Women Make Horror

ALISON PEIRSE is an associate professor in film and media at the University of Leeds, UK. She is author of After Dracula: The 1930s Horror Film and co-editor of Korean Horror Cinema.

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 image and the imagined (usually male) audience member, theorized as the “spectator.” In the 1980s and 1990s, these ideas dominated horror film criticism specifically and feminist film criticism more generally (which focused on film noir and melodrama). There were outliers during this period though, primarily Cherry, who interviewed real women fans of horror film. While Williams argued that when women watch horror they often refuse to look at the screen “with excellent reason… not the least of which is that she often asked to bear witness to her own powerlessness in the face of rape, mutilation and murder,” Cherry points out that “whether most female spectators actually behave like this is another question… there are female viewers who do take pleasure in viewing horror films and who… refuse to refuse to look.”[10] Cherry’s research is a significant influence on many of the contributors to this book, and it is a clear indication of the ongoing value of her work at a time when empirical studies were not highly valued in horror film studies. 

Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, critics began to raise problems with psychoanalysis as a feminist tool of film analysis. bell hooks, among many others, pointed out that psychoanalysis was ahistorical and privileged (binary) sexual difference, while suppressing “the recognition of race, reenacting and mirroring the erasure of black womanhood that occurs in films, silencing any discussion of racial difference--of racialized sexual difference… many feminist film critics continue to structure their discourse as though it speaks about ‘women’ when in actuality it speaks only about white women.”[11] We return to psychoanalysis in this collection to explore this important point further. In Chapter 14, Lindsey Decker works through the criticisms of canonical texts on psychoanalytic film theory and suggests that a different kind of gaze theory might be useful for thinking through the work of Iranian-American director Amirpour. In Chapter 15, in her study of Mexican-Canadian filmmaker Gigi Saul Guerrero, Valeria Villegas Lindvall argues for the usefulness of psychoanalysis, as a recognition of “the relevance of its call to rewrite a language within which the ontological constitution of the self is always gauged against a universal male subject,” and then argues that its limitations can be overcome by grounding it in “decolonial thought and its revision by decolonial feminists as a critical tool to address racialized female monstrosity.” 

In the 1990s and 2000s, horror film studies slowly began to turn away from gender and sexuality to focus on affect, trauma and national cinemas. At the same time, neoliberalism and post-feminism were on the rise in popular culture. For Imogen Tyler, neoliberalism is “packaged as concerned with individual freedom, choice, democracy and personal responsibility” while systematically stripping “assets from the poor (including welfare provisions) and concentrates wealth within a tiny global elite (individuals and corporations),” while postfeminism is, for Angela McRobbie, “the thorough dismantling of feminist politics and the discrediting of the occasionally voiced need for its renewal.”[12] Rosalind Gill and Christina Scharff reveal the relationship between postfeminism and neoliberalism, suggesting that “both appear to be structured by a current of individualism that has almost entirely replaced notions of the social or political, or any ideas of individuals as subject to pressures, constraints or influence from outside themselves.”[13] Looking back now at this period, as a fledgling academic doing my MA and PhD in the 2000s, it is no wonder that I’d never considered women horror filmmakers. Feminism was over, activism was unfashionable, filmmakers were white male directors, women were actors, and psychoanalysis, the primary methodological tool for analyzing gender in horror film, was proven to be lacking. 

This brings me back to my module design for Hull. There were women working on those films, I just didn’t know about them. Edna Ruth Paul edited Night of the Living Dead. Daria Nicolodi co-wrote Suspiria. Debra Hill co-wrote and produced Halloween. Janice Fisher was co-creator of the story, and co-writer of The Lost Boys. Karen Walton wrote Ginger Snaps. A Tale of Two Sisters was produced by Oh Jeong-wan and edited by Lee Hyeon-mi. I realized there was no point waiting around for someone to write this account of women horror filmmakers for me, and in early 2017, I decided to write a Call for Papers for an edited book collection. I did not have a publisher and I wasn’t sure about the shape or structure of the book. My goal was to collect a fantastic group of like-minded academics to explore this unknown territory with me. 

Cine-feminism Meets Horror Film
Writing the Call for Papers was difficult. I struggled to articulate the framing of a project on women horror filmmakers: I knew it was a political, feminist book, but in what way? I was overwhelmed with all the different possibilities for exploration. Thankfully, I was rescued by Annette Kuhn’s Women’s Pictures (1982). Kuhn defines feminism as “a set of political practices founded in analyses of the social / historical position of women as subordinated, oppressed or exploited either within dominant modes of production (such as capitalism) and / or by the social relations of patriarchy or male domination.”[14] This made sense, as did the idea of women’s films as those not just about or addressed to women, but made by women. What was more important though was Kuhn’s conviction that “conditions now exist for feminist film criticism and feminist film making to share some common concerns and goals,” and they are interconnected “either explicitly in their politics, or implicitly in the kinds of thinking that underlie them.”[15] This approach offered a feminist way of exploring both women filmmakers and the films they made. 

Kuhn’s work, like that of E. Ann Kaplan, Claire Johnston and Pam Cook, is part of the 1970s “cine-feminism” movement that emerged from women’s film festivals and Women’s Liberation, as “well as from the intellectual and ideological lessons of the New Left.”[16] However, cine-feminism eventually transformed into feminist film criticism which focussed more on representation, as opposed to women making films. As a result, “by the mid-1980s the artist behind the camera was barely in the picture. The near-symbiotic relationship between feminist film theory and women’s film practice that characterized… Women’s Pictures… was no longer sustainable.”[17]

What happens if we take those initial, radical ideas about the relationship between women’s filmmaking and film criticism, and align them with the spirit of Wood’s reading of horror as a place of potential political change? There is a natural synergy here between film theorisation and the realities of film practice; as Wood argues, his model “enables us to connect theory closely with the ways we actually think and feel and conduct our lives.”[18] By bringing together cine-feminism and Wood’s work on horror this way, I offer a model for doing horror film studies that engages with women practitioners and resonates with the increased need for activism given our contemporary political climate. Having established the parameters of the project, I then wrote three questions for my contributors, designed to provide a coherent intellectual underpinning for the collection.

The first question is can horror cinema be women’s cinema? If we mean by women’s cinema, cinema made by women, then yes, of course, horror cinema can be women’s cinema. But what I am digging at here is the longstanding assumption, explored academically, that horror is a misogynistic genre.[19] Really, the question is (how) can horror cinema be women’s cinema? Critics have historically shared a similar point of view. In 1982, Janet Maslin published a New York Times article on (what we now call) slasher films, which she describes as a new form of “violent pornography” against women. She takes to task Debra Hill, producer of Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982) and Amy Holden Jones and Rita Mae Brown, director and writer of The Slumber Party Massacre (1982) for making these films, saying of the latter, it is “no less bloody, sexist or ugly than comparable films made by men. But it’s a little more reprehensible, because its creators ought to know better.”[20] For Maslin, the films are made even more dreadful because they were helmed by women. Nearly forty years later, it is still considered weird to be a woman and a horror fan or filmmaker. Sylvia Soska has commented “every time we said we were horror directors, people would look at us and go, ‘Oh, honey, you don't have to do that’… it was almost like they were talking about how I clean up roadkill for the city, and it was this weird preconceived notion that horror movies and women don’t mix.”[21]

This has never made sense to me. Like many fans, many of my formative memories of my family and home life revolve around horror. When I was about seven, we watched Legend (1985) one Sunday afternoon. I remember being utterly terrified by Tim Curry as the Lord of Darkness, while my mum grumbled through the ironing. When I was 11, me and Chris, my younger brother, rented a VHS of Tremors (1990) from the corner shop. Just as a giant worm monster ploughed through the desert after Kevin Bacon, my Dad burst into the living room and threw the tumble dryer hose extension at us. We screamed, he laughed his head off and went back into the kitchen to cook dinner. In-between being a thoroughly revolting teenager, I bonded with my mum over a viewing of The Lost Boys; when my mum explained that she knew Max was the head vampire because he had to be invited into Lucy’s house, I was really impressed with her, probably for the first time in years. Horror has always been in my family, it has always been communal, interactive, scary and exciting. Why wouldn’t I want to study it when I grew up? 

Kier-La Janisse has noted that as a horror fan she is often questioned about what she gets out of it, “I give them the stock answers: catharsis, empowerment, escapism and so on. Less easy to explain is the fact that I gravitate toward films that devastate me and unravel me completely – a good horror film will often make me cry than make me shudder.”[22]For those people who can’t understand the relationship between women and horror, I wonder why it isn’t enough of an explanation that we are simply drawn to a genre with the concomitant emotions and experiences (multiple, varied, distinct to individual fans) offered to us? We don’t demand similar in-depth psychological explanations of fans of action films or comedy. The opposition we face here comes out of multiple sources: our gender as fans and filmmakers, the “low” cultural perception of the genre, and then, the widespread beliefs about how this genre represents our gender. But there are plenty of gendered parallels in “high” cultural forms that don’t attract this disapprobation. Take for example Greek tragedies like Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex (429 BC) and Aeschylus’ Agamemnon (458BC), or Shakespeare’s plays, Titus Andronicus (1593) and King Lear (1606). These plays all feature significant amounts of emotional and physical violence enacted upon male bodies, including blinding, cannibalism, madness and murder. Yet when male audience members leave the theatre, we don’t ask of them, confused, “but what do you get out of this?” 

So rather than can horror cinema be women’s cinema, the perhaps more pertinent question to replace it with, is why do women make the kinds of horror films that they have? This book explores a variety of reasons for women’s choices. A number of writer / directors initially got their break collaborating with Roger Corman across the 1960s – 1980s, including Stephanie Rothman (discussed in Chapter Two by Alicia Kozma), Barbara Peeters, Katt Shea, Amy Holden Jones, as well as producer Gale Ann Hurd. Given its traditionally low budget and wide appeal, horror has also been a pragmatic choice for many women, including Karen Arthur (discussed in Chapter Three by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas) and Roberta Findlay, who worked across grindhouse, pornography and horror, depending where the money was.[23]

In the 1980s and early 1990s, franchises were also a place where women could work their way up through the ranks. Both Slumber Party sequels were also written, produced and directed by women. Kristine Peterson worked on A Nightmare on Elm Street before directing Critters 3 (1991). Hope Perello worked on Puppetmaster (1989) before directing Howling VI: The Freaks (1991). Rachel Talalay (discussed in Chapter Six by Tosha R. Taylor) cut her teeth working with John Waters before working on The Nightmare on Elm Street series, eventually directing Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare (1991). 

Some women had already developed good careers in related disciplines, in Mary Lambert’s case, directing music videos including Madonna’s “Like A Prayer,” before directing Pet Sematary (1989) for Paramount Pictures. With domestic box office receipts of over $57.4 million, Pet Sematary remains not only the highest grossing US horror film directed by a woman but also in the Top 100 highest grossing horror films of all time.[24] However, even Lambert still lacked creative control in the commercial studio system. When she made the sequel Pet Sematary 2 (1992), she wanted to tell the story of Ellie, the one surviving member of Creed family, but her idea was blocked by the studio who insisted she made the protagonist an adolescent boy. She commented, “my career is littered with the projects I wanted to do that were about women - not, like, ‘girl movies’ but crazy, baby-killer psychopath women, or women in combat movies. They all got thrown back at me. Most of the time it was like, ‘we can’t do this with a female protagonist; we have to make the male part bigger; when she goes into combat, the guy’s got to save her.’ I’m like, that’s not the movie!”[25]

For a new generation of filmmakers, horror film festivals have functioned as a vital training, networking and promotional site. In Chapter 12, Donna McRae examines the support networks offered by the Stranger With My Face International Film Festival in Australia, while in Chapter 18, Sonia Lupher interviews women filmmakers at American horror festivals in America, and discovers that festivals play “a pivotal role in the transition between fandom and practice within the horror community.” While festivals support women filmmakers working now, they also play an important part in rewriting and reconstructing our histories of women in the genre. The Fantastic Fest in Austin, Texas collaborates regularly with the American Genre Film Archive (AGFA), and their screening strands, onstage Q&As and AGFA’s subsequent home releases have been instrumental in bringing to light little-known women horror filmmakers such as Sarah Jacobsen and her I Was a Teenage Serial Killer (1993) and Mary Jane’s Not a Virgin Anymore (1997), not to mention Tina Krause’s shot on VHS Limbo (1999). 

The next major question that Women Make Horror explores relates to the politics of storytelling. What kinds of stories are told in women-made horror films? How do they represent women? Are they distinctive from, or similar to, stories told in horror films made by male teams? This is representative of the broader questions asked about women filmmakers. In a 1975 The Village Voice article, Molly Haskell asked “are women directors different?” is there “such a thing as a ‘woman’s point of view,’ a distinctly ‘feminine’ approach to filmmaking?”[26] But what is specifically interesting to us here, is how these questions worry at, even destabilize, notions of gender and genre. As Christine Gledhill notes, “does thinking about the constructedness and performativity of gender and sexual identity enable us to approach the production of film genres and the cultural-textual work of generic convention differently… how does gender get into genre, and what does genre do with it?”[27] Horror is a particularly valuable way of exploring these kinds of questions, given that the genre thoroughly explores (and often deconstructs) received notions of gender, sexuality, identity and the body. In Chapter 11, Molly Kim offers the first English-language study of women horror filmmakers in South Korea and argues that Lee Su-yeon and Kim Mi-jeong addressed the experiences and concerns of women in contemporary Korean society, while in Chapter 17’s analysis of Prevenge, Amy C. Chambers argues that the then-heavily pregnant director, writer and actor Alice Lowe “offers visibility of the lived experience that is biologically unavailable to male directors.” 

These questions of genre and gender then raise questions about we conceptualize working through the films of “women.” Writing on women’s literary history, Margaret Ezell points out that her direction is “fundamentally interested in the historically specific, in the particularity of the past, rather than an essentialist one searching for ‘the’ woman.”[28]Similarly, I argue that there is no specific “woman” to find, no universal experience applicable to all. And, in using “women” in the title of this collection, I’m signaling that I’m working with contributors and filmmakers who self-identify as women. This is in line with E. Ann Kaplan’s stance that “being ‘female’ or ‘male’ does not signify any necessary social stance vis-à-vis dominant cultural attitudes. We have learned that biological women are not necessarily more progressive or forward-looking than are biological men, and the terms ‘male’ and ‘female’ do not automatically link biological sex to masculine or feminine behaviors or to certain film genres.”[29] But, if this is the case, why bother to analyze women filmmakers at all?

Writing in 1983 on the suppression of women’s writing in the society, culture and academia, Joanne Russ argues that “a mode of understanding life which willfully ignores [half the human consciousness] can do so only at the peril of thoroughly distorting the rest. A mode of understanding literature which can ignore the private lives of half the human race is not ‘incomplete;’ it is distorted through and through.”[30] Similarly, what Women Make Horror proposes then, is not that a woman director necessarily will make a woman-centered film, nor that this woman’s experience will make sense for another woman per se, nor that directors must be feminist, nor do we need to create feminist readings of genre texts. To go even further, when we do have women filmmakers that explicitly identify as feminist, this doesn’t mean that their films will necessarily contain this political content. For example, Peeters requested that her name was removed from directing credits for Humanoids of the Deep (1980), after executive producer Corman arranged for the shooting of explicit nude rape scenes, but her request was refused. In 2019 she commented “I don’t talk about that film… I’ve always – since a small, little girl – been a feminist.”[31]

Instead, this book simply suggests that there are a vast number of women filmmakers completely absent from our written horror histories and that by not including the outputs from “half the human race,” our histories are faulty. As Aislinn Clarke, director of The Devil’s Doorway (2018) points out, “female stories can and should be seen as human stories, rather than niche.”[32] This is a longstanding sentiment, one echoed by actor / director Lee Grant, star of The Mafu Cage (Karen Arthur, 1978) over forty years earlier: “there is a sensibility, a backlog of experiences that have not been put on film and when they are, people will say, ‘Oh my God, I know that. I was there.’ It’s not something limited to women, but all people who have been forced out of the mainstream.”[33]
There is still value in thinking about who is telling the stories though. This brings us onto authorship, explored in Chapter Four, in Martha Shearer’s study of Daria Nicolodi, in Chapter Eight, in Laura Mee’s analysis of director Mary Harron and writer Guinevere Turner’s American Psycho (2000), and in Chapter Nine, in Katarzyna Paszkiewicz’s exploration of screenwriter Karen Walton’s authoring of Ginger Snaps (2002). Authorship is tricky, not only because filmmaking is a collaborative process, but also because of its longstanding male connotations.[34] In Genre, Authorship and Contemporary Women Filmmakers, Paszkiewicz reconsiders women’s authorship as a “complex network of discourses,” including “what expectations did her gender bring to bear on the kinds of films she made? How did she negotiate these expectations in relation to her public persona? How did reviewers interpret women’s films?”[35] Given Paszkiewicz’s useful framework, I’ve left my contributors to assign authorship as and where they will, in the same way that I have not demanded the designation of either “woman” or “female” across the book. There are no simple solutions to thinking through authorship, but, in accordance with Sue Thornham, this book makes the case that it remains important. Thornham explains “when access to the signature, the ‘authorizing function,’ has been so lately granted to women it is important politically that it is not simply given up. But that signature is also important because it makes women, and their marginality, visible, and regenders male writing, so that it can no longer claim universality.”[36]

This brings us to the third and final set of questions that underpins this collection. In Women’s Pictures, Kuhn asks, “is the feminism of a piece of work there because of attributes of its author (cultural interventions by women), because of certain attributes of the work itself (feminist cultural interventions), or because of the way it is ‘read’?”[37] In writing my Call For Papers, I paraphrased this, pointing out that a horror film made by a woman may not be feminist, and men may make feminist horror films. So, what makes a horror film a feminist film? Is it the attributes of the author, attitudes in the work, or because of the way the film can be read? Many women filmmakers do not identify as feminist. Ida Lupino, director of horror/noir hybrid The Hitch-Hiker (1953), said on set “I retain every feminine trait. Men prefer it that way. They’re more co-operative if they see that fundamentally you are of the weaker sex…  I assume no masculine characteristics, which can often be a fault of career women rubbing shoulders with their male counterparts, who become merely arrogant or authoritative.”[38] In 1975, Karen Arthur also repudiated the feminist label, saying “I am not part of the Woman’s Movement as such: it’s so bloody boring the way they talk, endless dreary polemics nothing to do with people.” But she does concede “I was brought up in a very sexist society… women have a lot of reason to scream. Bigotry and chauvinism in the film world is bad; and the industry has been notorious for poor handling of women, both in the projection of the image and in behind the scenes participation.”[39] Some women have refused to engage with the gendered implications of filmmaking at all. Kathryn Bigelow, director of vampire-western Near Dark (1987), not only “rejects the ‘feminist’ tag, she has also consistently resisted any attempt to categorize her as a ‘female’ director – whether in relation to her films, her position in the industry, or audiences.”[40]

However, it is never just about the filmmaker’s intent, or academic readings. Katt Shea wrote and directed Stripped to Kill I (1987), Stripped to Kill II (1989) and Dance of the Damned (1989) for Roger Corman’s Concorde Pictures, and then co-wrote and directed Poison Ivy (1992) for then-independent New Line Cinema. At the Seattle International Festival of Women Directors screening of Poison Ivy, curator Mary Brennan reported “most of the audience was furious that a female director would create something as politically incorrect… Shea was bombarded with hostile questions at the postfilm Q&A,” while the New York Times review described Poison Ivy as “a B movie with a vengeance, one that offers a wickedly feminine (though hardly feminist) view of nominally happy life and its failings.”[41] This reflects Paszkiewicz’s point about the inscription of authorship with the politics of gender. If you are a woman filmmaker, you are ascribed a political position regardless of personal belief. As Lizzie Francke notes, once feminism took root in the 1960s, “women in creative professions would find themselves and their work perused as feminist or not. ‘Feminism,’ with its multifold meanings, became something that women writers could espouse, distance themselves from, or claim to have never come across. It was a knot in the background fabric, there to be unraveled or ignored.”[42] As such, this collection is feminist in its determination to illuminate the work and lives of women filmmakers in the horror genre. It explores some avowedly feminist filmmakers, but also offers feminist readings: in Chapter Ten, Maddison McGillvray re-reads Marina de Van and Claire Denis’ films as a “feminist art-horror” model of the New French Extremity. Similarly, in her analysis of Talalay’s work on Freddy’s Dead, Taylor argues for the importance of audiences creating their own feminist analyses, noting “Jane Gaines cautions us not to overlook the audience as another contributor to a film’s meaning.”

As a feminist collection though, this book also has one more, really important point to make. In 2017, Wiley-Blackwell published Benshoff’s “cutting edge” collection A Companion to the Horror Film, a 600-page book featuring “many of the finest academics working in the field” and “many exciting younger scholars.” There are thirty chapters, and three are written by women. Given the centrality of women academics to the study of the genre, there is something truly terrible about the fact that we have to get to chapter twenty before we see a woman author. Of these three women contributors, two are Hawkins and Pinedo, two of the most pre-eminent international scholars on horror. As a woman, do you have to have transformed the field in order to be a contributor to this book? The same level of gatekeeping does not apply to all the male contributors. As with our filmmakers, effectively leaving out the opinions of half the population can only contribute to a flawed collection. We know that women write, produce, direct, shoot and edit horror, let’s not forget that they analyze it too. 

  Books such as A Companion to the Horror Film are just one reason why all Women Make Horror’s contributors identify as women. While this fact alone makes the book unique in horror film studies, it was not done to be distinctive. In the same way that some people might argue that the existing horror film histories don’t address a wider range of women filmmakers because women were not making films (something we prove wrong), it’s not good enough to assume that there are not the women out there to contribute to these projects. I secured the majority of my contributors through a single posting to a Gothic Feminism Conference blog and was inundated with responses from all over the world. When I posted I did not specify women contributors, and I did not plan to reject any outstanding abstracts on the basis of the writer’s gender. But the response from women was so strong, I did not need to look any further. I then selected contributors at different stages of their career, including three women who are still undertaking doctoral study. Mentoring new women academics is important: if, as women, we are only let into the major collections when we have transformed the discipline, what does that mean for most of us? And so, when we do secure that prestigious book contract with an eminent academic publisher (thank you Rutgers University Press), what stance should we take over the structure, content and development of the collection? 

The Women Make Horror Manifesto
In February 2010, Hannah Neurotica, creator of Ax Wound zine, created Women in Horror Recognition Month (WiHM). Inspired by the “girls to the front” ethos of Riot Grrrl, her aim was to bring about awareness of the women “writers, directors, producers, artists, eerie musicians, creepy doll makers, FX artists” and audiences involved in horror and “how we can ALL TAKE ACTION to bring AWARENESS to women in the industry.[43] WiHM went viral and has grown from a blog into a sustained, international initiative; in 2019, it celebrated its tenth year as “a Decade of Blood.” In the spirit of WiHM, I offer you my six-point manifesto, a declaration of my intentions for this book, used to select, organise and edit the material from my contributors. You’ll notice each point is defined in opposition to an existing way of doing horror film studies or studying women filmmakers. This standpoint, while appearing negative, is designed to draw attention to and then deconstruct the natural and inevitable way women practitioners and / or horror film are analysed, and in so doing, break open a much wider range of opportunities for future work on gender and genre. 

The first principle is that horror films do not need to be contemporary be worthy of study. At the beginning of this chapter, I referenced a number of recent film releases, and readers may be disappointed there are not more references to women filmmakers working now – where is the full chapter on the Soska Sisters? On Anna Biller? On Jennifer Kent? On Kimberley Pierce’s Carrie remake (2013)? And believe me, you don’t know the pain I feel over the lack of space to write a chapter on Jennifer’s Body (Karyn Kusama, 2009). However, I argue that for contemporary women filmmakers, there is an ever-growing online community that seeks out this work, and an active network of horror film festivals that do a great service in screening the work of new horror filmmakers. This isn’t to say the system is perfect, but exposure can and does occur. 

Instead, Women Make Horror grounds its subject in history. Discussing Raw in 2016, Ducournau commented “I really hope nobody thinks this is just a trend or something. That would be horrible.”[44] Ducournau was commenting on press’ perception of the new “golden era” of women’s horror filmmaking, but we can take her comment further. Women making horror is not a trend because they have always been doing this. Chapters Two, Three and Four explore women’s filmmaking in across the 1950s - 1970s, while Chapters Five, Six and Seven focus on the 1980s and 1990s. The selection and organization of this chapters is the first step in piecing together stories of women working in the genre. 

But we could go even further back in time. We could consider the work of Ardel Wray, Irene Kuhn, Ruth Rose, Lillie Hayward or Leigh Brackett, all women screenwriters working in 1930s and 1940s American studio horror. Or further back still, to Edla Hansen, the Danish editor of Häxan (1922), or even back to the origins of cinema: in 1913, French-born Alice Guy Blaché directed and produced a three-reeler adaptation of Edgar Allen Poe’s The Pit and the Pendulum, of which one reel remains in the Library of Congress. So, please keep looking further back into our histories to find women working at all points in genre cinema. These women may often be editors or screenwriters rather than directors, and at certain periods in history, there are literally just a handful of them working in above-the-line roles. But this doesn’t mean they are not worth discussing. Until we fully engage with historical materials, our understanding of women’s contributions to genre cinema remain faulty and incomplete. And we’ll keep making the same mistakes as I did, a few years ago, when I enthusiastically greeted the work of women horror filmmakers as if they were all “shiny and new.” 

The second principle is that horror films do not need to be feature length to be worthy of study. This is particularly important given that women filmmakers (and particular women of color) historically have had far less access to funding for feature-length productions. As such, while we do cover features, we also consider a range of narrative and experimental short films in Chapters Five, 12, 15  and 18, while in Chapter 13, Erin Harrington takes horror omnibuses and anthologies to task, arguing that “despite their self-professed eclecticism, offer an inconvenient cultural barometer of horror that exposes the limits of a frustrating, male-dominated status quo.” 
The third principle is horror films do not need to have a commercial narrative to be worthy of study. A chapter on avant-garde Czech filmmaker Vera Chytilová’s teen slasher Vlci Bouda / Wolf’s Hole (1987) would have been fantastic, and I would have loved to have read a study of Germaine Dulac’s La Coquille et le clergyman (1923), or Maya Deren’s The Witch’s Cradle (1944) and Meshes of the Afternoon (1943). However, tensions between fine art and filmmaking are still explored in Chapter Seven, in Dahlia Schweitzer’s study of artist Cindy Sherman’s Office Killer (1997); in Chapter 16, Janice Loreck considers how Lucile Hadžihalilović’s Évolution (2015) offers a hybrid of art cinema and genre filmmaking; while in Chapter Five, the relationship between fine art, experimental video and genre filmmaking are beautifully synthesised in Houde’s study of the fine artist videos of Cecelia Condit and Ellen Cantor. 

The fourth principle is horror filmmakers do not need to be directors to be worthy of study. As a scriptwriter and script editor, I am fascinated by story, so I asked my contributors to focus on key above-the-line roles that had a major impact on story as way of establishing voice and point of view. So, while the collection does study a number of directors, we also look at screenwriters including Daria Nicolodi, Karen Walton, Alice Lowe and Guinevere Turner. I would have liked to have seen work on more writer / directors, including Jackie Kong, Shimako Sato and Mari Asato, or a case study of writer/director Marina Sargenti’s fabulous teen horror Mirror, Mirror (1990). There’s also room for more work on multi-hyphenated filmmakers, covering multiple roles on low-budget independent productions, such as Gloria Katz who co-directed, produced and wrote Messiah of Evil (1973) or Kei Fujiwara who wrote, directed, shot and starred in Organ (1996). I’d also love to see future work on the (apparently) newly-discovered version of splatter film A Night to Dismember (1983), directed, produced and co-edited by Doris Wishman. 

Given the length of this book, I didn’t push for work on Editors or Directors of Photography, but these are becoming increasingly rich roles to mine for future projects. Editing case studies could include Amy Jump, Plummy Tucker or Jennifer Lame, while DoPs in just the last few years include Ari Wegner on In Fabric (2019), Charlotte Bruus Christensen on A Quiet Place (2018), and Natasha Braier on The Neon Demon (2016). I had also hoped for work on specific producers, which didn’t materialize; for example, a chapter on You ling ren jian / Visible Secret (2001), produced and directed by Ann Hui, would have been welcome. I’m unclear why producer case studies are unpopular; are producers less well-known, their names less familiar outside the film industry? Studies of producers are crucial for better understanding women’s filmmaking practices. As Stacy L. Smith et al have noted in their study of independent women filmmakers, “across all behind-the-camera positions, females were most likely to be producers.”[45] Thanks to Christopher Meir et al’s recent book, we now have a methodology for studying producers, and I hope that future writers are emboldened to explore the careers of women such as Jenn Wexler, Jennifer Handorf, Roxanne Benjamin and Catherine Cyran.[46]

The fifth principle is that horror films do not need to demarcated as either national cinemas or Hollywood to be worthy of study. This statement addresses the fact that historically, horror film studies have predominantly focused on Anglophone cinema. Second, it then follows that when academics did start to write about non-Anglophone horror, predominantly post 2000, films and filmmakers were frequently siloised into “national cinemas” (I’m also guilty of this one). In this collection we study films and filmmakers from all over the world, one country of origin next to another, without comment. My decision to avoid a center-periphery model is influenced by Lucia Nagib, who proposes we consider “the cinema of the world. It has no center. It is not the other, but it is us,” it is “not a discipline, but a method, a way of cutting across film history according to waves of relevant films and movements.”[47] Nagib in turn inspires Patricia White, who argues that “women’s cinema should always be seen as world cinema,” a sentiment that this book embraces.[48]
Relatedly, Women Make Horror has a global remit that examines corporate for-profit cinema, grant-supported art cinema and no / low budget indie filmmaking and, in terms of chapter organization, makes little distinction between these monetary sources. This isn’t to say that funding is not important. It impacts on every stage of the filmmaking process and is the basis for decisions on distribution, exhibition and intended audiences, which in turn controls how fans discover, access and enjoy films. And indeed, academic engagement with audiences is crucial, not least because, as Lupher points out in Chapter 18, fan audiences can and do become the next generation of women horror filmmakers. However, in this collection, all categorizations – short/feature, narrative/experimental, country of origin and funding revenue - are purposefully fluid, a fluidity that reflects the intertextuality of the creative process for the above-the-line storytellers we explore. Creativity does not recognize these kinds of distinctions: consider the way that a major-studio American feature filmmaker can be influenced by an experimental European filmmaker like Dulac, or how a fine artist such as Aïda Ruilova chooses to rework Italian giallo in Goner (2010). 

Moving towards our final manifesto principle, and reviewing this book as a whole, I hope that future research better foregrounds a range of identities. Darren Elliot Smith engages with “male directors/producers who self-identify as gay, bi, queer or transgendered” in horror film, but this leaves us with plenty of space to illuminate the queer women in horror, through films such as Make a Wish (Sharon Ferranti, 2002), Lyle (Stewart Thorndike, 2014), Women Who Kill (2016, Ingrid Jungermann) and Release the Bats (Michelle Tea, 2018).[49] At the moment, critical studies of identity politics occur at grassroots level, through blogs, podcasts and social media. As Alex Hall, creator of the Lezzie Borden “dyke/lez/bi” horror Instagram explains, she set up the account because “I was… experiencing this thriving queer horror community, mostly focused through the lens of male subjectivities… I was desperate for the kind of horror analysis that’s so intrinsic to queer women; this lesbian lens to horror.”[50]

Similarly, while this book addresses the experiences of a range of East Asian, Black and Latin American filmmakers, it is worth noting that many of the book’s chapters, particularly the earlier ones, focus on white women. As Maya Montañez Smukler points out in her study of women directors in the 1970s, “that this is a white woman’s history reflects the institutionalized gendered racism within the film and television industries during the 1960s and 1970s.”[51]Black women were in horror in the 1970s, as Robin R. Means Coleman has explored, but they were predominantly on-screen as actors.[52] The institutional problems highlighted by Smukler remain today: the majority of the filmmakers of Black, East Asian and Latin American descent discussed here work in short form, suggesting that whiteness is one barrier that many of our women feature filmmakers have not had to overcome. At the moment, it is blogs such as Ashley Blackwell’s Graveyard Shift Sisters that are undertaking this valuable coverage.

However, this book is not simply about inclusion. This brings us to the final manifesto principle: This book is not a correction of the existing canon. As Anna Cooper points out, “politics of inclusion” are “ultimately quite limited” in terms of creating a more progressive or diverse canon, because of how they “re-center white masculinity” and allow “inequalities to be concealed or to be made non-disruptive.”[53] Instead, Women Make Horror is the beginning of a radical reappraisal of the genre. It demonstrates that the old, single model for horror film history is no longer viable, and then rejects the correction of that history, or of the creation of a counter-history. Instead, this book offers you a plurality of histories that cut across form, content, country, and funding sources. So, forget inclusion or correction, and instead let’s tear up the “ur-canon” so lovingly outlined in my Hull module guide.

Conclusion
Women Make Horror is not just the first all-woman edited collection on horror film, but it is also the first book-length study to focus on women horror filmmakers.[54] As a foundational publication, it is the starting point in creating a multi-voiced, global history of women in genre filmmaking. It offers a plurality of contributors and case studies from across the globe and in so doing demonstrates international and intercultural breadth. It comprehensively overturns commonly held beliefs about the lack of women working in horror film, a misapprehension still in circulation today, given the comments of Jason Blum, (founder of powerhouse horror studio Blumhouse), that “there are not a lot of female directors period, and even less who are inclined to do horror.”[55]

However, we could argue that to consider these horror filmmakers as “women” is to isolate them from their peers. As Lambert has said, “it’s always a little annoying to be labelled a female film director because men are just ‘directors;’ and then there's the double whammy of ‘female’ horror director. How many boxes can you be put into?’[56] Does it reduce the filmmaker by considering her as a woman? Existing horror film histories are not badged as histories of men or male filmmakers, so why should women’s film be considered in this way? In short, why should you care about this project?

This project matters for two reasons. The first is visibility. Drama, comedy and romance have long been considered the appropriate genres for women filmmakers, and women wanting to work in genres coded “male,” e.g. horror, thriller and action, can encounter a great deal of difficulty.[57] After co-writing and directing Urban Ghost Story (1998), her third feature film, British filmmaker Geneviève Jolliffe was invited out to Hollywood by MGM to interview for a teen horror film. After many board room meetings, she “sat down with the head of the studio where I was asked ‘What makes you think anyone will listen to you, a woman director?’” Undeterred, she went for further horror directing roles and found “it would come down to me and another person who was always a guy. Every single time the guy was picked…. perhaps I was just unlucky, but after [a while] you realise that perhaps something else is at play here.” Joliffe also found that women working in positions of power hewed closely to this line: “they were more comfortable taking a risk on a male director than a female director in the horror / thriller genre as otherwise they would have to fight a much bigger fight.” Time and again, Joliffe’s chosen genre was an unsurmountable hurdle: “studio execs would more easily give rom com directing gigs to women because their audience is women and they’ve had a history of women rom com directors doing well.”[58]

Given experiences such as Joliffe’s, we can see why the “women” in this book title is important. By revealing that women have worked in horror since the inception of cinema, we can overturn this faulty assumption that women and horror do not mix. When women filmmakers then go for a key creative role on a horror film, we can then hope that not only are these women more confident of their lineage in the genre, but also that those in positions of power consider hiring a woman to be less going against-the-grain, and less of a risky prospect. Indeed, within two months of  Blum’s comments, and the ensuing online backlash, Blumhouse hired Sophia Takal to co-write and direct the reboot of Black Christmas (1974), then hired Zoe Lister-Jones to write and direct the reboot of The Craft (1996) and in September 2019, signed Saul Guerrero (discussed in Chapter 15) to a first look film and television deal. Here’s hoping that this book is published at the start of a major change in the industry’s gendered hiring practices for genre film.

Inspiration is the other reason that this project matters. R. Shanea Williams, multi-award winning director of Paralysis (2015), explains “if you don’t see yourself often represented in something, it’s hard to see yourself as a creator of that very thing.”[59] As such, unearthing these invisible histories can have a positive impact on future generations of women genre filmmakers. In her biography of Milicent Patrick, creator of the Creature from Creature of the Black Lagoon (1954), Mallory O’Meara describes a transformative moment in her life. Teenage O’Meara discovered a photograph of Patrick working on set. Patrick was not bringing the coffee, was not assisting the men, nor was she “being helplessly carried away in the arms of a monster. She was creating it. It was the first time in my life I had ever seen a picture of a woman like that.”[60] Now a horror film writer and producer, O’Meara explains that as she worked her way into the film business she thought of all the girls “who love monsters, girls who love film. These girls are sitting on the sidelines, not content to watch, but filled with a frustrated desire for momentum and creation. All these girls are potential artists, designers and filmmakers. It’s so difficult to be something if you cannot envision it. To see no way in, to see the world you love populated exclusively with those who are not like you is devastating.”[61]An encounter like Patrick’s photograph, or, I hope, the discovery of a film or filmmaker amongst these pages, has so much potential power. As a horror fan, when you do see your like in the production credits, it is a validation of your creative ambition. It is a hand reaching out to you, an encouraging whisper that says “yes, you can.”

As such, this book is for all those people (regardless of gender) who love horror, but don’t see themselves represented, either in the industry gatekeepers, or the filmmakers discussed in the standard horror histories, or in the critics who write about the genre. This book is for everyone who still feels that they have to create their own horror histories from scratch and are exhausted by the prospect. You do not have to feel alone anymore. My contributors have much to share with you, and we hope that they will inspire you to write, product, direct, shoot or edit your own stories, or even make your own monsters. Maybe this book will inspire you to be a critic, to follow this collection with your own zine, blog, article, or book on the genre, or to become a programmer, showcasing women filmmakers at your own film festival. “Women” horror filmmakers ought to be an oxymoron, and I do wish, like Debra Hill, that “someday there won't be a need for Women in Film. That it will be People in Film.”[62]
But, as this book evidences, we are not there yet. 

Notes to Chapter 1

Contents
Acknowledgements
Chapter 1. Women Make (Write, Produce, Direct, Shoot, Edit and Analyze) Horror         
Alison Peirse
Chapter 2. Stephanie Rothman and Vampiric Film Histories
Alicia Kozma
Chapter 3. Inside Karen Arthur’s The Mafu Cage
Alexandra Heller-Nicholas
Chapter 4. The Secret Beyond the Door: Daria Nicolodi and Suspiria’s Multiple Authorship
Martha Shearer
Chapter 5. Personal Trauma Cinema and the Experimental Videos of Cecelia Condit and Ellen Cantor
Katia Houde
Chapter 6. Self-Reflexivity and Feminist Camp in Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare
Tosha R. Taylor
Chapter 7. Why Office Killer Matters
Dahlia Schweitzer
Chapter 8. Murders and Adaptations: Gender in American Psycho
Laura Mee
Chapter 9. Gender, Genre and Authorship in Ginger Snaps
Katarzyna Paszkiewicz
Chapter 10. The Feminist Art-Horror of the New French Extremity
Maddison McGillvray
Chapter 11. Women-Made Horror in Korean Cinema
Molly Kim
Chapter 12. The Stranger With My Face International Film Festival and the Australian Female Gothic
Donna McRae
Chapter 13. Slicing Up the Boys’ Club: The Female-led Horror Anthology Film
Erin Harrington
Chapter 14. The Transnational Gaze in A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night
Lindsey Decker
Chapter 15. Gigi Saul Guerrero and her Latin American Female Monsters
Valeria Villegas Lindvall
Chapter 16. Uncanny Tales: Lucile Hadžihalilović’s Évolution
Janice Loreck
Chapter 17. The (re)Birth of Pregnancy Horror in Alice Lowe’s Prevenge
Amy C. Chambers
Chapter 18. The Rise of the Female Horror Filmmaker-Fan
Sonia Lupher
Notes on Contributors
Index