The Design of Horror | The Horror of Design: a series

As a dark coper, I’ve long used horror to make sense of life’s trials and better understand the world around me. Boy, am I leaning on the genre a lot this year.

Payton McCarty-Simas, too. “When I’m sad, I’ll watch Audition,” the film critic and scholar of cinematic American witches told me in a recent conversation, referring to the 1999 Japanese horror film notorious for its shocking final sequence. “But when I want to be really afraid, I’ll watch 50 First Dates.” (They describe the horrific aspects of the supposed romcom here.)

“Women undergo the daily terrors of misogyny in such a casual way where, you know, you’re walking home, you’re going to have your keys in your hand just in case. Horror is an excellent kind of preparatory measure and cathartic expression of those same fears for women,” McCarty-Simas says. “It speaks to the kinds of repression that women are forced to do since birth, the way we’re socialized to be docile. Horror is an excellent rejection of that.”

And the recent spate of women-helmed horror films is really rejecting that docility, as I discuss in my reported essay kicking off Design Observer’s October-long coverage of horror and design’s spiky intersection. The piece centers The Ugly Stepsister (2025), Norwegian filmmaker Emilie Blichfeldt’s debut feature reimagining Cinderella from the titular ugly stepsister’s POV. The work is a pivotal entry to the burgeoning “beauty horror” subgenre, which took off last year thanks to The Substance.

As reproductive rights are rolled back and tradwife content surges, beauty horror riffs on the truism that “beauty is pain.” It’s a fitting moniker for a body of work exploring, with visceral acuity, the fraught, often ugly reality of being a woman in a body.

And yes, Blichfeldt’s film visualizes — in painful detail — that toe-cutting scene from the Grimm brothers’ folktale version of Cinderella.

For many, such depictions, though graphic, are healing.

“You know, that badness used to be mine, and I only [felt] that badness in myself, inside me, but now it’s out there, I can actually see it, and [e]verybody can see it all together,” So Yeon Leem, PhD, assistant professor at Dong-A University in Busan, South Korea, told me of her experience watching The Ugly Stepsister. Leem researches the intersection of gender, ethics, and technology, and has documented her experience undergoing an elective “two-jaw surgery,” which is popular in South Korea, she says, because it creates a balanced, youthful V-curvature in the face, and makes professionals in certain industries more competitive in the job market. “A small jaw is not intimidating compared to a big jaw,” she explains. “You don’t want to intimidate, especially men, if you are a woman. … [You] shouldn’t look too strong.”

Leem is in good company. As I note in my piece, the “forever-35 face” is in vogue, thanks to luxury facelifts priced upward of $200,000. Globally, nearly 38 million aesthetic procedures were performed in 2024 — a 40% increase from 2020, says the International Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgery.

Aside from femme bodies, this aesthetic also informs the design of traditionally female spaces, according to the design thinkers and workers you’ll hear from throughout October.

In her pitch about “the horror of surfaces that refuse to age,” writer, historian, and psychotherapist Elizabeth Dyer, PhD, argued that “after” shots of transformations ranging from facelifts to kitchen remodels “are less about beauty or function than about disciplining surfaces that are femme-coded, never allowed to look as though they have worked.”

You’ll read Dyer’s full piece later this month. You’ll also hear from Sithara Ranasinghe about “the lethal history of culinary pigments that turned dinner parties into death scenes,” and from Madison Jamar on the dinner table itself as a centerpiece around which middle- to upper-class families “engage jovially or impress” that can turn sinister if conventions are not strictly upheld.

You’ll learn about a widening range of design and art horrors, too, like the occult imagery in rap music, the visual language of preppers, the afterlife of souvenirs, and a weed-fueled haunted house visit that launched one photographer’s career.

I hope this coverage, curated below as it publishes, sends a chill down your spine — that tell-tale tingle of fearsome anxious ugly beautiful excitement that’s the lifeblood of any creative.

Delaney Rebernik
Executive Editor
[email protected]

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