Kristy's Reviews > Shock Value: How a Few Eccentric Outsiders Gave Us Nightmares, Conquered Hollywood, and Invented Modern Horror

I love a good "behind the scenes" book, and I was so excited about this because I love horror films. But dear God, the lack of critical thinking that went into this novel is just absurd. The casual sexism sprinkled throughout without the slightest bit of self-awareness or contextualization was like listening to a comedy writer talk about their love for Woody Allen.

Thinking about the number of white men who must have read this book by a white man lionizing a bunch of white men who were clearly misogynists (and then went on to write and direct more movies) without even a casual mention of Roman Polanski's extracurricular activities is a phenomenal depiction of why Hollywood has such a gaping diversity problem. (There's a super fun part where one of the directors calls all French women ugly, and another where the author describes why sexually assaulting women on screen is just such a wonderful tool for 'shock value' that genuinely made me want to move to a cultural wasteland and never watch a film again.)

This novel proved to me that I am a straight woman because I swear to God if something could have turned me off of men, reading this would have done it.