Stepford Wives as Ideology? Horror?

Stepford Wives as Ideology? Horror? 1975 Film Version of the Stepford Wives The original 1975 film the Stepford Wives enjoyed a renaissance of interest, a surging river of media analysis during the promotional build-up to - and resulting from the critiques and reviews of - the 2004 version of the same movie, the new one starring Nicole Kidman and Matthew Broderick.

As to whether either film actually qualifies as a "horror" movie is a legitimate point of debate; but meantime, there can be little doubt that some members of the feminist movement were horrified at the first movie's chilling portrayal of sexism gone crazy in a suburban setting, and there can be no doubt that this movie stirred up some audience members through its ideological themes and images.

Beyond ideology, the film was seen by others - then and now - as an entertaining, not-to-be-taken-too-seriously parody on sexism, a satire on the perception that America is still a male-dominated society, and a tongue-in-cheek play on the fact that many men do, indeed, fear the feminist movement (AKA, "women's liberation").

And so, would a group of financially successful men - who are old-school chauvinists and who develop a workable plot to create robots out of their real-in-the-flesh wives - really prefer empty-headed, housework-obsessed fake yet stunningly sexy wives, to their real women? Could it also be that this 1975 version is a satire on the banal nature of the boring suburban housewife; the neat, perky woman who waits for her husband to come home and yell, after entering the front door: "Honey, I'm home! Is the meatloaf ready?" That theme would give a boost to the notion that the Stepford Wives is indeed a horror movie, because one of the consistent themes of horror has been the repression of sexual energy.

Certainly, these mindless though sexy zombies do not have the sexual zest of real women, albeit the "Men's Association" members seem to have their way with these robot women. And monsters have always been scary partly because though the monster is non-human, it has human traits; the non-human female robots have exaggerated human traits, creating a kind of friendly monster genre while playing out an ideological tale of male domination and female submission.

Could this movie possibly fall into the category of a conspiracy; that any fictional parody of male behavior (which this surely is, at least in part) becomes in fact a parody of female behavior as well? Is that what irks feminists about the Stepford Wives? And no matter what the answer to that question is, the "horror" aspects of this 1975 film were balanced, and even matched, by the ideological aspects.

Whether one views the film as a statement on that cadre of men who are control freaks, or that element of the female gender hopelessly submissive to the whims and demands of men, the film has a strong ideological theme. And moreover since ideology is part of the political world, and the political issues of the day seem to always creep into film, the Stepford Wives, as a feminist-themed film, is ideological.

Feminists always have a fierce political agenda, and part of the horror of this show is that it uses "mind control" to keep women down. In his book, the Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror, author David J. Skal discusses the various "scares" in American society that eventually became themes in horror pictures. The "bomb scare" produced monsters that became gigantic and menacing because they were doused.