Chapter 1. Women Make (Write, Produce, Direct, Shoot, Edit and Analyze) Horror by Alison Peirse In 2008 I secured my first academic post at the University of Hull, and designed a new module, "The Horror Film." I began with Island of Lost Souls (1932), then Cat People (1942), Horror of Dracula (1958), Les yeux sans visage (1960), Night of the Living Dead (1968), Suspiria (1977), Halloween (1978), The Evil Dead (1981) and The Lost Boys (1987). I followed this with a series of national case studies: Canadian Ginger Snaps (2000), British Dog Soldiers (2002), Japanese Ju-on: The Grudge (2003) and South Korean A Tale of Two Sisters (2003). The selection process was straightforward: the 1930s was my PhD research, Cat People , The Lost Boys and Les yeux sans visage were my favourites, the case studies reflected the then-academic preoccupation with national cinemas, and everything in-between was (what I then considered to be) the key texts of the horror genre. This module was the ur-canon: the emergence of the genre in the American studio system in the 1930s and 1940s, British horror in the 1950s, independent American filmmaking and the emergence of European horror in the 1960s and 1970s, the rise of the slasher and video nasties in the 1970s and 1980s, then the genre (more or less) goes under for most of the 1990s, before returning, globally, in the new millennium. Reflecting on those choices, I now realize that all the films were by male directors. In the cases of Island of Lost Souls , Cat People, Horror of Dracula, Les yeux sans visage, Dog Soldiers and Ju-On: The Grudge , the writing, producing, directing, cinematography and editing team was all-men.

Despite having written a PhD thesis on queer gender and sexuality in horror film, the gender of the filmmakers wasn''t something I even considered while creating the module. Indeed, it was a number of years before I even thought about this at all. That moment came in 2014, in the Cinematek bar in Brussels, where I was waiting to give a public lecture at the Offscreen Film Festival. I was idly perusing the film posters on the wall, and my eyes were drawn to a bold, minimal, poster. The background was a brilliant blood-red, at its center was a chador-wearing vampire, and across the chador, written in block capitals: A GIRL WALKS HOME ALONE AT NIGHT. I wrote down the title and, with Ana Lily Amirpour''s vampire film as my gateway drug, I began devouring contemporary women-made horror films. I worked my way through American Mary (Jen and Sylvia Soska, 2012), Soulmate (Axelle Carolyn, 2013), Honeymoon (Leigh Janiak, 2014), Inner Demon (Ursula Dabrowsky, 2014), The Babadook (Jennifer Kent, 2014), The Lure (Agnieszka Smoczynska, 2015) and The Invitation (Karyn Kusama, 2015). From 2016, references to women horror filmmakers achieved critical mass across multiple, international media platforms.

I read profiles of Prevenge (Alice Lowe, 2016), The Love Witch (Anna Biller, 2016), Egomaniac (Kate Shenton, 2016), Raw (Julia Ducournau, 2016) and omnibus film XX (2017) in articles proclaiming "The Rise of the Modern Female Horror Filmmaker" ( Rolling Stone ), "Welcome to the Golden Age of Women-Directed Horror" ( Vice ) and "The Female Directors Bringing New Blood to Horror Film" ( Observer ), then the Los Angeles Times declared that Revenge (Coralie Fargeat, 2017) offered "the first horror heroine of the Time''s Up era."[1] I questioned my own work as an academic. Given my research in horror film frequently engaged with gender and sexuality, and involved interviewing industry practitioners, why hadn''t I considered women filmmakers in particular? This really bothered me. The most important academic writers on horror were women: Linda Williams, Carol J. Clover, Barbara Creed, Rhona J. Berenstein, Brigid Cherry, Isabel Pinedo and Joan Hawkins.[2] But what about women as makers of horror? In the popular press that I was reading, critics always had the caveat: of course , women were making horror films before now, and throwing out the same kind of examples: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Fran Rubel Kuzui, 1992), Ravenous (Antonia Bird, 1999) and Twilight (Catherine Hardwicke, 2008). Where was this history of women horror filmmakers written? In a Hollywood Reporter profile, writer / director Jovanka Vuckovic explained that the making of XX was "a direct response to the lack of opportunities for women in the horror genre in particular.

an area where women have been historically misrepresented onscreen and under-represented behind the camera."[3] I excelled in the analysis of representation of gender on screen, I''d read all the women writers on the genre, but in terms of understanding the under-representation of women in production roles. Who? What? Where? When? In 2016, it was if women horror filmmakers had emerged en-masse for the first time, all shiny and new. During this period, there was a major upswing in publications on women filmmakers in the academy. The studies were usually in relation to specific filmmakers (including Ida Lupino, Nancy Meyers and Amy Heckerling) or in relation to national cinemas and / or identities (including British, Latin American and Black filmmakers).[4] I realized there was an appetite for reading about horror films made by women, and a growing body of academic literature on women filmmakers. This appeared to be a timely opportunity to think about how and why women make horror film. However, I quickly discovered that critical studies of horror were ill-equipped to explore this subject further.

Let me explain to you how horror film studies writes its filmmakers. In Hollywood Horror: From the Director''s Chair , all the interviewees are men. In The Anatomy of Fear: Conversations with Cult Horror and Science Fiction Film Creators , all twenty-one filmmakers are men. In his 867-page compendium Horror Film Directors, 1931 - 1990 , Dennis Fischer lists fifty-two "major" directors (all men) and forty-eight "promising, obscure or hack" directors. From these 100 directors, Fischer lists just one woman, Stephanie Rothman, and places her in the obscure / hack category. Fischer''s categorization of almost-exclusively white North American or European men as horror film directors is typical of how our horror film histories are written. From Fischer''s point of view, a self-proclaimed "exhaustive study," women have made a one percent contribution to the genre.[5] In Voices in the Dark: Interviews with Horror Writers, Directors and Actors , all directors featured are men, and all but one of the writers are men.

[6] Do note the "actors" in the above title. Women often do feature in these books, but they are usually reminiscing about the "great" man they knew, or they are discussing their on-screen work as actors. In these collections, women are objects of representation, a position that achieves its zenith in Marcus Hearn''s Hammer Glamour , a "lavish, full colour celebration of Hammer''s female stars."[7] If interview collections are predicated upon white male directors, what about the theorization of horror? In the 1970s, Robin Wood inaugurated the academic study of the genre. While predominantly studying those male directors popular at the time, including Wes Craven, George Romero and Brian de Palma, Wood offers a hugely helpful, feminist model for thinking through how to analyze horror film. In "Return of the Repressed" (1978), Wood argued that horror films can radically undermine the status quo of bourgeois capitalism (explored through Marxist dominant ideology) and the patriarchal, heterosexual nuclear family (explored through Freudian psychoanalysis). In particular, he argued that "central to the effect and fascination of horror films is their fulfilment of our nightmare wish to smash the norms that oppress us and which our moral conditioning teaches us to revere."[8] While his demanding theoretical framework may alienate a more general readership, Wood''s primary belief was that horror film is a space to rebel against dominant norms that oppress us, and that it can be a place to explore social and cultural change, particularly in relation to (what was then called) the Gay Liberation Front and the Women''s Liberation Movement.

This proposition is hugely powerful for helping us understanding horror film, yet it was Wood''s psychoanalytic material that proved to be most popular with feminist film critics and horror film analysts alike. Psychoanalytically-grounded feminist readings of horror films began to be published, including Williams'' "When the Woman Looks" (1984), Creed''s "Horror and the Monstrous-Feminine: An Imaginary Abjection" (1986) and Clover''s "Her Body Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film" (1987).[9] The readings predominantly focused on films made by men, exploring the representation of gender on screen, and the relationship between the.