Critic and Film International contributor Alexandra Heller-Nicholas discusses her 2020 book 1000 Women in Horror (BearManor Media) on the Rutgers University-Camden site.
A few quotes from the interview:
“1000 Women in Horror was a very different kind of project (than my other books) yet again, but I guess it still had a kind of immersive quality to it in terms of the actual experience of writing it.”
“The most interesting women in the book to me, now that it is done and dusted, are those I’d never heard about before I began the project. This includes (but is certainly not limited to) women including Eloyce Gist who was a Black woman from Texas who made films with her evangelist husband in the 1930s; British filmmaker, dancer and actor Wendy Toye who directed the segment “The Painting” in the 1955 anthology Three Cases of Murder; or director Svetlana Baskova from Russia, whose 1999 film, The Green Elephant, remains one of the most challenging and vicious horror films I’ve ever seen.”
“What I didn’t expect and what has largely taken me by surprise is the women who are emerging in the field who I also see supporting the book and getting excited about it, seeing themselves in a version of this book somewhere in the future.”
You can read the full interview here.
Alexandra Heller-Nicholas’ most recent book is The Giallo Canvas: Art, Excess and Horror Cinema (McFarland, 2021).