tag:theconversation.com,2011:/global/topics/magdalene-laundries-60520/articlesMagdalene Laundries – The Conversation2023-08-25T10:04:01Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2120612023-08-25T10:04:01Z2023-08-25T10:04:01ZThe Woman in the Wall: BBC drama about Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries is essential viewing<p>“This isn’t a prison,” a nun in the new BBC drama The Woman in the Wall says. “You can leave anytime you want. But where would you go? Who would have you? No one wants you. You’re a sinner.”</p>
<p>Set in the fictional town of Kilkinure in 20th-century Ireland, the show captures the story of Lorna Brady (Ruth Wilson), an unmarried mother who was formerly detained in a Magdalene Laundry. Established in the 18th century, the laundries catered for so-called “fallen women” who had engaged in sex work or had a child outside of wedlock. <a href="https://www.gov.ie/pdf/?file=https://assets.gov.ie/45749/4e93b6e33db541d49d2de2774a6c692a.pdf#page=null">Ten of these institutions</a> operated in post-independence Ireland between 1922 and 1996 and <a href="http://jfmresearch.com/home/preserving-magdalene-history/about-the-magdalene-laundries/#:%7E:text=What%20were%20the%20Magdalene%20Laundries,maltreatment%20in%20Ireland's%20Magdalene%20Institutions.">at least 10,000 women</a> spent time in them. </p>
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<p>Laundries were just one of many mechanisms by which the Catholic Church and the Irish state regulated behaviour that was perceived as deviant. The official <a href="https://www.gov.ie/en/publication/d4b3d-final-report-of-the-commission-of-investigation-into-mother-and-baby-homes/">investigation into Mother and Baby Homes</a> (institutions similar to laundries where women who had children outside of wedlock were confined) forms the backdrop to events in Kilkinure. This serves as an important reminder that the laundries were part of a broader <a href="https://undpress.nd.edu/9780268182182/irelands-magdalen-laundries-and-the-nations-architecture-of-containment/">architecture of containment</a> that included institutions such as industrial schools and <a href="https://theconversation.com/mother-and-baby-homes-inquiry-now-reveal-the-secrets-of-irelands-psychiatric-hospitals-153608">psychiatric hospitals</a>. By the 1950s, 1% of Ireland’s population was contained in institutions of <a href="https://manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/9780719095450/">coercive confinement</a>.</p>
<p>Flashbacks to Kilkinure Laundry punctuate the drama to demonstrate the soul-destroying <a href="http://jfmresearch.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/State_Involvement_in_the_Magdalene_Laundries_public.pdf">conditions</a> experienced by detainees. They suffered forced labour, beatings, inadequate nutrition and various forms of abuse. Their hair was cut off, they were often assigned new “house names” and they were sequestered from the outside world.</p>
<p>The <a href="http://jfmresearch.com/home/oralhistoryproject/">Magdalene Oral History Project</a> and <a href="https://www.waterfordmemories.com/home">Waterford Memories Project</a> address not only what it meant to experience these institutions, but also <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1468-0424.12667">“what it meant to survive the laundries”</a>. </p>
<h2>Dramatising the laundries</h2>
<p>For Lorna, surviving the laundry results in visceral hallucinations and sleepwalking, in addition to separation from her child (who was taken from her and presumably given up for adoption). While further research is needed into the <a href="https://theconversation.com/irelands-shame-reforming-an-adoption-system-marked-by-secrecy-and-trauma-160897">system of secret adoptions</a> in Ireland, one estimate places the number of illegal adoptions of children at a <a href="https://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/adoption-controversy-only-one-person-was-ever-charged-over-bogus-birth-certificates-1.3515329">staggering 15,000</a>. </p>
<p>Although not all women in the laundries were unmarried mothers – many were victims of domestic and sexual abuse, were destitute or deemed “at risk” of immorality – <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14780887.2017.1416803">trauma</a> is a common experience among survivors. <a href="http://childabusecommission.ie/?p=853">As one recalled</a> to the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse: “The older I get I find these years haunt me, I will carry it to the grave with me … The nuns made you feel as if you’re a nobody and you never have any roots.”</p>
<p>The theme of recurrent injustice surfaces throughout the series. Lorna and her contemporaries have not been recognised by the state as detainees of a laundry. Instead, Kilkinure Convent has been classified as a training centre. </p>
<p>The survivors meet with a representative of a lobby group called <em>Éadrom</em> (the Irish word for “light”). This storyline closely mirrors reality. The state’s initial response to the laundries was to claim that they were private institutions and the state was not involved. </p>
<p>The <a href="http://jfmresearch.com/aboutjfmr/">Justice for Magdalenes</a> group, whose <a href="https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/Ireland_and_the_Magdalene_Laundries/QcY4EAAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=magdalene+laundry+ireland+10,000+1922+to+1996&printsec=frontcover">campaign</a> was most active between 2009 and 2013, sought to secure a state apology for women detained in these institutions in addition to a redress scheme. An interdepartmental committee was established and its <a href="https://www.gov.ie/pdf/?file=https://assets.gov.ie/45745/46c6e60af9ad4a42afafe6da158121b5.pdf#page=null">2013 report</a> found “evidence of direct state involvement” in the laundries. The report, however, was <a href="https://www.irishtimes.com/news/social-affairs/religion-and-beliefs/department-of-justice-rejects-magdalene-group-s-criticism-of-mcaleese-report-1.1576048">criticised</a> for minimising the harm suffered by women and marginalising their experiences.</p>
<p>A <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FvwhU3OJKk">formal state apology</a> was offered in February 2013 by taoiseach <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Enda-Kenny">Enda Kenny</a>, who described the laundries as the “nation’s shame”. A redress scheme was established with women given ex gratia payments based on how long they were in the laundries. But survivors who worked in laundries and lived in nearby training centres or industrial schools were <a href="https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/spotlight/arid-40324277.html#:%7E:text=The%20terms%20of%20the%20scheme,payment%20offered%20was%20%E2%82%AC100%2C000.">excluded</a> (this was later addressed in 2018). </p>
<p>The religious orders who ran the institutions did not contribute to the redress scheme, nor did they offer a formal apology. Their silence speaks volumes. Like Sister Eileen (Frances Tomelty), the fictional Mother Superior at the time of Lorna’s detention, this failure to engage (or to accept responsibility) communicates a profound lack of repentance for the abuses that occurred in the laundries.</p>
<h2>Other depictions of the laundries</h2>
<p>The Woman in the Wall is not the first cultural representation of a Magdalene Laundry. Films such as <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0318411/">The Magdalene Sisters</a> (2002) and <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2431286/">Philomena</a> (2013) have also explored this powerful subject matter. But the BBC show’s creator and writer Joe Murtagh is the first to use the medium of a <a href="https://www.hotpress.com/film-tv/bbc-to-explore-magdalene-laundries-in-new-series-starring-ruth-wilson-daryl-mccormack-22925149">“gothic thriller”</a> to explore the laundries’ painful nature and legacies – and the effect is unnerving. </p>
<p>Jolting shots of a room in Lorna’s house (where she stores a box of photos and newspaper clippings relating to Kilkinure Laundry) are filmed in an ominous crimson hue. Red devil horns are placed on Lorna’s head by a drunken member of a hen party. References are made to a <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/banshee">banshee</a> (a female spirit in Irish folklore whose wailing foretold impending death). </p>
<p>Lorna’s world is one where nightmares become reality, where ghosts haunt the living, and where the line between sanity and insanity is blurred and uncertain. The Woman in the Wall exposes the horrors of the Magdalene Laundries and in doing so seeks to ensure that such horrors will not be repeated in the future. It does not make for comfortable viewing and nor should it. But it is essential viewing in every sense.</p>
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<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Ciara Molloy does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Set in the fictional town of Kilkinure in western Ireland, the BBC drama captures the story of an unmarried mother who was formerly detained in a Magdalene Laundry.Ciara Molloy, Lecturer in Criminology, University of SheffieldLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1608972021-05-14T14:37:57Z2021-05-14T14:37:57ZIreland’s shame: reforming an adoption system marked by secrecy and trauma<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/400776/original/file-20210514-19-csuzwh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C2048%2C1361&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">In the 20th century Magdalene laundries were punitive institutions where young "fallen" women – pregnant and unmarried – endured a daily regime of silence, prayer and hard labour. The last Magdalene laundry closed in 1996.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/infomatique/8010431147">William Murphy/lFlickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>For the greater part of the 20th century Ireland was marked by a culture of shame that separated thousands of women from their children, many of whom were forcibly given up for adoption. The trauma inflicted by these separations was compounded by legal barriers that prevented adopted people from accessing information about themselves. </p>
<p>However, on Tuesday May 12, the Irish government published a draft bill that would give those adopted the right to access their birth information. This comes in the wake of decades of activism by <a href="http://adoption.ie">adopted people</a> and their supporters, and has the potential to significantly reform an adoption system historically marked by secrecy, shame and the trauma arising from <a href="https://www.irishtimes.com/news/social-affairs/stories-from-the-homes-the-td-who-landed-woman-in-trouble-and-the-girls-forced-to-cut-timber-1.4457108">institutionalisation</a>. </p>
<p>In modern Ireland, institutions such as mother and baby homes and the <a href="http://jfmresearch.com/home/preserving-magdalene-history/about-the-magdalene-laundries/">Magdalene Laundries</a> were tasked by the state to deal with “fallen” women who had transgressed ideals of Irish femininity, especially by becoming pregnant out of wedlock. Their children were either boarded out to foster parents, institutionalised, or adopted by families of the same faith, some as far away as America, and – as survivors, advocates and researchers <a href="http://clannproject.org/wp-content/uploads/Clann-Submissions_Redacted-Public-Version-October-2018.pdf">have long maintained</a> – often under questionable circumstances. </p>
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<p>Many searches by birth parents and children have been thwarted (as poignantly captured in the Oscar-nominated film <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/oct/31/philomena-review">Philomena</a>), and adopted people in Ireland have been denied information about themselves – if it still exists – that is readily available in other jurisdictions. Although there have been media investigations and the government commissioned a 2019 <a href="https://www.gov.ie/pdf/?file=https://assets.gov.ie/126409/d06b2647-6f8e-44bf-846a-a2954de815a6.pdf#page=null">review</a> into a small sample of illegal adoptions, and published its <a href="https://www.gov.ie/en/collection/mbhcoi/">mother and baby homes investigation</a> in March, there has never been a fully fledged investigation into adoption practices in Ireland.</p>
<p>The information we do have, including testimony from adopted people and their birth parents, calls into question the legality and morality of such practices. A recent RTÉ Prime Time <a href="https://www.rte.ie/news/investigations-unit/2021/0302/1200520-who-am-i-the-story-of-irelands-illegal-adoptions/">investigation</a> showed how familial relationships were deliberately and systematically severed, with children taken and given away – all to enforce a particular moral code.</p>
<h2>Punishing women and their children</h2>
<p>That code, as we now know, was highly problematic, informed by a social conservatism and Catholic moral teaching that particularly penalised women and children. As with so many investigations into Ireland’s past, shame featured here as a frame with which powerful figures – seemingly acting with impunity – established women as deserving or undeserving of children.</p>
<p>Shame, and the potential revealing of one’s “shame” of being pregnant, was used as a means of control. The fall-out from this culture and the consequences of its secretive and illegal separation of women and children, was movingly related by adopted people in the RTÉ documentary. They highlighted the ongoing hurt such practices have caused down through the generations, compounded by their inability to access their birth records.</p>
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<p>The recent <a href="https://www.gov.ie/en/collection/mbhcoi/">mother and baby homes investigation</a> was set up by the Irish government to examine the practices and treatment of women and so-called illegitimate children at these institutions. Sadly it did not engage in an in-depth assessment of adoption in Ireland, and its March 2021 report includes some highly questionable assertions, including that there was little evidence of “forced adoption”.</p>
<p>Bizarrely, the report simultaneously maintains that women “did not have much choice” but to give their child up for adoption, and “had no alternative” but to enter a mother and baby home when pregnant. It attributes responsibility for the “harsh treatment” meted out to unmarried pregnant women to the fathers and their own immediate families, casting the church and state in mere contributory roles. These and other sections of the commission’s report are being disputed by survivors, a number of whom, including prominent advocate Philomena Lee (subject of the eponymous film), are seeking to quash parts of the report <a href="https://www.irishtimes.com/news/crime-and-law/courts/high-court/philomena-lee-among-five-given-leave-to-challenge-mother-and-baby-homes-report-1.4535356">via the courts</a>.</p>
<p>But what of the powerful people who ran not just the institutions, but Irish society more generally, and who maintained the wider culture of shame? What of the religious orders and doctors shown in Prime Time’s investigation who made decisions about who was to have a child, and <a href="https://www.irishtimes.com/news/social-affairs/religion-and-beliefs/%C3%A9amon-de-valera-s-son-facilitated-illegal-adoptions-in-1960s-1.4499519">illegally facilitated</a> the taking of children? </p>
<h2>Missed opportunity</h2>
<p>While the commission includes references to shame in its report, it did not refer to the academic literature on the subject – not even in an Irish context, an area in which I conduct my research. There is a growing body of important work on the <a href="https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/46172566.pdf">role of gendered shame in Ireland</a> and how this relates to processes of institutionalisation.</p>
<p>Had the commission consulted such work, it might have come to some very different conclusions, and avoided the <a href="http://www.nuigalway.ie/globalwomensstudies/news/researchers-respond-to-the-report-of-the-commission-of-inquiry-into-mother-and-baby-homes.html">considerable criticisms</a> made by researchers, survivors and their supporters. It might have encountered the idea of “<a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/55780">affective economies</a>” of shame (highlighting how shame circulates between and becomes attached to certain people), and questioned who benefited materially and socially from the sexual shaming of women and their children. And it might have developed a better understanding of how shame operates through social structures, including gender and class, and how inequalities are reproduced through shame. </p>
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<p>The challenge now is to acknowledge the past injustices committed against women and children through the deployment of shame, and to disrupt the trauma that is still being compounded by inadequate treatment of the people most affected. Any action must, at a minimum, entitle adopted people to information about themselves, including via this newly announced legislation.</p>
<p>Although this draft bill has just been published, adopted people have already <a href="https://twitter.com/cmcgettrick/status/1392140992917159937">raised some concerns</a> about its design; they have questioned the need for meetings with social workers to explain privacy regarding parents who have indicated a desire for no contact, and expressed disappointment at the inability of relatives to apply for birth information on behalf of deceased loved ones.</p>
<p>The Irish state must now work with adopted people to ensure this legislation fully provides them with the information they should have been entitled to long ago. In this way it will take an important step in redressing the impact of this legacy of shame in Ireland.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/160897/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Clara Fischer has previously received funding from the British Academy for a research fellowship on the politics of shame in relation to gender and institutionalisation in Ireland.</span></em></p>The conservative Catholic moral code that underpinned adoption in Ireland penalised vulnerable women and their children. Now a proposed new law seeks to redress the impact of this legacy of shame.Clara Fischer, Vice-Chancellor Illuminate Fellow, School of History, Anthropology, Philosophy and Politics, Queen's University BelfastLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1536082021-01-26T11:44:14Z2021-01-26T11:44:14ZMother and baby homes inquiry: now reveal the secrets of Ireland’s psychiatric hospitals<p>Mother and baby homes were institutions where unmarried women were sent to have their babies, often arriving destitute having been denied support by the child’s father, and even their own family, simply for falling pregnant outside marriage. The Irish government has recently published an <a href="https://www.gov.ie/en/publication/d4b3d-final-report-of-the-commission-of-investigation-into-mother-and-baby-homes/">inquiry</a> into conditions at these homes, where 56,000 women spent time between 1922 and 1998 when the last closed. A report on <a href="https://www.health-ni.gov.uk/publication-research-report-mbhml/">similar homes in Northern Ireland</a> has also recently been published.</p>
<p>The Irish government’s inquiry is the latest investigation into institutions that together constituted what we have described as a network of “<a href="https://www.irishtimes.com/news/crime-and-law/coercive-confinement-concept-needs-to-be-examined-1.617761">coercive confinement</a>”. This also included reformatory and industrial schools, psychiatric hospitals, county homes (former workhouses) and Magdalen laundries. Yet the largest part of this landscape of confinement – institutions run by the state, particularly psychiatric hospitals – has gone unexamined. </p>
<p>The first inquiry was the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse in reformatory and industrial schools. The resulting <a href="http://www.childabusecommission.ie/">Ryan report</a> in 2009 estimated some 42,000 children had passed through them between the 1930s and the 1970s. Former pupils gave evidence of the physical and sexual abuse they had experienced.</p>
<p>The Ryan report found that the Catholic religious orders that ran the schools colluded in covering up abuse, and the Department of Education responsible for monitoring them was “deferential and submissive” to the religious orders, with its inspection regimes “fundamentally flawed and incapable of being effective.”</p>
<p>More recently, the <a href="http://www.justice.ie/en/JELR/Pages/MagdalenRpt2013">McAleese report</a> published in 2013 investigated the Magdalen laundries. Also run by Catholic orders, an estimated 10,000 women were <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/feb/05/magdalene-laundries-ireland-state-guilt">kept working in unpaid labour</a>. They lived in harsh conditions, sometimes for years, entering via the criminal justice system, from industrial schools, mother and baby homes or other institutions, through self-admission, or having been sent there by their families.</p>
<p>These three inquiries show how Ireland and other countries have begun to grapple with a legacy of maltreatment, particularly where children are involved, in the very institutions that were supposed to ensure their wellbeing. </p>
<h2>An Irish phenomenon?</h2>
<p>While mother and baby homes were not unique to Ireland, the number of women who entered them and their longevity makes them distinctive from similar institutions elsewhere. The report states: “It is probable that the proportion of Irish unmarried mothers who were in mother and baby homes was the highest in the world.”</p>
<p>The same observation can be made of the other places of coercive confinement. For example, by the mid-1920s there were <a href="https://www.education.ie/en/Publications/Statistics/stats_statistical_report_1926_1927.pdf">more children held within the industrial school system</a> in the 26 counties of the Irish Free State (now the Republic of Ireland) than in England and Wales. A 1966 report on the future of psychiatric hospitals claimed the number of patients detained involuntarily in Ireland “<a href="https://www.lenus.ie/handle/10147/45690">appears to be the highest in the world</a>”. </p>
<p>The mother and baby home report lays out the role played by families in sustaining the system:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Irish families were less willing to provide a home and support to a daughter who had given birth outside marriage and her child. This was due to a combination of factors - large families, poverty, but above all a concern with respectability and a family’s status in the community.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Some have <a href="https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/debates/debate/dail/2021-01-13/10/">criticised this view</a>, but it cannot be summarily dismissed. We have argued <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/hojo.12051">at length in a book</a> and in <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1462474507070549">various</a> <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/2632666320936440?journalCode=icna">articles</a> that to comprehend Ireland’s history of coercive confinement requires taking account of the complex inter-relationships between the family, state, and church(es). The report sets out these inter-relationships in nearly 600 pages that detail the social history of the homes, making clear that the injustices of these institutions cannot be laid at the door of the church and state alone.</p>
<h2>State culpability</h2>
<p>The report focuses chiefly on institutions managed by Catholic or Protestant religious bodies, and these have drawn the most comment. A notable example is the mother and baby home in Tuam, County Galway, where an unmarked mass grave of hundreds of infants was identified in 2013, and <a href="https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/news/we-did-not-live-up-to-our-christianity-order-of-nuns-who-ran-infamous-tuam-home-apologises-39964026.html">for which the home’s operators, the Sisters of Bon Secours, finally apologised</a> following the publication of this report. </p>
<p>But conditions in the four county homes administered by local authorities examined in the report were significantly worse than in the mother and baby homes. In addition, those in county homes had to carry out unpleasant work for which they were not paid.</p>
<p>In 1950, as well as the 8,585 people in county homes there were 18,677 people in psychiatric hospitals, 469 in prison and 52 in borstal – all institutions managed by the state. By comparison, there were 6,588 children in reformatory and industrial schools, around 1,000 women in Magdalen laundries, and in the region of 430 women in mother and baby homes run by faith-based organisations. In other words, more than three quarters of those coercively confined were held in state run institutions, often in dreadful conditions.</p>
<p>Psychiatric hospitals, the single greatest contributor to coercive confinement in mid-20th century Ireland, where tens of thousands were involuntarily detained over the decades, have not been subjected to any detailed scrutiny. Available records reveal that conditions and quality of care were appalling. An official visiting St Finian’s Psychiatric Hospital in Killarney in 1963 described an overpowering stench and toilets that were:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>nauseating with deeply pitted floors and lavatory bowls broken and cracked. There were no doors and no seats. A few of the toilets had been liberally sprinkled with Jeyes fluid [disinfectant] and I never thought it could smell so sweet.</p>
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<p>An inquiry into the treatment of psychiatric patients is urgently required to correct the view that cruelty and abuse of power were the preserve of the religious orders. It would reveal the uncomfortable extent to which families and government bodies were enmeshed in a system of coercive confinement the legacy of which continues to reverberate today.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/153608/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Most of those incarcerated in mid-20th century Ireland were held in psychiatric hospitals, which have kept their secrets until today. This must change.Eoin O'Sullivan, Professor in Social Policy, Trinity College DublinIan O'Donnell, Professor of Criminology, University College DublinLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1042782018-10-03T13:11:46Z2018-10-03T13:11:46ZWhy true horror movies are about more than things going bump in the night<p>Critics seem to have been shocked by horror films in the past few years. Of all people, they shouldn’t be, as shock is one of the cheap tricks for which they have always denigrated horror movies. Shock is easy and effective, but it’s vulgar. And scary movies are an amusement ride that rack up tension towards a peak, then drop us into a trough with a scream. It’s the same ride every time and we loop back to where we began. They are that mechanical.</p>
<p>But films such as Ari Aster’s <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/jun/01/hereditary-review-horror-toni-collette-brilliant-fear">Hereditary</a>, Jordan Peele’s <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2017/nov/17/get-out-golden-globes-race-horror-comedy-documentary-jordan-peele">Get Out</a>, and Robert Eggers’ <a href="https://www.metacritic.com/movie/the-witch">The Witch</a> have changed that. They have been praised in the mainstream press for their lofty ambitions, their social consciences, and their worthiness. The critical impulse, however, has been to file them away as categorical errors: they can’t possibly be horror films, because horror films are just thrill rides. </p>
<p>But horror stories have long grappled with deeper themes of human experience. Frankenstein is rich with questions about the meaning of nurture and of empathy. The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde explores the duality of man. “Shock horror” films are different, feeling much closer to pornography than art – the story doesn’t matter, it’s about the extremity of what you see. Indeed, after pornography, horror is the highest-grossing genre of film. No wonder critics attempted to move the films they like out of such company and rehabilitate them, as has been done with <a href="https://lithub.com/10-works-of-literary-horror-you-should-read/">classic horror literature</a>.</p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/239148/original/file-20181003-52684-16ud0ix.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/239148/original/file-20181003-52684-16ud0ix.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=412&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/239148/original/file-20181003-52684-16ud0ix.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=412&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/239148/original/file-20181003-52684-16ud0ix.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=412&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/239148/original/file-20181003-52684-16ud0ix.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=517&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/239148/original/file-20181003-52684-16ud0ix.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=517&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/239148/original/file-20181003-52684-16ud0ix.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=517&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Sketch from Penny Illustrated Paper showing scenes from the 1888 West End production of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
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<p>Prominent articles in the <a href="https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/inside-high-end-horror-films-shaking-up-cannes-1111210">Hollywood Reporter</a> and <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/with-a-quiet-place-and-get-out-horror-is-having-a-mainstream-moment-will-that-alienate-fans/2018/04/13/99bbcbb0-3db1-11e8-974f-aacd97698cef_story.html">Washington Post</a> attempted to reclassify films such as Get Out and Hereditary as “elevated horror”, “smart horror”, or “post horror” – all terms that, while they may seem to qualify the genre, still just mean horror. They are films that do the thing that horror films do: through metaphor and fantasy, they reveal a dark truth. </p>
<p>The way we classify films can be misleading. A scary film, for example, is not the same thing as a horror film. A scary film scares you – and a scare takes place in an instant. It’s a “jump-out-of-your-chair” moment. It’s that same chair flying across the room, a door slamming, someone behind you going “BOO!” A scare is always accompanied by a sigh of relief. It’s fun – the thing wasn’t really there. Add enough of them together and you get a 90-minute scary movie.</p>
<p>A horror film, on the other hand, is much longer than that. Horror is the slow, dawning realisation that the worst thing is true. Unlike the scare, there is no relief from it. The scare and the horror are opposite extremes: the scare is just behind you, but the horror is right in front of your eyes.</p>
<h2>House of horrors</h2>
<p>When the producers came to me with their idea for the film that became my debut feature, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/12/movies/the-devils-doorway-review.html">The Devil’s Doorway</a>, it could have been a scary movie. They wanted to make a found-footage film – think The <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/may/21/how-we-made-the-blair-witch-project">Blair Witch Project</a> or <a href="https://www.metacritic.com/movie/paranormal-activity">Paranormal Activity</a>, films that purport to be unedited footage shot by the characters in the film themselves. And they wanted it set in an abandoned <a href="https://www.irishtimes.com/news/social-affairs/religion-and-beliefs/magdalene-laundries-i-often-wondered-why-were-they-so-cruel-1.3521600">Magdalene Laundry</a>, one of the haunted remnants of Ireland’s recent past, where woman – unmarried mothers, troublesome girls, lesbians – were condemned to live their lives in wash houses run by the Catholic church, kept from society and washing the country’s dirty linen.</p>
<p>In other hands, it could have been a race through empty rooms, pursued by the vengeful spirit of a mistreated girl – all caught on GoPro. That, however, would have missed the horror of the situation, using the history of those places as a mere backdrop for the film’s mechanics, like erecting a theme park there. I proposed we make a horror film instead.</p>
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<p>In 1960, two priests enter a working laundry, charged with documenting the supposed Marian miracle that has taken place there. As they gather footage and interview defensive nuns, it becomes clear that something else is going on. However, it is not the Gothic revelations in the film that make it a horror film – rather it is the thing that the two priests really document. There is spooky stuff, but the real horror is the slow dawning for the priests – and through them, the viewers – of the real-life situation that exists and is being perpetuated by the Catholic church and the state that condones it.</p>
<h2>Visceral reaction</h2>
<p>A horror film set in <a href="https://www.irishtimes.com/news/social-affairs/religion-and-beliefs/magdalene-laundries-i-often-wondered-why-were-they-so-cruel-1.3521600">a Magdalene Laundry</a> may yet shock critics at home, simply because of the risk that it might be in bad taste. The Channel 4 sitcom, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2015/feb/24/hungry-irish-famine-sitcom-comedy-hot-potato">Hungry</a>, set during the Irish potato famine, <a href="https://www.irishexaminer.com/ireland/channel-4-scraps-plans-for-controversial-comedy-set-during-great-famine-374797.html">was panned</a> before it aired over similar questions. </p>
<p>But horror and comedy are linked in the way that our responses are pre-analytical – we are horrified or amused because we recognise something as being true without having to think about it? You either respond or you don’t. It is no surprise that Jordan Peele, who <a href="https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2018/03/oscars-2018-jordan-peele-best-original-screenplay-get-out">won a Best Screenplay Oscar</a> for Get Out, started his professional career writing comedy. </p>
<p>And like comedy, horror also should punch up – recognising and challenging those misusing their power at the top rather than merely making monsters of those at the bottom. There is nothing we can’t joke about – as long as we joke in good faith. And, similarly, there is nothing in the world so horrific that it is off limits to horror films. Indeed, we will only know it is a horror film if we feel truly horrified.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/104278/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Aislinn Clarke is the director of The Devil's Doorway which was funded by Northern Ireland Screen.</span></em></p>Proper horror should be more than just monsters and suspense.Aislinn Clarke, Lecturer in Film Studies, Queen's University BelfastLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.