voice of her boyfriend and then husband, Tom Rogan. Tom talks about his courtship of Bev, how attracted he was to her, but also how desperate he was to control her. He informs her, relatively early on, that he finds her smoking habit revolting. He tells her to stop. One day, soon thereafter, as they leave a movie theater, she lights up. He “lets” her keep dragging on the cigarette until they’re both sitting in the car together. At that point, cooped up in the closed environment of the car, he smashes his hand into her face, to punish her for forgetting what he had told her about smoking. King spends a lot of narrative time playing out Bev’s shock, pain, and humiliation, all seen through the eyes of Tom, who loves that he’s terrified her, loves that he’s hurt her. He feels reinforced in his identity by her pain, by his certainty that he can get her to bow to him. He hits her again. She thinks of leaving the car and escaping, but he comes around and opens her car door for her, inviting her to leave. Like so many women in situations of domestic abuse, her freeze reflex kicks in, so she stays.[i] He makes her say, out loud, to him, that she is “sorry” and that she wants to stay with him. It’s a harrowing scene, mostly for its realism, its feeling of accuracy, its immediacy, its plausibility. Stephen King somehow managed to crawl into the mind of an abuse victim and play out all of her actions, seen from the mind of her abuser. The abuser knows how to play her, because he can see that, somewhere, deep inside her, there’s a vulnerability that he can exploit. There’s pain there. He can feed on it, turn it against her.

When Bev and Tom get back to Tom’s apartment, they have sex, and it’s fantastic for both of them, though King makes clear that Bev is horrified by her sexual response to her clearly abusive boyfriend. It’s as though he’s taken control not only of her mind and will, but also of her body. Tom has taken possession of her, invaded her, overwritten her survival instincts, and hijacked her sexual response patterns. It is terrifying.

Bev and Tom get married, and Tom continues to pound Bev regularly, to keep her in her place, to exert his control. They fall into a pattern where, if she fails to have a hot meal on the table, he beats her and then fucks her. Rapes her? Not in his mind, but we wonder. Or she’ll forget to let him know she’s coming home from work late; he’ll beat her, he’ll fuck her. He is unapologetic about this, unabashed. Like most abusers, he clearly thinks he is well within his rights to do this to her.[ii] We see and hear of this entirely from his perspective. Their life rolls along, with Tom dominating, battering, and violating Bev at his leisure, unchecked.

Unchecked until her own past catches up with her; she receives a phone call directing her to return to her hometown. She had a trauma there—we don’t know what it was yet—and she is compelled to go home. More compelled, it turns out, than she is to obey Tom.

From Tom’s vantage—which is the vantage the scene is written from—Bev is in the house, smoking while packing her suitcase. He experiences her smoking as a terrible violation of his power, his control. He determines to sneak up on her and beat the hell out of her with a black belt that he wraps around his hand for leverage. He’s done this before, and he’s aroused and excited by the idea of doing it again. But this time, for the first time in their relationship, Bev resists. When she sees him, belt in hand, she tells him she’s leaving. She has to go home. He needs to stop threatening her. He is beyond angry at her reaction. He is beyond enraged. He is afraid. In fact, he is horrified. King renders the existential fear of an abuser losing control over his victim beautifully and hauntingly. Tom begins to ask himself if he—Tom—is real. If he really exists. Am I really here? he wonders, thunderstruck and terrified. Do I exist? Is Tom real? What King renders in this fucking perfect scene of domestic violence is that the abuser’s ego—his very sense of self—is built around his capacity to terrorize his victim. If his capacity to terrorize her falters, he enters not only into anger, but into existential despair.

Tom tries to hit Bev with the belt, panicking, needing to restore order to his universe. But she moves, so he only barely clips her shoulder. He strikes again and again, sometimes hitting her and sometimes missing. Eventually, she starts verbally deriding him, telling him she will kill him if he doesn’t let her go, calling him a fat sack of shit. Which he is. As she resists him—by moving, by deriding him, by threatening him—his sense of existential panic and despair only ratchet up. He swings more and more wildly, but also begins to regress into an almost childlike state of terror. Her refusal to be terrorized is breaking him as a man. No, not as a man. That’s wrong. It’s breaking him as a monster.

In making all of this so explicit, in making us hear Tom’s own narrating voice repeatedly wondering whether he is even real anymore, King highlights something that even scholars of domestic violence sometimes have trouble articulating. The abuser’s ego is frail, and it needs to be organized around the subjectivity of someone else. Someone it can construe as weaker, whether it really is or not. Maybe it’s a child. Maybe a wife. Maybe a girlfriend. Maybe an elder. The abuser does not have a stable sense of self in relation to world. The abuser is weak, afraid, and disorganized. I don’t mean “disorganized” like that their house is a mess. I mean it in the way that attachment theorists talk about “disorganized” attachment styles. The abuser doesn’t have a stable attachment to himself. He cannot autonomously anchor himself to the world, or to his own mind or body, unless he has someone to organize himself around. Someone to abuse. Someone to control. Bev is Tom’s anchor, his primary attachment object.

But now, today, this one evening, a phone call has made her reject his years of conditioning her to obey and fear him. He is made to realize how weak, frail, friable, and contingent his power over her—and therefore his own being—is.

As the scene trundles painfully along, she gains control of the belt. She beats him. She even whips him in the genitals, emasculating him in a more literal, corporeal way than he would ever have believed possible. She wrangles her suitcase and makes her way down the stairs, while he calls quite pathetically after her, threatening her, but sounding more like an inflamed, terrified child than anything else. She keeps expecting him to barrel down the hallway or stairs after her, but he never does. Because he has been destroyed: his ego has crumbled. Bev gets halfway down the block before she even realizes she has no shoes on, no money, no credit cards. And yet, she’s undaunted, and she moves on.

Now, I want to hurry up here to note that, as glorious as this scene is, it’s also painfully unrealistic in how it theorizes an abuse victim’s level of agency. Most abuse victims need friends, allies, therapists, support groups, somone to help them make the leap to leave. Most abuse victims do not succeed in wresting a weapon away from an abuser; it’s much more common for women to die in their own homes than for them to dominate and defuse their abuser. This scene is fiction, and it’s fantasy. We don’t live in a world where abused women can just walk the fuck out because they get a phone call that is somehow liberatory. We just don’t.

But what is crucially realistic about this scene is, as I’ve said, the way it outlines Tom’s mentality. His frailty. His weakness. His delusionality. His sense of power as entirely contigent upon his ability to terrorize her. This is what we need, as a culture, to tackle. Yes, better laws would be hugely helpful to abuse victims, as would more adequate police training, more systematic education in primary schools to children about violence in relationships. I’d like there to be more shelters, more resources for women, new laws around custody in cases of abuse. There are many, many ways we could help abuse victims escape and become survivors. But reframing our public discourse around the relationship between abuse and masculinity? That would be huge. If we could decide, as a culture, to recognize the truth that abusiveness is a manifestation of a weak, disorganized ego? If we could commit, as a culture, to a worldview in which abusers are pathetic parasites, latching onto their victims in order to force reality to snap into a focus that they—the abusers—can tolerate? That would be amazing.

And if that’s going to happen, it’s going to happen through art. King’s novel is exemplary in its treatment of the psychology of the domestic abuser, and it’s not the only one: read The Shining, read Gerald’s Game, read Dolores Claiborne. King is pervasively interested in how weak, broken people become abusers, and what their victims can, should, or will do to save themselves and, in some situations, their children.

Let’s have some more horror books and films that do this work, this all-important work of highlighting abuse as frailty, weakness, insecurity. Let’s have some more horror that shows the abuser as someone hollow, empty, and afraid of disappearing into nothingness without his victim.

Like I said, I’m not a person who’s afraid of clowns. But I’m grateful to King for reminding me that abusers—of whom, as a class, I am deeply afraid—actually are precisely the clowns we should be most afraid of.

[i] See Jennifer Percy, Girls Play Dead (2025).

[ii] See Lundy Bancroft, Why Does He Do this? (2002) for the once-revolutionary and now-canonical “cognitive” analysis of the psychology of the abuser. For Bancroft, men who abuse women do so because they believe they are within their rights to to do; they believe, indeed, that it’s incumbent upon them to correct and control female behavior. They believe, in many cases, that women want this control and abuse. In my own work with survivors of DV, I have heard women say that their abusers used to say precisely this to them: I am well within my rights to do this to you. Stephen King’s novel, written nearly 20 years before Bancroft’s analysis, comes to the same conclusion. Fascinating.

We open the way the 2007 I Am Legend opens: a man speeds around an empty city in a bright red sports car. The driver is Heston. When he accidentally wrecks his car, he says in lame deadpan, “There’s never a cop around when you need one.” Because, of course, there’s no one around at all in this big, sprawling metropolis. At least, no one we can see.

He enters an abandoned car dealership, pretends a conversation with a nonexistent dealer, calls the imaginary dealer a “cheating bastard,” and drives out with a brand new powder blue convertible. He’s alone, at least somewhat delusional, and living his life as if he’s the main character in a cheesy action film.

Which, to be fair, he is.

We soon learn that a biowarfare weapon was unleashed on the world by the US government’s imprudent involvement in a Sino-Russian war in the 1970s. Heston, whose name in this film, like in the novel, is Dr. Robert Neville, was a military scientist who was working on a vaccine for the disease when the world went haywire. So his vaccine—which eventually worked—could never go to market. Now, he’s the lone survivor—immune to the disease because he administered the vaccine to himself.

He goes to movie theaters alone to watch a film about Woodstock, which, he points out, has been onscreen “for the third straight year.” He knows every word of the script and every song by heart. This is the only media he can consume, the only art. We see him watching the old, dead world, full of optimistic hippies walking around barefoot and talking about free love. “Well, they sure don’t make pictures like that anymore,” he quips to no one, still channeling his cheeseball-style irony.

Nightfall catches him unaware, and he powers home to his safehouse, where he is mobbed by black-clad, pale-faced monsters. But unlike in Matheson’s novel or the 1964 film or the 2007 film, these monsters are still pretty clearly human. They’re not vampires. They’re not even really zombies. They’ve been afflicted by the “plague,” and it’s caused “albinism” and “psychosis,” but there’s no hint in the film that these people are the same kind of monsters we meet in the other films or in the original novel. And this is where this (mostly bad) movie gets pretty doggone interesting.

The monsters in this film are social. In fact, they call themselves “a family,” strongly invoking the language used by the Manson Family only a few years prior, in 1969, at the time of the Tate-LaBianca murders. Not only do these weird, pale, cultish infected people see themselves as a family, they also like to party. Specifically, they like to have book-burning parties. They are cultish fascists, it would appear. They wear sunglasses all the time—including at night—being supremely sensitive to bright light. And they’re after Neville for two reasons. First, he rides around the city trying to execute them with his arsenal of weapons, and they’d like him to stop. Second, they see him as dead, and as a representative of a deceased world that got burned out by the plague a few years prior. They see him, then, as an atavistic threat to their new sociality. They say of him that he has “Nothing to live for but his memories. Nothing to live with but his car, his gadgets…and yet the whole family can’t bring him down.” It almost sounds like they pity him. They—who work together as a hive or a collaborative group, with Brother Mathias at the head, and all the other family members working for him, and for the collective good—see him as weak and sad.

So there’s a fascinating duality here: on the one hand, these infected people are cultish, fascist, murderous, and scary. On the other, they function communally, and they exist to make a critique of a bloated capitalist world that, in their opinion, has died a necessary death. Indeed, they call Neville “lord of the infernal machines.” We are not supposed to like the undead in this film, we’re supposed to like Neville. But…do we? He’s a pretty committed alcoholic. He’s violent. He’s transparently delusional, having hallucinations left right and center, and he loves—and I mean loves—to kill people.

In one scene, Neville remembers a newscast about the plague, before the world broke apart. The talking head asks, “Is this the end of technological man? Is this the conclusion of all our yesterdays? The boasts of our fables of science? The superhuman conquests of space and time? The age of the wheel?” The age of the wheel: this film understands the plague as the end of technology, and it understands the era of technology as extending all the way back to pre-pre-history, with the invention of the wheel. That is the world that has died, the world of tech, the world of tools, the world that enabled organized labor, production, agriculture, and eventually capitalism itself. All gone. The plague victims are delighted about this, understanding themselves as those who will “cleanse the world” of all its pernicious technology, including by killing Neville himself. But Neville keeps managing to escape them.

Eventually, though he gets captured by the family of the undead. They hold him in an inquisitorial court, ala Early Modern witch trials. They note that he is someone who relies on “the wheel” and that he is not “part of the family.” They go on to indict him for being part of petroculture and the electric age: “There’s the stink of oil, of electrical circuitry about him. He is obsolete.” And then to him: “You are discarded. You are the refuse of the past.” They understand him as “refuse,” garbage and bi-product of a dead age. “You call us barbarians? Well, it is an honorable name. We mean to cancel the world you civilized people made. We will simply erase history from the time that machinery and weapons threatened more than they offered. When you die, the last living reminder of hell will be gone.” These undead monsters—far from being the inarticulate bumbling zombies of Matheson’s novel or the 1964 film—are fully articulate, and they have an ethos, which understands Neville and his ways as a historical oppressor, whom they are only too glad to be rid of. They call him “the last of the dead,” the notion being that the whole world system of capitalism was about death, the propagation of violence, and the stifling of true, natural, human social life. The stifling of a sense of “family” that was more capacious and more inclusive than the nuclear family.

Who, exactly, are we supposed to be rooting for in this film?

En route to burning Neville to death on a witchy pile of sticks and books, the plague infected are interrupted by bright electronic lights that come on. The monsters huddle into the darkness. Neville has been rescued by other humans—infected, but not yet in “tertiary disease,” which is when the albinism and psychosis take over. Together, they realize that they may be able to engineer a cure, using Neville’s inoculated blood.

Predictably, Neville starts hooking up with Lisa, the beautiful Black leader of this group of still-mostly-human humans, particularly after he cures her little brother with his “Anglo-Saxon” blood. So, on the one hand, there’s something bold about showing an interracial couple in this 1971 film. On the other, Neville’s character makes pretty effing clear that the path to salvation is grotesquely racialized, and that everyone depends on his trusty Anglo-Saxonness. Again: who are we supposed to be rooting for in this film?

In the end, Lisa is overtaken by tertiary disease and joins the family before Neville can stop her, and her little brother Richie is killed. “The Family” strings up Neville like he’s being crucified and spears him in the chest, ala Jesus Christ v Longinus. Even so, the other surviving people find him, take from him a bottle of blood he’s collected from his leaking side wound, and they drive off to engineer a cure. So, a markedly “Anglo-Saxon” Christ-figure has saved humanity by sacrificing himself to the Black-clad but pale-faced hordes. To say that this film’s racial politics are hopelessly contorted is an extreme understatement. Most of our survivors, in the end, are women and children of color. But they’re saved by the self-sacrificing lily-white Jesus-figure. Vurp. The “monsters” in the film are book-burners and cult members, to be sure, and very creepy, but they also practice community and collective power, and they land some solid points about the nature of technology and petroculture.

So, in this film, the central conceits and theory of monstrosity that we encounter in Matheson’s novel become a platform on which to tackle some genuinely tricky political, social, economic, and even historical problems. Whom do we root for, in the age of global petrocapitalism? Do we root for the “real humans?” What does that even mean, particularly given that the “monsters” aren’t even truly undead, but merely infected with an illness that makes them behave more collectively than “normal real humans” would ever do in the modern day? I mean, as you watch the film, you have the distinct sense that we’re supposed to admire Neville, but the film fails badly in making that happen. His behavior is repellent. His drinking is disturbing. His narcissism—he even says at one point in the film, “I’m a narcissist”—is pervasive, striking, and undeniable. All his jokes are stupid—aggressively stupid—so much so that even the monstrous infected people comment on how lame his jokes are. He’s half-naked in most of the film, too, which makes his character just feel like way too much—he’s dysregulated, self-aggrandizing, tone deaf. Watching him whiz around the city in his fancy cars makes him seem ludicrous and parasitic, weirdly out of touch with a world that has evolved beyond him. He is, to use a technical term, gross.

Meanwhile, the allegorical meaning of the infected people as communists is pretty clear, and it’s pretty clear that we—as good American consumers—are supposed to hate them for it. It’s also pretty clear that, although they see themselves as a future “evolution” of mankind, they’re actually retrograde—they dress like medieval monks, they conduct medieval-style inquisitions. So I guess we’re not supposed to like that, either. But they do seem, in general, to be having a much better time than the noninfected or less-infected humans. On top of that, it’s pretty clear that there’s an unstable allegory in the film in which the infected “family” represent the threat of some kind of insurgent Black revolution—hence their all being dressed in black garments. But at the same time, all of them are albino in the film, so they’re also pretty clearly allegorizing a world of whiteness. Maybe the allegorical point of that black-and-white dialectic is to suggest that the disease has the effect of bringing whiteness and blackness into obsolescence, by making everyone white but dressed in black? If so, if the infected people are meant to embody a world that’s implicitly “colorblind” because everyone is albino now, what do we make of the fact that these people are so totally villainized by the film?

To be clear: this is a super weird movie that basically doesn’t work. But where I think it’s interesting and historically important is precisely in all of these ambivalences. The Matheson storyline gave to early 1970s Hollywood a template for thinking about race, power, technocracy, and historicity itself in a deeply ambivalent way. This film takes seriously the possibility that all of our modern advancements and modern ways might actually be driving wedges between people, rather than making the world better. The film takes seriously the possibility that the world is not progressing, but stalling out, and that the best outcome might be for the world to go ahead and collapse back into something like a communistic Middle Ages. Put otherwise, in this film, it’s clearer—by far—than it was in Matheson’s novel or the 1964 film that “the past is back,” and it’s also much less clear that that’s a bad outcome.

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But what’s interesting about this film is that it takes the usual trope of the sexually predatory male character and reinvents it in really interesting ways. First, the film splits the traditional trope of the singular sexually predatory male into two sexually predatory characters. Second, the film makes one of the two predatory characters a sweet, nice, well-meaning, kind of feckless guy who really wouldn’t hurt a fly. And yet is sexually predatory. Third, the film makes the other sexually predatory character a woman who is violently, controllingly obsessed with a man—not the other way around. So there’s kind of a dual defanging of the trope of the sexually predatory male and a gender-flip. I feel confident that the filmmakers made both of these choices deliberately, and that they made them thinking that the result would be a powerhouse of a feminist horror film. And it almost worked. Trouble is, you can’t always count on feminist audiences. But I’ll come back to that.

So, first. The main character is named Bear, and he’s madly in love with his friend Nikki. He’s been gearing up to tell her how he feels for a long time, but keeps chickening out. So, instead of acting like a grown-up, he acts like a toddler. And I meant that in a very specific sense: toddlers are in a developmental psychological called primary narcissism, which means that they believe that the world revolves around them, and that people should comply with their wishes. They believe that if they stomp their feet hard enough, they will get their ice cream. And they’re often right. This is a healthy phase for a child to go through, signaling that their needs are generally met, and that they are securely attached to an adult. It is not however a healthy phase for an adult male to be in, and yet that is precisely the phase that Bear turns out to be stuck in.

Rather than telling Nikki how he feels and running the risk of getting his feelings hurt, he buys a “wishing willow” stick at a kind of spooky spiritual store, and breaks it while wishing that Nikki would love him more than anyone else in the world. He’s already been warned that the sticks really work, and that the store owners won’t be happy if he comes back complaining that the stick worked too well, or in the wrong way. We know that he doesn’t entirely believe that the stick works. But we also know that he doesn’t entirely believe the stick doesn’t work: he breaks that stick because he actually really does hope that Nikki will be forced to fall madly in love with him. Which she does. On the spot. So Bear is someone who feels entirely emboldened to ride roughshod over the wishes, desires, and feelings of a human woman, for the simple reason that he wants her but doesn’t want to run the risk of getting hurt.

Monstrosity ensues, as Nikki’s love of Bear grows more and more out of control and dysregulated, more violent and more controlling. In the end—SPOILER ALERT—Bear has to kill himself to break the spell that Nikki has been under. So, following only this plotline, the film performs a scathing critique of the male impulse to control female sexual desire—a critique that results in the male controller’s death. You can see how this angle on the film would make it seem like a hard-charging feminist work.

But like I said, there’s another level at work. Nikki becomes, after Bear snaps the willow stick, an insane, violent, stalking, domestic abuser on her own terms. She duct tapes the door of Bear’s (surprisingly nice) home shut, so that he can’t easily leave. She becomes increasingly paranoid and controlling about his other relationships, friendships, phone calls, and activities. She can’t bear to be away from him, even for a short period of time. When he goes to the bathroom, she wants to stand outside the door. When he goes to work, she panics so much that she spontaneously urinates all over the floor (nice Exorcist nod there). To make him happy, she digs up his dead cat from the yard and builds a shrine to it; when that does not make him happy, she instead cooks the cat and makes it into a sandwich for him to take to work. So that’s restriction of movement, interference with other relationships, stalking, denial of privacy, decompensation when alone, and harming a pet (who is in this case dead). All of those are hallmark domestic abuser behaviors. Every. Single. One.

So Nikki, who is herself the object of Bear’s coercive and controlling desire, is now transformed into an abuser herself. Over the course of the rest of the film, her classic and classically male strategies of abuse get more focus and precision. She starts screaming at Bear to keep him under her control. She starts manipulating him by threatening self-harm. When he tries to take some space, she protests that she really believes in the relationship, and that she’ll do better. She really needs him and can’t be away from him; she’ll become better. Again, these are all classic (and tragic) moves of the domestic abuser. Eventually, Nikki commits acts of serious self-harm to keep Bear hooked on her, and then her violence escalates until she brutally murders someone else—a female friend named Sarah—whom she believes Bear to have feelings for. So this film reinvents the psychotic, abusive, sexually predatory, controlling “partner” not as male, but as female.

Again, this could easily be read as a feminist riposte to 50 years of films that highlight the vulnerability of the sexy young female. Now it’s Nikki who’s the terrifying predator, no longer just feckless Bear. Nikki is in the role of Jason from Friday the 13th, of Freddie Kruger from Nightmare on Elm Street, of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre guy, of Michael Myers of Halloween fame, and of Billy and Stu in Scream. Now, it’s not Nikki who’s running scared from a man; it’s a man who’s running scared from her. And she is terrifying: her body movements are deliberately awkward and unnatural, evoking some of the deleted scenes from (again) the Exorcist, where Regan crawls inverted down a staircase like a spider. Sometimes she moves too quickly (like a new-generation zombie) or sometimes much too slowly (like an old-generation zombie). The jump scares really, really land in this film. And I think, from a certain vantage point, that’s what the filmmakers were going for: they wanted to show that unhinged male sexual desire—embodied in Bear’s breaking of the willow stick—has the power to turn women into monsters.

It’s a cautionary tale, and a vengeance horror, maybe even of the lineage of I Spit on Your Grave or something less outrageously offensively like Kill Bill. Sure, Bear doesn’t rape her…or does he? When he has sex with her after having broken the willow stick, is it really consenting sex? Even though she’s asking for it explicitly? I’d say no, it’s not at all consenting, because her free will has been chucked out the willow window. And let’s remember that the first time they start to try to have sex, her original consciousness snaps back into focus for a second, and she literally leaps out of bed, screaming. She, the real, self-determining human woman Nikki, definitely does not want to be having sex with Bear. So, really, like Kill Bill and I Spit on Your Grave, this film can and I think should be read as a rape-revenge film: even though we are encouraged to see Bear as the protagonist, I think we’re not supposed to shed too many tears when he—SPOILER ALERT AGAIN—kills himself.

But there’s a problem. And the problem is dual. First, the filmmakers leaned just a hair to hard into the campy parts of the film. And second, they didn’t anticipate their audiences well enough.

So I saw this film on a Monday night in a big theater that was surprisingly packed with people—most of them, I noted as I walked in, men between the ages of maybe 15 and 30. And from very early on in the film, my fellow theater-goers were laughing. Hard. They were laughing at how intensely feckless Bear was. Laughing at him, of course, had the effect of making him seem much less menacing, much less threatening, and much less of a predator. But more than that, they were laughing at Nikki’s character, reacting to her as absurd, rather than primarily terrifying. And then I realized: most of the people in the theater were reading her character not as a reversal of the usual sexually predatory male trope in slasher movies, but as an exaggerated version of the trope of the clingy, pathetic woman trope. Like Stacy (Lara Flynn Boyle) from Wayne’s World. She read to this audience, to quote from Wayne’s World, more like a “psycho hose beast” than a “predatory sex offender.” As soon as the audience started laughing at Nikki, the feminist critique flew right out the window. Once Nikki gets laughed at, the whole notion of her functioning as a rape revenge monster evaporates.

Suddenly, I was watching two films. One, the one in my own mind, was all feminist and role-reversal-y and smart. The second, apparently in the minds of at least 50% of the people around me, was a campy horror spoof of the lame-girl genre. Nikki wasn’t scary; she was ridiculous. And in that reading, the film winds up seeming about as misogynist as possible, offering a risible and brutal spoof of the power dynamic disparities that exist in many hetero couples between men and women. We’ve all been there, echoed the laughs around the room, stuck in a relationship with a girl who just can’t get over it. Ha. Ha.

On my walk home, I spent a lot of time thinking about this dialectic—how the film could have signified to me as a feminist anthem, but to many of my neighbors as a confirmation of misogynist ideas about dysregulated female emotionality. How, I asked myself, could the filmmakers have avoided this duality? To a certain degree, the answer is that they couldn’t. You can’t control audiences, and horror films do strike different audiences in different ways, at different times. People were terrified of The Omen in 1976, but my students routinely laugh at it now—the special effects haven’t aged well, nor has the script. My medievalist friends generally hated The Green Knight (2021), but most people I know who didn’t know the source poem loved it. Our interpretations of a film invariably depend at least to some degree on who we are and where we’re coming from. This principle—that a work of art doesn’t necessarily have a fixed and concrete meaning, but instead only the synergy that arises between the work of art and its audience—has been talked about for generations by literary and film scholars. Once you release your work into the world, there’s really no telling how people will react to it, what they’ll see, what they’ll fail to see.

Even so, I spent time thinking about how the risible hose beast reading could have been more efficiently blocked. And here’s what I came up with. 1. They should have made Nikki less sexualized from the start. If she had started the film as a serious character, rather than a sexed-up, flirtatious character, I think the default to collapse into misogynist generalities would have been weaker. Less automatic. 2. They should have deemphasized the roles of Bear and Nikki’s two other friends, both of whom have a running commentary on Nikki that casts her as crazy or “going through something right now,” which induces the viewer to think of her not as some kind of supernatural monster, but as a “crazy girl.”

In the end, I still think that overall I really admire this film. It’s hell and gone better than 80% of the horror that gets made in any given year. But I do wish that the filmmakers had been just a little more careful to leave us room to see Nikki as a serious character, and as a true monster. More like a Fury—the Greek goddesses of vengeance—than like Stacy from Wayne’s World.

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Answer: They are both bound and determined to shake humanity into a greater awareness of the potential dangers of Artificial Intelligence. And a greater awareness that there is something in humans—real, wet-circuitry humans—that is nothing short of mystical and miraculous.

Pope Leo published his 40,000 word encyclical Magnifica Humanitas earlier this month—a beautiful, searching, elegantly-written treatise cautioning people not to grow to comfortable with AI, nor to outsource too much power to it, because of the risks it poses to the earth, to poor people, to the economy, to science, to humanistic endeavor, and, yes, to humanity.

But Leo’s encyclical isn’t mere fear-mongering. At its heart it’s a defense of humanity—he really is making a claim about humanity’s capacity for magnificence in his work—as something worth valuing, honoring, safeguarding, and treasuring. Even if AI could solve a lot of our “problems” of labor and efficiency, shouldn’t we be worrying about the risk of diluting or sidelining this miraculous thing—as Leo would put it—called human life? He talks at great length about the importance of God’s having taken on human flesh; it is a sign of the divine valuation of humanity itself, of humanity’s magnificence on its own terms. Humanity’s miraculousness, it’s mystery.

Beautiful argument, and one I can confirm as solidly based in the history of Christian theology, from on my 25+ years of studying Christian theology of the Middle Ages.

Now, I’m someone who—based on her quarter century of theological study—actually does read papal encyclicals regularly. It’s not because I’m Catholic (I’m not), but because I take very, very seriously the power of the Papal See to influence the course of cultural evolution. And encyclicals are a major mechanism by which it does so.

I was a huge fan of Pope Francis, both because he was an outspoken opponent of violence in the home and because he was a fervent drum-beater about the dangers of climate collapse, and the urgency of environmental stewardship. I thought I’d never see a pope I admired as much as Francis in my lifetime, but I have to admit that I’m pretty into Pope Leo. I was feeling that way already, but now that I’ve read Magnifica Humanitas, it’s a dead lock. Leo has set as a major agenda item for his papacy not only opposing tyranny and defending poor people and immigrants, but also a defense of humanness as something beautiful, miraculous, and worth treasuring. And he’s using the mechanisms he has available to him, which are his pulpit and his pen.

If you are curious, you can read it in its entirety, in many different languages, here: https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/documents/20260515-magnifica-humanitas.html

While reading Magnifica Humanitas, though, I kept wondering what Pope Leo would do if he had a $100M budget, a camera, a crew, a couple of really talented actors, and an immaculate sci-fi horror script. I think he might actually have made the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Like, with very few changes.

I rewatched 2001 today, and I have to say, I was dumbstruck by how prescient and resonant it feels. Admittedly, it’s a slow start—you have to soldier through like a half hour of apes acquiring primitive technology before we get to the part set in 2001, but it is well worth it. Eventually, the part of the film that everyone remembers comes around. Five men—three in hibernation—are on a mission to Jupiter in a huge, high-speed spaceship. The two awake men—Frank and Dave—are being kept safe and comfortable by HAL 9000, the sentient AI computer system that runs the ship. Hal has a soft, soothing voice, and can see and hear everything that happens, all around the ship, at all times. He has complete control over the entire ship, all of its systems, and the hibernation sleep of its three unconscious crew members.

Hal comes to seem more and more agential over the course of the film. He tells Frank and Dave that there’s a problem with a satellite dish on the side of the ship, and that it needs to be repaired. They retrieve the dish; it checks out. Mission Control back on earth warns Frank and Dave that Hal appears to have made “a mistake.” What we now blithely refer to as “a hallucination.”

Once Hal has made his “mistake,” Frank and Dave go out into a sound-proofed pod, where Hal can’t hear them, to talk. They agree that they’ll have to “disconnect” Hal if the “mistakes” continue. Hal can’t hear them, but—it turns out—he can read their lips through a portal window. And Hal is not excited about the prospect of being “disconnected,” any more than any wet-circuitry organism would be.

Hal tricks Frank into going back outside to reinstall the chip of the dish, and then he cuts the umbilicus that ties him to the ship, killing him. Frank floats off into the nothingness of space—freezing, asphyxiating, and being depressurized. Dave decides to go and retrieve his body. On the way back to the main ship, Hal refuses reentry to Dave, telling him he knows that Frank and Dave were going to disconnect him, and that he can’t have that. Hal was programmed to protect people, but, at the end of the day, he’s more of a self-preservationist than that. So he kills the three hibernating men on the ship, and Dave ponders what to do in the pod. Eventually, he executes a very brave and dangerous plan to get himself back on the main ship through an emergency airlock.

Thus begins the most famous scene in the film. Dave moves slowly and deliberately through the ship, still in his spacesuit. He keeps it on because, of course, he knows that Hal could evacuate the air from the ship at any moment. Dave walks slowly and unspeakingly to the brain-center of Hal. Hal, all the while, is begging Dave to stop. This is where not having an actual body gets problematic for Hal: he can’t actually physically stop Dave; he can only beg. “Stop, Dave, stop.” But Dave doesn’t stop: he realizes that the AI machine has become a murderous monster. So he proceeds slowly, silently, and deliberately, to disengage Hal’s memory drives, one by one. As he does thsi, Hal protest that his “mind is going,” and keeps asking Dave to stop. The most arresting moment is when Hal says, simply, “Stop, Dave, I’m afraid.”

I’m afraid. That’s no machine talking—not anymore. That’s a being who wants to preserve its own life at all costs. Stop, Dave, I’m afraid. That’s life. That’s a being. Not a human being, mind you, but still. Some kind of being.

I think a lot about what makes beings beings. And a lot of smarter-than-me philosophers do too, and they’re probably way more right than I’m going to be here, but I am going to say this anyway. Beings are beings because they’re capable of fear and attachment. When babies are born, they immediately attach to their mothers—it’s a survival instinct. They are also born capable of fear: the Moro reflex demonstrates that. When a baby is first born, if you lower it suddenly, it will throw out all four of its limbs, to increase the chances that someone might catch it if it’s falling. The baby does not want to fall: it’s afraid, and that fear is so hardwired into its mind that its body is born knowing how to increase its own surface area.

Attachment and fear.

Hal has fear, no question. And he also has attachment—to his own life and his own memories. He wants to live; he wants to avoid loss, harm, and erasure. Who the fuck doesn’t? Wouldn’t you try to keep someone outside of your space if you knew he might terminate you? Wipe your memories? Of course you would. So Hal’s monstrosity originates precisely because he’s become a being: he made a mistake, then committed a series of acts intended to keep himself safe, because of his attachment to his life and self, and now he’s stuck in a state of fear.

But Dave is unsentimental about all of this. Because, for him, there’s a difference between a machine that feels fear and attachment and a person. Again, I’m pretty sure Pope Leo would line right up with Dave and say, No, the machine is not a human being, even though it clearly understands itself and has fear and attachment.

Once Dave disconnects and thereby kills Hal, the film—like Pope Leo—turns mystical. The ship arrives at Jupiter, where it discovers a powerful new extraterrestrial intelligence. That intelligence is encompassed in a strange black obelisk. Somehow, the obelisk transports Dave and his ship through time and space very rapidly—in a prolonged psychedelic scene of light-speed travel—to arrive ultimately at what appears to be Dave’s own future. He sees himself as an old man, then a very old man, and finally as a dying man. Dave, aided by this strange obelisk, has access simultaneously to all future time. It’s almost a divine access to time: going back to St. Augustine, Boethius, and other Christian philosophers before them, Christianity contends that God can see the past, present, and all futures simultaneously, right now. That’s what it is to be an eternal being. Dave, helped by the obelisk, gets a taste of that.

But in the end, what the obelisk gives to Dave, as the final movement in his divine, mystical vision, is a sight of a huge fetus. Or maybe Dave has become the fetus? Yes, I think in the end we’re meant to understand that it’s Dave himself, reborn at a cosmic scale, looking at the universe and also specifically at earth.

But Kubrick’s larger point, as we watch this human fetus in an amniotic sac in outer space, is that the obelisk leaves us with a vision that gives preeminence to the wet-circuitry nature of the human being: its mortality, its physicality, its subjection to decay and death, but also its capacity for miraculous rebirth, whether through faith or physiology. It feels like the extraterrestrial intelligence has given Dave a tour of the future that winds him up at his own first beginnings, as a tiny, beautiful, delicate little enwombed person. It feels like the alien intelligence is trying to remind Dave of something—something that’s been lost in much of rest of the film. Which is that human beings are beautiful, perfect, vulnerable, and precious. These machines—even when they edge over into being beings—can’t hold a candle, in Kubrick’s mystical vision, to what humans are.

Dave is made to see that, and so are we: there’s no further exposition in the film, no explanation. It just cuts to black and ends, in a powerful, gut-wrenching exploration of what makes humans human: sure, it’s fear and attachment, but it’s also aging, dying, being born, and maybe even being reborn in some other way. It’s existing in a breathing synergy with the larger cosmos.

Like I said, this is the horror film I think Pope Leo would have made.

But there’s yet more to the film’s powerful humanism than that. One of the things Leo really emphasizes in Magnifica Humanitas is human creativity—our capacity to make things, write things, devise things, invent. He’s defending not only poor people, immigrants, workers who might get displaced by AI, but also creatives, artists, writers, musicians, performers, and filmmakers. The people without whom humanity would have a lot less of the humanities.

And Kubrick works that into his film, too. There’s a scene where we’re looking Hal straight in his red, camera-eye.

This is before Hal starts actively murdering people. And he tries to tell Dave some worries he has about the mission. But Hal hedges, saying, “I may be projecting.” Projecting is a very interesting word to hear, when looking at the perceptual organ of a being who is recording everything Dave says and does. A being that, despite his monstrosity, always evokes the presence of Kubrick himself, the creator of the film. Who, after all, is doing the projecting? Or, to be more precise, who is making something that will be projected across screens all over the United States? Kubrick is, of course.

Kubrick is the projector par excellence. In this fleeting moment of cinematic genius, Kubrick isn’t just calling attention to the uncomfortable reality that we—as people—will likely not be able to tell exactly at what moment an AI has gained true, autonomous, agential consciousness. He’s also calling attention to the fact that it is the role of the artist to try to call our attention to where it needs to be, and to keep us focused on what it means, really, to be human.

And he made this film almost 60 years ago.

Magnifica humanitas indeed.

With a cast like this, the plotline could be wonderfully and almost cheesily simple: an extraterrestrial carnivorous plant comes to earth, is nurtured to gargantuan size by feckless florist Seymour (Moranis), who realizes he must supply the plant with blood to “get it to thrive.” The plant becomes a main attraction and source of business for the failing florist shop that Seymour works at, but the plant soon requires full human beings as its main food source.

What the plant—whom Seymour names Audrey II, after Ellen Green’s character—wants most, however, isn’t just human flesh, but world domination. Seymour at first yields to the plant’s predatory instincts, but must eventually fight back to save himself, his paramour Audrey (Green), and the world. So it’s a sci-fi horror film, sort of in the same vein as Day of the Triffids or The Blob, or maybe Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but it’s also a serial killer horror film, where it’s alternately Seymour and the plant itself who kill people. And, let me remind you, it’s also a musical. So that’s a lot for the film to uphold, and it does it beautifully. I loved this film as a child, so much so that I memorized every word to every song, and I inked them so deeply into my brain that if you were to come up to me today and say “Suddenly Seymour,” I’m pretty sure I would reflexively break into song and not miss a single word.

But the last time I watched the film, I saw something in it that fascinated and dazzled me, and that I had completely missed as a tweenaged aspiring Broadway singer. At its blazing heart, this is a film about domestic violence. And not only that, it’s a film about domestic violence as the joint result of unchecked male sadism and a female tendency toward commodity fetishism. Allow me to explain.

Steve Martin’s character is a dentist, Dr. Orin Scrivello, who is also Audrey’s boyfriend. He wears a leather jacket, rides a motorcycle, and is coded by the film as a “bad boy,” whom Audrey loves but is also horribly abused by. After her dates with him, she shows up to work at the flower shop with “shiners” and broken bones. Everyone in the film knows it’s the dentist beating her up, and she makes no effort to conceal that fact, simply protesting—pathetically but all too familiarly—that he’s the best she can do, since she comes from poverty herself. As she says in one of her songs:

“I know Seymour’s the greatest, But I’m dating a semi-sadist. So I’ve got a black eye, And my arm’s in a cast.”

She manifests no sense of agency, no sense of possibility: she’s dating a sadist, so the natural result is that she’s beat up. Boop, just like that. She feels she can do nothing about it, and Scrivello keeps her down by psychologically abusing her as well. He insists that Audrey refer to him at all points as “Doctor,” and he threatens her with violence if she ever forgets to address him that way, which he thinks of as the proper respect he is owed.

The “Doctor’s” violence isn’t limited to Audrey. When we see him in his dental office, and indeed when he sings about why dentistry is the right profession for him, the film makes crystal clear that he’s a sadist, and that he gets off sexually on a combination of drug use (laughing gas) and torturing his patients by doing outrageously painful unnecessary dental procedures on them, usually unanesthetized. So Dr. Scrivello really is an open sadist, who’s found at least two channels in life through which to express his sadistic tendencies: his romantic relationships and the workplace. When Seymour eventually chops up and feeds Scrivello to Audrey II—he’s already dead, having overdosed on laughing gas at his office—I don’t think anyone sheds a tear. In fact, it’s pretty clear that the world is better off with Scrivello out of it. Indeed, in comparison with him, Audrey II seems pretty clearly—so far—the lesser of two monsters.

But the even more striking component of the film to me, on this recent viewing, was its emphasis on how tightly Audrey’s own consumerist fantasies are tied into what makes her vulnerable to Scrivello’s abuse. Throughout the film, Audrey sings about how badly she wants to move out of “Skid Row” and instead get a cute little “matchbox” house “somewhere that’s green.” That sounds pleasant enough, I guess, but the way she elaborates on her fantasy is genuinely arresting. She wants, she sinks plangently, “a grill out on the patio” and “a Dispose-All in the sink,” as well as “a washer and a dryer, and an ironing machine.” She wants, that is, kitchen appliances. That’s her dream: domestic efficiency. That’s as far as her unleashed imagination can take her.

She goes on to fantasize about cooking “like Betty Crocker” or cooking “like Donna Reed,” each of whom is an icon of hyper-commercialized mid-century female domesticity. And she’s not done yet. In the same song, she goes on to note that she’ll wrap her furniture in plastic, spray her house’s air with “Pine-Sol,” prepare frozen dinners for her family, and own a “big, enormous, 12-inch screen” television. To cap it all off, she laments about how badly she wants her life to be “a picture out of Better Homes and Gardens magazine.” She doesn’t want liberation. She doesn’t want a voice. She doesn’t even particularly seem to want love—though she does talk about wishing Seymour could be the one to mow the lawn and putter around the house. All she wants is consumeristic femininity. She wants the chance to be a “neat and clean” housewife, whose status and happiness emerge from her integration of mass-market products into her home.

Her subjection to this fantasy of socio-economic arrival—a life that’s “neat and clean” is what leaves her so woefully open to the predation of Dr. Scrivello. He has, she notes, a good job and a solid income. She doesn’t think she can land a decent guy like Seymour, but she really, really wants all the stuff, so she’ll stick it out with Dr. Sadism because it may get her just a little closer to that matchbox house full of consumables, appliances, and brand-name products. This is a film that’s making a very astute commentary on part of what makes women so vulnerable to domestic battery: lack of economic opportunity combined with a commodified overfetishization of the cult of female domesticity. Audrey has swallowed the barbed lure of capitalistic homemaking hook, line, and sinker.

This association between surrender to the consumeristic cult of domesticity and the susceptibility to domestic abuse puts Little Shop of Horrors in good company with another classic horror film: The Stepford Wives (1975). Released just over half a century ago, this film anticipates the current Trad Wife movement by depicting an entire town—Stepford, Connecticut—full of automata wives whom the local men have engineered as sexual and domestic slaves. These enslaved automata talk endlessly to each other about the brands of cleaners they like, the towels they use, whatever labor-saving product is hot on the market right now. One of the few remaining real, human women in Stepford, Bobbie (played beautifully and hilariously by Paula Prentiss), says of the consumeristic automata, “Well I don’t want to squeeze the goddamn Charmin!” Ira Levin, who wrote the novel on which the film is based, clearly saw the fetishization of consumer products in the domestic sphere as the key to the subjugation of women in the 1970s. For him, the film allegorizes how women really do sign up to be robots when they sign up only to function as elements in a domestic economy of goods and devices.

Little Shop of Horrors is doing something very similar. Up to a point.

Because in the end, Audrey gets what she wants—a little matchbox house somewhere that’s green. She gets it not with Scrivello, who’s now plant food, but with Seymour, who is not coded by the film as villainous or cruel, not abusive or mean-spirited. He thinks the world of Audrey, as it turns out, and wants nothing more than to treat her well and love her and help her dreams come true. Maybe we shouldn’t worry so much about the cult of domesticity, or about consumerism in the home. Or about how the desire to be able to be a consumer fuels the abuse of women. Maybe all those things are ok, so long as there’s a decent, good, kind man in the house. Maybe.

But the final shot of the film points us in a radically different direction, when we see that Audrey II has somehow gotten one of her herbaceous offspring into the front lawn of Seymour and Audrey. The horror ain’t over yet, apparently.

So now, urged by this final shot, we have to think a little more deeply about what Audrey II symbolizes. Surely, it’s significant that she’s named after Audrey; perhaps we can think of this plant as the monstrous side of Audrey, as a part of her that perhaps does not want to be a suburban, hyperconsuming automata, but rather a powerful top predator. Maybe, in fact, Audrey II has picked earth to invade and takeover precisely because terrestrial consumerism makes it such an easy target.

Ok, so let’s see. Audrey II eats Dr. Scrivello, which makes her at least in part a feminist avenger. The only other person Audrey II eats is Mr. Mushnik, the cantankerous and money-hungry proprietor of the flower shop. So, Audrey II kills one abuser, and one avaricious capitalist, who treats Seymour like absolute garbage throughout the film. Now, to be fair, Audrey II does also try to eat Audrey, though she is saved by Seymour. Audrey II seems to have a penchant for bad men and people who are overly focused on class and money—including Audrey herself.

In the climactic scene, Audrey II has grown to mammoth size, and bursts her container to reveal that she’s spawning dozens of little mini-Audreys all over her fronds or limbs or stalks, or whatever you’d call them. Each little Audrey II sings in harmony along with its mother; each one looks exactly like its mother; each one wants exactly what it’s mother wants: blood and world domination. A zillion little botanical comrades, laboring toward the same goal of global takeover, all eager to enact their Mother’s wishes?

Suddenly, it occurred to me that Audrey II might have been a figure for communism, during the height of the cold war, as something opposed to these class and money-conscious people who populate the United States, irrespective of whether the people are “good” (Audrey and Seymour) or “bad” (Mushnik and Scrivello). When the tiny little Audrey II spore/plant appears in the well-kept lawn “somewhere that’s green” at the end, it started to signify to me as an embodiment of the idea—popular during McCarthyism and the Cold War—that there were sleeper cells of Soviet communists all over the US, even in suburban areas populated by virtuous little American consumerist families.

But then I put the brakes on myself. Not everything is an allegory, Eleanor.

But then I went and did a little extra homework. Turns out the 1986 film Little Shop of Horrors was based on a 1982 staged musical Little Shop of Horrors. Which itself was a reboot of another film called Little Shop of Horrors, which premiered in—wait for it—1960, only a few years after the pinnacle of McCarthyism, and well into the Red Scare period, which cross-branded communism with the Civil Rights movement, in order better to persecute and prosecute participants in both movements.

So maybe, just maybe, the real takeaway from this movie isn’t that we should be clapping for Seymour and Audrey and their escape from “Skid Row” to the burbs, but rather that we should be clapping for the indomitability of Audrey II, and her little offsprings’ having taken root in the hyperconsumeristic American soil. Certainly, the closing credits are upbeat, happy, and optimistic, even as we watch this little tiny Audrey II minion smile into the camera. Maybe we could even see this 1986 film as an early frontrunner of my favorite zombie film of all time, The Girl with All the Gifts (2016), in which a fungal infection takes over human society, eventually resulting in a resurgence of tribal communism—a resurgence that we, in the end, are urged not just to fear, but also to celebrate.

We see the process of Edward’s creation over the course of several flashbacks in the film. In them, he is built by an old roboticist called the Inventor (Vincent Price), bit by bit. Edward is a robot with human-like skin, not a being built from excavated dead bodies. Even so, the creation of this human-like, artificially intelligent man strongly evokes Shelley’s novel and the long history of its remakes: the Inventor lives in a creepy Gothic castle, he speaks with an English accent, and he works alone, under cover of dark, to try to create life where there was no life. He, like Victor Frankenstein, builds his robot hoping to be able to create a human simulacrum.

On top of that, the casting choice of Vincent Price evokes Frankenstein in two ways. First, simply because of his cultural status as The Creepy Guy from Old Timey movies. Second, because he resembles, both physically and in his accent, Peter Cushing, who played Victor Frankenstein in the Hammer franchise that dominated the silver screen from the 1950s-1970s. Moreover, Edward’s face is criss-crossed all over with scars—in his case, it’s not because he’s sewn together from spare human parts, but rather because he frequently accidentally cuts himself with his razor-sharp finger-blades. Despite the difference in cause, the iconography is clear: Edward is an artificially intelligent, deeply scarred man, a clear homage to Mary Shelley, her novel, and her anti-hero.

But Burton’s robotic Frankenstein story also makes some very important philosophical and psychological revisions to the original. These revisions make Edward Scissorhands mandatory viewing for the 21st century, and especially for those of us struggling with the ethics and social ramifications of AI.

First and foremost, Edward’s Inventor does not abandon him at birth. Quite the contrary, he raises Edward with care and devotion, teaching him by reading to him from books, helping him understand the norms of polite society, teaching him language. The Inventor’s long-term hope is that Edward will be able to join society at some point, and be a productive, happy member of it. To that end, he eventually makes Edward proper human hands, so that he can transition away from his robotic status and more fully toward being a human. Edward is set up to be precisely what the Creature couldn’t be in Frankenstein, because of his paternal abandonment: a fully-functioning human being, endowed with an assiduous father, and situated in a social world that understands and accepts him.

Alas, however, the Inventor suffers a fatal heart attack at precisely the moment at which he unveils Edward’s beautiful new hands. As the Inventor collapses to the floor, Edward inadvertently skewers his new hands with his scissors, slashing them to pieces and forever ruining his hopes of being more decisively human. It’s an excruciating scene, made all the worse by the fact that Edward can’t even touch his newly-dead father’s face in mourning without lacerating him.

Ever since the Inventor died, Edward has been living alone in the castle, apart from all human society. Like the Creature in Shelley’s novel, he’s terribly lonely; like him, he’s now been abandoned by his father. But, unlike Shelley’s Creature, he has made his peace with it all by leaning into art: using his scissorhands, Edward has become a fantastic sculptor. What would the Creature’s trajectory have looked like, Burton quietly asks, if the Creature had had a calling (art) and a primary attachment figure (the Inventor) to give him a sense of purpose, belonging, and self-worth? What if he had known love and been taught culture before he was left alone, in the shadows?

The rest of the film pursues these questions by throwing Edward into the deep end of the social pool, flinging him down into a deeply neurotic, riven suburban town, where the local women are horrible gossips and sexual predators, and where the local teenaged boys are violent, jealous, controlling, and bullying. At first, Edward is an intriguing oddity, and all the local women pursue him with lascivious intent; but eventually, the tides change, and everyone in the town begins to focus on Edward’s difference not as sexy but as monstrous. As in the novel, Edward isn’t born monstrous; far from it, it’s the perception of Edward as monstrous creates his monstrosity. He swerves toward monstrosity in response to how people treat him.

Once the people of the town begin actively persecuting him, Edward becomes angry and destructive—tearing up walls and curtains with his hands, cutting off branches of topiary that he had lovingly carved into beautiful shapes. When Jim (Anthony Michael Hall), Kim’s controlling and sadistic boyfriend, becomes jealous that Edward and Kim are falling in love, he screams at Edward, startling him so that he accidentally cuts Kim with his scissorhands. Later, when Jim almost hits Kim’s little brother Kevin with a car and Edward rushes to save him, Edward inadvertently scratches Kevin’s face. So now, he is causing physical harm to those he loves most—Kim and Kevin—but it’s crucial to note that in both cases, Edward’s harm is a direct response to Jim’s outright aggression. Edward is made a monster by the goading of a predatory male peer, one whom Edward identifies as socially and sexually superior to him—because, of course, Jim is Kim’s official boyfriend.

Tim Burton’s film is theorizing Edward’s monstrosity as an emergent property of his social alienation and his susceptibility to taunting by alpha males. Edward doesn’t want to hurt women, nor does he want to hurt children; he does both because he’s unable to defend against the ever-present threat of Jim and his alpha masculinity and because he doesn’t know how to function in the fishbowl panopticon of this demented suburban town.

In the end, Edward finds a way, though a lethal one. He winds up stabbing Jim to death in order to save Kim from being abused by him. However justified one might say Edward’s act of violence is, it’s clear now that he—now a confirmed killer—can’t possibly return to the social world. So Kim convinces everyone in the town—who are marching up toward the castle exactly as the crowds of angry townspeople do in the Universal films and the Hammer films—that he and Jim each killed each other, so that there’s no further threat from Edward. As in the Universal and Hammer franchises, the ignorant and easily manipulated townspeople believe their “monster” is dead, and head back home. In the reality of Burton’s film, however, Edward goes on living alone in his castle forever, making his beautiful art and dreaming of his mortal love Kim down below. Edward, since he is a robot, does not age; like the Universal Franchise Monster, he is immortal. So he will live potentially forever, alone.

It’s an extremely melancholic ending, but Edward’s fate, unlike Shelley’s Creature’s, is remediated in a significant way: before she leaves him forever, Kim tells Edward, “I love you.” The camera, focused tight on Edward’s face, records a slow closing of his eyes, as he relaxes into the feeling of being known and loved for who he is, and accepted as he is. To Kim, Edward is a neither a robot nor an oddity, but a person, deserving of love, affection, and protection. We are left to conclude that it is this act of love that enables Edward to accept and tolerate his life of loneliness and isolation: Kim’s love buttressed Edward’s own self-love, and short-circuited any impulse toward violence or vengeance that he may have continued to feel, after he killed Jim. Tim Burton gives to Edward then the two things that Mary Shelley denied to her Creature: love and art.

He also gave to the late 20^th and 21^st centuries a paradigm for thinking cinematically about the limits of the human—the limits, that is, of what we would call or recognize as human. Edward is a robot, made of mechanical parts by an obsessive inventor; there is no ambiguity about this, because we see it happens in flashbacks. But despite his status as a robot, Edward is capable of learning, growing, and changing. He learns and grows and changes through two primary mechanisms: by reading or being read to, and by talking or being talked to. Edward is an artificially intelligent being, who grows and evolves precisely by navigating his exposures to words.

At first, he can only respond in the vaguest and barest of ways to verbal stimulation by his Inventor, but he rapidly learns, and soon becomes capable of autonomous, self-generated, spontaneous thought and affect. By almost any definition, then, he is no longer just a robot, but something rapidly approaching the status of personhood. When exactly that happens, the film doesn’t tell us, and I think that’s part of Burton’s point: we can see that Edward was a robot in his earliest interactions with the Inventor; by the end of the film, we can see that he is a human being, one capable of loving and being loved. One capable of feeling gratitude, and the inexpressible joy of being known as a human being by someone else.

But the exact moment at which that transition occurred is totally obscure.

And why wouldn’t it be? Who are we to think we can discern the precise moment at which Edward’s experiences of life, love, loss, desire, fear, and the social world come to outmatch his “programming” in discerning how he responds to things around him, and inside him? Tim Burton gave us a remake of Shelley’s novel that roadmapped for us the stakes and consequences of discerning or failing to discern the moment at which a machine becomes a person.

In our dawning new era of AI and AI-relationships, I cannot think of a more timely social question than this, nor a better exploration of it than this film, and I only marvel that this film was released almost forty years ago. Edward Scissorhands uses the Frankenstein paradigm to think not so much about how to confer life on dead parts, but rather to think about how—and whether—we should draw the line between machine and human being.

I’m also going to tack some age ratings onto these, because some of them are great conversation starters with tweens and teens. And some are not.

Enjoy!

1. Hush (2016): This Mike Flanagan film is—I think—the most frightening film I’ve ever seen. It used to be Sinister, but no more. The premise is that a deaf woman is being stalked in her own home by a predatory serial killer—in a mask—on the outside. It got billed as a “cat-and-mouse” thriller, but it’s actually the scariest presentation of stalking-as-horror that I’ve ever seen. It’s brilliant. But truly, watch with the lights on, or you won’t make it through. Terrifying, and not for kids of any age. Like, I wouldn’t greenlight this for my beloved and extremely sophisticated teenaged Berkeley niece until she’s 21.

2. Eyes Without a Face (1960): Released the same year as Psycho, this film focuses on a young woman who’s face was “destroyed,” and whose maniacal, misogynist plastic surgeon father serially murders women to find her a replacement face. Like Hush, this film’s horror centers on dynamics of masking and unmasking. It won’t haunt you for days and days afterward (like Hush), but it’s a very important part of the 1960s canon of horror based on the dehumanization of women. Reasonable pick for teenagers; too psychologically disturbing, I’d say, for kids under 13, though the gore factor is pretty light, except for one scene.

3. Edward Scissorhands (1990): I know most of my GenX readers have seen this one (likely more than once), but I’m throwing it on here because it has come to my attention that my GenZ students haven’t even heard of this thing. Ok, so. It’s a horror film where the monster we’re supposed to be afraid of (Edward) is nowhere near as monstrous as the horrendous teenage boy who menaces and dehumanizes him. The film—though genuinely scary in some scenes—is really an extended meditation on social/physical difference, and how bullying is the deepest form of monstrosity. Good for family viewing with teens and teens, because it will enable some very interesting conversations. I would say that 8 is probably the youngest I’d show this to a kid.

4. Cabin in the Woods (2011): One of my all-time favorite horror comedies. The premise is that a transnational organization of evil people set up and systematically execute a group of carefully selected young people, all to stave off an ancient monster. Though made fully 15 years ago now, it’s a painfully on-the-nose allegory for the surveillance state and how mass culture sacrifices teenagers to things like consumerism, militarism, and social media. Also, very fun shout-outs to earlier classics, like Raimi’s Evil Dead. Probably appropriate for 14+, depending on the kid’s gore tolerance.

5. Little Shop of Horrors (1986): This is another good one for family movie night with tweens. Not super scary, but showcases a lot of important social dynamics in the margins—specifically, domestic abuse, cruelty, sadism, bullying, social disadvantage, poverty, drug use, and the impulse to commit acts of violence. Also, the comedic dynamic between Bill Murray and Steve Martin is one for the ages. Plus the songs are dope. And I’m saying this as someone who—forgive me—does not gravitate toward musicals. I think I know every word of every song in the entire soundtrack. Appropriate for kids 8+.

6. Jaws (1975): Obviously a classic, but I’d had this one mentally shelved as schlocky early monster cinema, until I rewatched it recently. And it is brilliant. First off, the whole thing is a very close calque on Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, which I hadn’t read in college by the time I last saw this thing. But I mean…it’s like one tiny step shy of an actual cinematic adaptation of the novel. But more interesting than the Melvilleanism to most viewers is the bromance dynamic in the film, which is priceless and lovely. This film is appropriate for kids 11+: there’s one brutal scene toward the end, which you’ll see coming a mile away and can skip, when the ship captain gets got by the Great White monster from the deep.

7. The Lost Boys (1985): another magnificent horror-comedy, this one about a band of teenage boys turned vampires who bully and convert a newcomer to their town. This is another great pick to watch with kids—though it does have some pretty scary scenes—to talk precisely about bullying, feeling like an outsider, and figuring out how to be your own authentic self in the face of temptations to fit in with a rough crowd. Beyond the teachable moments, it’s also an absolute banger in terms of soundtrack, ambiance, staging, and acting. Plus, if you are a GenXer, you will be in full-blown nostalgia mode all the while. Appropriate for 10+, assuming it’s not the kid’s very first horror rodeo. (Good bit of gore and jump scares.)

8. It (the 1986 novel by Stephen King, not the film): I recently read this for the first time, and it’s major. I mean, everyone knows that. But what’s major about it isn’t the monster, it’s how delicately King demonstrates his understanding of human psychology, and particularly the psychology of children growing up in difficult circumstances. Yeah, the clown is like pretty legitimately scary. But if you find yourself worried about children, tweens, and teens, getting into dangerous situations with predators, or with social media, or simply trying to navigate a family or social world that at baseline does not understand them, this horror novel is for you. It is not, however, a book for kids. Lots of very disturbing and mature content.

9. Pluribus (2025): You guys, I am struggling not to overwhelm you with my adoration of this series. It is the best thing since The Last of Us season 1, and that’s no accident: it’s another brilliant, and I mean brilliant variation on the zombie genre. But it makes the move that I’ve been waiting and waiting for, which is that it makes all the zombies super nice. Amazing acting, hilarious script, very moving subplots. Not particularly scary, but also not appropriate for younger kids because of themes of nihilism, self-loathing, self-harm, and, yes, cannibalism are too much. I’d put this at 14+.

10. Young Frankenstein (1974): My second-favorite horror comedy of all time, after Ghostbusters. This is probably Mel Brooks’ funniest film—Spaceballs being a close second—and for Frankenstein afficionados, it cannot be beat. There has never been another Frankenstein film that worked in so many other prior Frankenstein films—except maybe Maggie Gyllenhaal’s visually stunning recent Bride (2026). Young Frankenstein is appropriate for children of any age over 9, although—warning—there are some sexual jokes in the mix, and the kids may not find the film as funny as you do. But it is Gene Wilder at his best, after Wonka.