The Ongoing Horror of #MeToo

Updated at 11:07 a.m. ET on October 25, 2019.

Horror is often a matter of architecture. The crowded cabins of Friday the 13th, the cramped spaceship of Alien, the mansion of Get Out—they are spaces that have ways of trapping people inside. At every turn, the vulnerable characters, who are proxies for the audience, find themselves prevented from escaping the monster, from finding relief from their fear. I recently watched The Shining, and was struck by how effectively the film makes its physical luxuries into a menace: Gilded corridors ensnare people within them. Gleaming mirrors play tricks of vision. There is nowhere to hide at the Overlook Hotel, because it is the building itself that is doing the stalking. The Shining takes horror’s defining claustrophobia to its most anxious conclusion: It makes the environment itself into a monster.

I thought of when reading a spate of recent books that add new reporting to #MeToo’s ever expanding collection of literature—among them , , , , and . The first two books are stories about the stories—details of how investigative reporters brought to light Harvey Weinstein’s decades of abuses against women in his orbit. The next two are deep-dive expansions of existing reporting—about