In Scream With Me, Eleanor Johnson’s 2025 bestseller about horror and feminism in the 1970s, the literary scholar makes the case for horror as the genre that showed us that something was rotten in American domestic life. She outlines four characteristics particular to that decade’s domestic horror films (such as Rosemary’s Baby and The Omen) that set them apart from other subgenres: The horror takes place in the home, there is a male antagonist who cannot be removed, the horror centers on children and reproduction, and the movies were released against the backdrop of legal conflicts in the US about women’s rights.
The Lindsay Clancy trial was not a movie. The Massachussetts mother of three admitted to experiencing a psychotic break, strangling her three small children in their basement, and then attempting suicide. But the trial—and the discourse around it—became a spectacle, one that many of us watched as if it were a horror film. I began to wonder if this was because the Clancy story can be so easily conformed to those mythic cinematic elements Johnson describes in Scream With Me.
The victims were children. The killings took place in the home. Despite Clancy’s own admissions, the discourse attempted to cast her husband as the villain in her story. It seemed plausible enough. Statistically, family annihilators are usually men, and it’s not close: 91 percent of familicides are committed by men. In the comments of the Clancy posts on social media, I saw hundreds of different iterations of the same sentiment: It’s always the husband. As the trial proceeded, women dressed in pink protested outside the courthouse, sharing their stories of post-partum depression and domestic abuse. Countless TikToks argued for Clancy’s innocence, including one notorious video that used Bratz dolls to recreate the crime scene.
