In Horror Films, the Newest Nightmare Is Getting Canceled

Men around me speak about cancel culture with such hyperbole and terror, you’d think it was a supernatural force.

This is Women Watching Horror Films, a column by Heather O’Neill on gender and horror cinema.

Everything I learned about sex, I learned in the basement of a girl named Albertine. Albertine had a basement with yellow carpeting. It was dimly lit and tiny. There were piles of broken electronics, random lamps, dolls with matted hair and no pants, coat racks, old suitcases filled with her dead grandparents’ clothes. I would head over on Saturdays, wearing my Adidas shorts and a T-shirt that advertised something or other, like a paint store or a tai chi association. I had hearts drawn on my sneakers and clear, sparkly polish on my fingernails.

Albertine would always have a group of girls sitting cross-legged around her. We would talk about creepy men in the neighborhood who tried to invite us into their houses or who had stopped us on our way home from school to call us sluts. We spoke about teenage boys who made it their mission to have notches on their belts and about being pressured into sexual acts that made us uncomfortable.

We spoke about men who were predators as though they were figures in ghost stories.

I always felt guilty and ashamed about having these discussions. We knew what we were doing was taboo. If the adults knew what we were talking about, they would be horrified and would not love us anymore. There was a sense that, because we were girls, we should not have any of this knowledge. We were supposed to go around having only My Little Ponies and colorful cupcakes in our heads. To speak openly about these things made us dirty and provocative and shameful. Because to be sexual as a girl is to be a slut, and sluts are unlovable.

This was our whisper network, and it was supposed to stay in the basement. But years later, with the Me Too movement, those discussions became roaringly loud.

The things girls and women had been complaining about for years were finally being taken seriously. I tweeted about sexual harassment I had endured while in grad school, and the next morning there was a lineup of news vans outside my door. I had been talking about it for years, but suddenly there were people listening.

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In the past year, cancel culture has entered the landscape of horror films. As rational discourse ceases to contain or convey irrational fears, they turn into metaphors and horror tropes. Horror is also a place where it is permissible to examine fears you might not want to admit to, like the (very male) fear of being “canceled.” The fear that their past actions will be judged by new and unpredictable standards, which will lead to them losing their social status and being publicly shamed and unable to pursue their life work. It doesn’t surprise me that the fear of cancellation is now appearing in horror films. Men around me speak about cancel culture with such hyperbole and terror, you’d think it was a supernatural force.

As rational discourse ceases to contain or convey irrational fears, they turn into metaphors and horror tropes.

In Zach Cregger’s 2022 film Barbarian, AJ, played by Justin Long, is an actor who is being canceled for raping one of his TV costars. To help pay his legal costs, he goes home to Detroit to try and sell a property he owns. He discovers a door in the basement that leads to a deeper cellar. The cellar’s appearance puts us immediately in the realm of the supernatural. It makes no sense for a cellar that deep to be constructed anywhere. It is so deep, it doesn’t seem as though AJ is in a house anymore at all, but rather like he is descending into a mine shaft or a catacomb. That, or perhaps his subconscious—what the basement in horror often symbolizes; a space where we try to keep our impulses and crimes even from ourselves.

There, in the depths of this basement, lives an aging serial killer. He lies in his single bed with a television and a pile of VHS tapes depicting his sadistic rapes and murders of women.

AJ plays one of the VHS tapes. When he sees the contents, he is sickened and asks the killer what is wrong with him. The VHS tapes immediately evoke a past era—this is someone whose acts of violence were committed a long time ago. The serial killer also represents an outdated version of what a rapist looks like: someone who is unequivocally evil. Now, the public has come to understand that in most cases, rape is perpetrated by individuals that people know or work with. We understand the role of power imbalances, which can lead the person with less of it to be manipulated and coerced into sexual relationships without their true consent.

But men were content with this earlier depiction of violence because it allowed their behavior to go unchecked. They could sexually harass their employees, sleep with their students, pressure girls decades younger into sex, create hell for anyone who rejected their advances, and still be lauded and admired. They were able to look at these weapon-wielding lunatics who abducted women they didn’t know off of street corners and make them the targets of their total opprobrium and the worst punishment the law could offer. The only time they could empathize with a woman’s feelings was when she had been beaten to a pulp and left for dead. They felt good about themselves for feeling this way. It meant they were on the right side; they were good guys.

Now, there has been a widespread reeducation of what constitutes assault. It has expanded to include abuses of power and informed consent, among other things. It has changed the face of a perpetrator from a stranger lurking in the shadows to men we know and recognize, like AJ, who is shocked when he is accused of rape during an encounter he insists was consensual.

What AJ doesn’t realize is that the serial killer in the basement is the same as him. He is the rapist and the monster. He is the one whose selfish actions lead to women being hurt. His obliviousness is grating to me. All the men who are shocked, like AJ, that their actions are being interpreted as terrible obviously knew they were hurting women, but they simply didn’t care because there were no repercussions. Women were left to fester with their rage. The inbred daughter of the serial killer, seven feet tall with drooping breasts and covered in filth, emerges from the darkest recesses of the basement, an embodiment of female rage and the way it twists and torments those who have to bear it, and puts an end to AJ.

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During a wave of Me Too denunciations in Quebec, where I live, virtually every man I knew in entertainment expressed the fear that they would be called out. What did you do?! I would always ask, morbidly curious. There’s a terrible curiosity around these events. I mean, humans love a public hanging. But they always said they had no idea what they’d done, or who might instigate these accusations. It would be as much of a shock to them as the public. Their fear wasn’t of specific women, but of this new power women could tap into—an unholy power that, once unleashed, can’t be put back in its bottle. The pervasiveness and hyperbole of their paranoia made it seem to me that men are afraid of being called out by this strange irrational movement, not that they feel any guilt about their behavior or truly believe it to be wrong.

Although Todd Field’s 2022 film Tàr is not a horror film, it uses fantastical and ominous elements to express a similar fear. The acclaimed conductor Lydia Tàr, played by Cate Blanchett, is being pursued by this kind of malicious force. The sound of a woman crying follows Tàr as she jogs through the park. She keeps being woken up in the night by a mysterious sound in her apartment. When she is trying to seduce a new young cellist, she follows her through a doorway and finds herself in a basement labyrinth in an abandoned building. She hears a dog growling and approaching her. It is as though she has entered a portal into hell and is facing Cerberus. As viewers, we know that Lydia Tár is doomed. She is going to be canceled.

This monstrous, spectral force, the thing that will undo her, is accountability for having groomed young musicians. She is fired from her prestigious gig as the conductor for the Berlin Philharmonic, her recording of the complete cycle of Mahler’s symphonies is taken over by a male conductor, her ability to conduct anywhere in the West is over, and she loses her wife and access to her child.

Cancel culture, when it does catch up with a person, is a savage thing. Particularly to an artist whose entire identity is based on her success. It is violent, although no physical hurt is inflicted. To go from being celebrated to being spurned and unemployable is a shocking fate that, to the powerful, may seem worse than death.

Lydia Tàr discusses cancel culture with an older male colleague who compares it to post-WWII Germany when everyone and anyone could be accused of having been a Nazi. Even Lydia Tàr scoffs at this link between sexual impropriety and Nazism. More evidence that men love to use hyperbole when talking about cancel culture. As though it is the very worst thing that happened to humanity.

The conversation around famous men being brought down became so ubiquitous that it entered the public’s collective unconscious—even for people who weren’t famous to start with. I was having a conversation with my building’s plumber. He said anytime a celebrity got canceled, he was worried it could happen to him. I asked him if he had some wild younger years. He said no, not at all. He was never especially popular, and he thanks heaven every day his wife agreed to ever date him. I’m not even sure what it means to have a plumber canceled. Can you no longer flush your toilet if it was installed by a predator?

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In Mark Mylod’s 2022 film The Menu, Ralph Fiennes plays a renowned chef who sexually harassed women and thwarted their careers when they rejected his advances. He has now come around to see that his actions were wrong and has decided to punish himself. But the proposed punishment takes place in such a grandiose way, one wonders if he actually has any sympathy for his victims or if he just likes the pathos of canceling himself. If he is going to be taken down, he’ll do it properly, thank you very much. He invites a group of guests over for an exclusive meal, at the end of which he announces everyone will be killed along with him. But no one is really guilty of anything profound; it’s only him.

One guest is being killed for the crime of starring in a mediocre film that wasted the chef’s day off. The actor then asks why his date is going to be killed. The chef asks where she went to college and whether she has student loans. When it is revealed that she went to an Ivy League school and doesn’t have any debt, Fiennes’s chef says this is enough. He basically determines upper-middle-class and upper-class people are all inherently cancelable.

It is as though, if he is guilty, pretty much everyone else is. Men love to say that cancel culture can take down any man it decides to focus on. They say it in a way that makes me think they have been rehearsing a defense, or at least their speech for the gallows. They want it to be known that they are the victims of an arbitrary movement from which no one is safe. And if they are going down, all of society is going to crash and burn. There is no civilization left if men of genius are going to be called out.

Cancel culture does, at its very roots, challenge the notion that male geniuses are allowed to act as if they are beyond all consequences, which entails, among other things, the right to female bodies as the spoils of their achievements.

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Perhaps to counter the fear of cancel culture, everyone wants to make sure they are on the opposite side of it. As humans we have a default tendency toward binary thinking. People want to make sure they position themselves as the accuser rather than the accused. Accusing people of really anything makes the accuser feel powerful, safe, and morally correct. There’s almost a gamelike aspect to it all, particularly when it plays out on social media. I always feel like I’m playing Russian roulette when I tweet. Once, I made a spelling mistake in a tweet, and the vitriol was fairly intense. I often feel as though I’m one hot take away from being canceled. But that’s the perverse thrill of it. Accepting that you might be collateral to a movement you are involved in is part of life. The French Revolution wasn’t over until Robespierre’s head was in a basket. But, although women, like the fictional Lydia Tár, get canceled too, the irrational fear does not appear to affect women in quite the same way. Perhaps it is because as a woman, you have already been subject to so much shame and humiliation and career setbacks that the threat of having your career taken away is something that you have always felt and feared. And, as a woman, you can’t help but see the positive effects cancel culture has had on the lives of women everywhere now. So if one must go down to further the fall of the patriarchy, it’s all for a greater good in the end, isn’t it?

Accepting that you might be collateral to a movement you are involved in is part of life. The French Revolution wasn’t over until Robespierre’s head was in a basket.

Halina Reijn’s 2022 black comedy horror film Bodies, Bodies, Bodies is a send-up of this cultural dynamic. The film is about a group of affluent Gen Z friends who gather for a party in one of their mansions to wait out a hurricane. None of them need any money. They are more interested in cultural capital they acquire online. They are young enough that they cannot remember a world without the internet. Their personalities and identities have been created half online and half in the real world. They are all hyperaware of appearing woke—showing that they are up to date on the latest discourse and aware of the notions of privilege and intersectionality in every situation, so that they won’t be considered gauche or problematic or irrelevant.

When the Wi-Fi goes down, they are instantly isolated and left to their own wits. As they begin dying one by one, they start to scrutinize one another, trying to find personality traits that would mark someone out as the killer. They resort to flinging insults that would be devastating online, accusations of gaslighting and toxicity, but in this situation they seem vague and ridiculous. They have an argument where they try to position themselves as victims in order to accuse the others of mistreating them. There is a type of class consciousness that is paid for by middle-class parents. One actress suddenly blurts out that she has “gender dysmorphia.” The young audience I was watching it with began screaming with laughter.

One character, Bee, is the most vulnerable to accusations because she is working-class. She made up things about herself, like saying she graduated from the University of Utah, when in truth she had to drop out to take care of her mother. Her Eastern European accent betrays her at every moment. Having a full-time minimum-wage job and being a caregiver leaves her less time to appear as woke as the others. She hasn’t had time to learn these concepts and therefore isn’t as able to weaponize them.

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Recently, I was at a dinner with some musicians and cancel culture came up. One male musician said women had suddenly changed the rules, and you shouldn’t be called out for things you did before this new education was put in place. Men act as though the lines that women are drawing are shifting and inscrutable. But the line is so clear to women, because we are aware of the way it feels when men cross our boundaries. If men paid attention to women’s feelings and their own desire to pursue their dreams and goals, they would see where the line was. Just treat us with dignity and respect.

Horror is so often about those who have mistreated people finally getting their comeuppance. The ghosts of victims rise up from the dead to enact revenge they couldn’t get while they were mere mortals. That is why spooky young girls are so often the center of horror films. Little girls are conduits for unleashing hell on the world. They will crawl out from under your bed; they will listen to no one and will be devastatingly disobedient. They will suddenly be powerful and will wreak havoc on the lives of their victims, who were once their tormentors. The reason we are seeing cancel culture in films is because men see it as a similar force: women acting out a psychotic, demon-like revenge. But women have never been looking for revenge, just change.

Women’s testimonies and accusations now carry more weight and are no longer being kept in the shadowy land of places like my friend Albertine’s basement. In Barbarian, Tess helps get AJ out of the basement, even though his actions make it clear he would never do the same for her. Women did not begin the Me Too movement to punish men, but to hopefully make them come out of the basement and see the light with us. But women’s newfound power will remain at the center of horror media nonetheless because of its capacity to destroy patriarchal modes of power. We will be seeing more films made by men where the evil element stalking the protagonist is the threat of cancellation.