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

Also would it kill you to just be honest and say you are uninterested in horror as it intersects with all feminism? This is only about white women. The scope doesn’t extend beyond that!

It also props up liberalism as the be all end all - an annoying stance to take given what liberalism has let slide (war crimes, deportation etc etc.)

I also find her inability to talk about how many directors were abusers to be bad cultural critique! Rosemary’s Baby is in my opinion a feminist work but that movie was directed by a man who raped a 13 year old girl. What does this say about feminism that horrible men can adapt feminist stories? What does it say about us that we can like things made by monstrous men? Questions the author doesn’t care about.

It is OKAY to like media that is not feminist, it is fine to read things through a feminist lens even if it does not present that way, it’s okay to point out the flaws in a work that meant well.

What this work does is try to make moral arguments to justify enjoying something. Which to me is a really strange instinct!

There’s something kind of annoying about this? I think it’s that she’s bending over backwards to call works feminist because they can be interpreted in that way. There are no case studies, no actual correlation, she’s just making sweeping statements about how the exorcist helped people consider domestic violence with no thorough argument? Also it’s such a white feminist text.