Speaking Horror

In her essay on Leigh Janiak's Honeymoon (2014) and more contemporary horror, Laura Maw explores how horror articulates female pain.

Note: This article contains spoilers for US

Her rehearsal takes place in a pistachio-green bathroom. Bea (Rose Leslie) is standing over the sink in soft natural lighting, gazing into the three-panelled mirror as she speaks. She is rehearsing a conversation with her husband, Paul (Harry Treadaway) - but her words don’t fit together: she repeats sentences, swaps words for synonyms, stops mid-phrase. Each variation of speech seems wrong, somehow. The intimacy of this scene in Leigh Janiak’s debut horror, Honeymoon (2014), is almost painful, a sharp portrait of a woman attempting to construct a story of her pain that rings true. As she speaks, we can almost hear the presence of another voice - something interior, knotted with self-doubt: does her story match up, or are the details too perfect? Is she composed enough to make her story credible, but distraught enough to make it believable? These anxieties are present in Bea’s speech: her implicit understanding that, no matter her choice of words, her story will be subject to interrogation. 

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Women’s trauma, and its credibility, is at the heart of horror narratives. As such, horror is concerned with speech: how do we articulate pain? How does trauma shape the way we recount our stories, and how those stories are received? Our current political climate - where women’s speech is seen as both too powerful, by those they testify against, and not powerful enough to be plausible for the courtrooms in which they testify  - informs how we speak, and how we listen to other women speak. These dynamics bleed into horror more so than any other genre, because the very concept of communicating women’s pain is inherent to its narratives. 

The complication, or loss, of speech in the face of trauma is a familiar genre convention: in Janiak’s Honeymoon, Bea struggles to piece together any kind of language to describe her experience; in It Follows (2014), Jay (Maika Monroe) can only nod in response to police questioning after her trauma; in Unsane (2018), Sawyer’s (Claire Foy) speech has no weight against her stalker’s, and it is used as evidence against her sanity; in Us (2019), Adelaide (Lupita Nyong’o) struggles to communicate her experience in a way that gains her husband’s trust; and in Midsommar (2019), Dani’s (Florence Pugh) speech is dissolved by her grief. Women’s voices across the genre are so often characterised by this fragmented storytelling, these broken sentences, silences and omissions that accompany post-traumatic stress. These films are concerned with the power dynamics of this speech: who is afforded a voice to speak their pain, and, more importantly, whose voices hold social, political or legal weight?

Horror’s focus is not only on the communication of trauma, then, but its reception, too. Where do these stories land, and who listens? Protagonists’ communication of their pain in horror films follows a similar trajectory off-screen: women’s stories (as well as the stories of other marginalised groups) are interrogated for their falsity; they are met with hostility, derision or dismissal; their content is combed for evidence of melodrama, fabrication, and malicious desires for revenge or power. Horror unpicks the impossible standards of credibility to which women’s speech is held, and women’s voices across the genre are infected with an anticipation of this interrogation, a desire to cover every question ahead of its asking. It’s sculpted with the knowledge that women’s stories are inherently subject to disbelief. More than any other genre, contemporary horror is uniquely receptive to the politics and anxieties of credibility. 

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Honeymoon is a striking portrait of the ways in which trauma shapes speech. The film follows newlyweds Bea and Paul on their honeymoon in a secluded cabin in the woods. One night, Paul returns to their bedroom to find Bea missing. He searches for her through the woods - and eventually finds her, standing naked, among the trees. When he touches her, her head jerks upwards and she screams, as if some deep privacy has been ruptured. In the days following, Bea is unconvincingly insistent that she’s fine, but her behaviour becomes increasingly erratic: she forgets the recipe for French toast; she doesn’t grind coffee beans; she leaps into the freezing water of the lake. It’s clear Bea has experienced something horrific in the forest, but we don’t know what it is - she can’t seem to communicate it to Paul. The developing silence between them picks at the seams of their relationship, and their intimacy unravels. 

“We talked a lot about brain trauma,” Janiak recalled in an interview, “and how there are different aspects of your memory that decay and fall apart.” Among them, she listed: the names of objects, simple actions, people’s names - and these areas of decay permeate Honeymoon. Trauma distorts Bea’s language and gives her a new one in its place: full of gaps, omissions, turns of phrase she doesn’t recognise. She begins to forget words: during a card game, she rolls the dice and declares, “Two of a kind.” Paul looks at her quizzically. “Some people might call it a pair,” he tells her. When Bea is explaining where her nightdress is, she tells him frantically, “It’s in the clothes box,” before correcting herself in a hurry: “The suitcase - it’s in the suitcase.” In her journal, she scrawls in large cursive: My name is Bea. My husband is Paul. Her words seem lost somewhere she can’t locate, burned at their roots. Her speech and its failings betray her efforts of composure.

Although a woman’s speech can lend her credibility, it can also betray her - and Honeymoon lingers, delicately, on this porous border between credibility and betrayal. In the bathroom mirror, Bea begins: “I feel like we should… I feel like we should get a good night’s sleep.” She stops. “I don’t know, I took some Advil but this hea…” She breathes, pauses, tries again. She looks to the ceiling, exhausted, trying to remember; she can’t find the language to communicate the physical manifestations of her trauma in the forest, let alone the trauma itself. “I took some Tylenol but this headache won’t go away. My tummy hurts… My stomach… feels…” She opens her mouth over and over but can’t find the right words, so cycles through synonyms: Advil, Tylenol; tummy, stomach. She rehearses her speech like lines in a play, leaning over the sink as if the weight of the words leaves her nauseous. Leslie is utterly compelling in this scene: she has a frantic physicality to her. She sticks her jaw out in frustration, rolls her shoulders back. We watch her reflection in the mirror from Paul’s point of view, the camera peering carefully through the gap in the door. She tilts her head, trying to assess which words sound right. Cruelly, Bea’s rehearsal of speech - intended to give her time to hone her credibility, to sand her speech into a smooth shape free of knots - is what betrays her: Paul watches - fascinated, hurt, confused - her rehearsal as proof of fabrication, of crafted performance. Her words hang in the air between them, shining with the irrefutable evidence of her trauma, her anxious anticipation of his hostility. 

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Sawyer is measuring her words as she speaks. When, in Steven Soderbergh’s Unsane, she arrives in a psychiatric ward, she is panicked: she realises that she has been admitted without her consent. Like Bea in Honeymoon, she concentrates on her composure: she knows this is the gateway to credibility. She tells the nurse: “You’re just doing your job, and you’ve been so considerate of my feelings and my wellbeing - and you’re right, I signed those papers. I’m here by my own volition and it’s for my own good.” When she asks for a phone call, the nurse agrees. Sawyer tells her: “You’re so nice.” Her voice is soft; she smiles; she nods. Her speech is punctuated with a sense of compliance, of gratitude, of civility: they are markers, she thinks, of a ‘sane’ person, a person who does not need to be admitted to a psychiatric ward, who cannot be held against her will. She is too lucid, too gracious. This will be what sets her apart.

But - as in Honeymoon - her speech is what betrays her. When, using her phone call, she dials 911, the nurse asks her flatly, “Do you know how many calls the cops get like that every week?” Sawyer realises that her speech - the only tool she has to ‘prove’ her sanity - is instead a marker of the reverse. She is, in fact, too composed, too coherent. She must not be telling the truth. When Sawyer realises that her stalker is posing as a doctor at the facility, her efforts to communicate this to other staff members are dismissed - and her speech becomes fragmented and increasingly frantic in her frustration. “I’m trying to tell you,” she begins, “You’re not even listening to me - I’m trying to tell you –“ She starts again, but the doctor cuts her off to tell her that he is adding sedatives to her medication. “Are you serious? That’s your diagnosis? You’re sedating me?” She asks in disbelief. The more she attempts to communicate her trauma, the more it is held against her as ‘proof’ of her insanity. The film’s tagline itself ignites our doubt: Is she or isn’t she?

Unsane’s premise is so effective because it rests on the impossible criteria to which women’s speech is judged and measured: Sawyer is, at first, too composed - and then she is too hysterical. Howsoever she speaks, she is unbelievable, which lends itself to the conclusion that it isn’t her delivery that matters - what matters is that she is a woman communicating her pain in a culture that profits from its dismissal. Her delivery of that pain - her tone of voice, her body language - could shapeshift into any number of patterns. It would lend no weight to her voice. It would make no difference to its reception.

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In 1986, American social psychologist James W. Pennebaker conducted a study with seventy-two students. Splitting the group in two, he asked half of the group to narrate their most traumatic memory, and the other half to narrate their plans for the rest of the day, speaking into a tape recorder. The results were striking: each student adopted a different voice or register when speaking about a traumatic memory. In one recording, a female student spoke in a high-pitched voice about her day, but when recalling a traumatic event, her tone of voice switched. Her voice became so low and quiet she sounded like a different woman - Pennebaker found the recording so staggering he was convinced he had mixed up the tapes. This change - referred to as ‘switching’ in clinical practice - manifests in different vocal patterns, facial expressions, and body movements. In communicating trauma, Pennebaker’s study suggests, a new mode of speaking emerges: a different voice, a different register - as if another language has been accessed. This ‘switching’ leads to accusations of performativity: it deviates from preconceived notions of narrative storytelling, of credibility, of consistency, so that the burden of proof rests with the victim in communicating her pain to an audience sceptical of these deviations, and what they must signify about her. “If patients who present such dramatically different states are treated as fakes,” writes psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk[4] , in his book, The Body Keeps the Score[5] , “they are likely to become mute.” 

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This divide of self, in the aftermath of trauma, is made literal in Jordan Peele’s Us (2019), which opens with Adelaide meeting her doppelganger, Red, in a hall of mirrors. Years after this event, the film then stays with the woman we assume to be Adelaide - until, while on holiday with her family in Santa Cruz one summer, an identical family arrives on her driveway. Led by Red, they are dressed in red boiler suits, grinning, clutching gold scissors. The central twist of the film - that Adelaide and Red swapped places in the hall of mirrors as children - is revealed in the final scene. 

Speech - or its lack - plays a central role in Us. Both women’s speech has been shaped as a result of their pain, and their speech grows around it, taking its weight. Adelaide’s vocal cords are damaged from Red’s strangulation in the hall of mirrors, and her voice is hoarse and low; her speech is full of metaphor, fairytale, biblical reference. Red, as a child, after replacing Adelaide, is mute - which a psychiatrist suggests is a symptom of post-traumatic stress. Through adulthood, speech remains difficult for her - and, when the family arrives on her driveway, her speech gives way to repetitive sounds, “uh-uh; uh-uh”. The figure of the doppelganger is an enduring metaphor in horror, but it is particularly apt for conceptualising the ‘switching’ evident in Pennebaker’s study: Red and Adelaide are two sides of the same coin. Adelaide takes on the weight of the trauma - her vastly different vocal patterns, facial expressions and body movements - while Red attempts to maintain composure, to construct a credible narrative. 

Like Bea, like Sawyer, the woman we assume to be Adelaide also grapples with the articulation of her story, despite the literalisation of this switching - how to tell her husband, how to phrase her anxieties, whether to tell her story at all. In one of the film’s most powerful scenes, she tells him, ‘‘Gabe. I want to go. I can’t be here. It’s too much. Being here… it, um… it feels like… there’s this, um… black cloud just hanging over me and… I don’t feel like myself.’ Her breathing judders, the pale fabric on her body shaking. She is standing with her back to him, staring at her reflection in the window, as if trying to place herself there, to sync herself up to her own figure, to watch the ways she communicates - much like Bea in the bathroom mirror. Nyong’o’s performance is harrowing and alarming; her voice cracks. “I’ve felt she’s still coming for me.” The sentence is long and drawn out, the words spaced apart in agony, as if the sentiment has been clawed out from somewhere dark and closed. At first, Gabe makes light of the situation, and then becomes doubtful and dismissive. He tells her, “I think you look like yourself, and whatever happened, happened a long time ago.” Her speech - the story she has tried so hard to tell - is met with instant dismissal. 

She tries again and asks him, “You know how sometimes things line up? You know, like coincidences? Since we’ve been here, they’ve been happening more and more. I think… I feel like it means like she’s getting closer.” Her voice is shaky, manic, her words fast. As she speaks, her hands move quickly, her chin trembles, her eyes fill with water, desperate, searching for a sign of acknowledgement, of belief. She waits for him to speak. He says, “Who? The mirror girl?” With her eyes closed, resignation spreads across her face. She nods slowly. “You don’t believe me,” she tells him. His response - that he does - is unconvincing. The source of her anxiety, of course, presents itself only minutes later: she finds her doppelganger standing in front of her house, clutching a pair of gold scissors. Slicing her crafted persona - a woman who has not suffered - apart at the seams. 

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Anxieties of the credibility of suffering punctuate horror - and speech is tasked with lending weight to this credibility. It isn’t a premise far removed from the lived reality of our current climate, and contemporary horror runs strikingly parallel to existing criticism of the reception of women’s voices. As the protagonists of Honeymoon, Unsane and Usdemonstrate, rather than act as a tool to communicate their pain effectively, speech becomes a tool, weaponised against them: to identify their missteps, their omissions, their narrative inconsistencies. Even the protagonists’ doubts about their own speech - evident in a rehearsal, in vocalised self-questioning - are not a marker of their anxious desire to be believed, but, instead, a marker of some perceived ‘truth’: that their speech is a fabrication of experience, that this self-questioning is a carefully engineered double bluff. More than any other genre, horror is attuned to these power dynamics, to these impossible standards of credibility. It asks us to consider the sociopolitical implications of who is heard and who is not, and to consider that the reception of a woman’s story might affect the way she tells it - with which voice, under which forms of pressure, against which anxieties. 

Laura Maw is a writer living in London. Her essays on horror film, art and culture have appeared in the New Statesman, Electric Literature, Hazlitt and Catapult, among others. She is currently working on her first book - part film criticism, part memoir - about women in horror. Her twitter is here

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