DAWN OF THE WOMEN: FEMALE DIRECTORS OF HORROR

 

Dragi moji, dozvolite da vas podsetim: PONOVO sam nominovan za Rondo Hatton Classic Horror Award! To je jedna od najprestižnijih nagrada u oblasti horora, a dodeljuju je horor fanovi, glasanjem. I ovog puta nominovan sam u kategoriji NAJBOLJI ČLANAK (BEST ARTICLE).

Ako do sada još niste glasali, ispod možete naći članak za koji sam nominovan. Kad ga pročitate i shvatite da je to nešto vredno Rondo nagrade, sve što treba da uradite jeste da pišete Rondu.

            Izbor svih nominacija nalazi se OVDE, od ponuđenog izaberite šta vam se sviđa, pa to iskopirajte u mejl i pošaljite na adresu taraco@aol.com. Ne morate sve, možete da glasate i samo u 2-3 ili 5-6 kategorije – samo ne propustite BEST ARTICLE! A lepo bi bilo i gde god vidite RUE MORGUE, dajte im glas.

            Glasanje traje do 20. aprila. Ne čekajte zadnji dan! Pišite im sada.

 

Dakle, evo za šta sam ovog puta nominovan.

 

 

DAWN OF THE WOMEN

 

(c) Dejan Ognjanović

 

 

The female half of mankind has been directing horror since the very birth of cinema, but their contributions have never been properly and systematically valued – until now. Heidi Honeycutt’s I Spit on Your Celluloid: The History of Women Directing Horror Movies, coming this August from Headpress, is a pioneering overview of the subject which aims to right the wrongs once and for all.   

 

This huge volume is not merely a history of women directors in horror: it also conveys the changing nature of the genre throughout the 20^th century thanks to the women’s rights and civil rights movements, new distribution technologies, the destruction of the classic studio system, plus the 21^st century’s rise of digital cameras and social media, modern ideas of gender and racial equality, LGBTQ acceptance and so much more. The book’s staggering size, with over 450 illustrated pages in large format, is augmented by the fact that the author conducted hundreds of interviews and watched thousands of films in order to make what cult filmmaker Stephanie Rothman (The Velvet Vampire, 1971) labelled “a book that needed to be written”. And who could argue with Joe Dante? In his words: “At long last, a criminally-neglected aspect of film history is illuminated. Honeycutt knows her stuff, and the wealth of information is fascinating. This is a major work.” 

Heidi Honeycutt is a film festival programmer, film journalist and film historian who specialized in horror movies. She co-founded Etheria Film Festival, the prestigious showcase of new horror, sci-fi, fantasy, action and thriller films directed by women. She has contributed to various genre books and magazines, including Famous Monsters of Filmland, Fangoria, Moviemaker Magazine, Delirium and, yes, Rue Morgue. Her experience with the genre is obviously rich, but a big task like I Spit on Your Celluloid also required stupendous amounts of dedication and perseverance, as she readily confesses for Rue Morgue:   

 

“The biggest challenge in writing a first-of-its-kind book is that there isn’t any one place to do all the research needed. The information was scattered in different places: some of it in books dedicated to horror as a whole, or in a series of interviews with many different directors, or a book dedicated to a single film in entirety; some of the information was only available by speaking to people who studied one specific film or had very specific knowledge of one filmmaker; some information was preserved by archivists of silent era films, or specialists studying one specific country’s history of cinema; some of the information was known only to professors or academics who were currently researching a specific film or filmmaker, or to a family member of the filmmaker.”

 

A few books partially paved her way, like House of Psychotic Women (2014) by Kier-La Janisse, dealing with “female neurosis in horror and exploitation films”, and two recent academic collections: Women Make Horror: Filmmaking, Feminism, Genre (2020), edited by Alison Peirse, and Bloody Women Women Directors of Horror (2022), edited by Victoria McCollum and Aislínn Clarke. However, more helpful, by Honeycutt’s own admission, were obscure sources, like the 2005 documentary Taiwan Black Films: “It focuses on the trend of extremely violent low budget films made in the country between 1979 and 1983, and is one of the only sources of detailed making-of information about director Chia-Yun Yang’s films Lady Avenger (1981) and Exposed to Danger (1982); Lady Avenger was the first woman-directed rape/revenge film.“

 

The author has also contacted people personally and asked for direct interviews. That wasn’t always possible, as some are deceased, or don’t wish to discuss their films. Obviously, it was easier finding out about films from the past few decades, but quite a different matter when it came to rare films and barely known female directors from the silent era and the classical period.  

 

“A great source of information”, says Honeycutt, “are the saved and archived issues of The Moving Picture World, a printed magazine which ran from 1907 to 1927 that detailed film releases in the silent era. It featured reviews of films, interviews, advertisements, and synopses of new releases at the time, many of which are now lost. Without the preserved issues of Moving Picture World, and a few other printed serials of the time, like Motion Picture Herald, most of the information they contain would be irretrievably lost.”  

 

What distinguishes I Spit on Your Celluloid is that it provides a detailed, chronological overview of all the horror films made by women, from Alice Guy-Blaché, the first woman to direct a film, all the way to yesterday’s rising stars. Its scope encompasses short films, anthologies, documentaries, animated horror, horror pornography, pink films, and experimental horror: the she-makers of “elevated” and the “exploitation” horror are joined between these covers. The strippers, the sequels, drive-in fodder, art films, feminist manifestos, mindless and mindful slashers, nudie flicks, horror classics, theatrical and mainstream horror together with digital flicks, short and experimental titles from the deepest underground – none escaped Honeycutt’s meticulous research, not even the hardest-to-find female directed horrors from Asia and South America.

 

„I found”, she says, “that there are a lot of people who study the cinema of specific nations and specific time periods in those nations with the same obsessive nature that I exhibit when I research women horror movie directors, and they often unveil information about the women directors that worked in those niche eras. For instance, the blog Pelikula, ATBP is dedicated to cinema from the Philippines and includes rare scans of newspaper articles and advertisements from 1919 through 2019. Another amazing source of information is student film masters and PhD theses about specific filmmakers as well as ongoing research from professors. It would take a lifetime to do a deep dive in-person study of each of these films from scratch and visit the different cinematheques and preservation organizations around the world that house the only copies of their work.“  

 

One question which naturally arises when talking about women directors of horror is whether there is a quality or aspect of style or content which is unique, or at least more common to female directors. Who better to ask than Heidi? “The protagonists of horror movies directed by women”, she answers, “are more likely to be women, than when men make the film. People tell the stories that they know, and inevitably women’s life experiences will be different than men’s, and so the stories they tell may be different. Women may tell stories about women’s loneliness, or motherhood fears, or periods, or sexuality – but men have also told those stories about women in horror movies, so it isn’t only women directors that are sensitive to women’s experiences as potential horror stories. Ginger Snaps, May, Rebecca, Cat People, and Rosemary’s Baby are horror films about women that are directed by men. But Slumber Party Massacre, The Velvet Vampire, Prevenge, The Mafu Cage, The Babadook, Lyle, and Jennifer’s Body, all films about women’s experiences of horror, are all directed by women. I think we can see what we want to see when we look for it. I think yes, women direct horror differently than men. I also think they can direct horror that is indistinguishable from the horror directed by men.”

 

Honeycutt also points out that her painstaking research uncovered female authors and their films which deserve much greater praise and higher position in horror pantheon: “So many silent film directors who are regarded as ‘feminist pioneers’ actually made horror movies and many horror fans don’t know about them or consider them horror! And while Lois Weber and Alice Guy Blaché did direct films about marriage and abortion and women’s poverty and motherhood, they also directed home-invasion slashers (Lois Weber’s Suspense, 1913) and literary horror adaptations (Alice Guy Blaché’s The Pit and the Pendulum, 1913). Other women directors from that era, like Austrian filmmaker Luise Fleck, directed mostly horror, fantasy, and adventure films, and for some reason I never see them mentioned by horror fans anywhere. Fleck was the first woman to direct a feature-length horror film, Trilby (1912), and her 1919 movie Die Ahnfrau is a fun Gothic ghost story about a haunted castle.”

 

But the women directors’ contributions have been evenly spread throughout horror cinema’s history, and certainly much thicker in recent years. Honeycutt contends that we are in a period of “horror renaissance” now, and that the female directors brought a lot to its blood-spattered table: “I do think that right now more women directors than ever before are making horror movies, and many of them are pushing boundaries and exploring old and new themes, and many more are working directly for studios. Many very recent studio remakes, prequels, and premakes were directed by women, including The First Omen (2024), Black Christmas (2019), The Craft: Legacy (2020), The Slumber Party Massacre (2021), and Candyman (2021). That’s new – women usually aren’t hired for a string of big films like that, but I think since 2017 (when the #metoo movement began), studios want to specifically hire women to ensure audiences that women-centric stories are told ‘in a woman-y way’, whatever that means. I don’t think having a woman director on these remakes necessarily improves the quality of the film in the eyes of women audience members, but the studios think it does, so they offer many women directors new opportunities to work in an industry that had previously been more closed to them. I also think there are more women show-runners on big genre TV series now, which seems to increase the likelihood of women being hired in the writing room and as directors.”

 

Still, the area where women directors seem to be bringing their A-game to the horror table is in independent films: “Some of the best horror movies directed by women these days are only in genre film festivals and their popularity spreads by word of fan mouth and between film programmers, eventually ending up on streaming services. Many of the women directors that hardcore horror fans consider ‘famous’ are actually pretty obscure as far as mainstream Hollywood is concerned.”

 

Intriguing and fresh perspective is also brought by queer women. However, dealing with it is not always easy, since, as Honeycutt agrees, whether a woman director is a lesbian or not is not always public knowledge. “Some women directors have openly declared their films to have been influenced by their queer experience, such as Sharon Ferranti’s slasher feature Make a Wish (2002), which is about lesbians on a lesbian camping trip being hunted down by a lesbian slasher. There are several short horror films directed by women that make an analogy between being a trans man or queer woman and transforming into a monster/creature that feels new and uncomfortable or embarrassing. Many horror films, both with lesbian plotlines and directors and without them, are about women’s sexuality, both cis and queer, being akin to being, in particular, a werewolf, such as Jackie Garry’s The Curse (1999), Amy Lynn Best’s Weregrrl (2002), Lola Rocknrolla’s short I Was a Trannie Werewolf (2009), and Sydne Horton’s Meta (2020).”

 

In any case, the greater inclusivity in recent years, especially regarding female directors, doesn’t mean that there is no more room for change. One particular area in this respect which Honeycutt pinpoints is the monopoly on major money and distribution, held by just a few companies, which suppress smaller companies and filmmakers: “When these big entertainment conglomerates lose their near-total stranglehold on the film industry,” she says, “independent filmmaking and mid-level films will boom, because the money to fund films will be more adequately distributed. Being a woman director isn’t its own separate category of personhood beholden to different rules than everyone else in the film industry. Rising tides float all boats, and I think ultimately that someone’s gender shouldn’t even come into discussion when studios decide to hire a director. I’m not saying that sexism doesn’t exist or that women have equal chances of being hired for all jobs they compete with men for, but what I am saying is that when people in the film industry are treated better, offered new opportunities, and are allowed to make more daring and innovative choices, inevitably the discrimination that women face as directors will also be eroded.”

 

Mary Lambert talks:

 

Dejan Ognjanović

 

 

Mary Lambert’s immensely popular Stephen King adaptation Pet Sematary (1989) was the first large studio-produced horror film directed by a woman. As Heidi Honeycutt claims in I Spit on Your Celluloid: The History of Women Directing Horror Movies, “Hollywood ’broke the mold’ when they hired Lambert, because women were not usually offered studio directing jobs, period.“ This great commercial hit and fan favourite was followed by many other genre offerings, like Pet Sematary II (1992), The In Crowd (2000), Urban Legends: Bloody Mary (2005), Mega Python vs. Gatoroid (2011) and others. Since Mary Lambert also wrote the Foreword to Heidi Honeycutt’s book, it was as good an alibi as any for Rue Morgue to have a talk with her.

 

Rue Morgue: Did you pick horror or did horror pick you? In other words, did you have any special affinity for horror before the script for Pet Sematary landed in your hands? And also, in general: what is horror genre for you? How does it speak to you, what does it offer to you personally?

 

Mary Lambert: When I was a little girl I was obsessed with Fairy Tales as they were written down from the Middle Ages, when most of them originated. As I’m sure you know, many of them are quite horrific cautionary tales designed to scare children into obeying the rules of society. I have never wavered in my fascination for this type of allegorical fantastical storytelling, especially when it depicts supernatural events. Fantasy (and horror) help me understand and tolerate the boredom and sadness that sometime dominate the reality of existence.

 

RM: You were hand-picked by Stephen King to direct Pet Sematary. Still, how much protection and safety did that actually bring in the context of the fact that you were the first woman director ever to be given a big-budget studio horror film?

 

ML: Stephen was unbelievably supportive of me. He and I had the same goal of protecting the essence of his story from unreasonable meddling from outside sources.

 

RM: How have the times changed in recent years for female directors of horror, especially regarding their likelyhood to get to work in the business? What else needs to be changed in the near future for them? 

 

ML: There are many more female directors now than when I began my career. But there were virtually NO other female directors then, especially in the horror genre. Horror has always been a way for young filmmakers to enter the business of filmmaking with a low budget movie.  Horror is more respectable now and young women see it as a valuable way to express themselves. The truth is that most of the opportunities for women remain low budget projects, while the “big Hollywood” movies go to male directors. The ascendence of cable and limited series on streaming platforms is changing that and and there are a lot of exciting female directors who are focusing on that area for their careers.

 

RM: Do you have any passion project in horror genre that you have written already and would love to work on soon?

 

ML: Yes. I have just finished writing a script loosely based on Oscar Wilde’s “The Canterville Ghost”. It explores the idea that we carry in our DNA the cellular trauma of our ancestors. I am hopeful that I will be able to set this up in the near future.

 

RM: What is the biggest quality and importance of the book I Spit On Your Celluloid?

 

ML: Heidi has always been an incredible supporter of women in horror, respecting their work and elevating it into the mainstream. She continues this work with her insightful book.

 

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Izbor svih nominacija nalazi se OVDE, od ponuđenog izaberite šta vam se sviđa, pa to iskopirajte u mejl i pošaljite na adresu taraco@aol.com.