A year later, Dread Central staff writer Caroline Colvin reflects on mental health and ‘The Woman in the Yard.’
This time last year, a specter draped in black gauze intrigued us all with her presence in the yard. But she was the antagonist of an unexpected kind of horror movie, and many horror fans punished her for that. The Woman in the Yard has a 41% Rotten Tomatoes rating from critics. The Popcornmeter isn’t much better at 46%. I believe we, as horror fans, didn’t give The Woman in the Yard a fair shake.
No, I never thought that this film could win an Oscar. But I felt that many viewers missed the point — maybe because they weren’t Black and suicidal, too.
Revisiting The Woman in the Yard
Danielle Deadwyler plays Ramona, a widow injured in a car crash that killed her husband. She does her best to care for her two kids in the Georgia countryside. One day, a woman in the yard, draped in black, appears and tells the family that “Today is the day.” It’s up to them to figure out what the woman wants and why she is terrorizing them.
Director Jaume Collet-Serra takes viewers through a winding, time-bending psychological venture. He slowly unveils the circumstances of the car crash. Ultimately, the Woman, played by Okwui Okpokwasili, turns out to be a physical manifestation of Ramona’s dark state of mind. In order to get out of the tortured time loop, Ramona has to kill herself. Whether she does is left open to interpretation.
The pile-on at the time, following the film’s late March 2025 release, was great. Horror Movie Talk said was “lacking in character development and meaningful relationships.” Perhaps this is objectively true. But I understood the narrative arc. I recognized the archetypes and tropes. I felt the intended emotions behind the relationships. It all mirrored my own lived experience.
The Woman in the Yard
The Woman in the Yard makes you feel its weight
I have a soft spot for Southern Gothic horror. Like William Faulkner’s A Rose for Emily or Kasi Lemmons’ Eve’s Bayou, The Woman in the Yard leaned into Southern storytelling’s murky tradition.
Have you ever sat on the porch with your grandmother in the summer — with the air so heavy that it pins you to the sweaty seat? That’s how The Woman in the Yard felt. But a hallmark of Southern gothic isn’t just the swampy setting and the suffocating pressures of traditional values. It’s the obscured mental filth hiding behind pristine façades.
I think the story told by The Woman in the Yard is poignant. So many Southern families fall into the trap of pretending everything is fine when it’s completely not. The Woman serves as a Southerner’s worst nightmare: An occult entity that looks like a stain on an otherwise pleasant image, hellbent on dredging up the secrets they desperately tried to bury.
Courtesy of Universal Pictures
And yet ScreenRant’s critic called The Woman in the Yard “perplexingly bland” and characterized the film as drawn-out. That’s another thing about Southern horror. It feels like syrupy sweet tea swishing around in your mouth, like cornmeal in a cast-iron skillet, like the slime of okra that coats your fingers.
Being a Black Woman Feels Like an Uphill Climb
The same ScreenRant piece accused the film of being “draining.” But I’d like to think that leaving you exhausted was the whole point. I felt the tension and terror every minute as someone who has been afraid of their own mind for years.
The “strong Black woman” tropehas plagued us not just in media — think the neck-rolling shorthand of a “strong Black independent woman who don’t need no man” — but in real life. Black women should exhibit mental fortitude, fearlessness, wit, and resilience, without ever asking for help.
Even when people praise celebrities or pop culture icons for exemplifying this strength, it’s a trap. It’s why Black expecting mothers die in childbirth more often than their White counterparts. It’s why Black women struggle with a distinct depressionalone and why Ramona’s story felt so familiar to me. So many Black girls and women deal with a ghost haunting them from their front lawn, and I’m no exception.
The Transformative Power of Horror
I have struggled with my self-image and overall mental health since I was a child. As anyone accustomed to the curse understands, it’s cyclical. I’m doing better now, but this time last year, I was an absolute mess. I was seeing my ex again. The homoerotic toxic frenemy canon event, that made Forbidden Fruits hit home for me, was heating up. I feared leaving this friend behind, because she, too, was a Black woman who struggled with suicidal ideation.
And as if this wasn’t enough to juggle, I wasn’t sleeping well at all. I actually hate looking at pictures of myself around the time I dragged my living corpse to the theaters to see The Woman in the Yard. My skin was in shambles, and my body looked swollen.
Courtesy of Universal Pictures
Eventually, painfully, my life righted itself. I stayed sober. I stuck to my meds. I switched therapists, from one who told me what I wanted to hear to one who lovingly gave me hard pills to swallow. I moved into my parents’ basement and gained the privilege to sleep in the cool, deep dark, like a vampire bat in a mausoleum. And I went full force on embracing my passions unapologetically.
In the midst of so much shadow work, and personal and global uncertainty, horror became my lifeline out of dark times. Selfishly, I thank God that so many great horror movies came out in 2025, because it truly saved my life.
So Many 2025 Horror Films Were a Beacon of Light
Last April, as a Black and witchy Southerner, I was already been hype about Ryan Coogler’s vampire epic. Seeing it in theaters again, and again, and again last year changed the trajectory of my life. Michael B. Jordan’s Oscar win for Sinners confirmed that people who looked like me could actually ride our love of horror to the top.
But this isn’t the only movie I credit with giving me my immeasurable joy last year. The IKnow What You Did Last Summer reboot set the tone for a fun, campy, slasher-girl summer. Final Destination: Bloodlines demanded that I address my intrusive thoughts and finally watch the five movies preceding it. I had a ball watching M3GAN 2.0, a horror franchise that asks to confront the horrors of rapid AI-enabled tech innovation playfully. I loved watching Together, which made being single feel like a temporary blessing.
I had so much fun engaging with horror fans on Instagram, TikTok, and Substack. In fact, I had so much fun that I’m now gabbing about horror for Dread Central, of course. And while horror cinema becoming my beacon of light was a team effort, I’d be remiss to not give credit to The Woman in the Yard for kickstarting that journey last year. In retrospect, this film feels emblematic of the power horror has to make you feel less alone.
