Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
I'm t T and I'm Zakiyah and this is Dope Labs.
Welcome to Dope Labs, a weekly podcast that mixes hardcore
science with pop culture and a healthy dose of friendship.
We are in the thick of spooky season, and this
(00:24):
I think is one of our favorite times of year
in our friendship, don't you think. Yes, yes, I mean
bring on the fall fashions, yeah, turtle nicks and leather jackets,
but also bring on the scary movies. Absolutely. I feel
like we bonded over scary movies very early in our friendship.
You got me hip too, the insidious movies, and those
(00:47):
are still some of my all time favorites. Like It
scared me so much. There's something about dreaming. Y'all need
to watch it. Y'all gotta watch it. I think so
it feels good, But that's an old well, I don't
know if I would say it's an old scary movie.
But there's been a new wave of scary movies like
Get Out Us and most recently we've seen Centers and Weapons. Yes,
(01:08):
and I like this genre of scary movie because it
feels like we've moved from gore and blood and all
of that to like some symbolism and it's a little
new ones do you know? And that's not a new thing.
So you know, we've seen a little bit of symbolism
here there, and when you go back and look, it's like,
what do they say, hindsight is twenty twenty? Lit'll make
you start asking some questions, right, So before we jump
(01:32):
into anything, let's go into the recitation. So what do
we know? I feel like we know horror films have
been around for a long time, and some people hate them,
some people love them. I know your mom is one
of the folks that doesn't like horror films. No, no, no,
she doesn't want to be scared. Life is scary enough.
We also know that there are some similarities that we've
(01:54):
seen in these movies, so like witches, Satan and exorcisms,
ghosts and zombies, right, And I feel like that is
truth for a lot of different horror films. So what
do we want to know? Well, I think my love
for horror films started early. So there are some classics
that I've seen, but I saw them with like an
(02:14):
immature mind, if that makes sense, Like before I knew
what I was looking for. So I want to look
back and say, like, what are some of the blind spots?
What are some of the classic cases of like symbolism
that I don't even recognize? Yes, and I want to
know how horror films because we might not think of
it on its face, but it's art, you know. And
I want to know how this form of art is
(02:35):
a commentary on the times that these movies were released,
you know what I mean. Yeah, we think about it
forget Out and us, but you don't look back at
Alfred Hitchcock and say, oh, yeah, he was really talking
about what was going on there. You know, it's so true.
And I also want to know how recent horror films
are stacking up against the ogs. You know. I feel
(02:56):
like when we're talking about horror films, we talk about
the same ones. We talk about Carrie, we talk about
Friday the Thirteenth, Nightmare on Elm Street, we talk about
the Shining, you know, all of the same ones. But
I want to know, like how the present day horror films,
how they match up to some of the ones that
are stuck in our minds. Yeah, I think that's good.
(03:16):
What's going to be on your mount rushmore of horror films?
If you can't tell by now. This episode is all
about horror films, and I love what you said, t T.
There is an art to this. It is art, and
sometimes we overlook that. And so we said, who can
help us unpack it? You know, who can help us
find the science behind it? And so for this episode
we pulled out the really big guns and we have
(03:37):
doctor Eleanor Johnson.
Speaker 2 (03:43):
I'm Eleanor. I'm a professor of medieval literature and horror
films at Columbia University and my new books, Scream with Me,
was just published by Atria Books in September of twenty
twenty five.
Speaker 1 (03:53):
Your book Scream with Me introduced us to the concept
of domestic horror, and domestic horror is where you have
stories where the terror come from within the home instead
of like external monsters. So tera from within the home
would be abuse, control, bodily violation, and routines of violence.
And also in your book, you focus on six movies,
so Rosemary's Baby, The Exorcist, The Step for Wives, the
(04:16):
Omen Alien, and The Shining And you also focus on
a specific time period nineteen sixty eight to nineteen eighty.
Why was that time period so important to you?
Speaker 3 (04:27):
Several reasons. One, I was interested.
Speaker 2 (04:30):
In writing a book that would look at horror during
the period in which sort of feminism was really really
surging into the public consciousness and was worn with women's
bodily autonomy and so through obviously in Roe v. Wade
passed in nineteen seventy three, the Equal Rights Amendment, which
didn't pass, but was on the docket for like almost
(04:52):
that whole entire decade, and also the early laws and
social changes that tried to remediate mess violence or what
was then called wife battery.
Speaker 1 (05:02):
So you mentioned the Equal Rights Amendment, and it was
first introduced in nineteen twenty three, and it proposed to
make changes to the US Constitution that would make sure
men and women are treated equally under the law. Now,
Congress approved it in nineteen seventy two, but not enough
states have agreed to it yet for it to officially
become law. That's wild to me.
Speaker 2 (05:24):
So there were three really really big movements around women's
rights in the nineteen seventies, reproductive autonomy, safety in the home,
and equal rights before the law, and they were all
kind of getting cooked simultaneously in the public eye. And
I thought, you know, the nineteen seventies is a really,
really important moment because it's analogous to the twenty twenties,
(05:44):
for better or for worse, Like, there are huge backslides
happening right now in the avenues. Women have to extricate
themselves from domestic violence situations.
Speaker 3 (05:53):
As we know Roe v. Wade has been reversed.
Speaker 2 (05:55):
So whatever protections the American public believed that Rowe conferred,
those are gone. And the Equal Rights Amendment, like fifty
years later, has not passed, right, Like, I am not
an equal person in the eyes of the law, neither
of you, and we just go around and live our lives.
Women in the seventies had to live in this crazy
roller coaster where they were held out the carit of
(06:18):
equality repeatedly, and it kept getting yoinked back, and I
think that caused a cultural trauma unto itself that our
popular culture has not metabolized. Well, so instead we've just
suppressed it. We've forgotten that fifty years ago there was
an intensive effort to recognize the full equality end of
the law of women, and it failed.
Speaker 3 (06:41):
Right.
Speaker 2 (06:41):
That's embarrassing, right, And instead we sort of try not
to think about it.
Speaker 3 (06:45):
And I thought, I want to think about it.
Speaker 2 (06:47):
I want other people to think about it, and I
want other people to recognize that the twenty twenties are
looking way too much like the nineteen seventies for my taste, right, except,
if anything, the trajectory's worse now. At least in the seventies,
the general pitch was shallowly up. Women did get reproductive autonomy,
they did get relatively secure protections against violence in the home.
It got easier to end, for example, an abusive marriage.
(07:10):
But at the same and now all those things are declining.
It's getting harder and harder for women to extricate themselves,
for anyone to extricate themselves from an abusive situation. So
that was the reason I wanted to look at these
two periods, is because of the very uncomfortable resonances between
the nineteen seventies and the twenty twenties.
Speaker 1 (07:27):
In your book, you talk about how art often reflects
what's going on socially within our worlds. Can you talk
about how horror films, how art in general does that,
and how you see horror films doing that.
Speaker 2 (07:41):
Yeah, art often receives these impressions from us that we
can't fully articulate and then the art of repactes them
so that we can see them. And because of that,
because of art's capacity to do that, art doesn't in
fact just reflect cultural reality. It can accelerate cultural change
and cultural understanding. And I think that is really part
of what I wanted to convey and scream with me,
(08:02):
is that these works of art, these films, are receiving
a lot of input about women's rights and the status
and level of freedom of women's bodies in America in
the nineteen seventies and are reflecting that back and thinking
about it, and also trying to accelerate a certain kind
of social change around those dynamics. Part of the power
that horror has, and that horror cinema has even more
(08:25):
than like say a horror novel, it's that horror kind
of hits us in our heart. It hits us where
we feel, It hits us where we fear, and it
also hits us where we think about who we are
and how we occupy our bodies. So we watch a
horror movie and for let's just say, for example, Rosemary's Baby, right.
Speaker 1 (08:41):
For those who haven't seen Rosemary's Baby, it's a psychological
horror film that centers around a woman who is experiencing
her first pregnancy, and she starts to suspect that her
neighbors and even her husband are part of a satanic
cult that are plotting to use our baby for dark purposes.
I highly recommend watching this.
Speaker 3 (09:00):
You're watching Rosemary's Baby.
Speaker 2 (09:02):
You're gonna identify with Rosemary, I don't care who we
are or where you're from. Causes us to feel her
agony at becoming pregnant in a way that she was
not even understanding at the time, and then it came
excruciating pregnancy to term. So horror films because they activate
our fear, because they activate our feelings, because they activate
(09:23):
even our confusion and our panic, are very powerful ways
of making us empathize with a protagonist. And that empathogenic element,
the capacity to make us feel empathy, is part of
what gives horror, if anything, extra purchase on both explaining
and accelerating social change, because if you can be made
to feel compassionate empathic identification with someone unlike you, right,
(09:48):
that's a very powerful engine for social change and social movement.
Speaker 1 (09:52):
Can you think of some scary movies where you felt
some type of compassion for the protagonists absolutely. I mentioned
Insidious and not start of our conversation, and in that one,
I feel like who I felt empathy for like shifted
with each film. So at first I was feeling really
scared and a lot of empathy for the little boy.
Then I was feeling a lot of empathy for the dad.
(10:13):
Then you get this backstory on like who that demon.
I don't know who that demon person was. You were
feeling bad for him split second, you know, because you
find out like their villain origin story and what led
to them doing all of these things, and you're like, dang,
it's so wild how these movies can really like shift
your compassion for a person where you you might have
a moment where the villain you're like, oh, how this
(10:35):
might happen? So just think about society in general and
the patriarchal society that that we exist in the lens
through which you're watching these horror films through. It's a
feminist lens, right, Like, how can we if we're going
to think along that same train of thought, like how
does the male gaze play into all of this?
Speaker 2 (10:52):
Yeah, such a great question, right, And in the book,
I have this chapter called bad Men Making Good Art
because of course, So you're raising a really important question,
right when we watch Rosemary's suffering in that film, we
feel along with Rosemary, the question of what exactly we
feel during the rape scene a little more ambiguous, right,
And remembering that that scene was shot by none other
than Roman Polanski, legacy as an abuser of women is
(11:16):
well established, right.
Speaker 1 (11:17):
Okay, So a little bit about Roman Polanski before we
keep going. Roman Polanski is a famous film director known
for films like Rosemary's Baby and The Pianist. And in
nineteen seventy seven he was charged with sexually assaulting a
thirteen year old girl in Los Angeles, and then he
fled the country before he could be sentenced. And ever
since then he's been living outside of the US and
(11:38):
continuing to make films. And so there's this ongoing controversy
surrounding Roman Polanski, which complicates things.
Speaker 2 (11:46):
Yeah, it does, and it should complicate things because for
us to have the capacity, for any individual viewer to
have the capacity, in effect, to code switch between identifying
with a predator and identifying with a victim, that's an
important part of how we think about it violence and
how propagates itself. To realize that it's a hair's breath
that separates any of us from transitioning from having power
(12:07):
to having no power at all.
Speaker 1 (12:24):
One that after reading your book that kept popping into
my head was No. Sfaratu, the original and the remake,
and the violence against women in No. S Faratu as
like one of the first horror films back in I
think nineteen twenty two, And so it seems like this
has always been a through line in horror films, and
(12:47):
I'm not really sure why that is, Like, what do
you feel like artists are trying to reinforce by having
this narrative that exists throughout history.
Speaker 2 (13:00):
I think that our culture has been aware of and
anxious about predatory masculinity for a very very very long time,
like since way back before second wave feminism really even
coss the ground in the nineteen fifties.
Speaker 3 (13:17):
And I think that.
Speaker 2 (13:18):
We see that anxiety reflected much more clearly in cinema
than anywhere else.
Speaker 1 (13:24):
And this is such a great point because as a society,
predatory masculinity is a shared fear amongst all people. That's
why when we go into a movie theater, we all
scream when the man appears in the corner exactly. Okay,
it's not just women's screaming, it's not just what set
of people screaming. Exactly, everybody's screaming.
Speaker 2 (13:40):
If we go way back, and I'll sort of join you.
In the nineteen thirties, I was just teaching in a
class I'm teaching this semester called the History of American
Horror Cinema. I was teaching a set of films called
White Zombie, I Walked with a Zombie, and then the
film Gaslight. And in all three of those films, the
core dynamic is that there's a controlling, abusive man who
(14:00):
dehumanizes a woman in one way another, either by actually
turning her into a zombie, or psychologically abusing her so
that she's vulnerable to becoming turned into a zombie, or
by gaslating her so badly this is the case in
the movie Gaslight, that she becomes effectively mentally ill and
thus subject to his whims. What's special to me in
(14:20):
part about what happens in the Hayday of Domestic Horror
in the nineteen seventies is that the first of all
the women either do not get saved, as in the
case of Rosemary, or they save themselves, as in the
case of Ellen Ripley from Alien Right.
Speaker 3 (14:36):
And on top of that.
Speaker 2 (14:37):
It's very clear that the cruel, predatory masculinity is giving
the monster direct access to the women in the film,
so there's no instrumental purpose to it. And that sort
of dynamic is true in almost all of the films,
with the possible exception of The Shining, where Jack Nicholson
(14:58):
really does seem to derive wrecked immediate pleasure from worsering
and dehumanizing.
Speaker 3 (15:03):
Shelley Duvall who plays Wendy.
Speaker 1 (15:05):
Yes, I love The Shining. This is another classic horror
film and it follows Jack Torrance, which is played by
Jack Nicholson. He's a writer who takes a job as
a winter caretaker of this isolated hotel in the middle
of nowhere. There's all this snow, and his wife Wendy
and his son Danny, so they're with him, and as
they're getting settled in this hotel, Jack starts to some
(15:27):
starts to happen to Jack and he starts to lose
his mind. Jack started adding strange and very strange. But
his son Danny has psychic capabilities, which is called the Shining,
which is where the name of the film comes from
and it's a tale of Danny and his mother just
trying to survive their father and husband. It's another film
(15:48):
that I feel like is etched in the memories of
all people, Like we all remember Red Rum and the
Blood in the Hallway and everything like that, and when
we think about Wendy and what she went through in
that hotel, we fear for Wendy a lot, and so
(16:09):
understanding that Jack Nicholson could go from a guy who's
a husband that we father that we're just going along
with and then something switches, but there's no switch with
Wendy and so she has to endure. Essentially, it really
changes what you're scared of when you think of it
in that way. When you add this lens of feminism
(16:30):
to these films, it really makes you think of them differently,
Like it was scary a little bit before, yeah, but
then like put yourself in those shoes exactly like I mean,
it makes you think that you might not have to
think far, you might be right next to your foot.
Speaker 2 (16:44):
One of the sort of I don't know if this
was like a designed choice on the part of Stanley
Kubrick and everyone, or if it was an accident, but
I'm going to make something.
Speaker 3 (16:52):
Of it regardless.
Speaker 2 (16:53):
I think it's so important that the main character, the
main malicious evil character in the film is named Jack
Torrance and the actor who plays that character is named
Jack Nicholson, because it highlights that what's being described in
the film is fiction, but it's not fiction. This really happens.
And I think part of the reason that Shelley Duval's
(17:15):
performance is so frightening is like in the scene when
Jack Nicholson as Jack Torrance is battling her up the
staircase and trying to kill them, and she's sort of
like Jack. No, Shelley Duvall is like talking to a
real person named Jack. So you know, when when horror
depicts violence against women, it often does so allegorically, like
in the Exorcist, right, it makes the evil man in
(17:37):
the house into a demon.
Speaker 1 (17:39):
Their Exorcist is an oldie but a good Oh yeah
tells the story of Reagan, and she begins to show
some disturbing and violent behavior after becoming possessed by a
demonic force. Now her mom is like, somebody got help
me with this child. We've seen them, We've seen a
helpless mother before. You know, and so she seeks help
from two priests and they're trying to get the demon
(18:01):
out of her through an exorcism.
Speaker 2 (18:03):
And to your other point, that like, once you have
this lens fitted to your eye for thinking about domestic
horror and the men in a domestic scenario as the
source of the evil, you kind of see it everywhere.
I talk about some contemporary reboots of the original films
from the seventies in the book, like Immaculate, the First Omen,
Apartment seven A. But if you count a wider kind
of net, there has been just a ton of domestic
(18:25):
horror in the last few years. The movie Speak No Evil,
which came out as before the movie Weapons, Yes, a
very interesting variant on domestic horror, where like children prison
(18:48):
in a basement by this old witchy woman and the
language she uses to keep her the child who's kind
of like her lackey if you tell anyone, I will
kill your parents. That happens to be a well established
ruse that abusers use to keep children afraid to disclose
what's going on in their homes. So that film is
absolutely about domestic violence and domestic abuse of absolutely ridden right,
(19:12):
you see it, It's all over the place, right, It's
like happening constantly. The movie Heretic that was definitely a
variation were kind of genre. The only difference is that
the two girls that he abuses are strangers to him
until they get into his home. But once he's in,
they're in his home, they're every bit as subject to
him as Wendy Torrance is to Jack Torrance and the
Shining Have.
Speaker 1 (19:33):
You seen weapons? I've seen weapons, and I actually really
liked it. I thought it was such a smart movie,
in a very well done movie. It really makes you
think about a lot of things. And one thing that
I through our conversations with you, Eleanor that made me
think about something is that there are always witchy women
and not any witchy men. What is that about?
Speaker 2 (19:57):
Because in history, like I'm a medievalist by training, I
study medieval history, in medieval literature, I do a lot
of early modern literature and history. In the actual witch
hunts that took place in Europe and the United States,
men were witches too, not as frequently, but it was
well established that a witch could be male. We've lost
that cultural vocabulary over time. When we say which, I
think the default assumption is that we mean female, right
(20:21):
in terms of dark magic or whatever.
Speaker 3 (20:23):
And I think you're right.
Speaker 2 (20:24):
I think that when a female character in a film
is cast as really bad, she often gets monsterized in
a supernatural way, whereas men often just are monstrous, like
in a sort of daily quotitian like, oh, I.
Speaker 3 (20:36):
All murder my wife kind of a way. So I
think there's.
Speaker 2 (20:39):
Laytan misogyny baked into that, right, like that a woman
is bad, She's not just a bad woman. She's a monster, right,
airwolf like in Jennifer's body or in apps, or she's
like a vampire, or she's like a witch.
Speaker 1 (20:53):
Right.
Speaker 2 (20:54):
So I think that that's very much in play. I
also think the other thing that's interesting about the gendering
in that film, and it's related to the way that
film is mobilizing an awareness of how domestic abuse, and
in particular, the sexual abuse of children works.
Speaker 1 (21:08):
Right.
Speaker 3 (21:09):
Children statistically are far more.
Speaker 2 (21:12):
Likely to be sexually abused by someone they know and
are relating than by a stranger. Right. Growing up's parents,
they go around the world sort of afraid of the
kind of like iconic man in the van who grabs
their kid off the streets. When that happens. That's a calamity.
It's extraordinarily rare. It's much more different for a known
relative to say, molest a child than anybody else. And
(21:33):
so the fact that she's related to him, like his
mother's aunt, I guess that is what creates the condition
of vulnerability. So the film is I think doing really
important consciousness raising work around abuse of children, particularly the
sexual abuse of children, which isn't really in the film.
The other film, if I may, that I think is
a brilliant exploration of that dynamic is the absolutely outstanding
(21:56):
twenty eighteen film by a twenty four hereditary.
Speaker 1 (22:00):
Yeah, great about it.
Speaker 2 (22:01):
Yeah, Like, part of what's so interesting in that film
is that is very clearly a domestic horror film. But
the Tony Collette character, who's bad, and she's bad in
spite of herself. She doesn't want to be bad. She's
bad because her mother was bad. So that film is
exploring how there can be not only patriarchal and patrilinear
forms of violence in the home, but matriarchal and matrilinear
(22:23):
forms of violence in the home. And it's so important
that in that film, the progenitor of evil is the
dead grandmother transmitting the evil through her daughter and in
some ways also through the granddaughter and definitely the grandson.
So that film, I think, is exploring the same or
at least an analogous thing to what Weapons is exploring,
which is what do we do when the violence is
(22:44):
coming from a woman or from any really unexpected corner?
Speaker 3 (22:48):
Right, So the.
Speaker 2 (22:49):
Film invites us into this realm where we're imagining a
world in which, like the mom is bad, the grandma
is bad, but the person who is really the ultimate
driver of all this evil is the male demon. So
like this idea as in the Exorcist, And I have
to say I think that they had the Exorcist in mind.
Speaker 1 (23:07):
So when I think of other movies where we have
a woman who is the main character and there is
all of this awfulness happening around her and she wins
prevails at the end, can you talk a little bit
about what that is trying to signal? And then I
had a specific question about a more recent film Midsommer,
(23:31):
where we see that happening. Could you talk about that
a little bit?
Speaker 3 (23:34):
Yeah, I'd love to.
Speaker 2 (23:35):
So as to the women kind of winning in the end,
I don't have an answer that I'm totally satisfied with
for that question, because I ask it to myself often.
My provisional answer is, I think that you know, American
film goers are like everyone living through the twenty first century,
really tired. No matter what your politics are, no matter
(23:57):
how to vote for, I think we can all say
that were exhausted, emotionally exhausted. Our culture has been in
a state of embattled fighting for a really, really long time,
and I think that we as a culture need both
to continue to practice the kind of vulnerability that horror
teaches us to practice, and we sometimes need to win.
(24:19):
One of my absolute favorite horror movies of all time
a minute ago, Jordan Peel's perfect film Get Out. Yes,
that film, as you may well know, had an original ending.
Jordan Peel changed the ending specifically because he felt that
they needed to get He needed to get them away.
He wanted to land the film on a happier note
than what the original film ending was. And for those
(24:41):
who don't know the originally shot ending to the film,
the main character doesn't get away and winds up getting
the rest of his life in prison. Right if there's
like a truly brutal ending to a horror film like
that one. That's it right. Not only did he have
to deal with this horrific violence that people try to
perpetrate on his body, he then spends the rest of
(25:02):
his life in the penal system, which is all too
often a reality for black Americans anyway.
Speaker 3 (25:08):
But Peel shot that ending and you can see it.
You can see it on YouTube. It's really interesting.
Speaker 2 (25:13):
Yes, I the theatrical release is very very different, and
he has said, and I think this is right.
Speaker 3 (25:18):
You know, sometimes we need the win.
Speaker 2 (25:20):
I think that filmmakers who are doing domestic horror are
feeling some of that energy. Sometimes we need the win.
Sometimes we want the girl to get away in the end.
So but then you do you get other movies like
the movie Men, oh.
Speaker 1 (25:31):
Oo, Men that came out in twenty twenty two, and
it follows Harper and so Harper is a woman who
goes to the English countryside to deal with her grief
and heal from trauma after her husband's death. Now, once
she's there, she begins to encounter a series of strange
and increasingly threatening men who all share the same face,
(25:51):
and they're reflecting her fears and guilt. So the film
kind of blends like psychological horror and body horror to
explore these themes of grief, gender violence, and the lingering
effects of abuse.
Speaker 2 (26:03):
It's a great fath and I have a substack about
that actually on my substack Eleanora's horror dot substack dot com.
And I love that movie because I think that movie
is a beautiful meditation on how patriarchy itself is to
blame for domestic abuse. It's not one individual man, it's
the fact that all quote unquote men are animated by
(26:25):
this predatory spirit of patriarchy, and we'll just do what
they want to a woman and to her body, into
her space and to her home, into her mind, etc.
And the fact that in the end, the character of
that film survives, and the last shot of the film
was like her kind of perched on a wall, she's
got blood on her and she's waiting for her girlfriend,
her friend who's a woman, to up and be with her.
That is like the happiest ending to a horror film.
Speaker 3 (26:47):
Really, really long time think it.
Speaker 2 (26:49):
Is because they want the answer to be this is
what survival looks like. There is the way of surviving
in which the victim of violence is not like a
broken shell of a person like Rosemary at the end
of Rosemary's Baby. Nor is she as like fantasy impossible,
as like an Ellen Ripley, like jetting away from the
(27:09):
exploding spaceship alien movie.
Speaker 3 (27:12):
She's like a real person.
Speaker 2 (27:13):
She still got blood on her clothes, so she's not
it's not pristine, it's not astheticized.
Speaker 3 (27:18):
But she's there sitting and waiting for her friend.
Speaker 2 (27:20):
And I think we are going to see more sort
of experimental horror that looks at gender and thinks about
what does survival actually look like, what does it look
like to be at the end.
Speaker 3 (27:28):
Of the story.
Speaker 1 (27:29):
Are there any little nuggets that you're noticing in recent
horror films that you feel like, ah, yes, they are
speaking specifically to this. I know that we talked about weapons,
but are there any other films that you can cite?
Speaker 2 (27:44):
First of all, I'm very pleased to report that I
think that the horror industry, such as it is, is
getting braver and bolder, claiming political relevance for itself.
Speaker 3 (27:54):
And I think that's a good thing.
Speaker 2 (27:55):
And I hope that anyone who listens to this, who
might be an aspiring filmmaker go make horror movies. Because
it's a good avenue for change, positive change. Twenty twenty
four was the year in which women's reproductive coercion was horror.
That was a really, really important year. I think we're
going to see more work like that. I really have
no doubt, because I think that filmmakers have realized this
(28:17):
is a powerful vehicle for trying to inspire social change
and changes in public consciousness about many different dynamics, one
of them being the status of women.
Speaker 1 (28:30):
You know, it's so interesting. I've been playing around with
this idea of dilating my pupils. I got it from Moonless,
not physically dilating my pupils, but metaphorically like sitting with
things and looking at them. You know how when your
pupils are dilated is like you can't really see well,
(28:51):
but you just take some time and really look at
things and it kind of comes into focus. I feel
like this lab did that because I'm a horror lover.
But what I've pulled out the feminist angle, the feminist
lens here and seeing all of those patterns without doctor
Johnson explaining it to us like that, absolutely not. I
feel the same way. I mean, I even just recently
(29:13):
watched this movie called The Oddity, and it's a scary film,
and I was glad that I watched it after reading
this book because it let me come into it and
be like, oh, patriarchy, that is what is driving this
whole thing. And it's such a refreshing way to consider
this art form because it helps with us our understanding
(29:35):
of what we are currently experiencing in real time. And
Eleanor brought up how all of these things very nicely
parallel with what's going on present day with women losing
their bodily autonomy, with the rollback of Roe v. Wade
and all these different things like that, and so it's
showing up in film makes complete sense, you know what
I mean? Yeah? Absolutely, if you are partaking in spooky season,
(29:58):
particularly if you are celebrating by watching scary films, I
hope you take something away from this lab to help
you kind of reflect and look at your favorite horror movies.
And even if you don't have one, think about one. Okay,
try them all out and see if you don't see
some of these themes that we talked about today in them.
Boo boo. You can find us on x and Instagram
(30:27):
at Dope Labs podcast ct is on x and Instagram
at dr Underscore, t Sho, and you can find Zakiya
at z said So. Dope Labs is a production of
Leimanada Media. Our supervising producer is Keegan Zimma and our
producer is Issara A. Sevez. Dope Labs is sound designed,
edited and mixed by James Farber. Limanada Media is Vice
(30:50):
President of Partnerships and Production is Jackie Danziger. Executive producer
from iHeart podcast is Katrina Norvil. Marketing lead is Alison Canter.
Original music composed and produced by Taka Yasuzawa and Alex
sugi Ura, with additional music by Elijah Harvey. Dope Labs
is executive produced by us T T Show Dia and
(31:12):
Zakiah Watki