THERE IS A MONOLITH IN THE KITCHEN OF MY HOME.
I do not remember how old I am, or if I could even call this my first memory because to organize those first sparks into consciousness would be impossible, but I know I am old enough to open the fridge, or more specifically, the freezer. My cousin Ashley is babysitting me and she’s asleep on the couch - not out of derelict of duty, it had to be well past midnight, but even in my childhood I was a night owl. So I was awake, and for all intents and purposes, I was alone.
“Nosferatu” (1922) plays on the television. Max Schreck in all his uncanny glory stands and stares me in the eye. I remember being unafraid, and if anything, a morbid curiosity washed over me. I was, however, and admittedly still am, afraid of the dark. But there were glowsticks in the freezer. I remembered this. So I walked from the living room to the tall 1990s monolith of a fridge, white with a faux-stone plastic texture, and I tugged open the freezer and retrieved the glowsticks. And then, hypnotized by what was going to be my first horror movie, I idly chewed on the glowsticks as I watched “Nosferatu” play out.
At some point one burst - the bitter concoction of whatever makes glowsticks glow coated my mouth and I immediately knew: this is bad. It’s such a strange sensation for a child to know something is wrong, and perhaps I did something to make myself sick, and that if I woke up Ashley I would certainly be in trouble. I was far too young to understand death but I still believe this was my first brush with mortality. As a vampire movie played and I stood transfixed, I for the first time faced the uncanny. That my actions could have consequences.
So, I guess that’s where it all started. My first taste of blood. This is a story of a personal journey for me, a strange little girl who fell in love with horror, rejected it, and then gave her heart to it.
This is also a story about how my life was shaped by women within the horror genre. From the themes and societal attitudes I found reflected back at me, defining and influencing my existence as a woman, to the way womanhood and femininity informed the horror genre itself, to the women I saw on screen and decided that’s what I want to be like when I grow up, or, just as often, that is not what I want to be life when I grow up. Horror is one of the few genres where the feminine side is given its equal share. I want to expose that as part of the reason it has become so important to me, and why it so quickly dug its claws into my heart and never let go. So, although I had only just had my first taste of the genre that would grow to partially define me, it was already changing me in small, indiscernible ways.
In the weird way that a child’s brain worked, my meeting with Nosferatu and my first taste of something wrong did not traumatize me. Frankly I don’t think it really mattered to me until I got older and people (and myself) started asking “Why are you this way?” I think I was always this way - Nosferatu or not.
From as early as I can remember I sought out the strange.
There is a hilarious photo of me as a first grader in a classroom full of princesses and firefighters and I’m sitting there, smile wide on my face, wearing a ragged dress and corpse makeup because I insisted I wanted to be something scary. Wasn’t that what Halloween was about? My mother was more than happy to oblige, I come from a family of strong and strange matriarchs. My mother is famous for her all black attire and striking hair, a metal-head through and through, a black cat of a woman who would take on the world entirely for her children. One of my grandmas taught me to read palms and tarot cards and told me pagan stories and taught me to respect myself and trust my instincts. Another taught me to embrace my imagination with my Barbie dolls, even if a little macabre, creating Frankenstein Monsters out of doll pieces, and to embrace softness and femininity. My great-grandma instilled in me a black humor, a perspective born from living through her hometown, London, being bombed in World War Two, a humor she would carry on to pass on to her family. There is a glint in the eyes of women in my family, it wouldn’t be a stretch to call it vampiric. My sister and I and our countless cousins have inherited it now, though I have to say my sister’s is far deadlier than mine. Me and my coven.
Truth be told it’s impossible to trace back where Vampir started, so many cultures developed the same idea organically, all the way back to Mesopotamia and probably before then. That being said, what we in the modern age consider vampires started in the 1700s. What had been oral folklore about bloated bodies with clammy skin, a fear of what a corpse is and what it means to rot, had transformed into romantic and oftentimes erotic stories, with the main focus being romantic love. Many of the “first vampires” were women, a trend that would sadly die and not see its light in cinema for some time, driven from the grave itself to pursue either their lover or the man who had wronged them. Nowadays, we see a different vampire not all too different from the vampires that started cinema.
After all, you can tell a society’s shared fears by its popular monsters. My most favorite example is the Creature Feature craze of the 1950s, fed by Cold War nuclear fears and the question of what exactly we had done to our planet and to society with the invention of the atomic bomb - when giant ants or kaijus from the deep reminded us that we are playing with forces beyond our control.
This theory certainly can be applied to vampires: they are the common collective fear of aristocracy. They have riches and abilities beyond the common person’s capability or understanding. They hypnotize young women - the male fear of having “our” women stolen by “them.” This is very common in early post-WWI cinema, and not just vampires, but the monsters of the 1930s and 1940s in general. They make women the victim and maiden, something to fight for and protect - which only makes sense given what society had just been through, the men going to fight a war overseas and bearing witness to horrors beyond imagination. One can see how these threads are weaved, how the seeds are planted, and how our societal fears feed our most visceral film and fiction.
SHAPESHIFTERS, RAZOR WIRE, AND ABJECT TERROR
Have you ever felt something abject? It doesn’t have to be terror - it can be joy or disgust or sadness. But I do know I have faced abject terror.
My cousin Courtney is a few years older than me. Now, it doesn’t feel so far away, but when I was 10 and she was 15, it felt like everything. I got invited to her birthday party and I wanted so desperately to be one of the cool older girls, but they wanted to watch “IT” (1990). My mom didn’t forbid it, just suggested it might be too adult for me. One of Courtney’s friends offered that she’d seen it “a million times” and would tell me whenever a scary part was coming so I could cover my eyes. And miraculously - she did! I didn’t see a single scary moment, safe behind my palms. Unfortunately for me, this was the age of VHS.
The rental was rewinding. I walked upstairs from the basement to see the movie slowly going backwards. I watched the death of Stan in the bathtub in uncanny backwards double time, warbling behind static bars that did little to censor the horror from me. The fear of the Pennywise the Clown, snarling and cackling in the sewers, dug into me like so many sharp teeth.
It was a disaster. I was beside myself with terror. To even go into a bathroom was nightmarish to me. “IT” lived in every faucet, in every sink, in every bathroom, in every toilet for a year. My already burgeoning insomnia escalated to the degree of doctor appointments. There was a concern - no child should have such an intense reaction to such a brief exposure but maybe Taylor just has an active imagination. I became terrified of everything. The boy next door taunted me with tales of Chucky and terrorized me with fake spiders. I refused to use the bathroom at night. Horror movie trailers on TV at night would send me into a panic. I could not sleep alone. To this day, I have an incredibly hard time explaining just how scared I was, over something that was in reverse, with no sound, with no context.
Taylor just has an active imagination.
It is now that I can tell you that “IT” is my favorite Stephen King book. Perhaps my favorite story of all time. An amazing tale of young misfits finding each other and through that, finding their bravery. The Loser’s Club. It wasn’t many years after my first viewing of “IT” that I would, like Beverly, the singular female character of “IT,” find my group of boys on bikes, my own Loser’s Club, and I would, like them, find my bravery. We would go to train tracks and watch scary YouTube videos. We would prank each other with Slenderman pages. We would brag (usually lying) about all the crazy, horrible movies we had seen.
I was 13 when I watched “Saw” (2004). I remember it was in my friend Lauren’s basement. I hadn’t watched a single horror movie since I had accidentally watched “IT” three years prior, but the chasm between being 10 and being 13 is vast, and I refused to admit to anyone that I hated horror. That would be so uncool.
Thirteen-year-old Taylor sat there wide eyed. There was a boy trying to kiss me but I was too enraptured with what was on screen to even consider him. I had hidden myself from horror so, so desperately that when my first love finally found me again it was like a symphony. When the movie ended nobody wanted to talk about it like I did. I was too young to even appreciate the relatively low budget, high emotion effort that was “Saw.” The dam had cracked. I was done for. I kept asking would you crawl through razor wire for survival or would you cut your leg off for survival or would you kill another person for survival not realizing something within me had been unlocked.
SERIAL KILLERS, CULT LEADERS, AND COLLEGE FEARS
My father is a quiet cinefile and also a quiet, pervading force in general. Believe me when I say this: I am my father’s daughter.
One day, I stumble upon my dad halfway through a movie and, like usual, I join him. However something about this one catches my imagination even more so than the others. It’s a story about an FBI agent, a serial killer, and a cannibal. I absolutely fall desperately in love with “Silence of the Lambs” (1991). How couldn’t I? It was designed to be admired. One of the best movies of all time. And it was the first time I saw, outside of a princess or an ingenue, a female protagonist and hero in her own right.
Jodie Foster as Clarice is everything. She is educated yet naive. She is brave yet cautious. She is inviting yet wary. She is feminine and masculine. And there is a reason she stuck with me so much, even to this day - she is such a person. A person. Oh I wanted to be her - or at least try to be her when I grew up.
It was around this time that I was in my first play. I had done studio dance since I was old enough to walk, but puberty hit me like a ton of bricks and I had turned into something of a newborn deer on ice - I was clumsy. So my mother, in all her wisdom, suggested a play. The local community theater was doing “The Wizard of Oz” so it wasn’t hard to convince me. I got the role of Dorothy. Trust me, that accomplishment is still one of my proudest, and it began the longest love of my life: acting.
However once high school came around, it became clear I wasn’t leading lady potential. I did great in supporting roles, especially comedic ones, or ones where I’m supposed to be grating; Lydia in “Pride and Prejudice,” a stepsister in “Into the Woods,” my final senior role in “The Mystery of Edwin Drood” didn’t even have a name, but I still got accolades for it. Anyway, this is all to say that by the time college came around, my lofty ideas of being a professional actress had entirely melted away. So I fell back on the old dream.
I wanted to be Clarice - or something like Clarice. So I went to New York to hopefully become a criminal psychologist.
That lasted less than half of a semester. It wasn’t for me. Instead, I started double majoring in religion (with a focus on cults, shocking, I know) and film! I had a real talent for film analysis, apparently, and also a talent for stomaching Jim Jones and David Koresh and the like. Sadly, it wasn’t long until I was staring down the barrel of a mental breakdown with the question of what I was going to do with my life. My closest professor asked me, point blank, “what would you do if you could do anything?” I hadn’t asked myself that question in so long. So often those things are tethered in the consequences of future realities. So I just blurted out the first thing that came to mind: I would make horror movies.
She knew a guy - a producer at an independent genre film company in Brooklyn called Glass Eye Pix. I got the interview, I got the internship, and soon I was living my dream as a production assistant fetching cases of water bottles and scrubbing fake blood from floors and feeling like I was going quite insane. Thrust from a comfortable and sheltered Minnesota life to the hustle and bustle of New York, to uncertainty of my future, to complicated and problematic interpersonal relationships and a deep, deep sense of isolation that I think was just innate from going from girl to woman.
The first movie I ever worked on was called “Darling” (2015) directed by Mickey Keating - oh and go watch “Psychopaths” (2017) - and it’s essentially a love letter to “Repulsion” (1965) which is the story of a young woman going insane with agoraphobia and androphobia and it’s a Polanski movie so… go with how you feel on that recommendation. The bottom line is I felt very much that this time of my life was defined by a razor thin grip on my propriety, and that there was something very exciting and liberating about that. For the first time in my life, and not despite of but because of the fact that I was entering the boys club that is cinema, I felt off the leash.
I was no longer that little girl with no one around her who understood why she was the way she was, or riding bikes until the stars came out for lack of anything to do. I felt like I was finally the creature I was meant to be, even if that was a little scary, and I didn’t always behave fairly or even kindly. Still, if they wanted their insane woman trope, they would get it.
The idea of the ‘insane’ woman as a device is as old as time. Simply put we have been used as the antagonist simply for being a woman. If you subscribe to Christian theology, the vilification of women goes back to the very beginning. If you don’t, it goes even further back than that.
The feminine mania (hysterical! Not even a century ago I could’ve and probably would’ve been lobotomized) follows me still, but I appreciate it more. I’m doing something now - a play, at my beloved Theatre Winter Haven that expresses it, called “Venus in Fur.” It’s going to be a lot, and it’s going to be amazing, and if you’d like to witness me expressing this profound joy, there are tickets to be had. Yes, this is a plug, but only because acting is my deepest love…
Well, except for one other thing.
ZOMBIES, BODIES, AND THE MAN I MARRIED
For all this talk of blood and guts, I’d like to talk about romance. It’s the proverbial slow song of the article. A moment to catch our breaths and get close to the one we love.
Not that my husband dances.
Zombies. I didn’t know it when I met him, but Jeremy had made a pretty darling zombie movie. That’s why we were meeting, actually. We were doing a chemistry test for a short film, essentially to see if we could act together and pass as a real life couple. Spoiler alert; there was plenty of chemistry. He was living in Connecticut and I was living in Queens and we left the little audition knowing that we’d be filming the short film in Peekskill, New York in a couple of weeks. What we didn’t know was that after those couple weeks we’d be falling over each other in reckless and romantic ways. What can I say? I’m a sucker for a man that looks like he could be a cult leader. And makes me laugh. And who values the pen over the sword. And is tall and handsome. And can cook. And is worldly. And so, so, devastatingly compassionate. Oh no, am I rambling? Sorry. For all this gore, blood pumps from the heart.
Truth be told, of all the movies and creatures I’ve discussed and am going to discuss, zombies are kind of the least romantic! There’s not too many examples of zombie romance and those that do exist sometimes ask bigger questions of body and consent than they do of actual romance. That being said, the zombie genre is where some of our biggest reflections of home and society exist - and our biggest questions of humanity. I defy you to find a single zombie movie that doesn’t beg the question, at least at one point, “Is humanity the real monster after all?” “The Walking Dead,” for all its work it did to bring horror to the mainstream television once more, beat that question to death. How many scaryeventually-revealed-cannibalistic-enclaves do our main characters have to go to before they decide maybe everyone is evil! Just - don’t go there this time! Have you thought of that, Rick?!
Disclaimer: I have never really watched “Walking Dead.” But I know enough to know.
Second disclaimer: It hasn’t always been like this. Zombie is perhaps one of my favorite subgenres because it changes so much so quickly with society - though it has (until our lord and savior George Romero) an incredibly unsavory beginning point that I would be remiss to not include. Our first zombie films are centered around the fear of the other, and specifically of Caribbean and Black others. That indefinable and racist ‘scary voodoo’ that turns white women into mindless slaves. This is not hyperbole - this is the plot of the film “White Zombie” (1932), regarded as the first use of a zombie in a feature film, it even stars Bela Lugosi. Back then, zombies were not the bloodthirsty diseasesourced horde of shambling humans but victims of hypnosis and ‘voodoo’. We cannot look at zombies without confronting their racist beginnings.
Which made the casting of Duane Jones, a Black man, as the lead character in George Romero’s “Night of The Living Dead” (1968) all the more poignant. Romero always maintained that Jones was simply the right man for the job, but I’m of the opinion that both things can be true.
Romero’s film is considered the first of the modern zombie movies, and where our fear of the other shifted to the fear of conformity and commercialism (you can thank the 1960s counterculture for that), where zombies are shambling and hungry and dead-eyed with singular goals to consume. In more recent decades, the overarching themes change again to something different, the fear of overpopulation, the fear of disease and pandemic itself (which we as a society know plenty of now) zombies have turned fast, they’ve turned angry, they can gosh darned run and climb! Take a look at “28 Days Later” (2002) rage zombies, or “World War Z” (2013) zombies so dense they act as a liquid, or for heaven’s sake in “Army Of The Dead” (2021) the zombie’s had an I-shityou-not societal structure! They had leaders! Zombies are changing, and will change, so long as we as humans keep finding new things to be scared of.
Jeremy’s zombies in “The Battery” (2012) are old school. They’re slow and dumb and hungry. The fear Jeremy explores here is of becoming one of the horde, of becoming just like everybody else, of being normalized. I think that’s one of the big reasons I fell for him. He was strange, like me, and in ways unexpected. A redneck from Florida who grew up in a trailer, who made horror movies, who sang Erykah Badu at karaoke, who would probably commit war crimes for his cats. And you can best believe, I can’t think of a better person to face down the horde with.
This one’s for you, honey. [Insert reference from “We Are The Flesh” (2016) that only you and I get. You know the one.]
BLOOD, BIRTH, AND MOTHER MONSTERS
Anyways, enough of that. If you survived through that sweet slog without getting sick, don’t worry, I’m gonna give it another go in this section. Which is also where I say turn back now ye who would not like to read about…
[lightning flash, thunder boom] Menstruation. [dramatic piano sting]
And other such topics of the human body. Okay. You have been warned.
But here’s the thing, y’all; it happens. It happens every month for most of our lives and it sucks for almost everyone and the fact that it is a dirty subject, still blows my mind. To me it’s just this: the very fact that having a uterus is a horror show. Can you imagine - you’re just getting old enough to feel like you’re your own person, you’re starting to form your dreams and ideals and morals and personality, and then one day it’s like “oh, hey, by the way, every month for the next forty or so years you’re going to bleed. And it’s going to hurt. And it’s going to make you feel like a different person. Oh, and if you’re super unlucky, it could very much try to kill you! Anyway, have fun with that, okay bye!”
My mother was very upfront with me about what was going to happen when I got my first period and I still thought I was dying. Didn’t tell anyone. Just thought I’d wait it out and pass peacefully and mysteriously into the grave. Better not to worry anyone, after all. Goodness, I was such a dramatic little shit.
Or maybe I wasn’t! A first period - a menarche, as they call it - has been a tool in horror for a very long time in fiction and otherwise. The very famous potential real-life haunting that was the basis of “The Conjuring 2” (2016), also known as the Enfield Poltergeist, was reportedly brought on by the first period of one of the girls in the house. Oh, and let’s not forget about “Carrie” (1976) - who’s torment and eventual psychic awakening all follows her first period. There is so much shame and horror attached to something as natural as breathing!
Then again, it’s all just a prelude to the truly most horrifying thing: pregnancy. Pregnancy in the abstract is as terrifying to me as motherhood is beautiful, but for a moment consider just the facts of pregnancy. Something grows inside of you literally, literally, and for nine months! You ache and your skin stretches and you get sick and your organs rearrange, and then all your suffering culminates into a literal bloodbath of a birth which could very well kill you! There is so much strength in that, so much bravery. I’m sure there are those out there who enjoy being pregnant and to that I say, affectionately, you absolute maniacs, you gods among mortals! But the fact remains that when you simply just isolate the physical reality of pregnancy (not even accounting for the emotional and psychological part!) it is wild that we can do that, that we must do that, that the very survival of our species is tied to what is effectively nurturing a parasite for nine months and, all the while, we must go on about our day! And then, after those nine months, we must birth that parasite in one of the most excruciating pains a human can experience, a life-threatening wave of blood and guts and screaming that is expected to last for hours, perhaps days! It’s a horror show.
My favorite media that looks at the horror of pregnancy is less literal, which makes it all the better, and it quite literally destroys any barrier to entry - man, woman, or otherwise. “Alien” (1979) is a masterpiece in many ways, one of my personal favorites that spawned (hehe) one of my favorite franchises. I will try to limit spoilers within this.
“Alien” has been in the collective cultural understanding for quite some time and I doubt many people are unaware of what a Chestburster is. Here’s how it works: terrible little eggs hatch, and then terrible little creatures (Facehuggers) run out to find a mouth to stick their terrible little tail down, after which they quite literally impregnate the victim, who after some time fatally births another, different terrible little creature (Xenomorph) from their rib cage. It’s all a very uncomfortable affair that no one was safe from, and that was very much by design. “Alien” took the fear of psuedo-sexual violence and impregnation and birth and applied it to everyone. The Facehuggers, as they were, did not discriminate who would become mother to the Xenomorph.
I myself am not a mother, not yet, and I’m still not sure when (or if) I’ll walk down that road. I see motherhood as beautiful all the same, and we as a society across all the ages put motherhood on a high pedestal - sometimes too high, when the sole purpose of a woman becomes rearing children. Perhaps that’s why when the concept of motherhood is polluted, it becomes one of the most sinister and terrifying devices available to horror media. All we have to do is look at perhaps one of the most (or perhaps THE most) famous and iconic horror movies of all time: “Psycho” (1960). Or instead maybe two of the most influential and important horror movies of the modern age - “Hereditary” (2018) and “The Babadook” (2014)?
I personally take so much pleasure in the horrific feminine. It informs and explains me. To straddle that line between monster and princess gives me so much joy and belonging. I love being a demon that must be exorcized from my own life, and I love, simultaneously, holding a candle, terrified, to the rattling doors and bleeding walls of the ghosts that live within the haunted house I call my body and soul.
END CREDITS
I think, at the end of the day, as to what this product finally is: it’s me screaming! Screaming for what? Hard to say. A few things: for myself and the art I love so much, for the people who have supported me in chasing this life, for my husband, for the strange little kids who might think that there’s something about them that makes them different and that being different makes them bad.
I love horror. I love being scared. I am at the end of something, this article, whatever it is, and it is something that has torn me completely raw and made me look at myself in the mirror. I feel as if I have said both too much and too little - but I have to stop now.
Nurture yourself and the things you love. Be kind and be engaging and be curious. Feel the fire behind your eyes and let others see it. Never stop.
I’d like to thank Joe Dunham for being my favorite boss and the best unlicensed therapist a girl could ask for, Christian and Elise Stella for their amazing help with the photoshoot for this article and also for being just as unhinged as me. My Fellowship (Jess & Sam) for dealing with the most unhinged versions of myself and for playing pretend with me. Jack for being my favorite person to sit next to in a movie theater and an amazing creative consultant. And of course, Jeremy, for reminding me that I need to stop procrastinating (and a final spoiler alert: I did not stop procrastinating).
“Venus in Fur” will be performed on select days from October 24 – November 3 at Theatre Winter Haven. The play contains adult material, very limited seating. Purchase tickets in advance at theatrewinterhaven.com.
