The Horror of The Stepford Wives and Its Lasting Relevance

Hey, it's October 1st already and while I'm dealing with the existential dread of how quickly time is passing me by, I thought it would be fun to look at some great horror type things that I enjoy. That's right, I don't just like trashy teen things and rom coms, I also enjoy the odd horror from time to time. Generally speaking, I've just always been obsessed with movies of most genres. My mom, picking up on this, would often try to introduce me to new things that I might not have picked up on my own as a teen. She introduced me to The Princess Bride, Stand By Me, Kiss of the Spider Woman and many others but I think the most important film she ever introduced to me was The Stepford Wives.

This one, not the Nicole Kidman version

I did not think of my mother as a fan of horror but she was adamant that this was amazing (she also introduced me to the OG The Haunting) so I gave it a try. My tastes are usually quite light and fun. I enjoy the occasional drama but I fully admit my film tastes are not refined. But she knew how much I loved horror movies (in spite of being the biggest scaredy cat in existence. Seriously, I had nightmares because of the beginning of Batman Returns) and she suggested I watch this one. I was immediately intrigued as the only horror I normally watched was stuff like Halloween and Child's Play. I thought they were scary but I didn't know what the fuck was in store for me when we watched this one.

The Stepford Wives on its surface is an extremely dated movie from the 70s, in that it is very slowly paced and very entrenched in the mind-set of the 70s but that does not take away from the story it is trying to tell. The times have definitely changed since the bra-burning feminism of the 70s but that doesn't mean that the general premise of this movie doesn't hold the fuck up today. While not in your face scary, the movie is still as chilling as ever.


In fact, it really irked me that the remake treated it like a comedy. To me, that tells me that they had a profound lack of understanding of what this movie was trying to say and just remembered that one scene and thought it was funny. Honestly, if you want the true Stepford Wives reboot, watch Get Out, it understands the psychological/social horror way better and is infinitely better. Though it does borrow a lot from this movie, some scenes almost feel ripped from this movie and put into that one, still it's great.

If you don't know THE scene I mentioned earlier, I'm talking about the outdoor party where the wife will just die if she can't get that recipe. Most people think it's funny and out of context, sure it's a woman who's clearly off her rocker but I promise you, with context it's downright chilling. Here's the scene:

This isn't a funny scene, it's proof to Joanna that something is very wrong in her new town and sets her on a journey to discover what. Up until this point, Joanna just felt extremely out of place in her new town and thought something was wrong with her. This is when she started to question the apparent perfection of Stepford, Connecticut.

So, what is The Stepford Wives actually about, if not mocking silly housewives? Well, it's an incredibly insidious thriller about how men (take this to mean weak-willed, insecure men) view women, as objects and possessions. The opening scene even sets up this tenet when Joana's daughter points out a man carrying a "naked lady". Of course, it's actually a mannequin and Joanna, intrigued begins to take snap shots of this moment. The man is pulling the mannequin along, positioning it how he wants to make things easier on him as he carries it down the street, a chilling portent of what's to come for Joanna.

You see, in Stepford, Connecticut, all of the women are perfect, doll-like and love to cook and clean and are doting wives. While they are all immaculate, gaudily dressed and very much behave like mannequins, controlled and carted around by their own handlers, their husbands. It should be noted that while all of the women are beautiful and young looking, the men are mostly old, balding, and out of shape. This is the same for Joanna, although she dresses much more casually and with a sense of personal style. Of course, she's also played by Katherine Ross who is just the most gorgeous woman:

I wholeheartedly stan her



So, obviously she outshines her rather lacklustre husband who is balding and not the best looking. This is on purpose of course because the husband, feeling lost in the big city where Joanna feels completely at home, decides to move his family to Stepford for a better life. But, a better life for who? Joanna is miserable right from the get go and has only agreed to the move for her children but she misses the noise and life of the big city immediately. To make matters worse, she feels out of step with the rest of the wives in the town because they all appear to be doting stay at home wives with little to no personality or lives of their own. Joanna, is a photographer with big ambitions outside of caring for her children and feels suffocated by the quiet and seemingly perfect small town.

Meanwhile, her husband is thriving and joins a men's club. He feels right at home in this town because he has everything he wants, nice house, kids, good job, and a wife. Not to mention a nice social circle. In the city, he was a small fish in a big pond but here, he has a place, he feels noticed, he is a king. And yet, Joanna questions him, why they moved here, why he joined a weird men's group without asking her, why he bought a freaking house without asking her first. She wants a partnership but he wants free reign to make the decisions he wants. He recognizes her beauty and her intellect but it scares him. Moving her to a small town is a way to keep her under his wing. That, in and of itself is scary enough.

Enter in the fact that Joanna is essentially creatively stifled and suffocating in Stepford and is already losing a bit of her self-identity coupled with her feeling wholly lesser than the perfect wives of Stepford who always have sparkling clean kitchens and have afternoon trysts with their husbands with energy to spare, always happy, always perfect. It's an ideal that Joanna can't uphold, nor should she or anyone be expected to. Stepford is most men's dream world but it's out of most women's nightmare hellscape. 

Worse, it's something we all go through in the real world. We're constantly under pressure to be prim, proper, pretty, and perfect. All the time. It's exhausting the amount of pressure society puts on women, devaluing them as people. (Before anyone complains, men are under pressures too but they are not what we are discussing here). The point of this is driven home when the true horror of Stepford is revealed.

I don't think I'm blowing anyone's mind here but SPOILERS FOR AN OVER 40 YEAR OLD MOVIE: the twist is that the Stepford Wives are so perfect because they are all robots. It's a great twist and memorable but honestly, that's not the idea that scares me. What scares me is the utter betrayal Joanna faces, the utter dehumanization of it all.

The most chilling point of the movie, to me, isn't that women are killed and replaced with robots but the implied message behind it. Take, for example, Bobbie, Joanna's only friend in Stepford. They are friends precisely because they both have a personality. They can joke with each other and laugh and she makes Joanna feel normal for not having a perfectly clean house all the time. She is the one good thing for Joanna in the town but when she returns from a "vacation" she's decidedly different.



This scene stuck with me forever because I find it so viscerally terrifying. Everything about Bobbie has been snuffed out, everything that made her Bobbie, is gone. The woman Joanna encounters looks like Bobbie and sounds like Bobbie but objectively is not Bobbie in the slightest. She lacks any of the charm and nuances that made her an individual and is now just like the rest of the Stepford Wives.

And here's the thing, it's not the fact that she was turned into a robot in and of itself that terrified me, it was the fact that someone she loved and trusted did this to her, wanted to do this to her. When Joanna and Bobbie try to form their women's club, one of the wives actually admits that she doesn't believe her husband ever loved her and you feel sad for her but with this scene you suddenly realize...none of the husbands here ever loved their wives. It's not possible for them to have truly loved who their wives were and still want to murder them and replace them with an emotionless sex bot. So desperate are they for their dream of the perfect wife, they are willing to murder their loved ones and replace them with a look alike doll absolutely devoid of personality. They don't want someone to talk to and they don't want someone who will challenge them, they want someone they can mold into everything they want with no effort on their part. Joanna sums it up best when she talks to a therapist:

Joanna: It'll happen to me before then. When you come back, there will be a woman with my name and my face, she'll cook and clean like crazy, but she won't take pictures and she won't be me!

I think about this moment a lot. I think about it and I get really, really sad. Joanna is a bright, engaging young woman who loves her children and taking photos, but her husband, the person who is supposed to love her, doesn't care about any of what makes her a person. All he sees is a pretty wife and that's all he wants. That any of the men in this town are satisfied, nay happy, to be dating a robot that they have programmed to say and do what they want is downright chilling.

If this movie, or the book it's based on by Ira Levin, was meant to be a scathing satire of suburban housewives and how brainwashed they are, I'd like people to more seriously consider what made them that way? It's clear as day to me that the villains of The Stepford Wives are not the robot women but the men who created them. Worse, that something like this (minus advanced robotics) can happen in real life given the right circumstances or the wrong ones, if you will.

This movie is so powerful to me because it's horror is steeped in a scary amount of reality. I think about this movie any time I read about an Incel murdering people for not giving them their bodies as compensation for being nice. I think about this movie when I hear men writing laws that penalize women for abortions or limit their access to birth control. I think about this movie every time a man gets mad at a woman for expressing her opinion and calls her a bitch. I think about my great-uncle who emotionally abused my great-aunt so much that she could only share an opinion if she quantified it by saying her husband said it. I think about this movie and a small shiver runs up my spine as I realize that the men of Stepford are not fictional, they are very much real and they would be more than happy to replace us with programmable, agreeable robots.