Whether they’re behind the camera or in front of it, women have always been a part of horror. As actors, filmmakers, and producers, women have been instrumental in making the horror genre so incredible and relatable.
While there is more diversity now in horror than ever before, there is still progress to be made to ensure women’s voices are heard. You know the old saying, “a woman’s work is never done.”
Australian film critic, historian, and author Alexandra Heller-Nicholas has published nine books on cult, horror, and exploitation cinema with a focus on gender politics. She is a member of the advisory board for the Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies and holds a Ph.D. in Screen Studies from the University of Melbourne and is an Adjunct Professor at Deakin University.
Published in 2020, Alexandra’s book 1000 Women in Horror, 1895-2018 is an extensive love letter to both the stars and the women who have been too often ignored, who have made contributions to the horror genre and influenced it to become what it is today.
Donna Davies is an award-winning documentary filmmaker based in Nova Scotia who has established herself as a voice in the horror genre with documentaries like Pretty Bloody: The Women of Horror (2009), Nightmare Factory (2011), and Fanarchy (2015).
Directed by Davies, the documentary 1000 Women in Horror brings Alexandra Heller-Nicholas’ book to the screen and features interviews with Roxanne Benjamin (There’s Something Wrong With the Children), Akela Cooper (M3gan), Mary Harron (American Psycho), Kier-La Janisse (Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror), Nikyatu Jusu (Nanny), Roseanne Liang (Shadow in the Cloud), Annalise Lockhart (Inheritance), Toby Poser (Mother of Flies), Sara Risher (A Nightmare on Elm Street), Gigi Saul Guerrero (Satanic Hispanics), Kate Siegel (Hush), Jenn Wexler (The Sacrifice Game), and more. Showcasing the extraordinary women who have innovated horror cinema since 1895, the documentary explores the evolution of women in horror and how their work has been fundamental to the genre and its success.
Bloody Disgusting had the pleasure of talking with Alexandra Heller-Nicholas and Donna Davies about teaming up to create the documentary 1000 Women in Horror, why women are drawn to horror movies, representation of women in the horror space, and the role of gender politics in genre film.
Bloody Disgusting: This is such an essential book and documentary. There are so many amazing women in horror. Alexandra, how did you go about choosing the women to be included?
Alexandra Heller-Nicholas: The book started out as 100 Women in Horror and then became 500 Women in Horror and then became 1000 Women in Horror [laughs]. That’s a true story. The original proposal was pitched as 100 Women Horror, and I ended up just giving up, and that’s kind of the joke of the book and the joke of the documentary. Of course, there are more than 1000 women in horror. Once I sort of surrendered to that as a provocation, the process for the book was, “Who can I choose to provide a sense of scale?” So, not just a historical scope, but also geographical. I have a Nigerian filmmaker in there, people from Iceland, I really wanted to give it a strong sense of the geography, but also history as well, going right back to the early silent period, so that was really the governing thing.
I knew people were going to freak out if I didn’t put Jamie Lee Curtis in there, quite rightly, so there were all these big names that had to be in there. But it wasn’t a case of, “Who are the most important 1000 women in horror,” because that really goes into one of the themes that is really crucial to the book and to the documentary, which is that women’s labor is invisible, not just in horror, not just in women’s filmmaking, but in the world. You don’t notice your mum doing your laundry every day, right?
Women’s labor is historically invisible. So, that was really my driving thing. It was like, “How do I make invisible labor of women visible?” Because of that, I have people like Margaret Cardin, who was an Australian negative cutter; people don’t talk about negative cutters. She worked on every major Australian horror film from the 70s and 80s. So, it was really about addressing this idea of women’s invisible labor.
BD: I love how the documentary is told in chapters ranging from Girlhood through Aging, and how it’s presented in a way that is comprehensive and straightforward. Donna, how did you and Alexandra collaborate to bring the book to the screen?
Donna Davies: When we first put our heads together for the project, we were looking at possibly doing a six-part series, and there was a little bit of interest in that. So, we were looking at it in a different way, but then when we realized that we were going to be doing a 90-minute project, we were like, “Okay, we can’t do it in those kinds of chapters we had before.” The idea of a woman’s lifecycle was something Alexandra came up with, and it worked perfectly as a sort of a hanger to put all the material on. When we started to look at it that way, we quickly came to a consensus that there would have to be a certain amount of tentpole films that were essential and then in those categories, for example films about childhood, the most important films that we knew people would know about, but had to be mentioned, and then little less known, and then very important but from other parts of the world.
So, there were months and months of discussions and back and forth. This process of this film started in 2019, so it took quite a few years; it wasn’t a fast film, put it that way [laughs]. I think that we were on the same page in wanting to be very comprehensive, but entertaining, and also inclusive. Those were our main goals.
BD: I know I’m not alone when I say that this documentary made me feel validated as a woman and a horror fan. Several of the women in the film talk about feeling like weirdos or outsiders when they were younger, and how female horror fans form a relationship with horror, and how horror movies can be cathartic. Can you talk a little bit about that, and why do you think women feel so seen by genre film?
AHN: I think in certain circles, even now, there is the assumption that, whether you’re a horror fan or a horror filmmaker, if you’re a woman or femme-identifying, that you’re an interloper; that you don’t really belong; it’s not really your terrain; that horror is a masculine territory. The lived experience of so many women and femme-identifying people whom I know is the opposite of that, and I think in a way that’s what we wanted to map out. So, it wasn’t just a case of making both people who work in the horror industry and people who are fans; it wasn’t just a question of making people visible and feel seen, it was also a case of saying, “Look, it’s actually a really organic response for women and femme-identifying people to be drawn to horror.” So, that was really one of the big things that we wanted to more implicitly address. It’s like, “We’re drawn to this stuff quite naturally because it taps into every single stage of our life.”
DD: There is a point in the film where Kate Siegel says, “Women live a life of horror every time they walk outside their door.” The fact of the matter is that we’re very familiar with fear and with violence; we have to think differently; we have to be on guard. That’s just the way the world has evolved. We live a life that is filled with blood; we bleed; we have babies. We do all kinds of crazy stuff like that. Therefore, why shouldn’t we claim some of the domain as being ours?
Horror is a genre where those uncomfortable things that we can’t discuss in “nice circles,” like wanting to murder your child, like in The Babadook, all kinds of emotions that we’re able to exorcise through these films. I think Alexandra is right when she says that many people believe women who like horror are posing or that we don’t belong. Hopefully, you got that feeling that there’s other people who feel the way that you do and I’m really hoping that this film will get out there and young girls and femme-identifying people who see it, or anyone who feels not accepted, realizes that there is a place for them at the table, that it’s not what they’ve been told [laughs].
BD: I grew up with movies like A Nightmare on Elm Street and Halloween, so I’m a big fan of final girls, and I think they’re usually empowering. What are your thoughts on the evolution of the final girl trope and how it relates to the representation of women in horror?
AHN: That’s an interesting question. Carol Clover published a journal article and then published the book Men, Women, and Chainsaws in 1992. I think it’s really important to remember that Jamie Lee Curtis, even before the final girl label was created, was doing press for Blue Steel, talking about the final girl. She wasn’t calling her the final girl, but she knew exactly what that archetype was; she was engaging with it directly in Blue Steel. She was very aware and very tapped into the fact that the character that she played in Blue Steel was kind of riffing on the same kind of ideas as Laurie Strode in Halloween and things like Prom Night and Terror Train, so she was quite final girl literate even before the term final girl was created. So, I think that’s really important.
I think that there is a tendency, and it’s perhaps just human nature, to see old slasher films as less progressive, and that we’re so much smarter now, and we’re sort of post-postmodern, and things are so much more progressive. But I’m like you, I was sort of forged in the flames of 80s slashers. That’s my spiritual homeland.
I think lesser-known films like Happy Birthday to Me, on the gender political front, that is to me a radical film, and I don’t mean that like a ninja turtle. I think it’s politically radical. I think it’s a film that is deeply intersectional and that it’s about gender and class. I think My Bloody Valentine is again an incredible slasher film about class. I think that these films knew what they were doing. Bob Clark’s Black Christmas, which we talk a lot about in the documentary, was doing things, and April Wolfe gives an incredible, impassioned description of why that’s such an important film.
But that film talks about things that we find difficult to talk about today. The way that it talks about reproductive rights, the way that it talks about consent, the way that it talks about autonomy, and the female community. I struggle to think of a contemporary slasher that does what Bob Clark’s Black Christmas was doing in 1974.
BD: You just touched on gender politics in horror, which is discussed in the documentary. Horror has always been political. Can you talk a little bit about the role of gender politics in the horror genre?
AHN: When filmmakers come out and say, “I’m not a political filmmaker,” it’s like, “You don’t live in a vacuum.” Every film is responding or reacting, even subconsciously, to the context within which it is made. If that context is East Germany in the 1970s, that’s going to be a very different kind of context from something being made in Toronto in 2020. We can’t help it. That’s what art does. Art soaks up the zeitgeist and responds to it in some way on some level, whether it’s consciously meaning to or not. Art doesn’t exist in a vacuum. All film is political. Gender difference is part of the way that we navigate the world, along with things like class, ethnicity, race, sexual identity, and religion. We’re responding to the kind of social norms about these things in film, whether we mean to or not.
DD: I think Alexandra expressed it very well. I think that we’re making progress in certain ways, and I think that in making voices that are not commonly at the table known more and getting the stories out that are getting out there, it’s all about inclusivity. If we get a chance to bring the other voices to the table, I think we’re in for a big surprise as far as what we’re going to see in the next 10 years in terms of what films are going to get made, and I think that the response is going to be incredibly positive. I don’t see anything but blue skies for opening the floor up a little bit and sharing the space with some people who have some very big bones to pick and issues to talk about [laughs].
AHN: I think Alice Maio Mackay is the poster girl of that. She’s this young trans filmmaker who’s made an extraordinary number of films that would be an accomplishment for somebody twice her age, and they are just these punk, passionate, political, entertaining, smart films. I think that Alice is marking the next wave. My dream is that we have an army of Alice Maio Mackays in the next 10 years.
1000 Women in Horror premieres on Shudder on March 20.
