“Half-Dead Princesses and the Witches and Hags Who Cursed Them”: Exploring Women’s Roles in Pop Culture and Daily Life
The Call is Coming From Inside the House, Allyson McOuat. ECW Press, 2024.
It’s been a while since I felt engaged enough to read an entire book in one day and, let me tell you, it felt so good to be that enamoured of a book again. Allyson McOuat’s The Call is Coming From Inside the House is a collection of thoughtful, hilarious, enraging, and heartbreaking essays that use topics of pop culture, horror tropes, haunting, and monstrosity to explore what it means to be queer, a woman, a mother, a daughter, and a person with anxiety. Now, if you look at my personal interests in a venn diagram with these themes, you’d just see one circle, so perhaps it is unsurprising that I love this book so much, but it isn’t just the subject matter that grabbed me. It is also McOuat’s deft writing style that makes her discussions of slasher movies like All the Boys Love Mandy Lane blend seamlessly into analyses of scholarly work like Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful.
As a former academic and permanent pop-culture fanatic, there’s nothing I love more than a simple explanation of how scholarship can be used to help us understand why we love watching the things we love. McOuat delivers this over and over again in her musings on the horror movies that shaped her and how they helped her come to understand herself as a queer girl, a wife, a mother and, eventually, a single mother. She explores how these identities fit into the cultural Zeitgeist, and the ways in which popular culture made her feel both othered and empowered.
Throughout the collection, McOuat shines a light on the contradictory nature of society’s views on women, particularly queer women. Early in the book she reminds us that “fear and excitement [are] two emotions which manifest in the exact same physical symptoms: butterflies appearing out of nowhere and rustling about inside your stomach, the hairs on your arms and the back of your neck elevating, breath held” (26). The essay “The Crone, the Maiden, and the Raccoon (Trash Convention)” is a vulnerable look at the author’s own internalized misogyny, which surfaces during her pregnancy and becomes focused on her next-door neighbour whose lack of home upkeep and unapologetic chin hairs place her in the role of the crone. McOuat eventually realizes that her vitriol for the woman next door is due to her own identity as a pregnant woman, a state of being that indicates the transition from the maiden to the crone, since society tends to lump women into one of these two binaries. This essay explores the contradiction of hating what reminds you of yourself, and the power that comes from interrogating where that hate comes from.
In “The Victim (it’s Complex),” McOuat looks at another rock-and-a-hardplace role that women find themselves in: that of the perfect victim, AKA the “final girl,” in horror-movie terminology. The final girl is the woman or girl who stays alive to the end of the horror film, after being attacked and traumatized unrelentingly. She is the perfect victim because she refuses to succumb to playing the role of victim, but instead perseveres, runs, and fights where her supporting characters give in to despair. As McOuat puts it, “final girls have to fight and live their way through trauma to be respected” (185) and “final girls are revered for their ability to keep taking the abuse and coming back for more” (188). McOuat likens the final girl to a mother cleaning out the fridge: “she knows if she doesn’t do it, nobody else is going to, and it’s just going to be a bigger nightmare the next time the door gets opened” (188). This essay is a truly stirring meditation on the concept of the “victim complex,” toxic positivity, and the way we praise women for accepting terrible treatment as long as they persevere through it with a smile and a determined spirit.
The essay that is perhaps the most thought-provoking for me is “The Haunted House (a Spirited Journey Through Queer Homeownership).” This piece links haunting, gentrification, and colonization by portraying a haunted house as the manifestation of privileged white guilt. After buying a home where a family was killed, the homeowner begins to experience spectral phenomena that heighten as her guilt about taking over the dead family’s home increases. McOuat discusses renovating and redecorating the home as feelings of guilt about the home’s former residents take hold, saying “when you remove the decorative accents that someone has made to their home, it’s like you are removing their own history” (48). Upon painting over the previous family’s bold paint colours with eggshell white, she says “our goal was to erase the evidence of this family’s existence from what had been their long-time home so we could achieve our own white middle-class dream” (49). When unusual occurrences begin to happen in the house, the speaker leans into her already burgeoning guilt and assumes the family is haunting the space. This essay poignantly reflects the inner conflict of realizing that you are actively participating in gentrification or colonization, and how that conflict can manifest in what feels like a spectre, particularly if you are an anxious and empathetic person already.
In addition to fourteen luminous essays, this book also includes a playlist and a watchlist, which I think should appear in more books. The watchlist is a simple catalogue of every movie and TV series mentioned throughout the book, so you can easily find anything you’re interested in watching yourself. The playlist includes one or two songs for each section of the book. There are a number of ways you could integrate listening to the playlist into your reading experience — I decided to listen to a given essay’s correlating songs before reading it, to set the mood. I absolutely love the way having a playlist and watchlist creates a multi-sensory book experience, while offering dedicated space to spend time outside of reading the book when you are still thinking about it. This collection is truly a gem, with its playful humour, sometimes devastating emotional beats (I bawled during the epilogue, so prepare yourself), and always insightful commentary. Whether you are a slasher-flick aficionado, a pop-culture lover, a final girl, a bog hag, or a restless ghost, The Call is Coming From Inside the House has something for you.
— Rosalie Morris is a writer and editor whose work can be found in various literary magazines and she is the author of Intimate Publics, a Substack newsletter about pop culture, fandom, and feelings.
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