In The Shock Doctrine Naomi Klein describes the process of “disaster capitalism.” To simplify greatly, she notes that the neoliberal free market has evolved to take advantage of national crises and seemingly “natural” disasters, using these moments of collective distraction and general freak-out to stealthily implement intensifying exploitative policies and social arrangements. The COVID pandemic has set off another round of this predation, forcing us to turn our homes into offices, blend our domestic work with paid labor, pay for our own office supplies, and manage the psychological fallout that results from these changes. Meanwhile, we are advised to concentrate on the bright side of this brave new world – “More time with your loved ones!” “You can wear pajamas to work!” – while ignoring the dangers and downsides, “More time to get isolated and abused by domestic partners!” “More time to never be done with work!” For those of us who see the cup as half empty, we can find an avenging spirit in the protagonist of the only film directed by famed photographer Cindy Sherman, Office Killer, a horror film made in 1997 but still relevant today.
Spoilers follow!
The film tells the story of Dorine (Carol Kane), a frumpy, socially inept, copyeditor at a magazine called Constant Consumer, who is triggered into a murder spree when her office begins downsizing and, along with reducing her hours, banishes her to work from home, where she will have to combine her lonely job with caring for her sick mother. Rather than capitulate to this exile Dorine begins bringing home her co-workers to keep her company. She accomplishes this by killing them one by one.
The film belongs to a sub-genre that could be called anti-work horror, to be compared with American Psycho (2000), Sorry to Bother You (2018), Mayhem (2017), and the TV series Severance (2022). But Dorine’s character most closely corresponds to that of Milton Waddams in the classic non-horror anti-work film that came out two years after Office Killer, Office Space. Like Milton, Dorine is a meek, desexualized, and grating underling, negligible to those around her, who is pushed too far, and who finally burns it all down.
What is unique to Office Killer, then and now, is that it takes on the rapid “feminization” of the workplace, recognizing the horror of individualistic “lean in” feminism as well as the hyper-exploitation of feminized care work. Nearly all the important characters in the film are women, and none of them are sympathetic. Instead, as in Sherman’s most famous photographic work, they are portraits of “types,” namely those created by the feminization of labor, competitive capitalism, and the despair and depletion that haunts neoliberal sociality.
In that vein we have Norah (Jeanne Tripplehorn), the “new fangled” business woman who is happy to lend an empathetic ear to her co-workers even as she ruthlessly reorganizes the office, serving capitalist ends by shortchanging her underlings for their work and shedding the costs of infrastructural support by sending them home. Virginia (Barbara Sukowa) is the office manager who is a relic of the eighties. Instead of disguising her rapaciousness with soft pastels and cheerful maxims, as Norah does, she presents as a tough-as-nails alpha boss, comparable to the Miranda Priestly character in The Devil Wears Prada (2006). Finally, there is the more lowly office worker, Kim (Molly Ringwald), who compensates for her lack of status in the office by flaunting her sexual power.
From the start, the film shows Dorine’s life as one constant stream of care, labor, and deprivation. The film opens with a transition that will deepen this exploitation. Dorine is banished to work remotely from her home, which means that now there will be no boundaries at all. This blurring affects all the women of Constant Consumer. Virginia seems to live a life of sickly isolation, her cold demandingness a cover for fragility. Norah struggles for “work-life” balance as her fiancé eyes other women, and even in bed her thoughts are colonized by naked ambition. Kim is perpetually enraged by her work conditions and blows off steam by having affairs with “taken” men.
Dorine’s first kill is an “accidental” electrocution that occurs after she is sexually harassed by coworker Gary while they work together after hours. She starts to call an ambulance but instead decides to take Gary’s body home. This will be the beginning of her collection, as she goes on to intentionally kill Virginia and Norah, as well as a houseless man, a random mail room employee and a couple of girl scouts. She keeps these bodies in her basement where she stages domestic scenes with them, having finally found a loving family and set of colleagues that can’t disappoint her. In her eyes, her co-workers are still alive, keeping her company, but we see their abject bodies as they really are—gelatinous with blood and surrounded by buzzing flies. The killings culminate when Dorine’s mother dies a natural death. Soon after, Norah’s boyfriend, Daniel, arrives at Dorine’s house to investigate his missing girlfriend and finds the bodies. After killing him, she burns the house down and drives off to whatever future awaits her. In the final scene she is transformed from office frump to a glamourous femme fatale replete with blond wig and sunglasses. She is ready for her next job.
Office Killer is the anti-work, feminist horror film that many of us crave, but like many films that were made by and for women, especially in the nineties, this film has rarely been seen. In fact, it was produced by Christine Vachon, who was recently cited in a Guardian article lamenting the loss of important films in the age of streaming. The article notes that films by woman directors, such as Elaine May’s The Heartbreak Kid (1972) and Mary Harron’s I Shot Andy Warhol (1996), are especially likely to be disappeared because, as Harron claims, of “unconscious bias.”
In the case of Office Killer, this unconscious bias has led to the film’s quiet burial both now and when it was made. It was bought by Miramax, but after testing the film with a few largely male audiences, they declined to distribute it. It was eventually picked up by the small company Strand Releasing and distributed only to a few art houses “and then sent… to the grave of the VHS/DVD bin,” as Dahlia Schweitzer puts it.
I find this premature burial of Office Killer to be a particular loss to filmgoers. This is not only because of its prescient glimpse of the horrors of working from home, but also because it represents a road not travelled. There was no lack of intriguing feminist culture in the late 20th century, but much of it could only be viewed by a very small elite audience. The experimental films of Chantel Ackerman, Agnes Varda, and Laura Mulvey or, for that matter, the photography of Sherman herself represented counterpoints to male-centered narratives that dominated the screens of movie theaters and television. However, these works were relegated to academia and rarified spaces such as museums and art theaters. The fight for a popular, accessible feminist culture has been an uphill battle. I think of Office Killer as an important ancestor to the wave of current woman-directed horror films such as The Babadook, Raw, Relic, Fresh, Revenge, Prevenge, Black Christmas, Good Manners, Tigers are not Afraid, MFA, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, The Lure, The Fits, Candyman, St. Maude, American Mary, In My Skin, Fear Street, XX, Goodnight Mommy, Amulet, The Lodge, Rabid, The Love Witch, and Titane that constitute popular, feminist genre works that don’t settle for platitudinous empowerment narratives, but instead direct a steady and murderous gaze at the gory wounds inflicted by capitalism and patriarchy.
As the famed theorist of feminism and cinema, Laura Mulvey, has suggested, Cindy Sherman was particularly well positioned to bring feminist views to a wider audience, since her work was in constant dialogue with popular culture. In the face of the widespread fetishization of the female body, some feminists came to the conclusion that it was impossible to represent women’s bodies without capitulating to the “male gaze.” Sherman, instead, embraced this representation, finding ways to engage with popular culture and question it, “making it strange.” In most retrospectives of Sherman’s work, Office Killer is dismissed or not acknowledged, but in many senses, it is a culmination of the representational strategies we can see in her photography up to that point. As Rosalind Krauss notes, when one looks at the trajectory of Sherman’s work, “something …comes out in retrospect as each succeeding series seems to double back and comment on the earliest.” This is true of her one feature film as well.
In the late seventies, Sherman became well known for her series of black and white photographs called “Untitled Film Stills,” portraits she took of herself inhabiting the personae of different characters from imaginary films, inspired by film noir and B-movie genres. The focus was on feminine archetypes, such as a photo (#10) in which she crouches on a kitchen floor in front of an oven, grasping a carton of eggs lifted from a pile of groceries. This tragic domestic posture will be echoed in Office Killer towards the end of the film when Dorine attacks Norah, forcing her to similarly crouch between a washer and dryer before stabbing her to death. A thematic refusal of both domestic and waged labor is depicted as Dorine forces her boss into a sacrificial posture, kneeling before household appliances while she is slaughtered.
The echo between Office Killer and Untitled Film Stills conjures a long lineage of enforced feminine types that proceed the “working girl.” As Dahlia Schweitzer (who countered the silence on Office Killer by writing a whole book about the film!) puts it, these photos are “images we recognized because they told stories we knew—women whose roles and faces we had seen before.” Sherman’s work suggests that women have been constructed by what Mulvey calls a “culture of appearances,” and that rather than lost authenticity, “femininity” is a performance, or a series of masquerades, vulnerable to the voyeurism of the male/camera gaze. This understanding of the constructedness of feminine types persists into the logic of Office Killer where the female characters are presented as a bestiary of late capitalist grotesques, but whose monstrosity is shown to be the result of material pressures and constraints which these woman workers can’t escape.
After Untitled Film Stills, Sherman was commissioned by the magazine Artforum to produce a series of photos. Here, she continued her project of self-portraits, this time producing color photos of women in horizontal positions, inspired by the postures of models in pornography. But in these guises, Sherman does not conform to conventional expressions of sexuality, submission, or lust, rather she generally exhibits fatigue and lassitude, or an unknowable “longing and reverie,” as Mulvey describes it.
In one photo (#90) she wears a red wig and curls in on herself while lying on the couch, looking sleepily or forlornly at a telephone. This is echoed in a scene from Office Killer depicting the character Kim (played by red-headed eighties it girl, Molly Ringwald, who looks uncannily like Sherman). Unlike Norah and Virginia, who are Dorine’s bosses, Kim is her peer. But rather than this leading to solidarity there is only antagonism between the two women. Dorine does not succeed in killing Kim, but she does get her fired, after which Kim goes to Norah’s boyfriend, Daniel (Michael Imperioli), to warn him that Dorine is a killer, and that Norah may be in danger. However, at the same time that Kim is concerned with Norah’s well-being, she has been trying to seduce Daniel. Her life, we have learned throughout the film, feels empty and meaningless, as she is humiliated and mistreated at work and she has “failed” at securing a suitable male partner. Her only outlets are the fleeting feelings of eros that come with male attention.
At Daniel’s apartment, Kim lies horizontally on his couch, sipping a cocktail. Even though she is speaking of her fear, she also poses in a sexualized position, exhibiting a condition in which women’s sexuality is never free of fear nor of work. The scene ends with Daniel going out to investigate, but before he does, he hands Kim a telephone, making the reference to Centerfolds complete. Later, after killing Norah and Daniel, Dorine will call Kim, who is still supine on Daniel’s couch. Kim picks up and asks who it is. Dorine responds, “No one, Kim. No one at all.” This is Dorine’s revenge on Kim, the centerfold who has never shown her solidarity. Kim now knows that Dorine has successfully killed Daniel, and has won the struggle of all against all that characterizes contemporary office dynamics.
After the period of Centerfolds, Sherman’s photography becomes more explicitly horror influenced. This work is filled with dismembered mannequins and dolls, grotesque prosthetic body parts, and disembodied excretions. As Mulvey puts it, “in the last resort, nothing is left but disgust—the disgust of sexual detritus, decaying food, vomit, slime, menstrual blood, hair.” In these photos, Sherman turns the fetishized woman’s body inside-out. Untitled #190, may be a face, but it also may be a mound of scabrous pustules. Untitled #264 is a masked woman with no torso between her prosthetic misshapen breasts and exposed, cavernous vulva. These grotesqueries are echoed in Dorine’s basement where she keeps the corpses of the coworkers she has killed. Sherman dwells on the viscosity of the gore as Dorine tenderly cleans Gary’s gelatinous exposed organs with glass cleaner or plays with a handsy mail room worker’s severed hands. Dorine’s communion with these repellant meat puppets seems to be her only source of intimacy. Her solution to the disembodiment of her laboring life is to plunge into the blood and guts of these bodies. That is, her job at Constant Consumer has driven her to possess and consume her coworkers completely.
Laura Mulvey wrote about Sherman’s photography before Office Killer was made, but still she drew on theories of horror film to describe the logic of Sherman’s representational strategies. Writing in 1991, she cites feminist horror scholar Barbara Creed’s conception of abjection and of the “monstrous feminine” to describe Sherman’s most visceral work. In feminist horror criticism, abjection is a key term to express how the genre denaturalizes our society’s patriarchal logic in which attributes associated with femininity are devalued and seen as repellent. In the dominant culture, women’s bodily functions such as menstruation and childbirth are thought to be grotesque and unspeakable. Psychological states and characteristics associated with women—such as hysteria, madness, passivity, and irrationality—are feared and despised.
Horror has the capacity to depict the abjection of the “feminine” as something that we must pay attention to. And while some horror films may serve to reinscribe these associations, feminist-themed horror interrogates them. In Sherman’s photos and in Office Killer, abjection is not a means to render monstrous women as “other.” We are not meant to define ourselves in opposition to these women, or as their victims. Instead, we identify with these unspeakable women and see how social forces have shaped and cemented their monstrosity. As Yuxin Wen notes, even artists who refuse the label of “feminist” that others attribute to them, can be seen to share a “conceptual link” in their aesthetic and thematic expressions of abjection. Sherman famously kept her cards close when it came to her alleged feminism, but most critics agree that her use of horror was a way to critique the “idealized image of woman” and the misogynistic depictions wrought by male artists such as the Surrealists.
The women in Sherman’s photography and in Office Killer are illustrations of a continuum of archetypes that harness female desire to capitalist accumulation. Sherman’s photographic work draws our attention to female “types” who embody domesticity and sexualization, both crucial, as seventies feminists such as Leopoldina Fortunati and Silvia Federici have insisted, to facilitate the reproduction of the “productive” worker. Office Killer builds on this implied analysis to show that formal employment has not liberated women from these archetypes but mobilized them as a foundation for its own repertoire of “office types” that still conform to gendered logic. “Capitalism has been spectacularly successful in using the gender distinction toward its own ends,” as Juliana Spahr and Joshua Clover argue, and this means that gendered spheres of appearance, behavior, and activities are constantly adapted and readapted to alienate us from our own interests and desires.
Perhaps the scariest scene in Office Killer, from the perspective of our moment, is when Daniel delivers Dorine the computer and technology kit she will need to work from home. Dorine is hunched over in her living room watching a morning television show that insists, “we’re all happy to be here on this beautiful, cheerful day” when Daniel rings the bell. Just as many of us experienced at the beginning of the pandemic, Dorine is told that her computer is now her “lifeline to the office.” Rather than Zoom, in 1997 email was a technological frontier, and Daniel excitedly informs Dorine that “for you folks at home you’ll be using it for practically everything.” “Even though it seems weird at first,” he explains, “some folks say they like it so much, they stop talking to people in person.” This marks a moment, long before the present, when the feminized labor of communication itself is becoming fully functionalized and disembodied, even as the bodies and capacities of women are not at liberty to engage in other activities. At that moment, it seems, Dorine is at a crossroads. She can become a victim of her situation or a monster. Although she has already stowed Gary’s corpse in her basement, she has not yet killed anyone intentionally. The scene ends as we see her cats pawing at the basement door, where the stench of decay is already beginning to rise, and we hear the insistent sound of a buzzer ringing out from above, where Dorine’s housebound mother is demanding care. The slight smile that creeps over Dorine’s face makes us complicit and disgusted at once. We want to both applaud and run screaming from the mad woman who, if our confinement lasts much longer, we are destined to become.
Johanna Isaacson writes academic and popular pieces on horror and politics. She is a professor of English at Modesto Junior College and a founding editor of Blind Field Journal. Her book Stepford Daughters: Weapons for Feminists in Contemporary Horror is forthcoming from Common Notions Press in September 2022. She is the author of The Ballerina and the Bull (2016) from Repeater Books, has published widely in academic and popular journals, and runs the Facebook group, Anti-capitalist feminists who like horror films. More info can be found here. She has previously written for Horror Homeroom on the HBO series, Cosmic Slop.
Check out Elizabeth Erwin’s podcast on Office Killer from her When the Woman Screams series.
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