Scream With Me

Till death do us part.

Watching Curry Barker’s recent directorial debut, Obsession, brought to mind a book I read some months ago: Eleanor Johnson’s Scream with Me: Horror Films and the Rise of American Feminism (1968-1980).

Given the subtitle of Johnson’s book, the link may not be instantly obvious.

Two considerations here. One, despite 1968-1980 being the central timeframe covered by Johnson, her book does address contemporary films from the 2020s that tie in to her main ideas. Given this broader remit, Obsession could be within the scope of her analysis.

Secondly, the more relevant question: what does Obsession, if anything, have to do with American feminism?

Obsession’s relevance here comes into focus if, instead of seeking explicit political messaging, we turn our attention to the story’s underlying dynamics of control.

Barker’s film centers on a relationship that dramatizes the erosion of a woman’s autonomy under the pressure of another’s fixation. Nikki Freeman (Inde Navarrette) has no say in the matter of Baron “Bear” Bailey’s (Michael Johnston) wish-making upon her. When Bear uses his “One Wish Willow” to make Nikki love him more than anyone in the world, it’s not a request or imploration, but a supernaturally-enforced demand.

And so, while it contains no overt references to reproductive rights or legislative battles, Obsession taps into the same primal fear Johnson identifies: the loss of control over one’s own body, mind, and choices at the hands of an intimate other.

In this case, Nikki literally becomes a prisoner within herself. Depending on your interpretation of events following the original wish-making, her consciousness or soul is either bifurcated, with a split-off version enduring a state of hellish, torturous metaphysical incarceration in an undefined realm while the remnant struggles to try and regain autonomy of her body and emotions, or her true nature is extracted completely, leaving behind a Nikki-shell tyrannically and relentlessly subjugated to Bear’s carelessly uttered proclamation. Either way, while under the wish Nikki is no more.

Bear’s will to power, intrinsically weak as made clear by his initial ability to express his feelings to her when given the chance, has been aided and amplified by an otherworldly force, giving him the ultimate unfair advantage. His cheat code is not a shortcut to happiness, as he may naively had imagined, but the epicenter of a human-obliterating earthquake. Bear’s desire effectively entombs Nikki. What we see of her after she is enslaved by his wish is no longer her, but a costume, a hideously stretched Nikki-garb made to constantly be refitted by Bear’s own inherent insubstantiality.

Now let’s look in more detail at Johnson’s book, to make the connection clear.

“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,” notes Eleanor Johnson in her eloquent Introduction. Her book persuasively argues that the “blazing hot soul of horror” in Rosemary’s Baby (1968), The Exorcist (1973), The Stepford Wives (1975), The Omen (1976), Alien (1979), and The Shining (1980) “was the restriction and controlling of women’s bodies, minds, and rights.” Johnson breaks down the characteristics of “domestic horror” and argues that these films relate to the passing of Roe v. Wade, the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), and other reforms.

Art, Johnson maintains, not only reflects but can actively accelerate social change. Domestic horror specifically does so by tapping in to the power of tragedy, leveraging both phobos and eleos so that “we feel not just pity for them [endangered protagonists], but actual compassion and empathy.”

Criticism that genuinely brings a new, unifying perspective to well-known narratives is exciting, enlightening—and infrequent.

Johnson is to be commended for accomplishing all three.

After setting up her theoretical groundwork, she dedicates individual chapters to each of the aforementioned pictures. This chronological approach helps her chart the development of cinematic horror storytelling alongside American feminism.

In “This Is No Dream; This Is Really Happening: Rosemary’s Baby,” Johnson elucidates how the film, released during a heated battle over abortion rights in New York, allegorized the lack of legal recourse for women needing abortions due to rape or fetal anomaly (like those caused by thalidomide), and how the film’s widespread popularity helped shift public consciousness toward the legalization of abortion in New York by 1970.

“There’s a Demon in My House: Domestic Violence in The Exorcist” reads the movie as a complex critique of domestic violence in which the supernatural possession of Regan by a male demon becomes an allegory for the deep-seated historical reality under Anglo-American law of women and children being considered the property, or “possession,” of the male paterfamilias. Despite some anti-feminist undertones, the movie forces the viewer to witness the violent entrapment and torture of a mother and daughter in their own home, capturing the lack of support available to abuse victims in the early 1970s.

Johnson follows a similar interpretive tactic in “Trad Wives Forever: The Stepford Wives and the Equal Rights Amendment,” where sociological horror-satire shows how the ERA’s conservative opponents weaponized fears that equal rights would devalue homemaking and dismantle traditional gender roles.

“Benign Patriarchy Turns Malignant: The Omen” probes a story in which an act of seemingly loving paternalism—“benign patriarchalism”—directly results in a woman’s physical battery, the forced termination of her subsequent pregnancy, and her eventual death.

In “Reproductive Violence in Outer Space: Alien” the titular alien’s life cycle, which involves the non-consensual implantation and lethal “birth” of its offspring, allegorizes the horror of forced pregnancy and the expendability of individuals in the service of a corporate agenda, while also providing a powerful counter-narrative to anti-ERA arguments regarding women’s capacity for military combat and leadership. Concluding the book’s main section,

“The Shining: Only Just Fiction” case studies a film which leverages the Overlook Hotel’s isolation to literalize the entrapment of a woman and son with an alcoholic, child-abusing husband who embraces the archaic ideology of “correction” to justify violence.

The volume’s last two chapters bring us up to the present. “Bad Men Making Good Films: An Interlude” examines the implications of Roman Polanski, William Friedkin, and Stanley Kubrick as documented abusers of women. “Domestic Horror After Dobbs” chronicles a resurgence of domestic horror films following the 2022 Dobbs decision, with Immaculate (2024), The First Omen (2024), and Apartment 7A (2024) confronting the renewed systemic threat to women’s reproductive autonomy.

As Johnson’s book progresses, there’s a growing emphasis on detailed scene-by-scene recaps that dilutes the theoretical vigor and insights of the earlier chapters. And while the closing sections provide welcome material, they do occasionally overreach.

“Between 1980 and 2009, the domestic horror genre went into hibernation,” Johnson affirms, but a quick survey calls that claim into question: The Entity (1983), for instance, follows a single mother repeatedly assaulted by an invisible presence in her house, with the home itself becoming the site of gendered and domestic terror; The Stepfather (1987) is about a serial killer who keeps inserting himself into new households in search of the “perfect” American family; and The Others (2001) focuses on a mother and her children confined to a haunted house. Other pertinent entries include Misery (1990), Cape Fear (1991), The People Under the Stairs (1991), Single White Female (1992), What Lies Beneath (2000), and The Amityville Horror (2005 remake). The idea that “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” is no doubt psychologically plausible but remains extrapolative rather than factual.

Despite these issues, Scream With Me is a compelling, eye-opening re-examination of horror touchstones through an essential lens.

“The vertiginous reality is that now,” Johnson writes, “in the 2020s, we are once again living through the 1970s.” Though certainly a scary and depressing thought, Johnson rightly concludes with a plea to action, encouraging creators to “help us all to find our voices and help us use them to scream.”

The strength and clarity of Johnson’s writing is such that she never has to raise her own voice to get her points across.

And films like Obsession continue to make her case eloquently with both whispers and screams.