By Johanna Isaacson

In 2015 when I first began writing about feminism, capitalism and horror, Stepford Daughters: Weapons for Feminists in Contemporary Horror was only a twinkle in my eye. I had just finished a PhD program and was working incredibly long hours as a low-paid adjunct. One of my solaces during this period of my life was that I continued to participate in a writing group with friends from my Ph.D. program, Madeline Lane-McKinley and Kenan Sharpe, and together we created the online journal Blind Field where we wrote and solicited articles about feminism, anti-capitalism, and culture. 

These efforts allowed us to bypass the insular aspects of academia while connecting with others yearning for a leftist, feminist engagement with culture and the world. I’ve always been a compulsive writer and once I finished my dissertation, I began to steadily produce articles on horror films. I chose horror because while the genre can be fun and campy, it can also speak deeply about the mental and physical anguish that heteropatriarchal capitalism wreaks on the world, and provide visions of monsters and “final girls” who fight back. 

Five years later, one of the editors at Common Notions, Andy Battle, approached me about developing my thoughts on horror into a book. I checked out Common Notions and was deeply impressed with their publications and political commitment. 

Common Notions’ project was compatible with the work my comrades and I had been doing at Blind Field to create an emergent “structure of feeling” that is leftist, feminist, antiracist, and that promotes popular intellectual work to activists and a wide audience of curious readers. This affinity was further proven when my fellow Blind Field founder and co-editor Madeline also developed her important book Comedy Against Work: Utopian Longing in Dystopian Times with Common Notions Press. 

With Andy’s help I was able to draw together some of my thoughts on gender, capitalism, and horror films. The power of horror, I believe, is its ability to express and contest oppressions that lurk everywhere yet often become invisible as we adapt to the horrors of everyday life. 

Following the Marxist, queer film critic Robin Wood, I argue that horror is a genre that refuses to normalize this deep repression. Instead of burying our longings for freedom and self-expression, horror allows us to manifest our desires, delving into the darkness within and without. 

With Stepford Daughters, I wanted to explore horror’s power to educate and liberate with its uncanny, gothic modes, its evocation of abjection and the “monstrous feminine,” its estrangement of the family form as a “hearth of darkness,” its gothic revisioning of the dream world of national myth as a nightmare of history, and its raging “final girls” who can awaken our own fighting spirit. 

The chapters in Stepford Daughters cover what I see as the most mystified areas of social life in our moment. Most of the films were made after the 2008 real estate market crash and reflect the intensified contradictions that beset us after this financial crisis. 

The first chapter is about the home and family as horror, but also how this family form spills out into waged work. In Hereditary, The Babadook, Under the Shadow, Dark Water, and The Happiness of the Katakuris, home is where the hellfire is. But the monstrosity of enforced familial roles does not end at the front door. 

In chapter two I turn to the films Housekeeping, The Maid, Get Out, La Llorona, and Good Manners to examine racialized waged reproductive labor in horror. The commonplace face of domestic work is the white middle-class housewife, but the reality is that the bulk of reproductive laborers are rendered invisible and hyper-exploited, saddled with the “double burden” of low waged and unwaged domestic work. The films in this chapter render the violence of hyper-exploitation visible. 

Chapter three looks at how the films Maps to the Stars, Parasite, I Blame Society, Cam, and Sorry to Bother You navigate contemporary forms of emotional labor. What kind of horrors follow when workers are estranged from their own smiles? How do we understand our own feelings when love becomes our job? The loveless and unloved figures of horror help us map the cracks in the seemingly smooth surfaces of emotional labor. 

Chapter four examines girls’ coming of age stories in horror films such as It Follows, Assassination Nation, The Fits, The Lure, and Teeth. I ask, what does it mean for “generation rent” to come of age into the “bullshit jobs,” precarious jobs, joblessness and futurelessness of late state capitalism? And how do young women resist the imperative to assimilate as self-entrepreneurs and instead mature into warriors? 

I hope that by the end of the book that readers will see that contemporary horror films do not only diagnose the crisis of care and the feminization of labor that characterize our moment, but also create memorable figures of refusal and resistance. Even though horror is seen by some as a genre that promotes nihilism, I make the case that these films can provide feminist radicals with weapons to confront complacency and hopelessness. 

One of my dreams is that readers will form study groups to watch and discuss the films. We on the left deserve both bread and roses—political change and movie nights! One of the most gratifying opportunities I’ve had in the wake of Stepford Daughters’ publication has been the chance to host film screenings at local theaters and radical social spaces where we discuss the relevance of films such as The Babadook and It Follows to our personal and political lives. 

The themes at work in Stepford Daughters connect to many of the radical books published by Common Notions. One that particularly resonates, though, is Sasha Warren’s Storming Bedlam: Madness, Utopia, and Revolt out this month.

The gendered, capitalist oppression I explore in Stepford Daughters has long been called “the problem with no name.” Women and feminized people’s suffering is a social phenomenon, but one of the travesties that horror films often illustrate is that these problems are often said to be “all in your head.” 

In Storming Bedlam, Warren confronts the individualization and depoliticization of mental health in late stage capitalism, tracing the history of “the psychiatric revolution” along with the vicissitudes of its utopian and dystopian practices and unveiling the horrors that result when mental health care becomes a means of repression, serving only to manage or disappear those deemed worthless by capitalist society, or rendering the needs of people secondary to ideological and totalizing methods of care. Warren’s book is an excellent companion to Stepford Daughters as both tackle, in different registers and realms, our need to politicize mental health and take collective action.

JOHANNA ISAACSON writes academic and popular pieces on horror and politics. She is a professor of English at Modesto Junior College and a founding editor of Blind Field Journal. She is the author of The Ballerina and the Bull and Stepford Daughters, has published widely in academic and popular journals, and runs the Facebook group "Anti-capitalist Feminists Who Like Horror Films."

BOOKS FOR A MADDENING WORLD FROM COMMON NOTIONS PRESS:

Stepford Daughters: Weapons for Feminists in Contemporary Horror by Johanna Isaacson

Storming Bedlam: Madness, Utopia, and Revolt by Sasha Warren

Comedy Against Work: Utopian Longing in Dystopian Times by Madeline Lane-McKinley

The Self-Devouring Society: Capitalism, Narcissism, and Self-Destruction by Anselm Jappe, transleted by Eric-John Russell