Bloody Women: Women Directors of Horror

253 Pages·2022·6.561 MB·English

by  Victoria McCollum, Aislinn Clarke

Bloody Women

Bloody Women
Women Directors of Horror
Edited by
Victoria McCollum
Aislínn Clarke
LEHIGH UNIVERSITY PRESS
Bethlehem
Published by Lehigh University Press
Copublished by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.
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Copyright © 2022 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by
any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval
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who may quote passages in a review.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: McCollum, Victoria, editor. | Clarke, Aislinn, editor.
Title: Bloody women : women directors of horror / edited by Victoria
McCollum, Aislinn Clarke.
Description: Bethlehem : Lehigh University Press ; Lanham, Maryland : The
Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc., [2022] | Series: Critical
conversations in horror studies | Includes bibliographical references
and index. | Summary: “Bloody Women: Women Directors of Horror is the
first book-length exploration of female creators at the cutting edge of
contemporary horror, turning out some of its most inspired and twisted
offerings”—Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021052474 (print) | LCCN 2021052475 (ebook) | ISBN
9781611463071 (cloth) | ISBN 9781611463088 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Horror films—History and criticism. | Horror
films—Production and direction. | Women motion picture producers and
directors. | Women in the motion picture industry.
Classification: LCC PN1995.9.H6 B63 2022 (print) | LCC PN1995.9.H6
(ebook) | DDC 791.4302/3309252—dc23/eng/20220120
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021052474
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021052475
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper
for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction 1
Victoria McCollum and Aislínn Clarke
1 Horror’s Founding Mothers: Women in Proto-cinema,
Visual Avant-Gardes, and the Silent Era 21
Erica Tortolani
2 Women’s Filmmaking and the Male-Centered Horror Film 39
Alexandra Heller-Nicholas
3 Angela Bettis: Gender in the Space of Collaborative Horror 53
James Francis Jr.
4 Stitches, Screams, and Female Beauty: Canadian Women
Horror Film 69
Shelby Shukaliak, Eve O’Dea, and Ernest Mathijs
SCREENPLAY: Trim by Mayumi Yoshida 89
5 “They’ve Got Something You Haven’t. A Cock”: Exploring
the Gendered Experience of Horror Filmmaking in Britain 97
Amy Harris
6 At Our Table: Conceptualizing the Black Woman’s Horror
Film Aesthetic 115
Ashlee Blackwell
SCREENPLAY: Paralysis by R. Shanea Williams 131
v
vi Contents
7 Women in Horror Film Festivals: Representation, Dark
Storytelling, and an International Community of Filmmakers 145
Kate R. Robertson
8 “But Are You Really into Horror?”: The Importance of
Female-Centric Horror Film Festivals, Horror Curators,
and Industry Champions 167
Anna Bogutskaya
9 Short Sharp Shocks: An Interview with Women Who
Make Horror Shorts 181
Brian Hauser
SCREENPLAY: Childer by Aislínn Clarke 197
10 His Canon, Herself: Teaching Horror as Feminist Cinema 213
Dan Vena, Iris Robinson, and Patrick Woodstock
Appendix: A Cultural Study of the (Western) Horror Film
(Abridged Viewing List) 229
Index 231
About the Editors and Contributors 241
Acknowledgments
To the contributors—a collection like this results only from the contribu-
tions of many talented people. Thank you. Your commitment, enthusi-
asm, and expertise are what made this book possible. Thanks so very
much to my coeditor, Aislínn. Working with you has been an honor every
step of the way, and you’ve taught me so much in the process. I am also
deeply grateful to Brian for his unwavering support. Kate, Dawn, and
Trish, thank you for your patience and understanding.
Here’s offering my sincere, heartfelt thanks to my partner for her
strength of character and courage of conviction. I am deeply grateful to
my folks for their belief in me. I would like to offer my special thanks
to Giuliana for her insightful comments and suggestions. Without Gi-
uliana’s tremendous understanding and encouragement in the past few
years, it would be impossible for me to complete most of my books.
For Bella, a queen among dogs, my muse, and the best friend I could
have ever wished for.
—Victoria
Firstly, to my coeditor, Victoria: thank you for inviting me to collaborate
with you and for being such a trusty guide across the bridge from indus-
try to academy. It has been a privilege, an education, and a lot of fun.
To the contributors and the contributors we lost along the way: thank
you for your push, resolve, and patience. And to the publishing team at
Lehigh, thank you for your patience, resolve, and push.
I would also like to acknowledge the extraordinarily important work
of those who set up and championed Women in Horror film festivals—
particularly International Women in Horror Film Festival, Final Girls
vii
viii Acknowledgments
Berlin, and Axwound Film Festival, who have done so much for me. I
have been privileged to meet and work with so many brilliant women
through the Women in Horror community, and I will treasure those
connections. I hope some of your experience is represented here. With
special thanks to Sonia Lupher and Colleen O’Holleran.
And, finally, taking my lead from Victoria once again: my family, par-
ticularly my husband, who is always supportive and encouraging and
knows his place, just below Moose, my own best girl.
—Aislínn
Introduction
Victoria McCollum and Aislínn Clarke
In a 2020 pitch meeting, a US producer suggested we make the lead of my
(Clarke) proposed horror film female instead of male. It is not a propo-
sition made often in Hollywood, where the percentage of top-grossing
films that featured female protagonists dropped to 29 percent in 2020
(Lauzen 2021, 1). And still, in 2020, a horror film was the most likely
place to see a female protagonist, accounting for 39 percent of all female
leads (2). Indeed, horror is the only genre in which female characters re-
ceive the majority of screen time, if not speaking time. This would have
put my character in an established but select lineage of Scream Queens,
Final Girls, imperiled virgins, and all-sacrificing mothers, usually in films
directed, written, and produced by men. Women have always held a
special focus in horror cinema: most frequently looking terrified on post-
ers and VHS sleeves, routinely misrepresented, monstered, and sexual-
ized. But despite horror’s fixation on women (or maybe because of the
problematic nature of such depictions), it became news, in 2017, when
49 percent of tickets sold for the adaptation of Stephen King’s IT—a film
with an ensemble cast that included only one female character—were to
women (Donaldson 2017). Still, women watch horror films. We knew this
ourselves—I (Clarke) am a female director of horror films, which is what
I always aspired to be. The film’s producer is a female producer of horror
films. The conversation we had was not really about the protagonist of
the film at all; it was a conversation we doubt a male producer has had
with any of our male counterparts. Indeed, when Mary Lambert was to
make the sequel to her own hit Stephen King adaptation, Pet Sematary, in
1992, the male-headed studio quashed her attempts to write a female lead
(Dixon 2018). No, the change of protagonist from male to female here was
1