Uncanny Valley Girls: Essays on Horror, Survival, and Love

"In these extraordinary essays, Lisowski reads the entrails of her life like a witch and invites you along for the ride. How could you say no?" —Carmen Maria Machado

From Lambda Award-winning poet Zefyr Lisowski, a sharply personal and expansive memoir-in-essays dedicated to the strange and absurd beauty of horror films, exploring the complications of gender, the insidiousness of class ascension, and the latent violence hidden in our own uncanny reflections.

This is how it worked: first I loved them, and then I loved myself.

At twenty-seven, poet Zefyr Lisowski found herself in the place she feared most: a locked psych ward. While inside, she turned to horror movies—her deepest, most constant comfort.

Rather than disturb, scary movies have always provided solace and connection for Lisowski, as they do many others—offering a vision of a world filled equally with beauty and pain, and a reason to reach out to others and hold them tight. After all, as Lisowski argues, what terrifies us most about these movies is our own uncanny reflection—and at the root of that fear, a desperate desire to love and be loved.

In these wide-ranging essays, Lisowski weaves theory and memoir into nuanced critiques of films such as The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Saint Maud. From fears about sickness and disability, to trans narratives and the predator/victim complex, to the struggle to live in a world that wants you dead, she explores horror’s reciprocal impact on our culture and—by extension—our lives. Through it all, Lisowski lays bare her own complex biography—spanning from a trans childhood in the South to the sweaty dancefloors of Brooklyn—and the family, friends, and lovers that have bloomed with her into the present.

Deeply felt, blood-spattered, and brimming with care and wonder, Uncanny Valley Girls investigates the art of horror—and of the self—with brilliance and wit, blending the two topics seamlessly with essays such as:

• “Ghost Face,” exploring the legacy of whiteness in Scream from the vantage point of the author’s childhood in coastal North Carolina.
• “War on Terror,” outlining how the violence of the Iraq War and its legacy of torture impacted the films of that era, such as Final Destination, House of Wax, and Turistas.
• “Southern Fried,” an ode to the author’s beloved Texas Chain Saw Massacre and how the film’s simple beauty and cruelty shaped the author’s relationship with the South.
• “Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Werewolf Girl,” a complication of the werewolf as an inherently masculine form—and of the uneasy distinctions of victim and perpetrator—through the lens of films like Ginger Snaps and Angela Carter’s “The Werewolf.”
• And more.