Square Peg, Round Hole
A review of Uncanny Valley Girls: Essays on Horror, Survival, and Love (Harper Perennial 2025) by Zefyr Lisowski and Scream with Me: Horror Films and the Rise of American Feminism (1968-1980) (Atria 2025) by Eleanor Johnson.
I used to think I didn’t like horror films, but then, thirteen years ago, I met my wife, and she showed me otherwise. If memory serves, her beloved Halloween (1973), Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), Suspiria (1977), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978), and Alien (1979) were among the movies we first watched together in that genre—after all, when it comes to horror, “you just can’t beat the seventies,” as she says. A door opened for me onto a world of visceral anti-normality, by turns nastily nihilistic and counterintuitively utopian. Meanwhile, she did apparently gain something in return. I’m told I scream earsplittingly “half a second before one is supposed to,” thereby providing a “20-40% thrill boost” to the scary-movie veteran in question (whose responses would otherwise remain dulled by prolific habituation) and a potentially even bigger experiential enhancement to whoever else is with us at the time. “It was great,” texted a friend who saw Dario Argento’s Profondo rosso (1975) at the cinema with me in 2023, “but the thing that scared me most in the end was Sophie’s bloodcurdling and weirdly premature shrieking.”
Clearly, if I’m boasting about this to you now, it must be because I am—on some level—delighted by my own susceptibility and impressibility, my ability to feel and enjoy horror’s tortures precociously early. But when I ask myself what actually makes me happy about this, the answer that suggests itself is, above all else, not being alone. If I’m proud that I routinely hide from movies underneath sofa throws or my own sweatshirt, writhe all the way off seats, and whack or chew the limbs of my neighbours in an effort to cope with what I’m consuming, the key is surely the fact that there are loved ones with me whose companionship makes such vulnerability possible in the first place. I could never face a horror movie alone. Can you even imagine?
To some, it doesn’t matter whether hands have been proffered to squeeze throughout the ordeal. Many people don’t “do” horror because there is so much horror in the world already, from the ongoing 77-year-long genocide in Gaza, to the genocidal policies unleashed against trans children, migrants, and pregnant or disabled people. This aversion is a perfectly legitimate reflection of one side of the random distribution across human populations of the capacity to tolerate fictive atrocities emotionally. If you can tolerate the horrific in cinematic fiction, though, many of us think that it can open up a potentially fortifying psychical space in which to “work through” real planetary violence. The antis say that they wish to avoid adding extra distress to their day on top of that already inflicted by the news, the police, the family group chat, the boss, the landlord, the school bully, the conversion therapist, the rapist spotted at the train station, the medical gatekeepers encountered at the hospital, and so on. The irony, of course, is that one of the classic reasons cited by horror aficionados rationalising their proclivity is precisely the same thing: one turns to fictional horrors because there are so many horrors in reality. Where else, we ask, to put the feelings, pending revolution? A scary movie shrinks the world’s horrors down into, not manageable exactly, but bounded, feelable parcels. In a landscape dense with quiescent cultural products, horror is anti-anesthetic.
Horror sticks and lingers: it doesn’t do tragic catharsis and usually doesn’t arrive at a straightforwardly happy ending either. Sometimes it does happen, as in the tradition of what Rick Kelley calls “anticolonial horror”—exemplified by 2019’s superb releases Bacurau and La Llorona—that we receive an explicit vision of retributive justice through indigenous revenge against settlers; a quasi-revolutionary resolution. Similar comeuppances conclude some transgender slashers, when vengeance is exacted by the victims of cissexuality against its enforcers. (Needless to say, countless horror flicks contain more covertly transfeminist or anticolonial dynamics in the form of misunderstood “freak” or “doll” monsters, land- or building-based curses, or colonizer sadism.) It is far more common, however, for the horror screen to act as a funhouse mirror, defamiliarising all the carnage, brutality and evil we tend to put out of mind in our lives in order to go about our days—but without necessarily triggering or discharging our pre-existing trauma. Horror is only looking at it. Holding it. Touching it with a fingertip both perverse and tender. Voluntarily, in reply, we scream.
“I’m not interested in being healed,” writes the poet Zefyr Lisowski in Uncanny Valley Girls: Essays on Horror, Survival, and Love; “nor in my wounds being reopened. What I want now is to love the scars that make us us.” The attitude she is describing resonates with some contemporary psychoanalysts’ vindication of “traumatophilia,” an approach to woundedness (lately developed by Avgi Saketopoulou in the influential book Sexuality Beyond Consent) that questions the most culturally prevalent trauma-averse ways of thinking about “healing” and refrains from pathologising the kind of scar-tracing self-touching at the heart of Lisowski’s collection. This “philia” has nothing to do with apolitical complacency before present and future injustice. It is to say, rather, that horror—as an often traumatophilic art-form—can be a technology for revivifying and transforming the shape of scar tissue in the wake of ghostly harm, for living differently in hurt flesh without seeking to repair it or for that matter imagining it as reparable. The horror genre has often been defined, in fact, by its repair-averse disposition; its tendency to insist dreadfully on the present state of things, as the credits roll, such that we are left seeing a little more clearly than before, perhaps, what it is that is intolerable in our lives, ourselves, or society writ large, and what therefore must end.
This feminist conviction I share with many others—that horror’s ambiguous pleasures can, entre autres, bolster anti-violent desires off-screen and feed subversive political energies—does not come with the requirement, expectation or even wish for the work of art to speak a “message” of univocal progressivism. To say, as Johanna Isaacson does in Stepford Daughters: Weapons for Feminists in Contemporary Horror (2022), that “there is a continuous thread of feminist critique throughout the history of horror”—a critique of both waged and unwaged labor in all its insidious charm and gendered cruelty—is not to deny that “horror can serve as a retrograde force that warns us what will happen if we don’t behave.” The monstrous thing in horror is often coming from inside the house, sure; but the fugitive queer or disabled feminine prey may very well get punished, or mocked, or recruited into evil herself, rather than finding a way out and a way to live differently. In the Queer Marxism tradition of horror theorising to which Isaacson belongs—popularised in the seventies by Robin Wood—it is almost always the case that nihilism and the possibility of radical change coexist side-by-side in this cinematic domain.
Horror’s “return of the repressed” formula means that monsters surge in, thrillingly, to stab the heteropatriarchal sexual order in the eye, or douse the family with gasoline, throwing up glimpses of some of our wildest potential collective destinations. Then, though, one has to figure out how to feel about the vertiginously open-ended and ambivalent psychic space we’ve glimpsed, post-familial and unfamiliar. One may wish to embrace its howling unknowability in a spirit of nihilistic euphoria, or confront it with a leap of utopian hope, or oppose it fearfully and conservatively—sometimes doing all three in rotation. Horror is full of contradictions and ambivalences: it makes us hunger to light the blood-soaked catacomb of heterocapitalist “safety” on fire and makes us desperate for safety—any safety, whatever the cost—at the same time. “The true subject of the horror genre,” proposed Wood, is thus “the struggle for recognition of all that our civilisation represses or oppresses, its reemergence dramatised, as in our nightmares, as an object of horror, a matter for terror, and the happy ending (when it exists) typically signifying the restoration of repression.” It often isn’t clear, in an ending of that type, if we totally endorse the re-repression of the repressed that returned earlier in the movie, even as it feels pretty good.
On the other hand, there exists another school of feminist horror criticism for whom the politics of given horror texts can and must be decided upon with a degree of finality. The Columbia University English professor Eleanor Johnson belongs to this school. In Scream with Me: Horror Films and the Rise of American Feminism (1968-1980), Johnson contends that “American feminism and American horror have been—for more than half a century—allies on issues of domestic abuse, reproductive control, and women’s restricted rights relative to men.”
Right away, Johnson qualifies that assessment by noting that women in these films generally don’t fight back; that, moreover, several of the directors in question are, or were, “abusers of women themselves” (“very bad people make very good art,” more often than we like to imagine). Scream With Me rightly condemns the conduct of Roman Polanski, William Friedkin and Stanley Kubrick vis-à-vis women and girls. Nonetheless, it insists, we owe specifically feminist praise to the gems of “domestic horror” they made. Johnson examines six exemplars of this “reproductive horror” genre from the long seventies: Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby (1968), Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973), and Kubrick’s The Shining (1980), but also Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979), Bryan Forbes’s The Stepford Wives (1975), and Richard Donner’s The Omen (1976) (albeit Johnson never once mentions Donner, the director also of Christopher Reeves in the first Superman). These films, she maintains, raised America’s feminist consciousness both despite and because of the fact that, in some cases, a misogynist made them: “When Polanski filmed the scene of Rosemary being drugged and raped, it felt so real and so powerful in part because Polanski was filming out of his own hoard of abusive desires.”
The core thesis of Johnson’s book is simple and persuasive. These films “have trained Americans,” it claims, “to scream at the horrors inflicted on women’s bodies.” They “took what was going on in American cultural, political, and legal history in the late 1960s and 1970s, and they made those things feelable. They made that suffering seem like an emergency” by “signal-boosting the changes in consciousness and attitude that were already circulating.” With their inescapable Satanic pregnancies, near-inescapable “coercive controller” husbands, and scenes of female possession-by-male-demon, these half-dozen releases contributed concretely to advances in reproductive rights as well as to awareness of domestic violence and the righteousness of the Equal Rights Amendment cause. They changed the culture of the United States by forcing the public to “witness, fear, and lament the entrapment of women in the domestic sphere.”
Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist, The Omen, The Stepford Wives, Alien and The Shining amplified the volume on discrete currents of women’s liberationist rage rumbling through the land. In other words, Johnson tells us, these blockbusting fright flicks “turned whispers into screams.” Horror consequently “became the cinematic genre that did the most to organise and give voice to the burgeoning discourse against domestic violence, against reproductive control, and against the dehumanisation of women in the 1970s.” I buy all of this, yet Johnson mars her book by trying to evidence it not only (as she helpfully does) with reference to social movements and legislative history, but—primarily—with overstated and two-dimensional readings of the films’ plots qua whole feminist arguments.
For example, Rosemary’s Baby is “a parable about the dangers of denying women their reproductive agency,” and the book it’s based on—by Ira Levin—is a novel “about abortion availability.” Johnson comes awfully close to reducing the art to “a thought experiment in which the pope himself would have to advocate for Rosemary to terminate” (since the fetus is the Antichrist). In her zeal to convince us that it paved the way for Roe v. Wade, Johnson completely overrides Mia Farrow’s character’s wish to keep the world-dooming baby, and decides, over Rosemary’s head, that Rosemary is a “poster child” for legal abortions. By the same token, the treatment of Sigourney Weaver’s fetal xenomorph enemy and of Gregory Peck’s cradle-swapping spousal deceptions as tantamount to Planned Parenthood policy papers struck me as unnecessary to the bigger contention that Alien and The Omen make the world look at unfree gestational labour, empathise, and scream about it. It’s too neat: women characters are by definition not agents of patriarchy in their own right, only, at most, servants of it. Sex is cis. Satan is a usable feminist concept. Johnson defines her category of reproductive horror in terms of the presence of “at least one male antagonist.” When it’s girl-on-girl—when a woman treats another woman in a sexually violent way, as in The Exorcist—it’s because she’s (possessed by) a male person in that moment, and we are supposed to see male violence the better for it being displaced in a female body.
What of women’s real entanglements with and ambivalences about power though? What of teen girls’ werewolf sexualities, what of patriarchal motherhood’s own creative sadisms? I barely recognised, in Johnson’s discussions, the uncomfortable, campy, witty, polyvalent, gothic treasures I discovered hand-in-hand with my lover circa 2013. Does one “side” with the girl-rescuing policeman or the lewd police-roasting pagans in The Wicker Man? Yes. Is Sissy Spacek’s character Carrie White, whose inventor Stephen King likened to “any student who ever had his gym shorts pulled down,” not a ghoulish school-shooter archetype when she burns down prom at the end of Carrie, purely because she’s a girl? No, well, it’s complicated. If I did not always instantly grasp the freight of the koans in Lisowski’s essays—e.g., “This is a book about horror, real and filmic, which means it must also be a book about love”—I still much preferred the requirement to work a bit harder at reading. Having read Scream With Me first, I more than once mentally thanked Lisowski in Uncanny Valley Girls for the respect she affords films like Antichrist and The Ring merely by refraining from jamming the square peg of horror into liberal feminism’s round hole.
Uncanny Valley Girls, to be fair to Johnson’s monograph, is a whole different beast. Lisowski’s book is a strangely tender florilegium of transfeminist critical race thinking that is responding with “autotheory” to such diverse objects as werewolves, the War on Terror, the sea, Black Lives Matter in the American South (Lisowski hails from North Carolina), Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chain Saw Massacre, local histories of swamp-based marronage, the ax-wielding fin-de-siècle family annihilator Lizzie Borden, and the 1980s sculptor of dolls Greer Lankton. At stake is the methodology of sick, trans and disabled people’s collective survival, glimpsable by squinting at the edges of horror narratives, the vanishing corners populated by those who have been marked as disposable yet somehow, stubbornly, stick around. The genre is memoir, juxtaposing horror films with the author’s own experiences of psychiatric incarceration, self-harm, amour fou, invisible disability, queerbashing, sex, and beautification. Loving-kindness and rest are promised “at the end” upfront, but “the horrors are how I found myself, so let’s begin there.”
Lisowski wants to unearth the love at the core of horror, as well as in artistic practices about horror, be they disquietingly glamorous doll-statues or the sicko crime-scene miniatures innovated by nineteenth-century forensic scientist Frances Glessner Lee. With gentleness and curiosity toward what is horrific within herself—including, strikingly, her transness—Lisowski performs for us an address to a lover wherein her body “aches for you like the surgeon’s hand aches for the scalpel, like the butcher knife aches for meat.” Like Lankton’s dolls, every confession palpably carries the injunction “love me” stitched tight inside. Even a “lazy and cruel” movie like Black Swan, full of hate for “the abject and anyone else who death touches,” is cherishable and usable in a mode of “revolutionary care without charity”—Zef shows us how.
On the other end of the spectrum from this mycelial explosion, Scream With Me keeps itself beholden to the imperative to teach the reader one easily digestible thing over and over, namely, how to make political sense of a narrowly defined subgenre feministly (where feminism’s constituency is an unmarked—racially and otherwise—”American” womanhood). It’s a different mission. Still, generosity when comparing poison apples with clockwork oranges will only take us so far. Under the misleading guise of simplicity or clarity, Johnson’s concept of “American feminism” is unitary, patriotic, and perfectly anticommunist, in that not a single gesture at relations of class, cisness, whiteness, colonialism or heterosexual repronormativity makes it in.
Johnson ends her introduction with the invitation you’d expect—”So come: Scream with me”—but I registered this, over and over, as a quite different instruction, namely, Scream at the things I tell you to, when I tell you to, for the right reasons, without sadism. Lisowski, on the other hand, rarely tells us what to think, preferring to make thought itself, continuous and relational and unresolvable, seem irresistible. Messy as guts, her feminism apprehends horror as a resource belonging to “those of us who live in power’s periphery—trans, disabled, non-white, poor,” by which she really means all people for whom “love happens under violence’s shadow.” Ironically, what emerges from her guts-spilling is a powerful invitation to scream with, and perhaps even at “me,” screaming for reasons not fully understood, as long as we are doing it with each another.
“Through horror, you can see everything in a life: atmosphere and pain and death and the desire to keep living,” Lisowski writes, “And in in who you watch horror with—because few people I know watch scary movies alone—you can see the rest of it, too: the sex and guilt and grief and everything else that goes into loving yourself and others.” She is describing many a spookily convivial living-room and community screening I recognise deep in my jumpy, always-too-early bones.
Not especially pro-abortion or anti-abortion, but abolitionist in relation to all of it, horror refuses Nature. It’s like Lisowski says, “Sick bodies doing what they do, refusing to be stifled—together.”
SOPHIE LEWIS (@reproutopia) is a freelance writer and ex-academic who lives in Philadelphia (go Birds, fuck ICE, free Palestine). She only rarely goes back to the UK, France, and Germany, her places of origin. She is the author of innumerable essays, as well as four books so far: Full Surrogacy Now (2019), Abolish the Family (2022), Enemy Feminisms (2025), and Femmephilia (2026).
