15 Toni Morrison and Beloved from When Women Write Horror with Dr. Rosanne Welch

From On Screenwriting and Media with Dr. Rosanne Welch

In honor of Halloween - and in service to my teaching philosophy --

"Words Matter. Writers Matter. Women Writers Matter."

I presented this holiday lecture "When Women Write Horror" on Tuesday, October 29th, 2019. Researching the many, many women who have written horror stories - in novels, films, and television - brought new names to my attention who I am excited to start reading. I hope you will be, too!

Watch this entire presentation

Transcript:

In our class, we go from Shirley Jackson, We deal with probably the most respected haunted house story in American literature -- which is Beloved by Toni Morrison, who passed away just earlier this year because what she's doing is using, again, like Pauline Hopkins, the history of slavery and what those ghosts are for all of our society right because it's the story of a woman -- based on a true story -- a woman who did not want her children to grow up in slavery so she ran away with them and when the master almost captured them, she wanted to kill her children rather than make them live as slaves but she only succeeded in killing one of them before the rest were recaptured and now she lives with a ghost of the little girl who is named Beloved because that's the only thing she could afford to put on the tombstone. Instead of Dearly Beloved it's just Beloved.