Original subtitles

There is this crazy idea that horror is not for women or that women are not fans

of horror.

There's some deluded idea that talking about gender and horror is somehow a

contemporary phenomena.

It's like, sit down, little boys. The grown -ups are talking.

There's a whole tribe of women who are just so into it.

We're expected to behave certain ways in real life, but in horror films, no

holds barred.

And no mercy either.

Like, each of us thought we were, like, the weird kid. And now we're realizing

that there's so many other weird kids.

As a woman, is there some transference that I feel when I watch a woman

in jeopardy and I can relate to that?

Women have been integral to horror since the beginning.

Women practically invented the horror genre.

We've been gracing the front of horror movies for a very, very long time. And

you can't have horror without women. It's not possible.

I don't need another person to tell me what to do.

I don't need another person to tell me where to go.

I don't need another person to tell me how it is.

I don't need another person like you and you and you and I. No, not again. No,

come on, come on.

We live in a world where so many cultures have very strict, regimented

and expectations about what it means to be a woman from the cradle to the grave.

And what horror does, I think, for me at its very best, is it questions those.

It subverts them. It transgresses them. All of the sort of social roles that

women have been conditioned to play over time, they're all subverted, they're

all questioned in horror in spectacular ways.

Horror is...

Such an interesting way of looking at the world, the critique of society, but

you do it with zombies. Horror movies have always been about the body, and

bodies have always been gendered, whether we like to admit it or not. As a

female filmmaker, a female storyteller, we have a lot of fears that we want to

talk about. Women live a life of a horror movie.

different incarnations a prepubescent stage their ingenue stage when they're

like very fuckable am i allowed to curse in this then a fuckable mom and then

your time of being fuckable wanes all of this through the male gaze the only

difference is in the movie is they condense everything into two hours well

you're lucky two hours

Whether it's Barbie dolls or little baby dolls, I think that for girls growing

up, dolls are about the objectification of women at various ages throughout

their life. And we learn to be objects. We learn to be adored and we learn to be

things. You see, Claude and I were just playing a game we made up. The bad seed

is fucking mental. It is off the chain unhinged. Mother?

Is it true that when blood has been washed off anything...

A policeman can still find if it's there. The film is about a little girl,

Rhoda, who looks perfect. She looks like a doll. She has a doll. They have the

same sort of hair, you know, the little fringe and the braids. What have you got

on your shoes?

I run over my heels. And Mother had these iron pieces put on them so they'd

longer. Everybody comments on how good her manners are.

Well, isn't she a little sweetheart?

Thank you.

She also happens to be a killer.

And the only person who's aware of this is her mother, who is deeply, obviously

very upset about this.

Oh, I've got the prettiest mother.

I've got the nicest mother.

That's what I tell everybody.

Rhoda believes that if she lives her life playing nice, being this polite

doll -like girl child, that she can get away with anything, and really up to a

point she does.

Good night, sweetheart.

Good night, Daddy. I did have a doll as a child when I was a kid. My buddy.

was a thing. And my parents got me a My Buddy doll.

And I'm not going to sing the theme song, but I do remember the theme song.

My buddy. My buddy. My buddy. My buddy. Wherever I go, he goes. And I carried

that little guy around with me freaking everywhere.

And around the same time, I think Child's Play came out. I'm your friend.

I love Chucky in a weird, freaking twisted sense. I like the idea that,

buddy doll might come to life someday. Hopefully not try to kill me and my

family, but... It was appealing to me that, like, a doll could

actually come to life. It's scary in a thrilling way. And again, I want to

recreate this feeling, and how can I do that? Hi, Megan.

I'm Katie.

It's nice to meet you, Judy. The whole relationship between little girls and

dolls or robot -like dolls has been shaken quite dramatically by the

insanity that is Megan, which was written by Akilah Cooper.

Megan is about a little girl who loses her parents and is taken in by her aunt

who works at an advanced toy company developing, like, AI toys.

And because she's still grieving the loss of her parents and her aunt is

she gives her the newest prototype, Megan, to befriend her and actually test

how well the doll works. And unfortunately, the doll works too well

deaths are involved.

How could you kill someone?

I didn't kill anyone, Kurt.

You did.

I received a doll as a present.

When I was a kid, and I stood at the top of our stairs, and I said, I hate this

baby, and I threw it down the stairs.

I wasn't big on dolls, and I still have trouble finding them scary.

But then there are movies that will come out that I am very impressed by. The

Annabelle movies, I think, are really great and do an amazing job of making a

doll scary.

One of the first films that I think about when I think about girls and dolls

horror is Interview with the Vampire.

Another doll?

I have dozens, you realize.

So much of that film, just in terms of sheer runtime, is about Claudia and her

relationship to Louis in particular, but also just her journey and her identity.

Claudia, what have we told you?

Never in the house.

And she is very much brought on board to join the group as a kind of human doll.

You dress me like a doll.

You make my hair like a doll.

Why? As she's aging, she becomes angrier and angrier and angrier when she

realizes that her body isn't going to become a woman and that Louis and Lestat

are treating her like a human doll. You made us what we are, didn't you? Stop,

Louis. Did you teach me?

Not just in horror, but in screen culture more broadly, little girls are

a cipher or a kind of shorthand symbol for innocence.

So in horror, it's bad if something happens to somebody, but if it happens

little girl, it's even worse. And I think a really good example of that is

Hereditary, because what happens to the little girl in that film is horrendous,

and it would be awful regardless of who that character is, but the fact that

it's a little girl makes it so much worse, so much more agonising.

This relationship between little girls and innocence and vulnerability is

interesting in horror when it comes to reflecting back on screen culture

So at the beginning of Us, we have a little girl and her dad wins her a

T -shirt. And there's a little kind of squabble between her parents about

whether it's appropriate.

That shirt better not give her nightmares.

In trouble for winning my daughter a T -shirt.

Ha ha, that's a new one. And there's a beautiful image of her wandering off and

she has her candy apple.

And, of course, she's about to get lost, and what happens to her when she's lost

becomes the core of that film.

We see this, too, in Poltergeist with little Carol Ann in that iconic scene

the television.

And it really emphasises this idea that little girls are particularly

vulnerable, particularly open to exploitation, to the evils that can come

through the screen.

Seems like these from Us and Poltergeist play with the anxieties we have even

just at the thought of little girls being exposed to horror movies. But of

course they are, and in many cases even grow up to make their own.

I promise, we're better than ever. I grew up in the middle of nowhere in

Pennsylvania. It was basically Romero country.

Night of the Living Dead played on, like, all the time, unlike Public

So that was, like, literally one of the first movies I remember seeing as a kid.

When I was little, when we'd be getting ready for these Halloween parties, we'd

sit on the floor in the living room, we'd have newspaper laid out, and my dad

grew a pumpkin patch. And we would harvest the pumpkins, we would carve

together the night before the party, and watch Universal monster movies.

You have those, and I'll have these.

Frankenstein.

Dracula. Bride of Frankenstein.

Wolfman.

Preacher.

You name it, we watched it together.

My sister being 10 years older than me, she was a teenager when she was

babysitting us, and she did not give a flying fuck what she was watching when

she was babysitting us.

And I came downstairs and my sister was watching Hellraiser 2.

And it freaked me out.

Don't be scared of me. And I just like turned around and went back upstairs.

I've always just like loved horror from a very, very probably inappropriately

young age. I was very into suspense and I loved Hitchcock.

All the horror stuff was just stuff I saw on afternoon TV. They used to show

amazing things on afternoon TV that should be censored, really.

When I saw The Shining, that also haunted my dreams.

Here's Johnny.

So I was traumatized as a child. I think now that's why when I watch horror, it

comes with a certain tough skin that makes it thrilling.

What is more innocent?

than young girls.

There's so many elements that go into The Shining that make it tick and make

such a famous horror movie.

But for me, and I know I'm not alone here, it's the twins.

They're just unforgettable.

And there's a strange tension there because they're monstrous and they're

terrifying and they're scary, but they're actually not monsters, they're

victims. What's the most awful thing that could happen to innocents?

You know, we see the young girls in the hallway, and we see their bodies axed to

death and blood all over the hallway.

It still gives me goose pimples when I think about it. So, good job, Mr.

Kubrick.

I think I must have been 10. That's when The Exorcist came back out.

Remastered, new sound, new color, deleted scenes.

I said, Mom!

I'm turning 10 years old, and I want to see The Exorcist because I'm old enough.

So my mom was like, okay.

Little did we know we were going to come out crying.

I thought Linda Blair was under my bed. I thought Linda Blair was in the closet.

I thought Linda Blair was outside my bedroom. I thought Linda Blair was in my

classroom. You know what she did?

It was something about that feeling that has stuck with me. It wasn't until many

years later that I knew I wanted to be a filmmaker.

I remembered that feeling. A horror movie can follow you home.

Because she's possessed by a demon, it allows the movie to show this 12 -year

-old girl writhing in a bed in her nightgown, being tied to the bed by

masturbating with the cross her body is breaking her

head is spinning the movie does all sorts of crazy

things to this girl but it's because she's possessed by a demon we're trying

get the demon out is there someone inside you

Sometimes. Watching this innocent little girl talk about somebody being inside

her and that she has no control over it, we're talking about much grander themes

than just possession here.

How long are you planning to stay in Reagan?

Until she rots and lies stinking in the earth. The horror of The Exorcist is

about the horror of what happens to a little girl's body.

There's no way to think of that film and not look at Linda Blair's actual

physical body as a kind of battleground.

for power and for male power to play out on.

There is this fear that girls are dangerous if they

get too close to each other. I think societally there is a fear that their

friendships can turn dark easily. And in the horror genre, this is explored a

lot. There's a cluster of horror films that do really exciting, interesting

things. with the idea of toxic friendships when you're young.

Films like Heavenly Creatures, Don't Deliver Us From Evil, Poison for the

Fairies, films like those are really important because they really get to the

heart of this very insular sort of world -building project that friendships can

become.

Poison for the Fairies is a Mexican film from the 80s that is about two little

girls, one of whom is like the new girl in class.

And this kind of girl that has difficulty making friends seizes upon

girl and is like, you are going to be my new best friend.

And by the way, I'm a witch. They perform like a black magic ritual in the

and they're cursing the teacher.

And then by coincidence, the teacher dies.

The girl who says she's a witch is like, aha, you see, my spell worked.

And so then the other little girl is terrified of her friend.

Poison for the fairies works best when it blurs the lines between doubt and

trust in a friendship.

And it's something very specific, I think, to the experience of childhood,

your friends are your world. And when that friend is questionable, you don't

know who to trust. Do you trust yourself? Do you trust them?

Really what I think is at the core of the representation of little girls in

horror is about agency, is about... How much is too much freedom to give little

girls? And we get kind of stressed out when little girls are left to fend for

themselves, when they're not controlled and controllable.

And we need to chill out. We need to acknowledge that these are people and

they have agency and we should respect that. And that doesn't just go for the

representation of girls on film.

We look at somebody like Emily Haggins, who was 12 years old when she made a

zombie film called Pathogen with her mates.

Please!

Please, God, no!

Please, God, no!

Little girls can do a lot when they're given the freedom to do so.

Adolescence, a time of horror for many. As people go through... that is a time

of such change with adulthood on the horizon and all of the fears surrounding

coming of age. It's little wonder there are so many coming -of -age horror

films.

When I think about horror movies with standalone scenes that really shook me

my core, one of the first that comes to mind is the very beginning of the

Japanese horror film The Suicide Club.

And it's just a bunch of schoolgirls on a train platform. They're just hanging

out. They're in uniform, chatting happily to each other. There's an

that the train's coming. The girls join hands.

The train gets closer. The girls take a step forward.

And just before the train arrives, they jump.

Something about the fact that it's this sort of critical mass, this unified

force of these girls at that particular age.

that they can't be controlled and that they're sort of doing this thing that is

completely incomprehensible. The power in that scene is extraordinary.

The most dangerous and powerful creature on this planet is a post -pubescent

female because she could truly destroy everything and she has no idea.

And so the world works very hard to smush women in that age into little

they don't go around destroying men, which is what they could do. And the

I would go is Carrie.

Of course, it's the story of a girl who's raised by a single mother who's

strictly religious.

The opening of the film, it's like slow motion. It's like in the girls' locker

room, and they're all like having fun, and they're naked, and they're flicking

each other with their towels. And it's like, oh, it's so fun to be a teenage

girl. And then the camera goes in on Carrie in the corner, and then the blood

comes.

It's like a bait and switch. It's like an acknowledgement that this is a

fantasy, that this is not what being a teenage girl is like. It is not this

motion, you know, fun, love and fantasy. It's really this horror of your body

changing.

You know, just suddenly feeling out of touch with other people and there being

so much scrutiny of the...

Speed at which different girls develop, you know, or become sexually aware or

sexually active.

Carrie's story becomes one of discovering her power, and her power in

of this story is depicted as a supernatural power that is triggered by

menstruation.

My most favorite scene is definitely dumping the pig's blood on her, where

you hear...

It's just the hitting of the bucket, empty.

That is such an impactful way to feel what she feels. She's cut out the entire

audience of people laughing at her, bullying her, belittling her.

In each successive viewing, it's kind of perverse, but I'm like, yeah, like,

burn the whole gym down.

What Carrie's doing isn't really, isn't like the best thing to massacre your

entire class, but there were times when I was like, if I could just have a

little of that power, maybe they'd leave me alone.

The ending when her hand comes out of the earth.

People talk about that as like, wow, that scared me. And I thought about

for the next month.

And I don't know. I have this feeling of like, hopefully she got out and did

some other stuff.

Oh, gross.

Ginger Snaps is a really essential film to think about when we talk about

menstruation in horror.

You got some on you.

Nice.

Ginger's transformation occurs not just through the bite of the werewolf, but

through getting her period on the same day.

And that film is really interesting because on one hand, I think it's quite

tragic. There's a sort of inevitability that Ginger's journey will take her to

where it goes.

But at the same time, it's very, very funny. And the way that it talks about

menstruation and periods is amazing.

A thick, syrupy, voluminous discharge is not uncommon.

The bulk of the uterine lining is shed within the first few days.

Contractions, cramps, squeeze it out like a pump. So things like ginger snaps

and teeth.

and the film Hellbender that are often dealing with girls coming of age and it

coming with some kind of like a power, some kind of potentially destructive

power.

I'm kind of obsessed with menstruation and I'm always trying to fit it into

movies. So for me, there was a backstory to the Hellbenders that they should

menstruate from their mouths.

And I thought, well, let's just remove the vagina and make it, it's all about

the mouth. Hellbenders are created by eating another hellbender.

There's a lot of menstrual interpretation that can be had there. I

blood, particularly the kind that those with a womb create.

One of my pet peeves is when male filmmakers do horror films about girls

their periods.

It drives me insane because it, like, turns it into, like, this, like,

magical thing. And it's just, like, it's just awful. Don't get me wrong. I love

Carrie. It's one of my favorite movies. But, like, that was not what getting my

period was like.

So one of the things that we did with Black Christmas was just, like, what if

just had a girl who's, like, on the rag and she uses a diva cup?

I have a final in ten minutes and I can't find my diva cup.

lose a diva cup with abandon and like we just make it as like a normal thing

that's in the story and it doesn't have any magical implications whatsoever it's

just like a regular burden that a cis woman has to deal with every once in a

while the craft is a movie about four girls who discover

they are witches one of whom is an actual natural witch and the other three

kind of like self -made witches you ever heard of invoking the spirit

The four of them are able to come together and like share their power and

of like take back some of their lives

I

was getting all my friends to play light as a feather stiff as a board at

sleepover parties

And I'd be like, let's go to the graveyard after school and do seances

things like that.

Just absolutely loved seeing another curly -haired black girl on screen.

And I ask for the ability to not hate those who hate me, especially racist

pieces of bleach blonde shit like Laura Lindsay.

I had actually started wearing my hair natural.

So like my mom started like chemically, no more perms, no more hot comb, not

straightening my hair, just like wear it curly, let it air dry.

And like the first time I wore natural to school, like one of my white

classmates, like I'll never forget this. She looked at me and she's like, it

looks like a Kayla has a bunch of spiders in her hair.

And I was just like, I thought I looked cute.

And that obviously affected me. It's just like, I kind of like adjusted how I

wore my hair from there.

But seeing Rachel True in the craft and, like, having the white bully character

also, like, mock her hair, it's like, okay, I'm not alone.

Oh, God, look, there is a pubic hair in my brush.

Oh, no, wait, wait.

That's just one of Rochelle's little nappy hairs.

That's always stuck out with me with that movie. It's like, there's someone

in the world who's going through this, and hopefully she'll get through it, and

hopefully I'll get through it as well. But also, it's just like...

How female friendships can form so tightly and then just become so toxic so

quickly when they become not friendships but these codependent relationships.

There's Jennifer.

Only back then we were tight.

Sisters practically.

People found it hard to believe that a babe like Jennifer would associate with

dork like me.

This is a movie made for me.

That doesn't make me feel like I'm the kind of, like, token woman in the room

full of, like, horror dudes.

They're just boys, morsels. We have all the power. Don't you know that these

things, these are like smart bombs, okay? You point them in the right

and shit gets real.

It has, like, such a fun energy to it. It's funny.

It's scary.

But it's also the perspective. The perspective is from Needy's point of

Even the fact that her name is Needy is fucking amazing.

The combination of Diablo's script and Karen's direction of that movie made it

this kind of like clueless for horror kids.

She can fly.

She's just hovering.

It's not that impressive.

This is just kind of this super fun horror movie that is about being a

girl and about living in the body of a teenage girl and what that's like and

what those intense female relationships are like in that age.

Her marketing for that film was so fucked up. You look really pretty.

Megan Fox plays a half -naked demon who kills a bunch of guys in her high

school, but really...

You stop listening after Megan Fox, Half -Naked Demon. They were just trying to,

like, make it seem like, oh, okay, this is all about, like, Megan getting hot

and naked.

It's just, like, imagery that just doesn't represent the movie at all.

There were still a lot of cis, straight, white men who were doing the marketing.

Just, like, they didn't get it. And everyone needs to get it for these

find their audience.

You know what this is for?

It's for cutting boxes.

Middle school and high school was a horrible time for me.

It makes me a little emotional to talk about it. But I was bullied so horribly,

a lot by women and also by men.

My best friend in the whole world, I would go to her house.

We'd watch horror movies late at night. I have this vivid memory of renting

American Psycho.

I realized when I saw the director credit come up that it was a woman. And

like, Mary Herron, who is she?

I need to find out. And then I started to kind of pay more attention.

I remember watching Near Dark.

And I was like, Catherine Bigelow, who is she?

And Mary Lambert with Pet Sematary.

And we were having a sleepover. What's this movie? Slumber Party Massacre. This

looks cool.

Amy Holden Jones, I just was like, oh my gosh, women make horror movies. That's

what I want to do.

It was around this time that we were in

the middle of the late 90s teen slasher craze.

And so I discovered movies like I Know What You Did Last Summer.

And scream.

And urban legend.

And I became obsessed with horror. And horror

kind of became my friend.

I started to realize through movies like Scream, which have so many references

to the movies that came before it. They're all the same. Some stupid killer

stalking some big -breasted girl who can't act, who's always running up the

stairs when she should be going out the front door. It's insulting.

I started to realize there was this whole genre and many, many more movies

me to discover. So over the course of my teenage years, I just poured myself

into horror movies and started discovering the influences of those

So the final girl is a really key concept in horror, and it was coined by

J. Clover in her book Men, Women and Trainsaws. Final girl is the girl who

survives. She's the girl who fights back.

She's the girl who kicks ass.

She might be crying. She might be screaming.

She might be covered in blood and guts.

But she survived, and she often watches her friends die, but she keeps going. I

grew up with final girls. I loved them in horror films. When women weren't

protagonists of any movies, horror films were always a place where you could

find a lead who was a woman.

Horror is full to the brim of amazing final girls that are interesting for

they overlap and for where they deviate.

We have Nancy in Elm Street. We have Jess in Black Christmas. We have Sally

Texas Chainsaw Massacre. And, of course, we have Laurie in Halloween.

I killed him.

See, I can't kill the boogeyman.

Jamie Lee Curtis is a really obvious person to go to when we talk about the

final girl because we see her as Laurie in Halloween when she's a teenager.

But we follow her through those films right through to when she's much, much

older, when she's a grandmother.

And it's incredible. It's an incredible career arc, both for Curtis, but also as

a character arc for what happens when the final girl ages.

There's so much to love about Nightmare on Elm Street, but I think it goes

without saying that that first film just wouldn't be what it is without Heather

Langenkamp. She came in, and we loved her immediately because her beautiful,

fresh face, no makeup, freckles, beautiful blue eyes, and just

a girl -next -door look.

I'm your boyfriend now, Nancy.

What was so profound because she was so sweet?

It's how she took on the burden of fighting Freddie in the dreams.

And so she fought him.

Friday the 13th is full of lots of really interesting final girls, and they

change from film to film.

Think about it moving and make it move.

So we get these different representations and different ideas

final girl is and what she can do.

Let him out of there, Rick.

Megan, don't clown around.

I'm not the one with the funny red nose.

I think there's something cool about watching a final girl just reach the end

her fucking rope and, like, beat the shit.

out of the monster or the bad guy.

And it's a release.

And it's a much needed release for a lot of people, not necessarily even just

women. It's like black people, the gay community, like anyone who is like

the fact that you can't just walk out of your house and exist without some overt

threat. And you kind of need that.

concept is more important in a way than actually any particular incarnations of

it because what it did was entirely divorce the sense that a spectator will

identify most with a same gendered person on screen.

In some ways anyone can be a final girl now because the idea of a one -to -one

relationship between viewer and character.

has been turfed.

So Bob Clark's original Black Christmas involves a

group of sorority girls, and they live in a house, and it's about Christmas

break time when an unseen man sneaks up into their attic and starts giving them

horrific phone calls, terrifying them.

Oh, why don't you go find a wall socket and stick your tongue in it? That'll

give you a charge.

I'll stick my tongue up your pretty pussy.

You fucking creep!

I'm going to kill you.

What films like Black Christmas do that's so important is that they feed

much bigger issues than those specific to the experience of high school or

college alone, but to women more broadly.

I'm going to have an abortion.

You can't make a decision like that. You haven't even asked me.

I wasn't even going to tell you.

People still don't want to talk about abortion. They don't want to talk about

women's rights. They don't want to say it explicitly in the same way that Bob

Clark was saying it. Up in the frat house, one true fact.

And that is that I got attacked.

Up in the frat house, shit went down. And I'm telling everyone in town.

There were a lot of things that were going on in the world. Brett Kavanaugh

on TV.

crying and screaming that he likes beer.

And his fraternity is in the news, and all these other fraternities are in the

news because, like, of all of the assaults... Oh, wait, wait.

Helena?

...was just like, here's the things that are making me mad right now.

We're in the middle of something.

Do you want me to leave?

You bitches are all the same.

You act like you want it, but you're all a bunch of teeth. We wanted to see what

would happen if there wasn't just one exceptional woman.

What if a lot of women live? You messed with the wrong sister.

Horror movies are often about getting people separated.

And I really enjoy it when in horror, the characters are like, no, let's band

together. Fuck my...

The way that we approached it was that there is no exceptional woman. People

survive because they stay together.

What we see in movies like this is, yes, learning to be an adult woman is really

fucking hard, but if you play it smart and with an appreciation of community,

you don't have to go it alone.

It's sort of part of that transgressive, subversive energy and excitement and

power of what horror is and what it can do.

When you get to adulthood, that's when shit gets real. You've survived

you've survived adolescence, and suddenly you're out on your own. You

this freedom and this agency, but there's real dangers that you haven't

experienced before. And it's chaos.

Hey, you want a beer?

Or do you want to smoke some pot?

Or we can have premarital sex.

Horror has a very special and I think quite broadly underrated way of dealing

with women's sexual agency.

films that really demonstrate quite vivid and intense and wonderful displays

sexually autonomous women, even if things don't work out great for those

at the end.

When it comes to sexual agency and women in horror, I think the vampire is

almost like a go -to character because we have these incredible films,

especially in the terrain of lesbian vampire films.

You know, we have the Can't Stand trilogy from Hammer. We have The Hunger.

have The Velvet Vampire. And in those films and many others, we have this

interesting phenomenon where these women are just so comfortable with using

their lovers, whether they're men or women, as these kind of tasty sexual

snacks.

Tenebrae is a particular favourite of mine and the figure of Eva Robbins is a

fascinating one. And it definitely wasn't...

super clear or made super clear to wide audiences that Eva Robbins is a trans

woman and that she represents the fear of the phallic woman and as he put the

heel of her red stilettos into the mouth of some poor fellow who I'm sure didn't

have it coming.

There was something vengeful there that was very attractive.

Trouble Every Day is a really useful film to think about the connection or

relationship between the vamp and the vampire in horror. The director of that

film, Claire Denis, once described that movie as when a kiss becomes a bite.

Critics have talked about it as a cannibal film or a vampire film and it's

almost neither here nor there because when you think of that movie, what you

think of is just screaming, bloodied Beatrice Dahl fucking a boy and eating

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, just the title alone, you're already turning

the idea of the frightened girl walking home alone at night. Well, that girl is

the one to be feared.

And you're very, very nervous about what she's going to do, which is kind of the

reverse of what happens in most movies.

For a woman, there is a sense of recognition when it comes to horror.

I've always thought I didn't have to dig that deep when I was performing even

the craziest of things, even being dragged off by an angel vampire creature

then eaten alive in a graveyard. To me, it's just a sidestep from the types of

sexual assaults I have experienced in my life. And I'm talking gray area sexual

assaults, not like strange man in a mask drags me down an alleyway and rapes me.

I'm talking about like, I didn't really want to hook up with this frat boy, but

I was drunk and I didn't want to go home.

Fear is something we live with every day. I walk out my door and I have to

about, okay, where am I going?

What do I have with me if I need to defend myself?

And it's really unfortunate that we have to think about that. Even something

that's a mundane task, going to the grocery store, going for a walk around

block, going to the movies, whatever it may be that...

is something a man might not think twice about doing, is something I think about

if I'm going to be okay going to and from that thing I need to do. We are

cultured, and we are just conditioned to filter that as okay, and it's fine.

And you start walking around going, like, I think the world is a terribly

and dangerous place, but no one else is acting that way. And then you get to

watch a horror movie like Last House on the Left.

Hell yeah.

And revenge becomes something cathartic.

Rape revenge is obviously a very complex, very thorny, very challenging

Ah.

That's so sweet. It's painful.

Oh, God.

It's across a whole bunch of genres. But when it comes to horror, and especially

supernatural horror, we're really focused on the body in horror in a way

any other kind of genre that does very, very interesting things about gender

politics and has interesting things to say in sometimes quite sophisticated and

really confronting ways.

I love Revenge. I think it handles the rape.

revenge movie in a really smart way so you're really relating with the lead

character but then it does focus on the violence as she gets the revenge which

is fun to watch

when she flips

and completely takes revenge on what people have done to her and goes on this

like Murder spree?

It's a release.

And you're cheering her on. It's horrible what's happening. There's blood

everywhere. It's so gory.

The thing that scares me more than a woman being able to enact revenge and go

this killing spree is what the cost is.

for that character.

For myself, it really was cathartic because these are things that we can't

real life.

It's instructive in the horror context to look at rape revenge films that have

been directed by women because they're quite diverse and I don't think we

give them credit for that.

You can just go home.

I won't be done until tomorrow night.

We have the Soska's American Mary.

What we're going to do with you today.

A really interesting example is Evangeline by the Canadian filmmaker

Rape revenge films often isolate women. It's often about women by themselves

fighting back against rapists or somebody acting on behalf of that woman.

is really interesting to me is when we start having communities gather or women

joining forces.

There's a rape revenge film, a supernatural rape revenge film from

called Kuroneko from the 1960s, which is about a mother and daughter who are

raped and murdered by a travelling samurai.

And as ghosts, the spirits, they come back to seek vengeance.

It's almost a default now when thinking about women and community to think of

that famous scene from Midsommar where Florence Pugh's character is crying and

the women gather around her. They almost become one sort of single organism and

they weep together.

The strong woman trope is a trope that I'm trying to actively make more

especially for Black women protagonists.

So I think it's important to have final girls and women protagonists in these

genres, darker genres, who also, you're juxtaposing that with vulnerability and

softness.

You already came by here.

Women -centered home invasion films have a very long history in cinema. We have

The Lonely Villa, probably one of the first home invasion films ever made. And

of course, we have in 1913, the film Suspense, which was co -directed by Lois

Webber and also stars Lois Webber. Later, we have home invasion films about

women like Wait Until Dark with Audrey Hepburn and Lady in a Cage with Olivia

Havilland.

The home invasion, it's a very real fear.

Some of the films that are strongest in that area are the ones that do play with

the irrational fears on top of the rational fear of having your home

penetrated, if you like.

For example, The Entity, in which Barbara Hershey is terrorised by some

supernatural force and that terror assumes... a horrific sexual dimension.

Lucky is a film directed by Natasha Kamani that was written and stars Bria

Grant, and it's such an extraordinary exploration of the idea that male

is almost ambient.

Lucky is a surrealist slasher film in which May, the main character,

is attacked by the same man every night.

And people think it's just normal. I can't change it, Mae. This is just how

things are. This is not how things are. Yes, it is.

Every night, a man comes to our house and tries to. No, shut up. Stop talking.

wrote the film after I was attacked.

And it was part catharsis, a little bit of therapy.

I would tell people what had happened to me. And every woman I know would go,

yeah, because it had happened to them too.

I was being interviewed by an officer telling him what happened. And he said,

you know, you're just really lucky you didn't get raped.

That's not lucky.

I don't think that's lucky.

We understand that this one woman's experience that we've been tracking.

is the experience of every woman in this nightmare universe, in this Alice in

Wonderland wacko reality that we're in.

I find so often in history, people blame women for being these delicate

creatures, and yet they subject us to so much pain and so much judgment and so

much oppression and expect us to bear it.

And they get all fucking surprised when we fall apart or when we break down.

And even then, they can't bear to respect the beast inside of us, the

monstrosity that we all have repressed within us. They can't even respect that,

and they say, oh, she's fucking hysterical.

That's why something like Helter Skelter is so powerful.

Just living up to expectations of what an ideal woman should be is a job in

itself. It's such a release when you let go of all the bullshit, even if it

comes with violence.

It's just fun to watch. But on the other hand, there's so much going on in terms

of the gender politics and these other dynamics that are at work in this movie.

I think that watching horror films and seeing that a woman can crumble, a woman

can decay, a woman can transform into a fucking beast is kind of cathartic for

most women.

My first horror film I was a fan of was Alien. The first half of that movie is

Ripley dealing with a series of men who are trying to gaslight her.

You're guaranteed by law to get a share.

What? Why don't you just fuck off?

What? And they say, we need to bring this astronaut onto our ship.

And Ripley's like, no, that's a legitimately terrible idea.

Open the hatch.

Wait a minute.

If we let it in, the ship could be infected. You know the quarantine

24 hours for decontamination.

Ripley's making the right decision one after another, and it's a terrifying

movie.

But these were the role models I had in my life starting there. As an actress, I

would be sent these scripts, and it's so... At some point, I would have to

to the often male writer or director and say, does my character have a job?

They were just there because they were somebody's girlfriend or somebody's mom

or, you know, they played some role in relationship to this male protagonist.

But you didn't know what they did when they left there. You didn't know how

made money.

Unfortunately, we live in a capitalist economy, so, like, women have to make

money in order to survive, and it becomes part of our identity.

So, tell me everything.

There's two really interesting films about women and work that came out

the same time, and they both involve Bria Grant, the stylist in 12 Hours

Ugh, can't wait to do this with the dress.

Oh, neither can I.

Can you send me a photo?

Oh, yeah. The stylist is awesome. It combines everything you love about

maniacs...

with everything you love about single white female.

Maybe we could get together tonight with your bridesmaids and we could talk

about how you want their hair done and then... Claire.

Honey.

This is a lot. And it does it in this super stylish way as you're watching

this girl who's a hairstylist and she starts to become obsessed with

one of her clients.

Claire, are you okay?

12 -Hour Shift is a dark comedy about a bunch of nurses who are selling organs

on the black market.

It

all

takes place over the course of one 12 -Hour Shift when things go horribly

wrong with their schemes.

Really amazing films when it comes to thinking about women and work because

about how women could be taken for granted in their jobs We agreed on 100

the overnight rate, right?

No, it was done. It was 150.

Oh Okay 150.

Horror films about women working in service jobs in a domestic context are

really interesting because there's this blur between the home and professional

life. My mom is a writer. My first feature, Nanny, is loosely based on her

trajectory, having to put her dream of writing on the side to be a domestic

worker. Rose is in bed.

Great. Everything went smooth? No tantrums? No, no, not at all.

She is so relaxed with you.

Nanny is a horror film about a Senegalese woman who works in New York

to a very, very wealthy couple and their young child.

And the woman is working very, very hard to raise money so she can bring her own

child over to be with her.

My mom has just always been like this barometer of ambition

for me. Her entryway into domestic work.

really opened my eyes to the ways that certain labor is not valued.

She has not paid me what I am owed.

When the reality is a lot of these women who work in the domestic workforce are

keeping our entire society afloat. Since I started, I have been buying her food

or making some of my own. Did you ever wonder how your child was eating?

Are you too busy to care?

This is the invisible labor, and so at first I approached it as a

straightforward drama about an African woman in America.

I miss my country every day.

It's a good fact.

Do tell me about the bad part.

And then as I started to really dig into my influences, I wanted to couch it in

genre and folklore.

I started to incorporate West African elements that spoke to the spiritual

world, like being given that permission to tap into your own culture and the

specificity that makes your protagonist's journey just as universal

American protagonist.

When I read Shadow in the Cloud, it resonated with me on many levels. As a

who is underestimated or gaslit or whatever, all the things that we know

up to exist in this world and be of a success in this world. Roseanne Leung's

Shadow in the Cloud sort of historicises the idea of women in work because it

focuses on a woman who's a pilot during World War II and she has a special

project. that she is sent on, and she is placed on a plane, this old rickety

plane, with a big group of horrible men. These guys are shitheads.

And so she's trying to deal with the fact that gremlins are toking over the

plane. It's like a wonderful, fun popcorn movie.

But at the same time, she's sort of juggling that with the fact that these

around her are just dicks.

Can we get back to the subject at hand? Did you say winged, Dame?

What do you mean winged? Her arm's broke.

Who gives a crap about her arm?

How's her ass?

The way that you talk to people, the way that you make yourself known, it's

different for women. I'm assigned to this flight. This isn't a joyride,

Get off now. What the hell is going on back there? I'm commissioned to this

flight. Get off my fucking plane.

Some of the themes in the film are about what it takes to get your job done as a

woman. in a male -dominated workplace.

Someone watches it and goes, oh, oh, no, that's very

similar to something that happened to me or something that I've experienced or

that my friends have experienced or that my mother has experienced, my daughter

has experienced.

Everyone around me has experienced. You realise, oh, my God, I thought this was

history, but it's our present.

Sensor really shows this kind of collapse and this transformation that a

goes through when the entire world is turned against her. I think I might have

worked out where she is.

Oh, please, Lena, not this again.

She was looking for her sister, and everyone was just like, let's just have

dinner instead. Couldn't we just enjoy a lovely family dinner? I don't want to

grow old wishing for a happy ending that we all know might never come.

So are you deciding that she's dead?

Not recognizing that she is on the brink of collapse and that she is taking her

work so seriously because she's using it as her drug. And all of these things

just point to me how we women are so ignored and we're so outcast and we're

taken seriously. And then whenever we flip out, then everybody's like, well,

where the fuck did that come from?

When watching movies about horror film production, we can gain a new respect

the actual work that so many women do in front of the camera too. Someone like

Isabella Gianni in Possession is such a powerful example of a film making us

aware of just how hard women work in making horror.

We have to talk about Possession. There are times when I think to myself, what

happens if I'm gross on camera? What happens if I embarrass myself or others?

ultimate inspiration, which is possession.

You'll never stop thinking about it.

There is no end to what this woman does.

Hats off to Isabel Ajani for giving one of the most committed performances ever

captured. It hits a certain manic pitch early on.

stains it.

And the sequence with Ajani in the subway shrieking is

indelible. And it's something I actually find incredibly hard to watch. If I

watch that at home, I'm very conscious that the neighbours could call the

at any moment.

It's statingly obvious to say that this is one of the most memorable

performances in horror film history.

And in that U -Bahn scene, what looks like someone giving birth blurs with the

fact that we're watching a woman at the peak of her professional craft acting

the living shit out of it.

Maternal horror is one of the very, very rare areas, not just in screen culture,

but culturally across the board, where we get to acknowledge that maybe being a

mother... isn't always perfect. The bodies of pregnant people become a kind

site or a forum for a whole bunch of anxieties and tensions around gender

politics to play out. I love my son. I love you, baby, if you're watching. But

have to say my experience of pregnancy, and especially of giving birth, it was

not pastel coloured. When I think of filmic representations of my experience

giving birth, the first thing that comes to mind is Sergio Martino's film, All

the Colours of the Dark.

At the very beginning of the film, there's this sort of nightmarish,

kaleidoscopic horror show. It's like people screaming and kind of lurid

hysteria. When you're pregnant, it's kind of a horror movie. Even if you're

happy to be pregnant, as I was, your body suddenly changes.

It's very like a Cronenberg movie.

There's something inside me.

poking out oh motherhood is a horror movie just those first six months every

single mother is a final girl they should all get the pin they've all made

through it is the most insane thing that ever happened to me because i was right

in my horror career when that happened my mind was in indie horror anyone who

isn't ready to hear about body horror pause forward like a minute maybe okay

my first child i tried to push and it didn't quite work

And they had some concern that he had a fever. His heart rate was dropping. So

everything's fucking terrifying.

And they're like, boom, it's time for a C -section.

I have no understanding of what that means. I am wheeled into a room. My arms

are strapped down like a cross because oftentimes when someone cuts into your

body while you're awake, unintentionally you will try to stop them.

They bump up my spinal block. You think, oh, I'm numb from the waist down. No,

no, no, Nanette. No, no, you're not numb from the waist down. You just don't

feel pain.

You can still feel pressure and the feeling of being cut.

And that makes you very nauseous. So we're in a horror movie already. I'm

chained down and I'm puking and screaming.

You feel it cut into you.

And then you feel a bunch of hands.

enter your body and they're inside of you there is no way to describe that

who have a c -section know what i'm talking about and then you won't lift

baby out they first move all of your organs and then they put a little cut in

your uterus and then they squeeze the baby out like a pimple it's really

and then a baby fucking comes out and they're like love it mom love it forever

And you're like, it's great. Oh, God, he's so beautiful. Except he's covered

fur and howling like a freaking werewolf. And he's blue.

And you're still puking.

And then they decide that they need to cauterize the wound. And so they use a

cauterizing. And you smell your own burning flesh. Smells like bacon.

And then they sew you up. And then they throw you into recovery and hand you a

baby and go feed it.

And then there's crying in the house in the middle of the night, and you're not

sleeping. And there's, like, when there's not crying, there's phantom

where you think of it. People are trying now to really talk about it, but we

haven't quite got there, because I think they're afraid that if women really

knew, they wouldn't do it. And to that I say, fuck all men, because women do

everything all the time, even though we know it's going to be terrible.

The first film I saw was really...

affected me profoundly, which I saw when I was a young teenager, was Rosemary's

Baby. God is dead!

Satan lives!

If I could really name a single film that influenced me, it would be that.

know Polanski's, you know, very controversial, and I'm not defending his

personal behavior.

Rosemary's Baby was the first film I saw which was truly from a woman's point of

view. Read what they do, Guy.

They use blood in their rituals, and the blood that has the most power is baby's

blood. And they don't just use the blood, they use the flesh, too.

God's sake.

It really taps into the nightmare that is being a pregnant person and somehow

automatically becoming infantilized. Do you hear a baby crying?

No, I don't, dear.

Now you come and get into your bed now. It's time for you to take your pill.

The length that people will go to sort of touch you and pat you on the head and

treat you like an idiot because you're pregnant.

We're your friends, Rosemary.

There's nothing to be afraid of, Rosemary. Honest and truly, there is.

nothing but a mild sedative to calm you down.

And there's just the way that she's being...

patronized, kind of almost eradicated as a person.

If you're feeling that the world is not necessarily sunny and good and that

there's things that you should be suspicious of, Rosemary's Baby is the

you. I've been waking up every morning with this crazy old school idea about

sacrificing your firstborn son for fame or something.

Stuart Thorndike's movie Lyle, which is a...

You know, the reductive way of discussing it is that it's a lesbian

Rosemary's Baby. And it is that. The director, Stuart Thorndike, is a queer

director, and she is also a mother. But what's interesting is that the character

played by Gabby Hoffman in Lyle is very different from Rosemary in Rosemary's

Baby, because Rosemary is kind of like, things are happening to her, and she's

kind of freaking out, and she doesn't know how to react.

Whereas... Gabby Hoffman's character in Lyle is very forceful, and in certain

parts of the movie, she becomes hostile because she's so protective of her

child. Get away from me! Get away from me!

What? Leah.

She did it. I told you, you wouldn't listen to me. I kept telling you that

was something wrong. You never listened to me.

Calm down. Calm down. There were other things too. There was a baby and a

boy named Andrew who was only nine years old. Lyle is absolutely acknowledging

that it is riffing on Rosemary's baby very directly, but...

Because they're a lesbian couple, Gabby Hoffman's character has to be

inseminated by somebody else. We discover there actually is a satanic

afoot. But there's still an acknowledgement that a male child is

a female child.

Two girls for one boy.

With all of the progress that we think we've made and all these rights that we

now have, they have to sacrifice two female children to be worth...

what a male child would be worth to the devil. Even in this totally feminist

movie, there's still an acknowledgement that we're not there yet.

There's a tremendous amount of anxiety in some quarters about the idea of

motherhood and the sorts of bodies and people and gender identities that are

attached to the figure of the mother.

Or a parent, full stop, who gets to raise children, but also who gets to

them. And transmasculine people increasingly are bearing children, and

plenty of scope for anxieties about queer parents to be explored in horror.

Probably ideally by queer filmmakers more than by straight, middle -class,

heteronormative male middle -aged folk.

Dad!

A movie like Cujo, Dee Wallace is going to take on a killer dog to save her

child. I want my daddy!

I want my daddy!

All right, I'll get your daddy!

Her performance in that film is so incredible, and you feel that fear. It's

fear that that mother feels that her child could get eaten by this dog.

Cujo is such an important film about motherhood because it's not just about

passion and the intensity and the lengths that a mother will go to to

her child. It's also about the fact that mothers sometimes get things wrong,

that they're human and that they make mistakes.

I was amazed by, with all the feelings of love and patience and tenderness

that comes with motherhood, there was also a savagery behind it because I knew

that I would not hesitate to... kill someone or try to kill someone if they

after my child.

I would do anything to protect this baby.

And that was a surprise to me, this potential for violence rose when I

parent.

The Babadook is a horror film that I have a lot of trouble revisiting, not

because I don't think it's great, but because it was just too close to home.

son was maybe two or three years old when that film came out.

And all of my fears were on the screen.

I can't stand being around your son.

I can't believe you just said that. You can't stand being around him yourself.

This acknowledgement that it's not automatic, that not every woman is going

be great at being a mother.

Give it to me!

In one way, it was comforting to know that, but in the context of the

it gets pretty extreme.

You little pig.

Six years old and you're still wetting yourself.

and it still chills me to the bone, but it speaks to a very real truth, a very

deep fear.

I don't know why I said that. It was terrible.

I felt absolutely no sleep.

I didn't know what I was saying. Jennifer Kent made a film about a mother

to take care of an autistic child and being haunted by this crazy top hat

monster.

I think that what Jennifer Kent is...

saying about motherhood in the Babadook is that it is not always a joyful

experience. There are phases of your life where like you might hate your

ones. You may hate your children.

You will come to love them again.

You still have to come to terms with all of that because there is a person who's

depending on you. Their life depends on you.

And so it's not always like how James Cameron depicts motherhood in the

you know. It's not like Sigourney Weaver, you know, finding this little

being like, I must protect her and aliens.

It's not always natural because for Essie Davis's character in The Babadook,

it's not natural. It doesn't feel natural, doesn't feel right, but there's

a sense of duty and she still can overcome it and she still can protect

child and herself.

But there's going to be peril along the way.

If you touch my son again, I'll fucking kill you!

I love challenging the idea of what it means to be a good mother, to be a good

sister, to be a good human. But in this case, a mother with a troubled past and

a difficult child, in the extent...

that not only the mother is willing to go to, she almost kills her kid.

Let me in, you little shit!

Let me in!

Let me in!

Let me in!

We live in a society that professes to love mothers and support mothers, but

actions show otherwise.

We're required to come back in a week to talk through your options.

Here's my card.

So I think it becomes a horror story for so many women in different iterations.

Whether you're actively pregnant, or you have a child that you don't love, or

you have a child that you resent, or your child isn't here with you. Like,

there's so many iterations that I think are ripe for horror. The Babadook and We

Need to Talk About Kevin are an interesting pair of films in terms of a

and child.

Okay. Here we go.

Okay.

A mother fearful of a child being abnormal.

Isn't that a weird thing to collect?

I don't like stamps.

Perhaps where they differ, the Babadook mother is projecting a lot onto that

child.

The Babadook did it, Mum!

Yes, the child misbehaves at school, misbehaves around family.

But a lot of the fear being brought into the domestic sphere is the mother's own

doing. Whereas in We Need to Talk About Kevin, the kid seems pretty clearly off

the leash.

We're going to dinner.

I was hungry.

Lynne Ramsey, like, I think that she's just so masterful at thrillers and cross

-genre and tension.

How about Kevin go to Gladstone High? That movie is just...

So intense. The definition of how you're supposed to love your child and also

what if your child ends up being a serial killer?

And how do you deal with that?

Films like The Babadook, We Need to Talk About Kevin, and Prevenge really

challenge assumptions we might make about the experience of motherhood. It's

peculiar experience being a horror fan and having been pregnant.

Because when we think of having, you know, another person inside you, we

of possession movies. You know, we sort of default to things that are not

positive.

Provenge is a film about how weird it can sometimes feel to be pregnant and to

be faced with the whole concept of life and mortality.

How being pregnant sort of sharpens the awareness of what being alive

really means.

In the face of the inevitability of death.

It's a hard

thing to talk

about aging. We shy away from it. We don't want to face it. It's painful.

One of the most painful things and somewhere that we're all headed for

die young. I can't believe.

how old I am. I look and I go, God, I'm really, I'm all, where are those

wrinkles? And then I kind of, when I have my inner joy, I look great.

I don't want to die, Lee.

You have a long life ahead of you.

I cry with my heart.

You're never too old to express yourself.

I'm not ashamed of it at all. I love it.

I wanted a story where the old ladies are the heroes, where the older age, the

wise age, are the ones that kick ass.

Bingo Hell tells a story about the community of Oak Springs, this small,

small community in the most ghetto side of the city, where it's being

gentrified. But those wacky seniors who refuse to be gentrified decide to stay.

But little did they know that their beloved bingo hall was going to be

somebody much more powerful than money itself.

Welcome to our house.

It was so inspired by my abuela,

my grandma. I wanted to make a movie where she can sit with me and see

as the hero.

And I don't think we have that enough in horror movies.

Some of the most indelible characters in horror are aged women, or women of a

certain age, but then perhaps a bit older still, and hence terms arising

hag -sploitation for those sorts of films like Whatever Happened to Baby

where one -time glamour pusses like Bette Davis and Joan Crawford get to

duke it out in the cattiest, bitchiest way imaginable.

I think I should be horrified more than I am sort of camply entertained as well.

But the sight of the aged figure is one that is horrific or regularly depicted

as horrific.

There's plenty of room at your place. No, it's not about room. She has to be

watched.

Well, isn't that how it works?

Your mum changes your nappy, then you change hers?

The film that affected me the most probably was Relic by an Australian

called Natalie Erica James.

It's such a profound movie. I also had a mother with dementia, and the pain of

watching someone who'd been very beautiful and vibrant and very brilliant

sort of declined, it caught the dreamlike and surreal nature of what is

common to everyone's experience of aging. It is like a bad dream. It is

I can do it myself.

You've hurt yourself.

No!

Get out! Get out of here!

Get out! I think madness.

is a very scary thing to me, losing control over your own mind.

It's my room! It's my house! Get out!

Old Age is its own horror movie, and then with a parent, you watch them

in front of your eyes, suddenly sort of disintegrate. It created this tangible,

but quite beautiful, I think, experience of the horror of aging and dementia.

The ageing female body is often a site of horror and that extends well beyond

the filmic sphere, rightly or wrongly.

It's easy to dismiss horror as being kind of backwards or regressive when it

comes to the representation of older women.

Maybe I'm a glass half full kind of person, but for me what's more important

that women do stuff. Even if they're monsters, they have agency and they have

power and it might be dark power, it might be fucked up power, but they do

stuff.

Katsu is an absolutely wackadoodle Japanese film. It's about a group of

schoolgirls who travel to a country house owned by one of their aunties, and

they don't realise that she's actually a spirit. And she has sort of been driven

to this sort of homicidal mania by the memory of her fiancé who died during

World War II.

Now, the girls don't realise that any of this is going on until they all start

dying one by one, and the spirit of the aunt actually takes over one of the

girls.

And on one hand, we have this really great, vibrant, energetic film that it's

just so wild to watch.

But on the other hand, we have this sort of undercurrent about memory and the

war, which you don't really pick up necessarily on the first time that you

it, but you really feel it the more times that you view this film.

The young generation have forgotten the war and they don't have the same

emotional scars that the older generation do.

I have a real soft spot for horror movies that put young girls or young

very, very sharp contrast with older women and to show who has the power and

has the agency and what meanings can we draw from these about gender politics

more broadly.

Miss Dana.

I have something to tell you.

Who said that? Shut up! That's enough of these little games for the moment.

Suspiria, of course, is set in a ballet school, and that film effectively pits

two generations of women against each other. We have the older women, the

the witches, and the younger women, the ballet students.

And while the older women are clearly monstrous in comparison to the sort of

beautiful young women, they're powerful.

It's a film about different kinds of women's power.

What is so enduring about that film is that it's about what kinds of power

have at different ages and how it changes in old age.

I love Suspiria. It is a fairy tale fever dream about a girl played by

Harper who is the new girl at a German dance academy and she discovers

that her classmates are being killed one by one.

And she decides to get to the heart of what is going on. What's really cool

about the movie is that it's primarily a female cast.

The bad guys are also women. You have the girls helping each other, passing

information to each other to try to figure out what's going on.

And then you also have the women of the coven who are working together to kill

the girls. So in ways, it's like women supporting women. Going off the fact

it was influenced by Snow White, you do have this dichotomy of the young maiden

and the old crone. And the movie explores age. And it makes sense because

does take place in a dance academy. It is about ballerinas. And in that world,

you... age out of it really quickly.

Suspiria is obviously sensitive to the whole idea of youth that makes the young

women viable ballerinas.

But what makes it so interesting is how it also delights in showing us these

older women who refuse to disappear.

They just become empowered in different ways.

We're really lucky in horror, I think, where we don't necessarily sort of throw

out women once they reach a certain age.

I think of people like Barbara Crampton, who's surely doing some of the best

work that she's ever done in her career now. I feel more alive than I have in

years. We can add to that list Brink Stevens.

I prefer that you address me as mother.

Debbie Richon.

Debbie Richon directed a film called Model Hunger with Lynn Lowry, which is

much fun, but it's precisely about issues about aging and getting older and

feeling redundant and feeling that you're being replaced by younger women.

And what you do about that. And in her film, the answer is violence.

What have you done? All you have done is to constantly explore new ways to

exploit women.

You fuck with our minds just so you can fuck with our bodies.

I think it's a really nice fuck you to these little men, these sort of little

small boys who insist that horror is only for them.

But horror is for everyone because death is for everyone, no matter who we are.

The best -case scenario is that we might live to be really old.

Most of us will just get really sick and die, breaking the hearts of those who

love us.

If we're lucky, we'll end up crumbling and turning to dust like at the end of

The Hunger. I mean, is that the best -case scenario?

That all that's left is a faded photograph of someone that we used to

Famously, the film industry has subjected women to any number of

impediments to progress.

I've talked to my friends who are men that direct, and then I've also talked

my friends that are women that direct, and there is such a clear difference in

terms of some of the things we deal with on a daily basis. I've dealt with so

much gaslighting that it's comical. I'm laughing about it because I've dealt

with it so much.

to the point where they, whether it be a producer or whomever, makes you believe

it. It's like, oh, do you really want to do that? Do you really want that shot?

And it's like, yeah, motherfucker, I made the shot list.

Yeah, of course I want that shot. I've come so prepared.

And then they just, it's like, they just want to plant these little seeds of

doubt. Raising your hand every time there's a microaggression just isn't

possible, and it's not worth my time. It's not worth... most people's time

because it's exhausting we all have work to do i just don't have time to deal

with this person's rude comments it's weird to need to make that choice but

that's kind of what i see happening at least in my life in the beginning people

laughed in my face when i said i was making a film oh that's cute you know

making a film is hard and i was just like well yeah like so fucking getting

of bed and taking care of Your children, your husband, and your job, and the

household. I didn't need a fucking dick to hold the camera. In fact, I think it

would be pretty hard to hold a camera with your cop.

For people who are not the traditional idea of the director, John Ford with a

megaphone out on the fucking tundra. I didn't see myself as a director early on

is because I never saw female directors.

Eve's Bayou, Casey Lemons.

It was one of the first times that I saw on the screen black folklore being

weaved into genre. Being a woman who looks even remotely like me executing

was so pivotal for me.

As an actor, I worked with a lot of mediocre directors.

None of them were women. I didn't feel like they had something to say.

I feel like they were driven by their egos.

But I think...

hopefully some of those people are being phased out and we're replacing them

with people who really are inspired to do this job and do it in a way that is

smart and interesting and new and inspired.

I won't name names.

It's not just about women who are actresses or women who are directors.

Some of the biggest horror films that we have would not be what they are without

the women involved in a producer role. I'm thinking Deborah Hill in Halloween

and, of course, Sarah Richer in the Nightmare on Elm Street film.

I started as a studio executive, and I became then president of production.

And there were very few other presidents of production at that time.

I'm going to go and get the guy who did it.

And I want you to be there to arrest him when I bring him out, okay?

When I got on the set and I was needing to boss people around, as a producer

sometimes has to do, that could be difficult.

Because it's like a construction site. It's very male.

Where are you?

Everything's going to be all right.

Everything's under control.

Get my back, you asshole!

It's only recently that diversity has happened a lot where women get roles as

directors. There has been a tremendous amount of inclusion, gratefully. There's

still a lot of lingering prejudice, which people pretend they don't have,

is even more unnerving some of the time.

It definitely feels like there's more female -directed.

female -produced movies now than when I started.

Women are not new to horror filmmaking.

Two extremely influential examples that come to mind are Germaine Dulac, the

Sicilian clergyman from 1928, and Maya Deren in the 1940s, Messages of the

Afternoon. Extraordinary.

influential films with plenty of horror in them. I think we should also take a

step back and take a bird's eye historical view of horror storytelling

that women have always been a part of this legacy.

Scheherazade doing Book of a Thousand and One Nights, right? So there's horror

storytelling right there. And then you have Mary Shelley writing Frankenstein.

You have Shirley Jackson, right, doing horror in the 40s and 50s. In so many

ways, women have always had a seat at this table.

And so for my generation of filmmakers coming, it's more like we're reclaiming

the seat than making new space. It's space that's always been there, and it's

just there to be claimed and maybe repositioned at the head of the table.

Can you believe that bland and lovely growl conceived of Frankenstein? Why

shouldn't I write a mantra? The influence of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

horror cannot be underplayed. And it's not just the story of Frankenstein and

how that's impacted horror. It's also Mary herself. And there are these horror

films that are about Mary Shelley writing Frankenstein. Things like A

Awakes and Ken Russell's Gothic.

My story is a story of creation, of a creature who's wracked with pain and

sorrow and hunger for revenge, who haunts his mad creator and his family

friends. Mary Shelley was Garth as fuck.

She understood fear in a really kind of personal way. Are you going to survive

childbirth?

How are you going to survive this really tumultuous marriage?

The life of an artist.

These awful things that are going on with her. And when she writes,

Frankenstein, that's coming from an extremely personal place and it's also

setting the tone, I think, for a lot of great horror that follows it. Mary

Shelley is the progenitrix of horror and especially body horror and mad

scientist horror and that nexus of science fiction and horror. The fear of

what's possible.

Of recent horror, I would say the one that's blown my mind is Titan.

This character, spoiler alert, has a sexual relationship with a car.

And then comes to be impregnated by that car and it's taking over her

body and essentially it's like making her no longer human.

Satan is in a world of its own. It's just like through one character's lens,

is also a psychopath and a murderer.

She also becomes something beyond gender, both a mother and

a kind of sexual temptress, but also enjoys the kind of masculine attributes

being like a fire person.

Juliette de Cournot is clearly one of the leading lights.

horror in the 2020s and no doubt beyond.

Hitam won the Palme d 'Or at Cannes. Films directed by women routinely do not

win such prestigious awards in the first place, let alone for making a body

horror film that confounds any number of expectations.

What are we supposed to do now?

Horror filmmaking has been so much through a male lens in really the

cinema, and it made me very excited to see what's to come as we see more women

working in the horror genre.

And here we are.

I wrote a book called 1 ,000 Women in Horror, and the joke of that book is

of course there's more women in horror than 1 ,000. You'd be forgiven for

believing that women in horror as a new interest is something that is a sort of

recent phenomena, but this is not true.

It's only been in recent years, however, that these films have been exhibited

and distributed widely, that major publications have started focusing on

And very importantly, this is really largely to do with the extremely hard

of an international group of women that have spearheaded the women in horror

movement. It is a feminist activist movement, very much in the tradition of

something like Riot Grrrl in the 90s. I love that a thousand women in horror

exists, that that...

book exists and that it's sort of reminding everyone, oh yeah, this is a

of people that are not represented as much as they should be. I'm just trying

put more women on screen who also are really afraid and being as human and

of flawed as possible.

I've seen the change of how diversity, of how new voices and unrepresented

voices are being so welcomed in the industry and more than anything.

the horror community.

I'm very happy with how things are going. If you look at how it changed,

been extraordinary.

There are more people who are open to letting a woman helm film.

There are more people who are interested in having female protagonists.

and seeing stories from a woman's point of view. It's finally hitting people

that there's only so much of a white Western perspective people can take

things get a bit boring and stale. They kind of came around to realizing it's

like, yeah, when it comes to other cultures and other genders and other

sexualities, we can't just have cisgendered straight white men writing

this. I crave a variety of representation that can be inclusive of

being... as monstrous as anybody else as women as trans people as queer people

tapping into what the horrors are that we're navigating i'm just excited about

horror not being literally these jump scares and these tropes but like

them into something that feels much more contemporary and much more nuanced i

mean for fuck's sake we're 50 of the goddamn population like Is it so strange

see a woman as a protagonist or to hear her story? Why should we wait for anyone

to give us permission to do what we want?

You underestimating me is going to do me favors because I'm going to show you

what I'm made of.

We're here and we're not going anywhere.

There's a lot more to say on the topic.