The Women Who Shaped the Horror Genre
We live in a world full of unacknowledged horror.
It’s one of the central paradoxes of American society: We are, by almost any reasonable standard, an unusually violent people. Just look at the statistics: An average of one school shooting a week since 2013, 136 mass shootings in 2016 alone, a gun-related murder rate that’s 25 times higher than other developed countries. All in all, Americans are seven times more likely to die from violence than people in other high-income nations.
Yet we are also, implausibly enough, a nation that considers talking about or looking at violence to be in bad taste. Politicians warn us, stone-faced, not to politicize any given massacre. Teenagers, newly preoccupied by their own mortality, are warned not to get morbid. Some steely, non-optional strain of optimism insists that we keep on believing everything will turn out all right, even when everything very clearly won’t.
This is particularly true for women, whose bodies and lives are ringed in by violence they aren’t meant to acknowledge. Again, a quick flip through the stats tells the story: One in three women will be physically abused by a romantic partner in her lifetime, an average of twenty women per minute and ten million women per year. One out of six women has survived an attempted or actual rape. Over a third of all female murder victims…
