Eleanor Johnson

Traversing the horror of the domestic sphere. 

By Caroline Nieto

Illustration by Isabelle Oh

Eleanor Johnson is a professor of English and Comparative Literature and the author of four books, the most recent of which, Scream With Me: Horror Films and The Rise of American Feminism, was published just last month, on September 30th. Throughout her time at Columbia, Johnson has taught about the earliest depictions of horror in popular literature, specifically in her course “History of Horror,” where she explores the artistic progression from Dante’s Inferno to Jordan Peele. This semester, Johnson, alongside American Studies department director Jeremy Dauber, is teaching a course called “History of Horror Cinema” for the first time, which marks the impetus of horror movies from as early as 1910’s Frankenstein. I’ve been lucky enough to be her student this semester, and her lectures on films like Gaslight and Rosemary’s Baby have completely shifted the way I view horror in the scope of modern feminism. I can confidently say that Johnson is the most engaging lecturer I’ve had in the English department, cracking jokes and bantering with students even at a sprightly hour of 8:40 a.m.

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

… 

The Blue & White: You have taught History of Horror at Columbia for several years now, but this is the first time you have offered the course strictly as a film class. I was wondering how you came to develop the syllabus for it, and how it evolved from the initial history of horror class. 

Eleanor Johnson: The original History of Horror class, which I undoubtedly will teach again at some point, was seven hundred years of horror, basically from Dante to Jordan Peele. Jeremy Dauber and I agreed to do that, because we wanted to divvy up the centuries. I was doing centuries 14, 15, 16, and 21; he did 18 and 19, and we split 17 and 20. Our course evaluations for that class were very positive, but a few students said they’d like an all film version of the class. So about a year ago, Jeremy and I decided that we would try to put together a syllabus. Obviously, such a class can’t cover 700 years, so we had some pretty natural parameters around it from the get go. We had a lot of conversations about whether we wanted to design the syllabus to go more for historical coverage—which is where Professor Dauber leans in general—or focus more on particular decades, which is often more my leaning. I would be very happy teaching a history of horror cinema class that was ’60s, ’70s, ’90s, 2000s, and [20]20s. But Professor Dauber persuaded me, and I think it was the right choice to try and do at least a couple of movies from every decade since film has really existed. 

Once we decided on the theoretical structure of the course, which was a week per decade, the tricky part came in picking out which films would go in. And we decided to each send the other a list of films we wanted. He had a longer list, and it was from a larger historical period. We just kind of went through and tried to pick out representative films from each decade that would also represent the major horror film subgenres that have existed in time. So, the Frankenstein franchise, the Dracula franchise, a witch narrative, a representation of slasher films, and I wanted to have a good representation of domestic horror films, because that’s my research area. So we had Psycho on there, Repulsion, Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist, Alien, The Shining—all of these classic domestic horror films that I work on. Other than that, we tried to put together something that would have a lot of throughlines, but would also do a good job of covering the 20th century and into the 21st. 

B&W: There’s obviously a rich history of fables and cautionary tales common to many cultures, but the strict definition of “horror” is a relatively recent development. I’m wondering off the bat: why do you think people gravitate towards horror so strongly?

EJ: People gravitate toward horror because it provides an opportunity for practicing the feeling of vulnerability. There are historical moments when people crave that more, and there are historical moments in which people crave that less. Paradoxically, right now, people tend to be craving that a lot. I say paradoxically because we are all feeling quite vulnerable in many ways, not least of which we just weathered a major global pandemic. If you look at the rate of production of horror films, they spiked hugely in 2021. That had to do with filmmakers realizing that everyone in the world was feeling a little precarious and vulnerable, and that’s an environment in which people want ways of practicing those feelings that then kind of end, even if there is a little bit of a horror hangover. At the end of Immaculate, the Sydney Sweeney vehicle, you don't feel great. It’s a very bloody, violent, upsetting ending. But you do know that at least for now, it's over. You get to return to your daily life and move on. People gravitate toward horror because it gives this controlled arena within which to practice a feeling of physical, psychological, vulnerability. People want that all throughout time. 

You’re right that the strict definition of horror as a genre is relatively recent, but Dante’s Inferno is a horror narrative. He calls it a comedy, which is an odd label in some ways, but he wrote a horror narrative that was about the divine plan, and that’s an interesting move. It’s a very old mode of writing, and people are really into it now partially because we are all so aware of how vulnerable we are to pandemics, and tech, and AI, and governments, you name it. People are feeling anxious. It is also inescapably true that the cost benefit analysis in making horror for film producers is really favorable. They tend to be cheap to make and make a huge return on investment. So there’s also a production-side driver, which is part of why in the era of streaming, we’ve also seen a huge uptick in horror, because Netflix and places like that spend a little bit of money making a horror movie and they make a giant amount of money back. 

B&W: In the introduction of your newest book, Scream For Me, you claim that “tragedy is prosocial,” in that it makes viewers feel pity or empathy for the characters they observe. While you also acknowledge the marked differences between tragedy and horror, I’m wondering, do you think that horror is prosocial?

EJ: Horror can be very prosocial. It has become increasingly prosocial in about the last fifteen years or so. Filmmakers are recognizing what ancient Greek tragedians absolutely realized, which is that if you can make a person feel profound, wrenching empathy with a protagonist, there’s an opportunity for social intervention and processuality in that work. Tragedies sort of tend to end a little tidier than horror works do. Even if there’s a lot of dead people, the story is clearly done. Like Hamlet—a very bloody ending, but the story is done. That’s much less true in horror, which usually does have at least some kind of lingering after effect, or some kind of hangover type feeling. But even with that, I still think that the horror genre has become increasingly prosocial in recent times, and that filmmakers are really capitalizing on that. Jordan Peele comes to mind immediately as someone who’s committed to the position that horror can do political work, can depict social realism, while also being kind of surreal and supernaturalistic and terrifying. 

B&W: You also say that there’s a popular disparity between people that generally believe horror to be misogynist and those that believe it to be feminist, saying that the former view typically comes from people that don’t watch a lot of horror. Where do you think this difference comes from? Do you find validity in both views?

EJ: I do find validity in both views. And it’s partially epochal, in that earlier horror films tended more toward misogynistic portrayals of women, and it’s been in fairly recent times, really since Rosemary’s Baby, that you get pretty unapologetically feminist horror works coming out. So there’s a historical effect, which is that horror has become increasingly available as a vehicle for feminist thought. I also think it’s true that a work can be two things. Like I said when we talked about Repulsion in class, I don’t want to say it’s feminist film, but there is a feminist reading that you can easily make of it. It’s not the only reading, but it’s in there. Repulsion is quite misogynistic in many ways—certainly its reception history is extremely misogynistic—and yet there is an energy in that film that’s at least sort of proto-feminist. It’s in line with the revenge fantasy narratives that came to predominate, like in the ’80s and ’90s. You can have films that have a lot of misogyny in them that nevertheless do feminist work, and you can have films that have a very strong feminist edge that nevertheless trade in misogynist tropes and diatribe. The two, paradoxically, often travel together. 

B&W: One of the lectures I was most interested in was the class on Gaslight, because that film isn’t typically shelved as horror, but a thriller or crime film. I think many women watching it would likely find horror in it, and you gave it a new definition as a “domestic horror.” I’d love it if you could speak on why you think it’s a necessary term to adopt and how it fits into the horror landscape.

EJ: The domestic horror genre goes back at least to the ’40s with Gaslight, if we want to call that horror. But there’s a huge uptick in it in the late ’60s and through the ’70s. The book I wrote, Scream With Me, is about that uptick. In the domestic horror genre, what filmmakers are exploring is this idea that the home, which is notionally a space of safety and retreat and protection, in particular for women, is actually a space of danger, exposure, vulnerability, and unsafety. As we know now, that is demographically and statistically accurate. Women are disproportionately more likely to be subjected to acts of violence in their home than in any other location, by huge margins. These horror films captured that reality contemporaneous with the rise of real, clear feminism in the late ’60s, and a kind of proto movement about the need to end domestic battery. When popular American culture is starting to recognize that battery of women and children in the home is a real problem, there’s a correlative uptick in horror. Domestic horror films are both reflecting and accelerating that increasing cultural awareness that the home isn't necessarily a place of safety, but often is the dead opposite of that. So there are many factors that kind of make that rise in that genre happen when it does, but I do think the biggest one is this surge in grassroots, feminist awareness about the home as a place of danger. 

B&W: That also reminds me of our class discussion of Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby. We talked about how some of the most realistic depictions of female suffering in cinema are relayed by predatory men, like Polanski. I’m always drawn to Laura Mulvey’s idea that classical narrative cinema is always composed by the male gaze. I’m wondering why you think these predatory men are adept at representing these harsh realities, and if you think it coalesces with Mulvey’s idea.

EJ: With respect to someone like Polanski, or to pick a different film, Kubrick’s The Shining, he absolutely psychologically tortured Shelly Duvall the making of that film, and it’s part of why her performance is so good. The quality of her performance makes meaningful claims about how utterly horrific, indeed, domestic violence is. So it’s a really tight, complicated knot of seemingly contradictory things. Like, how can it be the case that Kubrick actually, psychologically harmed Duvall and that nevertheless, there’s a feminist reading available in that film? And it is true. Paradoxes are not made untrue just because they make us uncomfortable or because they’re paradoxical. William Friedkin, who made The Exorcist, significantly hurt Ellen Burstyn’s and Linda Blair’s bodies in the making of that film. When you’re watching Ellen Burstyn represent a battered woman, you are actually watching Ellen Burstyn get battered. That duality is very, very uncomfortable, and we would do a disservice to the films and the actors in them if we didn’t pay attention to this directorial paradox. Many of the most trenchant and feminist depictions of domestic unsafety were made by men who themselves were creating unsafe situations for the women they were filming and for women in real life. Part of the reason for that is these predatory men are interested in the vulnerability of women. And they thought a lot about how to elicit it, sculpt it, package it, and to produce it. Between Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist, and The Shining, each one seems to have tapped a vein in American culture to make Americans more aware of the dangers to which women were subject in the home. So whatever misogynist predatory drives may have been in play in the making of the films, the culture skewed very strongly to have empathy for the survivors.

B&W: I wanted to point out Rosemary’s Baby in particular, which traverses women’s reproductive rights with a strangely progressive take for the time. This issue has obviously been topical for a while, but after the release of this film, Roe v. Wade passed in the Supreme Court in 1973. How did you decide to zero in on the period from 1968-1980 in your book?

EJ: The whole book started because I was teaching Rosemary’s Baby in History of Horror the day before the decision to reverse Roe V. Wade was leaked. I talked about that film as a barely veiled allegorical meditation on the dangers of denying women reproductive autonomy. After the Roe decision was leaked, I thought, ‘maybe I should keep working on this and write this up as some kind of article.’ I had some time off, so I started doing that. And then I asked myself, ‘I wonder if there are other films in the same time period that are thinking along similar lines.’ Almost as soon as I thought about it, I realized there’s a bunch of them that all cluster around this period of around 1968 to 1980. I thought about a lot of films to include, but I ultimately decided on the six in my book both because they all take on ideas about domestic and reproductive violence. They all, at one level or another, are thinking about women’s equality. Do women have equal status in the eyes of the law, one way or the other? And what does that mean? What does it look like? What does it entail? What does it cost to bring that about? So I decided that I wanted to crossfade these six movies with three bodies of law that were getting propagated, which were Roe v. Wade, the Equal Rights Amendment (which was never actually passed), and early laws that were designed to criminalize domestic violence. I also decided that I really only wanted it in this book to talk about films where I could plausibly say that they had a significant cultural impact.

B&W: Are there any recent horror movies you’ve seen that you feel accomplish similar feminist ideals as those mentioned in your book?

EJ: The domestic horror genre is exploding right now. The three from 2024 that I talk about in the book are Immaculate, The First Omen (Natalie Erica James’ prequel to The Omen), and Apartment 7A, which is a prequel to Rosemary’s Baby. Those three are very clearly referencing former works. Bracketing those, I think Heretic, the movie with Hugh Grant, is a domestic horror film that doesn’t look like one initially because the girls are not in a romantic relationship with him. The reality is that once they’re in his home, they’re unsafe. Weapons is a variation on this, where the predatory domestic assailant is female, which is an interesting move. I would definitely put Hereditary in this category, as the primary agent of bad is female. It’s the mother and her mother, although it’s worth noting that both of them wind up serving an even more elevated male demon, so patriarchy is still in play. The movie The Witch is an absolutely fascinating work of domestic horror that’s made more fascinating by being set in the late 17th century, when rights and regulations around the physical treatment of women and children’s bodies were totally different than they are now. That film is one of the most sophisticated treatments of domestic horror in the 21st century. Poor Things is a Frankenstein movie, but in the end it turns out that the driver of all the horror was an abusive man who was quick to pull a gun. So that’s definitely also a domestic work, though it doesn't look like it until quite late in the film. Jordan Peele, too. Get Out is definitely a domestic horror. He’s saying these dynamics that are true around women also pertain to racial mobility in the domestic sphere. So, that’s one of my favorite domestic horrors of the 21st century also.