user27472828892’s Reviews > Scream With Me: Horror Films and the Rise of American Feminism, 1968-1980 > Status Update

The film's emphasis on choreography updates the domestic horror, making it structural. James's ultimate contribution to the domestic horror genre is to remind us that it's not ever just about the oppression, dehumanization, and abuse of one particular woman. It's about the structures of power, patriarchy, and belief that make the categorical oppression of women a thinkable and tragically desirable-thought.


Yessir

“Not only did these films embody that cultural shift, they also helped to accelerate it, highlighting the dangers of giving a camera to a selfish (Micah) or outright psychopathic (Josef/Aaron 2) man and letting him aim it at women to make horror films. ”

“Ripley survived, ultimately, by killing Mother, not by becoming a mother. Ripley, in the end of the second film, is subjected to yet another feminist ambivalence: She’s allowed to be fierce, but her ferocity is both curbed and structured by her subjection to maternal feeling. The Ripley of Aliens is a safer, more recognizable type of woman than the Ripley of Alien.
Chills

Chills wow so good I love this

“lthough Robert isn’t a deliberate, malevolent abuser, he nevertheless forces Kathy to live in unreality. Fundamentally, that enforced sequestration in unreality is what puts her most at risk from Damien.”

As a benign patriarch, he doesn’t trust Kathy to be able to tolerate the truth. He doesn’t entrust her with reality or with the right to knowledge and autonomy.”

“ultimate goal of this kind of coercion is to induce the victim to question her own reality, her own humanity, and her own basic rights, so that she grows ever more entrapped in the abuser’s web of distortion, mistreatment, and control.”

Wow

“What’s so important about the domestic horror films in this book is that they make viewers—whether or not the viewers are female—carry the fear an

The films, although they showcase women’s suffering, do not simply fetishize that suffering, but rather humanize it, make it palpable, exportable to the viewers’ own minds and bodies”

“in these films, the supernatural simply offered a lens through which to view the altogether too quotidian and too private realities of domestic violence and reproductive abuse. The true horror of the films was not ultimately otherworldly but domestic”

Already wow