Why!!!

Welcome to Stepford is a direct sequel to Bryan Forbes’ The Stepford Wives (1975), written by William Goldman and based on the 1972 book of the same name by Ira Levin. It’s set 49-50 years after the original film and follows a new cast of characters within the town of Stepford, Connecticut. The horror and thriller elements of the original are retained here, yet Levin’s original concept is re-examined through an explicitly intersectional lens by a queer and trans writer (me!).

The idea was to address two specific scenarios; first, how a queer and/or trans person would interact with the town of Stepford, its Men’s Association, and its unsettlingly submissive housewives; and second, what the Men’s Association of the original book would be like if it was run by 21st century insecure misogynistic men who aren’t content to just start a podcast, and instead have to strip away women’s autonomy and identities and mould them to fit their outdated standards of how women should act and behave. It first came to me in August 2022 after rewatching the original film, though I didn’t write a script for it for another year and a half.

The themes explored in Welcome to Stepford range from general concepts such as conformity, hostility towards outsiders, and the dismantling of oppressive institutions, to specific occurrences such as the rise of the alt-right manosphere within the past decade, ‘tradwife’ influencers on social media, and conversion torture and corrective assault towards LGBTQ+ people. The ultimate main theme, however, is about overcoming adversity, speaking out and fighting against oppression, and looking out for the people you love the most.

I made an effort to link my idea to the original in ways the made-for-TV sequels didn’t, such as including Mary Stuart Masterson’s character Kim Eberhart, who she portrayed as a child, in a pivotal supporting role, and utilising Dale ‘Diz’ Coba’s eldest son, previously only mentioned in the book, as a primary antagonist. I also worked Ruthanne Hendry’s family, the first Black family to move to Stepford in the original book, into my script; with the character of Arthur Hendry being Ruthanne’s grandson and having previously faced harassment from the Stepford PD due to the Men’s Association’s long-running vendetta against the Hendry family, after his grandfather Royal Hendry abruptly left the group. I realise that tackling the subject of anti-Black racism in the US from a white British perspective often comes across as misguided and offensive, but I feel like I could probably do a lot worse, which I’ve actively made an effort to avoid, and I hope I’ve handled the subject with at least some amount of dignity.

A lot of the characteristics and concepts for my script are heavily informed by my own involvement with queer and alternative communities. For instance, one of the first Stepford Wives we meet in the script is revealed to have previously been a lesbian punk musician who was in a committed relationship with her bandmate, a transgender woman and fellow lesbian. I also drew on my own previous experience as an amateur touring musician while developing the character of Rachel Martinez, the aforementioned Stepford Wife who is renamed ‘Rosie Everett’, by writing a character study detailing her experiences before, during, and after the events of the film, and also writing an in-universe song by her punk band Disaffectress named Stepford Wife. My own musical taste has also found its way into the script, most notably shoegaze, ethereal wave, and post-punk bands such as Asylum Party, Cocteau Twins, Pieter Nooten & Michael Brook, Curve, and Desperate Journalist, mainly for the purposes of establishing a mood and atmosphere. Omar Shahbazi, one of the supporting protagonists, also has an affinity for East Coast hip-hop including MF DOOM and A$AP Rocky, which is often heard playing in his car while he drives Zach Taylor around Stepford.

All four of my original protagonists for the script have queer identities, most notably Zach Taylor, the lead protagonist, who is a gay transgender man. His identity intersects with his experiences in the town of Stepford in many ways; when he is captured and interrogated by the Men’s Association during the climax, he is threatened with detransitioning via the Coba Technique, which is a collective term for various methods used by the Men’s Association with the ultimate end goal of creating Stepford Wives. Zach is openly gay, but stealth about his trans status; after he reveals this to Arthur Hendry, his romantic interest, the latter is kidnapped, interrogated, and forced to out Zach to the Men’s Association as a trans man, all of which happens offscreen.

The process of creating Stepford Wives is noticeably different from the original; while Dale ‘Diz’ Coba’s Men’s Association had women killed and replaced by robotic housewives, his son and successor Dale Coba Jr. utilises a wide number of methods to achieve the same result of submissive, conventionally feminine housewives. I drew inspiration from different adaptations of the original Stepford Wives concept, including the made for TV sequels and even the 2004 Frank Oz remake, having Jim Winterborough, a high-level Men’s Association member and neuroscience expert, detail various methods such as nanochipping, experimental consciousness transference techniques, and psychological reconditioning. My idea was that the original method – of having people killed and replaced with robots – had gradually become more wasteful and attracted unwanted suspicion, due to the vast amount of bodies that they would have had to dispose of, and that the Men’s Association membership wouldn’t have been able to feasibly find partners willing to conform to their ideals of how women should present and behave; so their preferred method in the present day involves kidnapping young women or luring them to Stepford under false pretences, brainwashing them, and forcing them into sham marriages.

While comparing the book and the film I noticed that Joanna and Walter Eberhart’s children are named Kim and Pete in the book, but Kim and Amy in the film. I made an attempt to address this discrepancy by having Kim’s sister Amy be a trans woman who fled Stepford at a young age to return to New York, where the Eberhart family had previously lived, and eventually took up photography much like her mother.

Aside from the original Stepford Wives book and film, I was also influenced by the non-comedic elements of Edgar Wright’s Hot Fuzz and The World’s End, most notably the themes of conformity, hostility towards ‘outsiders’, and the dismantling of oppressive institutions, and by concepts of psychological reconditioning as seen in Get Out by Jordan Peele. The fact that Peele also cited the original Stepford Wives film from 1975 as inspiration for Get Out isn’t lost on me, of course; I believe that artistic inspiration doesn’t happen in a straight line, that it’s ultimately a cyclical and reciprocal process. I approached the source material in a similar fashion to Arkasha Stevenson’s The First Omen and Nia DaCosta’s sequel to Candyman; what I liked about the latter was that since it was told from a Black perspective, compared to the original film’s white director-writer and white lead, there was less of the element of “oh nooo the Cabrini projects are evil and scary cuz all the evil and scary criminals live there!!!” and more of a sympathetic focus on how Black communities in Chicago have been disenfranchised by gentrification. Here I was hoping to achieve a similar effect with my characterisation of the Stepford Wives, by highlighting the lives they had before they became Wives and hinting at their future when they find their freedom.

I also took cues from Amanda Marcotte’s various articles for Salon on the rise of tradwife influencers; the character design of the Stepford Wives is very much inspired by these influencers, who espouse ‘traditional’ lifestyles on social media while presenting themselves in a suggestive manner, or in the case of one influencer, deliberately not disclosing her father-in-law’s role as the founder of JetBlue. While referring back to the source material for my script I noted that Ira Levin’s concept for the Stepford Wives was that they were more provocatively dressed, like Playboy bunnies almost, and this was meant to be incorporated by screenwriter William Goldman into the original film adaptation until the casting of director Bryan Forbes’ wife Nanette Newman led to the wives being clothed in a more antiquated, prairie-style fashion, with longer skirts and ruffled plunging necklines. With this in mind I attempted to combine both of these elements to portray the image of a Stepford Wife crafted, by men, to appeal to the male gaze, selling an ultimately sexualised idea of traditional gender roles to tourists or citizens, of a Stepford Wife of their very own.

The Men’s Association of the 21st century is also inspired by social media, in a way. I deliberately based the appearances and ideologies of many of the members on various far-right figureheads and movements, most notably the type of Christofascist rhetoric espoused by commentators such as Matt Walsh, Andrew Tate’s brand of misogyny, and the rise of the alt-right movement ultimately leading to the Trump presidency. I was particularly interested in portraying and dissecting the ‘respectable’ face of fascism; dressed in a suit and tie, with neatly combed hair, waxing lyrical about the importance of traditional Christian values, disguising outright bigotry as ‘genuine concerns’ about immigration and safeguarding. William Everett, the Men’s Association Vice President and one of the secondary antagonists, is deliberately modelled appearance-wise on Matt Walsh, who has notably stirred up hatred towards the LGBTQ+ community – particularly the transgender community which I myself am a part of – and was revealed to have advocated for the impregnation and marriage of girls as young as 16, among many other reprehensible statements. Another aspect I also worked into his characterisation was that of his name being an alias and his criminal record, similar to Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (who goes by the alias Tommy Robinson), a notorious far-right figure here in the UK. However, I tried as much as possible to avoid strawman characterisation for the villains, no matter how much writing their dialogue actively disgusted me, attempting to create these antagonists with the same amount of depth and backstory as my protagonists.

Long story short,