By Johanna Isaacson

Due to my horror film obsession, I stopped watching the Oscars and other Hollywood awards shows years ago. As Jacob Trussel so succinctly puts it, no matter how obvious it is that some of the best scripts, cinematography, direction, and acting appear in horror, the Oscars still don’t give a fuck about the genre. But this may be due to more than classist disdain for a degraded genre or to lack of interest. Perhaps, virtuoso performances by the likes of Betty Gabriel, Toni Collette, Lupita Nyong’o, and Mia Goth constitute a threat to the ideology and economics supporting these awarding institutions.

Not to be too grandiose, but I see these actors’ performances in horror films to be in line with what the Marxist playwright Bertolt Brecht calls the Verfremdungseffekt, or V–effekt, (translated as estrangement effect or alienation effect) a radical approach to performance that intends to sharpen both the actor’s and the audience’s critical faculties through non-naturalistic gestures, postures, and speech.

When wielded by contemporary woman actors, this method ruptures our assumptions about women’s needs, behaviors, and reactions to their social context. The purpose of this method, as Elin Diamond argues, is to “defamiliarize what ideology makes seem normal, acceptable, inescapable.” This is a form of representation that presents “reality” as contradictory and mutable, the “product of specific historical and social relationships,” as Angelos Koutsourakis asserts. Or as Brecht has it in his essay “The Popular and the Realistic,” “Realist means: laying bare society’s causal network / showing up the dominant viewpoint as the viewpoint of the dominators…”

Historically, women in Hollywood have not been allowed many roles behind the camera. Deprived of positions as writers, directors, and cinematographers, this often limited their means to influence audiences to their acting skills. The precision that goes into this craft is a legacy that contemporary actors preserve and build upon. Yet, there is very little popular or scholarly critical work on women’s acting in horror films (or really, in film in general). In Get Out, Hereditary, Us, and Pearl, these actors explore complex themes through meticulous, devastating performances that rip through conventional wisdom about women’s “natural” roles, allegiances, and emotional responses. Critics and viewers alike were awed by the skill and power of these feats of acting. However, the radio silence on the part of elite cultural institutions suggests that these voices are not only powerful but also subversive.

Betty Gabriel in Get Out (2017)

The “realistic” acting that Hollywood rewards with statues and accolades aims to build an empathetic relationship between actors and audience. This seemingly laudable empathy, however, relies on preconceived understandings of human behavior and aspirations. On the other hand, the horror genre allows characters to react with extreme and unusual emotions, making space for alternative visions of what reality is or could be. In Get Out, the “unrealistically” possessed maid, Georgina, facilitates the audience’s experience of a more critical and accurate social realism than can be realized in conventional Hollywood films. But this is only made possible by Betty Gabriel’s dazzlingly intimate and distantiated performance.

Georgina’s character does not remind us of a “real” woman. Instead, she is defined by her relationship to gothic conventions. In fact, she is a kind of zombie who has been buried alive in “the sunken place” while a sliver of her consciousness haunts her former body. Her dual reality illustrates the film’s implied message that racialized domestic work leads to totalized servitude. As a live-in maid, Georgina cannot clock in and out of her workplace, nor can she maintain a professional relationship to the people she works for. She is included in this family, the Armitages, but this is only because she is completely subsumed by their needs. There are, in fact, two people residing in Georgina’s body: one who is enslaved and one who is this terrorized person’s captor. This symbolic condition of the split self allows the actress to exceed our expectations of a “realistic,” unified being, and instead demonstrates the racialized class war that rages within her body.

This dynamic becomes evident when Chris, a Black man who is visiting the Armitage family, comes face to face with Georgina at a highly charged moment. Georgina enters his room to apologize for “accidentally” unplugging his phone. She speaks with the anachronistic rhetoric of an elderly white woman, which feels very uncanny, coming from the mouth of a young Black woman. She exaggerates this uncanniness with an expression that appears as a mask of warmth—a smile that clashes with the deadness behind her eyes. The falseness of her expression is exaggerated by the suddenness with which her smile widens, her eyebrows raise, her chin thrusts forward, her head nods from side to side.  She moves toward Chris slowly in a gesture that points to intimacy while exuding only menace.

Despite Georgina’s off-putting persona, Chris, who is already feeling alienated and trapped in a house full of hostile white people, still tries to reach out by explaining, “all I know is that sometimes, if there’s too many white people, I get nervous, you know?” These words penetrate to the woman trapped within the matriarch, and it is this immured woman who gasps quietly and whose eyes fill with tears. As her grief and sense of entrapment momentarily surface, the matriarch fights back by laughing and asserting herself, repeating the word “no” over and over in variations of Pollyanna soullessness. Finally, fully back in control, Georgina’s internalized boss seals her prisoner’s fate by saying in a condescending tone: “That’s not my experience at all. The Armitages are so good to us. They treat us like family.”

This “unrealistic” scenario gives us insight into the ways that a domestic worker must perform according to her boss’s explicit and implicit instructions, which include avoiding solidarity with other oppressed people. However, though she may try to banish her true feelings, she is haunted by forbidden needs such as those for respect and love. Gabriel’s jolting acting style doesn’t allow us to see her as an integrated person, but rather illustrates the faultlines and fissures that beset a woman who is faced with these contradictory demands.

Gabriel’s description of her approach to the character emphasizes Georgina’s physicality, while also contextualizing the character’s embodiment within a highly politicized history. In preparing for the role, she explored the literal feeling of being trapped in one’s body by studying Martin Pistorius’s experience of “locked-in syndrome” while researching the history of racial relations that informs the metaphorical and political dimensions of this entrapment. To weave an intertextual web in creating her character, she watched films like Bride of Frankenstein, studying the gestures of a fully constructed woman who defies the association between feminized behavior and “nature.” The horror genre, she notes, liberated her to make these explorations, which suggests that a more “realistic” scenario might circumscribe her adventurous acting choices.

Gabriel’s mobile manipulation of her face, body, and voice is not so much mimicry but a form of analysis. And this corresponds to Brechtian gestus, an acting style which demystifies and narrates socially constructed “types” through gesture. In Brecht’s day, this method was discussed in relation to social class, but more contemporary feminist theater scholars have examined Brechtian feminist performance in which “the social gest signifies a moment of theoretical insight into [historically attuned] sex-gender complexities,” as Elin Diamond argues. In Gabriel’s stylized performance, the contradictions and constraints of race, class, and gender are displayed as a question for the audience to consider, rather than a pat answer that cements prefabricated assumptions about Georgina’s conditions or reactions.

Toni Collette in Hereditary (2018)

Hereditary builds a world in which visits to grief support groups co-exist with demonic possessions. This juxtaposition of the “realistic” with the “unrealistic” provides a window through which the audience can explore the relationship of ordinary pain to institutionalized, hierarchal structures of power and violence that are usually made invisible. Here, supernatural phenomena are portals to taboo emotions that mothers/wives/feminized workers experience but cannot express while remaining “sympathetic” or “realistic.” 

In one climactic scene Toni Collette, as the protagonist Annie, conveys the contradictory aspects of female “hysteria” that prevent women from being heard. After a series of hauntings and bizarre supernatural experiences she finally unravels the conspiracy behind her mother’s odd behavior before and after death, that has to do with a satanic cult that will take over the lives of Annie’s whole family. Her husband, Steve (Gabriel Byrne), has long given up believing that Annie is capable of sanity, and vacillates between humoring her and dismissing her altogether. Yet, Annie believes that she must convince him to dispense of a possessed book or their son will die. She can’t bring herself to throw the book in the fire since she knows she will burn along with it.

Annie begs Steve to destroy the book, and though her emotions convey her desperation, they are not naturalistic. Through over-the-top yet still believable expressions of terror and anguish, she conveys that she will do anything to gain Steve’s understanding, but her physical gestures communicate her knowledge that she will never be believed no matter what she says. With every point she tries to make she uses the book in her hand as a support: waving it around, pointing to it, flipping through it, as if it is hard evidence that will back up the emotional claims she is making (and corresponding to the Brechtian injunction to rely on gestures and props to convey social factors that shape human behavior and emotions). She pleads in a steady stream but never waits for a supportive response, which she knows will not be forthcoming. Instead, she uses the book and her gestures and movements to physically move Steve into the family’s living room, that includes a fireplace. There, we realize, that on some level she is not really trying to convince him, but to kill him.

When Steve refuses to indulge Annie and throw the book into the fire she does it herself, and (maybe) to her surprise it is her husband rather than she who burns up. On a metaphorical level, it makes sense that Steve would burn up with the book, because that prop is the physical manifestation of men’s disbelief of women. Because women’s emotions are not honored, they must instead provide something that is concrete, material, and masculine-coded. It is for this reason that, unbeknownst to Annie, she wanted Steve to burn. But this desire places her beyond the pale of humanity and Collette’s acting choices reflect this transition into monstrosity. Annie’s mouth becomes impossibly wide, showing her shock to find herself beyond “natural” human emotions. Following this, all expression quickly drains from her face as she enters a deeper layer of possession.

By showing at once a woman’s dread of and desire for the death of a husband who will never believe her, this series of gestures make room, as Elin Diamond argues, “for a viewing position for the female spectator,” who can now analyze the taboo contradictions of her lot, such as being told it is in her nature to unconditionally love and support her family despite her frequent feelings of resentment and fury at being treated as an unwaged (and unbelieved) servant. 

Annie’s simultaneous submission to and violence toward Steve produces the V-effekt that Elin Diamond claims “would highlight sex-gender configurations as they conceal or disrupt a coercive or patriarchal ideology.”  These and other points in the film where Annie seems to be performing her emotions rather than experiencing them provide some viewers, including myself, relief and insight into ways that women may not be able to access impermissible emotions but still sense the impact of these feelings. Not only are Collette’s acting choices illuminating but they make the film wildly entertaining, keeping the audience in a state of tremulous shock and curiosity as well as horror.

Lupita Nyong’o in Us (2019)

Us is another film that stars a woman who is estranged from normalized emotions, and who cultivates an acting style to showcase this. In this instance Lupita Nyong’o plays two characters, Addy and Red, who are versions of the same person. Addy is a middle-class Black woman vacationing in a beach town, who has an idyllic life, despite the microaggressions that she faces. Yet even though her situation appears nearly perfect, there is something in her behavior that seems remote and guarded.

Soon, her shadow, Red, along with degraded doubles of the rest of her family, stage a home invasion. Eventually we find they have been trapped underground and have now come to seize the lives of their doppelgangers. This staging of the characters in Us as mirrors not only distances the audience from the “realism” of accepted behavior, but allows us to witness this “reality” unravel. Addy and the characters who live above ground are illustrative of “realism” as it is experienced within the hermetic world of the middle class, while the characters who live underground represent another dimension of “realism,” the shadowy underworld of monsters produced by systemic cruelty and neglect. The film’s horror tropes allow both of these realities to coexist, as they do in real life, albeit invisibly so.

A key device allowing us to experience these concealed social structures is Lupita Nyong’o’s voice and physicality, as they transform across her dual characters. Her distance from herself in these roles performs the work of Brechtian gestus, “call[ing] into question individual agency and reveal[ing] the individual’s dependency on the social milieu,” as Angelos Koutsourakis describes. This raises the question of how much of human behavior is agential, and to what extent we are controlled by the systems and structures under which we live. As Nyong’o put it, her performance was a critical operation, working with “mathematical precision” to “hold down both sides of the argument.”

In a scene where Red explains the differences between the two women’s lives she speaks in a gasping croak that both exhibits and distorts emotions, rendering her at once human and monster. Her voice only comes to the surface with effort, as if she has never spoken before, letting us know how intent she is on communicating her pain even as she is perceived to be an animal, unworthy of empathy. Deprived of smoothly transitioning movements and gestures, she can only sit stock still with unwavering eye contact or scuttle quickly from one destination to another, and this insectile, circumscribed physicality points to her exclusion from the full range of human expression. Yet, while Red’s subjugation has given her a “cockroach quality,” her unwillingness to accept her lot also endows her with what Nyong’o calls a “regality.”

With this regal assuredness, Red compares her life to Addy’s point by point. While, growing up, Addy had warm delicious food, Red ate raw rabbits. Where Addy had cushy toys, Red only had sharp objects to play with. Addy met and married a man she loved while Red was forced into a relationship with her non-verbal mate. Nyong’o emphasizes the horrific toll that economic privilege exerts on those banished from these comforts by aspirating and emphasizing typically comforting words like “warm” and “tasty,” effectively making them monstrous. Her face freezes in ghastly contortions, seeming to point to the fact that she knows she is performing these gestures rather than naturally displaying them.

Nyong’o’s acting choices force the audience to consider that even the seeming emancipation of Black women in wealthy sections of the developed world is built on a past of slavery and a present of unevenly distributed global oppression. Together, Addy and Red represent both this knowledge and its willful repression. We must not only credit Jordan Peele for creating a film that, as Mark Steven argues, reaches “beyond the impasse of…liberal anti-racism,” and rather carries on a radical tradition of anti-capitalist cinema, now foregrounding “the revolutionary immanence of surplus populations as distinctly racialized class groupings.” In considering these exciting transformations in political cinema, we should attend to the (often feminized) artistry of acting in addition to our admiration of the stylistic and thematic decisions made by film directors, writers, and cinematographers.

Mia Goth in Pearl (2022)

In its exploration of a sympathetic psychopath, Pearl also interrogates what we think we know about gendered behavior and desire. The titular character tends to her paralyzed father and helps to run a small family farm while her husband is away fighting in World War I. Although she adheres to her duties and sometimes acts with kindness, Pearl is also deeply resentful, and, since this is a horror film, this drives her to become a sociopathic serial killer.

The film is self-reflexive about its own status as mass culture, showing how the repressions and denials women face are channeled into fantasies about the culture industry, as Pearl dreams of becoming a dancer in Hollywood. And yet that dream is shown to be in continuity with her murderous rebellion. When she auditions for the role of a chorus girl and loses the part to her all-American sister-in-law, her psychopathy escalates. At this point she has racked up quite a body count, but we still don’t entirely lose sympathy for a young woman who only wants love and adventure on her own terms in a world that offers few options.

Mia Goth’s acting in this film is more naturalistic than the other performances I have explored here, but still she subverts audience expectations. In her lauded eight minute monologue during which she confesses to an astounding number of taboo thoughts and deeds including infidelity, envy, hating her husband, being happy about a miscarriage, and being a serial killer, she speaks as if she is confessing to her husband while he is not in the room. To conjure him, she pauses before beginning to speak and enters a trance-like state. The monologue is delivered in a kind of droning, lugubrious monotone that makes no distinctions between confessions of minor flaws and life-altering sins. In this, the performance defies audience preconceptions about self-awareness and responsibility for one’s actions. Her speech reveals that, in her own mind, she still deserves love and empathy even though she has exhibited extreme sociopathic behavior, including matricide and patricide.

While confessing to society’s most taboo crimes, she also feels entitled to class-based resentment, stating that the privileges her husband takes for granted are at the root of her monstrous behavior. This is not offered as an excuse or a plea for forgiveness, but as an objective fact, echoing Brecht’s call for actors to demonstrate and analyze contradictions rather than to emotionally manipulate an audience’s sentimentality. The matter-of-fact statement of her motivations is reminiscent of Brecht’s play, The Mother, where the protagonist is equally driven by capitalist-fueled greed and motherly love, a combination that is reflected in her gestures as well as her unconventionally dry line delivery, even as her children die one by one.

Likewise, Goth’s tone in this speech refuses the “common sense” distinctions between human and monster. Instead, she exists in a kind of third space that the audience is forced to judge for themselves. Indeed, to center her performance, Goth rejected conventional assumptions regarding good and evil, to rather focus on the character as a sensitive dreamer. To describe the paradox of Goth’s simultaneous purity and taintedness Jacob Trussell reaches for the dialectical term “anti-innocence.” Due to the inextricability of personal choices and determinative social conditions, Pearl can neither be guilty nor free from guilt, confirming Koutsourakis’s definition of Brecht’s “dialectical world view” which “proposes that the individual needs to be shown as a nexus of social forces rather than a unified entity.” This avoids “the reduction of politics to questions of moral reformation.”

The most estranging moment in Pearl appears in the final scene, when Pearl’s husband returns from the war to a house in which a family of corpses are seated around a dinner table loaded with rotting food. Pearl’s greeting is a ghastly citation of the way a wife is conventionally imagined to welcome her long-absent husband home from the war. He enters the home with an enthusiasm which immediately turns to revulsion as he sees the hideous dinner tableau. As if her home hadn’t become a grand guignol chamber of horrors, she appears in a fresh housedress, holding a pitcher of lemonade, and faces him with a protracted, forced smile that lasts nearly a minute as tears run down her face. As the credits roll, the smile grows, widening and becoming less naturalistic by the second, while romantic music swells. This smile presides over a scene that grotesquely estranges the wholesomeness and comforts of the idealized family, both citing and subverting the image of a good, patriotic, wife, and making a retroactive case that all along Pearl’s murderous and rebellious behavior has represented the taboo desires lurking below the surface of obedient, white, womanhood.

The threat posed by Goth’s and the other performances discussed in this essay is that they disrupt Hollywood’s ceaseless, deafening narrative that assumes an unchangeable world to which we must adapt. Helped along by the horror genre’s conventions of exaggeration and irrealism, these actors mobilize their intellect and talent to wrench their audiences from the comforts of received knowledge and sentimental platitudes. For Brecht, this disturbance is what gives life and meaning to art. As he puts it, “When something seems ‘the most obvious thing in the world’ it means that any attempt to understand the world has been given up.”

Author bio: Johanna Isaacson writes academic and popular pieces on horror and politics. She is a professor of English at Modesto Junior College and a founding editor of Blind Field Journal. She is the author of Stepford Daughters: Weapons for Feminists in Contemporary Horror (2022) from Common Notions Press and The Ballerina and the Bull (2016) from Repeater Books. She has published widely in academic and popular journals including, with Annie McClanahan, the entry for “Marxism and Horror” in The Sage Handbook of Marxism (2022). She runs the Facebook group, Anti-capitalist feminists who like horror films