Eleanor Johnson Hurst Talk - "Scream with Me: How Horror does Politics"
Eleanor Johnson is Professor of English at Columbia University. She has published three scholarly monographs on medieval literature, theology, and environmental history, all with University of Chicago: Practicing Literary Theory (2013), Staging Contemplation (2018), and the award-winning Waste and the Wasters (2023). Her newest work pivots to think about the history of women's rights and horror: her 2025 book Scream with Me: Horror Films and the Rise of American Feminism (Simon and Schuster) analyzes the relationship between horror and women's liberation in the 1970s, and her forthcoming 2026 book Monstrous Bitch: A History of Terrifying Women (Princeton) analyzes the long history of the demonization of women in Western culture. Her current books in progress center on Dante's Inferno and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.
This is a public lecture that will examine the horror genre in cinema with an eye toward how it has a perhaps unique power to do real, serious political work in the world. This talk will focus on the greatest horror films of the 1970s---Rosemary's Baby, the Exorcist, The Stepford Wives, The Omen, Alien, and The Shining--to look at how these films energized and signal-boosted major currents in American feminism. In the end, the talk will pivot to talk about the political work that horror can do and is doing now for us in the 2020s.