A recent trend can be observed among mid-budget pseudo-independent films, pendulating between the genres of horror and comedy, exemplified by films such as 2025’s Companion or Death of a Unicorn. These films share many of the same trappings, including strong formal elements and competent directing, but tonal mismatches and scenes that are better suited to be clipped for short-form video content (e.g., TikTok) than relevant to the plot. Zachary Wigon’s Victorian Psycho (2026) continues this trend, following Winifred Notty, played by the excellently campy Maika Monroe, as a governess in mid-19th-century Yorkshire. While early on, Notty proclaims herself to be “the most normal woman alive,” the next 90-minutes demonstrate her becoming increasingly mentally unhinged, illustrated by intensifying murders of the rich family that is employing her. While at times comedic, the actual horror of the film rarely produces tension. By the end of its runtime, the most intriguing aspect of the film is what it leaves unsaid about the mythologies associated with madness during the Victorian era.
Victorian Psycho, in many ways, is a reimagining of the 2000 hit American Psycho, itself a reimagining of Hitchcock’s 1960 film Psycho. Yet, while these prior works comment on the incipient phenomena of hyper-consumerism and the postwar nuclear family, respectively, Victorian Psycho trades this commentary for easy thrills. Central to American Psycho is class, with Patrick Bateman, the titular ‘psycho’ and a wealthy financier, frequently murdering vulnerable and working-class individuals without facing repercussions. The titular Psycho in Hitchcock’s film, Norman Bates, is based on the real-life Ed Gein, both of whom had strictly religious, domineering mothers who have often been psychoanalytically linked to their crimes. Victorian Psycho inverts these precedents in several ways. The titular ‘psycho,’ Notty, is a working-class woman, gender swapping both American Psycho and Psycho. Along with many other recent horror-comedy films, Victorian Psycho espouses a vague criticism of the rich, which is trite and superficial. Contrary to the Oedipal mother-son relationship in Psycho, in Victorian Psycho it is later revealed that the head of the manor is her distant father, who condemned Notty to death in her infancy due to her parentage. While in a better film, these inversions of past themes could be intriguing, in Victorian Psycho, they end up conforming to problematic past stereotypes associated with the myth of the madwoman.
Madness has long been a condition culturally associated with women, a misconception that became only more exaggerated during Victorian times. The ancient Greeks associated madness with hysteria (from hystera, meaning uterus), believing it was caused by the uterus physically wandering around the female body. By the Victorian era, England passed a law known as The County Asylum Act of 1808, which institutionalized mental health in England through the building of public asylums. While these public asylums were intended to be for ‘pauper insane’, regardless of gender, they perpetuated the gendered treatment of madness. Elaine Showalter (p. 17) writes in The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830–1980, “As the inmate population of public asylums increased during the century, so too did the percentage of women; by the 1850s women were the majority of the inmate population, and the asylum rather than the attic was identified as the madwoman’s appropriate space.” Joel Peter Eigen’s Witnessing Insanity further traces the evolution of how insanity has been evaluated in Britain. During the Victorian period, insanity, particularly among women, was divorced from any diagnosis, with even the testimonies of doctors undervalued in favor of general perceptions of normalcy. During this same period, madness and the supernatural became intertwined as concepts. Extant literature has traced how this same fervor led to the witch trials in the 15th-18th-centuries; thus, when the death penalty for witchcraft was legally abolished in England in 1736, the new forefront technique of persecuting women became through their madness.
The literature of the Victorian Era similarly reflects this predilection for the ‘madwoman.’ In literature, madness arises concomitantly with society’s expectations and confinement, and it is juxtaposed with the calmness of the ‘normal’ individuals around them, often men. There are exceptions to this, for example, in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper (1892), madness is rendered entirely as created by confinement and in a sympathetic manner. Contrastingly, Jane Eyre (1847) by Charlotte Brontë features Bertha Mason, a “madwoman in the attic,” whose confinement contrasts with Jane’s independence, and symbolically serves as a warning against female rage. The best analysis on the topic has been penned by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, entitled The Madwoman in the Attic, which argues that while women writers were historically constrained by patriarchal structures, they wrote ‘mad’ characters as a double to represent inner impulses they were not permitted to express externally. How then should Notty in Victorian Psycho be treated – an expression of inner-feminine rage or a caricature of the Victorian madwoman? Unfortunately, Victorian Psycho, much like its ambivalence towards genre, seems unconcerned with deciding between the two.
The ending scenes of Victorian Psycho display Notty in a state of full psychosis, a murderous rage. Here again, the film diverges from Psycho and American Psycho, which use the term ‘psycho’ in a colloquial sense to describe psychopaths. This Victorian Psycho seeks to subvert the audience’s expectations at every scene. Near the climax of the film, a crying baby leaves Nott with no other choice but to viscerally stab it, a scene that generates an audible gasp from the audience. Yet, in this wanton subversion of expectations, Victorian Psycho begins making changes that regressively reinforce prior stereotypes. A malicious interpretation may be that the film actively seeks to perpetuate these harmful mythologies, but the far more likely explanation is that of carelessness. Virginia Feito, the writer of Victorian Psycho’s novel and screenplay, in an interview with The Guardian, stated “I guess I was kind of poking at that: what if the evil psychopath were female this time? . . . [Victorian Psycho is] an ode to the Victorian literature that I love so much but it’s also subverting it.” Yet, in this attempt to subvert, it ends up only reinforcing historical mythologies of the psychotic woman, without adding any nuance to the genre conventions.
Director: Zachary Wigon
Distributor: Bleecker Street, 2026: 102 minutes
Web image courtesy of Bleecker Street.
