So it’s been a while…

Ah, Social Media Burnout.

This summer I had the crazy idea to play around with various social media platforms and see what worked for me as a writer. By the end, I was suffering from burnout. I’m not sure how Gen Z does it…

I didn’t take it personally, though. After a quick search, it turns out that to really make your TikTok account successful, you need to post up to 4 times per day and the average length of production for a decent quality video is 30+ minutes. That’s a whopping 2+ hours a day producing, then tack on more time for engagement.

In those 3-4 hours I could have written a few thousand words! No thanks.

ANYWAYS, I ended that social psychology experiment and, as of this morning, joined Bluesky. It’s a magical place where you don’t need to feed a ravenous algorithm every day. Best of all, it values actual engagement. I felt like I was posting on TikTok and Insta just for views when all I really wanted was to geek out about books and writing.

So if you want to geek out with me, come find me!

A Halloween Season Well Spent

What did I do with all my free time not posting on social media, you ask?

I watched, wrote, read, and played all manner of horror. The classics. The new classics. Jordan Peele. Zac Creager. Guillermo Del Toro. Stories about cannibalism. Stories about witches. Silent Hill 2 (again). Silent Hill F (meh). A little known game called Soma (legit makes me cry).

Then I came upon a little cult classic called Jennifer’s Body. I remember the marketing blitz back in 2009, when I was a bright-eyed former coed, fresh out of college and using my psych degree to work at a bakery. And I remember thinking “that looks so insanely fetishized who in their right mind would see that?”

So I settled in on a dark, stormy night, popcorn in hand, preparing for a good nostalgic laugh. But what I got, dear friends, was a freaking feminist horror masterpiece!

Jennifer’s Body: Cult Classic for a Reason

Was it nostalgic? Absolutely.

Was it cheesy? Hell yes.

But was it good? Surprisingly so.

I did some research and learned the horrible truth: that, as I suspected, this movie was marketed largely to teenage boys, not young women. BIG MISTAKE.

This is not a story for boys and men (unless you watch it as a cautionary tale). This is a story for girls and women, directed by Karyn Kusama and Diablo Cody. But sadly, their movie was largely written off.

If you dig deep though, you get a nuanced story dealing with the complexities of female relationships, queerness, self-worth, female sexuality and exploitation, and feminist rage. It is UTERUS HORROR. Damn, that sounds powerful.

The world was just not ready for this.

The Origins of Women in Horror

Naturally I got to thinking about women in horror. Then I asked myself an aged old question (thank you Professor Cynthia Enloe): where are the women?

Growing up as a 90’s kid, I would flock to anything and everything where girls and women were featured at all, even just a little. Girls and women just weren’t there. Like we had nothing better to do. When we were there, it felt like we were always annoying. Or crying. Or screaming. Or irrational. Or being murdered by monsters and serial killers.

Maybe that’s because women were largely absent from any of the writing and production roles. Nowadays, I could turn on a random show on Netflix and there’s (GASP!) many more women horror (and other) writers!

Here’s the real kicker: women played a huge role in the creation of the horror genre!

Yup.

The horror genre as we know it today was born of gothic fiction. The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole is widely considered the first gothic book. It was a pretty big deal.

People are less familiar, however, with Clara Reeve’s follow up book The Old English Baron. This is the book that made the over-the-top zaniness of Otranto (large helmets falling from the sky and killing an heir, anyone?) palatable for the masses. Suddenly it wasn’t some weird genre, but something you could tell your friends you were reading without feeling immoral.

Later, Anne Radcliff swooped in and revived the fizzling gothic genre by injecting it with feeling. People were hooked. She became the most successful writer of her time and paved the way for centuries of women gothic/horror writers (Shelly, Brontes, Alcott, Jackson, and more).

Were men there too? Absolutely. Bram Stoker. Oscar Wilde. Poe. But the distinction is that women were there too, and they were having as much success, if not more, than their male counterparts.

Yet, here we are today, when stats say men submit somewhere between 70-85% of horror story manuscripts and comprise 85-95% of horror movie writers/directors.

Where did we go wrong? When did women fall off the horror radar?

Are there successful women in horror today? Absolutely. But think of all the women whose stories have yet to be told. Think of all that untapped potential!

Time to get to work, I guess. *cracks knuckles*