By Ellie Dean.
We have very clear socially constructed, stereotypical ideas of what girlhood means, what femme adolescence means, what motherhood means, etcetera, and horror works so well as a forum to explore and deconstruct these cliches because it defamiliarizes them, makes them strange, and at its best transgresses and subverts those very tropes….”
—Alexandra Heller-Nicholas
Award-winning film critic, scholar, author and programmer Alexandra Heller-Nicholas is well known for her incisive writing on gender, power and genre. Much of her commentary—which has, over the years, covered an impressively eclectic range of topics—is bound together by an interest in the complex relationship between women and horror cinema. Debates in this area have often focused on matters and qualities of representation, but for Nicholas the topic of women and horror—and how they fit together—connects to women’s significant and highly impactful (yet underappreciated) contributions to the genre as creatives and creators.
Nicholas’ groundbreaking book 1000 Women in Horror, 1895–2018 (2020, BearManor Media) explores this territory and has inspired the new documentary of the same name: 1000 Women in Horror, which premiered on Shudder on March 20th of this year. The book is a self-described “snapshot” of the “overlooked, underrated [and] taken for granted” women whose contributions have effectively built horror into the genre we know and love (or abhor) today (3). It provides not only compelling evidence of the impact and significance of women’s labour in shaping the genre, but a push for a radical (yet timely) reimagining of the way we understand its history. The new film, written by Nicholas and directed by Donna Davies, features interviews with a diverse selection of experts and creatives. It continues the book’s original project by refuting conceptions of horror as a boys’ club, while also giving due attention to the complexities, contradictions, and diverse experiences encompassed by the category of ‘women in film’. I had the pleasure of speaking to Alexandra Heller-Nicholas in advance of its release.
This new film shares a name—and a lot of themes—with your earlier book 1000 Women in Horror, 1895–2018, but it also stands in its own right. What role do you see the title playing in the projects of both pieces?
The title 1000 Women in Horror was consciously designed as a provocation. On the surface, it does what was clearly the intention of the projects—in both book and documentary form—in that it seeks to make visible the enormous invisible labor of women and femme-identifying folk in horror film history, both behind and in front of the camera.
The book initially started as 100 Women in Horror, then 500 Women in Horror, until finally settling on 1000 Women in Horror, but the spirit of provocation was always the same, I have always felt that if I did my job right, there would be a sense of outrage from critically engaged readers and/or viewers who—rightly—would exclaim “What? Only 1000?”. In this spirit, I even include a blank space in the introduction to the book where readers can add names I have missed or—even more ideally—add their own, once they get out there and start making their own stuff.
To cover every single woman who has made a significant donation to horror cinema is functionally impossible and flagrantly absurd to even conceive as an achievable project: it is to me just as ludicrous as suggesting that you could do such a thing for the male/masc donation to the genre. What this title very specifically seeks to do then is make people conscious of the sheer enormity of the femme donation to horror cinema since its inception.
I’d love to know more about how you would describe the relationship between the two. Is it accurate to call the film a spiritual sequel to the book? Or is there another term that feels more appropriate?
You know, I’ve actually not really thought about this and it truly is food for thought. I think we’re loosely going with “adapted from the book”, but in many ways I think more specifically it’s actually a “reimagining of the book”. We’re really stripping the book down to its conceptual essence, looking at what my motivations for writing it were and what the key points I really wanted it to illustrate were, and then applying that to a more narrative-based cinematic framework. The multiplicity of voices, the historical breadth of the femme donation to horror, exposing and discussing the invisibility of women’s labor—these all carried through fairly directly from the book to the film, but the method to communicate these things was fundamentally reimagined in an entirely different way.
On that note, the film somewhat differs from your original book by introducing a more direct focus on how women have been represented in horror films, as well as the ways they are involved in creating them. However, for many of the women we hear from throughout—including yourself—it’s clear that there is also a very significant connection between their experiences as consumers of horror, and their own creative output. When we discuss the history of women in horror, how important is it to recognise the relationship between modes of ‘audience’ and ‘author’?
In a sense, I see a focus on labor practices and gender politics as the flip side to the same coin of gender representation in horror cinema. Because both, at their core, are about perceptions, assumptions, and the kind of preconstituted biases all of us—regardless of our own gender identities—bring to the table when gender difference is flagged as a marker of social difference.
This isn’t as abstract as it might at first sound, and in a way one of my favourite things about the documentary is that it really maps this out quite explicitly. We have very clear socially constructed, stereotypical ideas of what girlhood means, what femme adolescence means, what motherhood means, etcetera, and horror works so well as a forum to explore and deconstruct these cliches because it defamiliarizes them, makes them strange, and at its best transgresses and subverts those very tropes.
Women’s filmmaking in many ways does the same thing: it’s hard to pick a favourite line in the documentary, but the gloriously funny and overwhelmingly talented Roxanne Benjamin saying that she never saw herself being a director because she and other women didn’t live up to the image of “John Ford out on the fuckin’ tundra”. This is something we hear over and over and over again: because of the historical invisibility of women’s work in the horror genre behind the camera especially, there is a kind of representational void. So in a way, this is a question of representation and subversion as well: femmes who work in horror cinema in any capacity by their very definition are kind of defying traditional ideas of who we think makes horror in really practical, material ways.
Going back to your question, this certainly taps into my experience as a woman horror fan, especially when I was younger. This is again flagged in the documentary, but the assumption that being a femme into horror is actually not the anomaly we have implicitly (and sometimes, even now, still explicitly) been led to believe is revelatory: the last couple of decades we’ve really seen these fantastic clusters of femme horror makers and fans cluster right around the world, all really championed and supported by pioneering groups like Etheria, Ax Wound, Nyx Horror Collective, Graveyard Shift Sisters and Cut Throat Women in the US, Sapna Bhavnani and Wench Film Festival in India, Final Girls in Germany, Final Girls (a different one!) in the UK, and the wonderful work of Mònica Garcia Massagué at Sitges Film Festival and her hugely important Women in Fan initiative. And honestly, that doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface (apologies to the many important people and groups I know I haven’t named here—it’s late and my brain isn’t fully mobilized!)
I see a focus on labor practices and gender politics as the flip side to the same coin of gender representation in horror cinema. Because both, at their core, are about perceptions, assumptions, and the kind of preconstituted biases all of us—regardless of our own gender identities—bring to the table….”
The film’s tagline (“horror isn’t a boys’ club”) directly challenges the inaccurate (yet frustratingly pervasive) assumption that the horror genre is something made by men, for men. We hear a few interviewees name specific titles that opened their eyes to the influence of women as creators and creatives in that world, but I don’t think we hear yours. Is there a specific film or filmmaker you credit with your own ‘awakening’?
This is a great question, and in a way taps back into something I mentioned previously. When I was growing up as a film-obsessed teenage girl, being a director is literally something I never even thought could be possible for me. It wasn’t that I even consciously thought about it, but the fact that directors were male was as basic a fact as the sky being blue.
Looking back, women-directed films were absolutely part of my film-watching diet when I was younger. I am a child of the VHS era, so the video shop was absolutely my film school. But I don’t think I ever consciously registered at the time at least that Wayne’s World (Penelope Spheeris, 1992) was directed by a woman, or that Fast Times from Ridgemont High (Amy Heckerling, 1982) was directed by a woman, or that Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Fran Rubel Kuzui, 1992) was directed by a woman, or that Desperately Seeking Susan (Susan Seidelman, 1985) was directed by a woman.
For me in Australia, I think from memory the first time I consciously registered women’s authorship was local heroes like Gillian Armstrong and Jane Campion (the latter of course is from New Zealand, but has lived and made many films in Australia so I consider her a regional in-law, at the very least).
And on this front in specific relation to horror, I guess for me a really huge moment was reading an interview with the great Jennifer Kent around the time of The Babadook (2014) where she said she went to film school originally to study acting because she had no idea that women could be directors. That was honestly like being struck by lightning for me, and I felt this enormous sense of grief—it sounds hyperbolic, but it was really genuinely upsetting. Because it occurred to me that unlike so many of these incredible filmmakers, I never had that “fuck them, I’m doing it anyway” moment. It literally never occurred to me before then that I could have become a filmmaker instead of a film critic, and I kinda felt robbed.
In some ways, you’ve done it then…. I’d love to know more about the process of constructing this documentary, both in a creative sense and a more logistical one. What motivated the decision to organise the discussion around different age archetypes—and were there other framing devices you and the team considered?
Donna Davis both directed and produced 1000 Women in Horror and is an extraordinarily talented, intelligent and intuitive filmmaker, as well as being one of the most generous and kind people I have ever met. We obviously worked very closely together from the outset of this project, and we knew there was no way the alphabetical, encyclopedic structure of the book would work in a documentary, and none of our key production team—which also included Giles Edwards, Nicola Goelzhaeuser and Greg Newman, each of whom I owe the world—really had any interest in doing this chronologically, either. That felt kinda boring for us, and really wasn’t the right shape for what it was that we wanted to communicate with this project.
So really the structure that we ended up with which follows the assumed normative life cycle of a woman—girlhood, adolescence, motherhood, old age, etc—really appealed to us because it brought us back to what I mentioned earlier, that horror cinema is a space where these kinds of stereotypes are often aggressively subverted and transgressed in sometimes really powerful ways. Awwww you are a cute little girl with a doll—oh-oh, the doll is evil! The girl is evil! Awww you are a teen in a pink dress going to prom—oh-oh, you are gonna get covered in pig blood! You can murder people en masse with your mind! You get the idea.
In an interview with MIFF last year for the film’s premiere you mentioned that you (as well as many others, including Donna Davies and Nicola Goelzhaeuser) have noted the horror genre’s evident reluctance to address one of the most significant bodily experiences for women: the “absolute biological shitshow” that is menopause and perimenopause. I know you list some artists already pursuing this front—including the great Isabel Peppard—but what you said earlier about not feeling like you had the right (or capability) to pursue filmmaking as a young woman made me think….would you ever consider taking up the mantle yourself? And what would your dream menopause-horror film look like?
This really is such an enormous elephant in the room when it comes to the representation of women not just in horror, but in cinema more generally. I wrote an essay for this very publication a few years back now called “The Substance is a Documentary“, where I really laid a lot of this stuff out in the context of my own personal experience. I am fairly bold in saying that this is a definite gap in the documentary, but I refuse to apologize for that because it really does point to this broader omission of peri/menopause from cultural discourse in general—there were no horror films we could really look to in order to spark that discussion, it was like we go straight from motherhood to What Ever Happened to Baby Jane, which reflects the total eradication of women from cultural and social life during peri/menopause.
A really pivotal moment for me personally was the mother of an ex once telling me that once you hit about 45 as a woman you become invisible—but it’s up to you to decide if you use that invisibility to oppress you, or as a secret kind of superpower. I don’t think a week has passed in the last five years for me that I have not thought about that, and if that isn’t a great central premise for a horror movie, I don’t know what is.
I’ve spoken to Isabel Peppard about this a few times and it all boils her piss as much as it does mine—and really any woman of a similar age who have gone (or are going through) the same things and are mortified at the total absence of discourse around what is for many a deeply harrowing experience, both physically and psychologically.
I’m not a filmmaker so I wouldn’t feign to know how to do this, but my gut feeling is that as the current wave of younger femme filmmakers especially—many of whom we talk to in 1000 Women in Horror—get older, they will continue to bring their experiences and perspectives to the screen, and peri/menopause will inevitably be a part of that. But the reality is no studio is going to bankroll this, no investor is going to say “this has got dollar signs all over it!”. But even though The Substance wasn’t explicitly about peri/menopause specifically, who knows—maybe it will be a game changer on this front?
Finally, this documentary has an impressively star-studded cast, reflecting a really wide variety of backgrounds and experiences, as well as different time periods in the industry. I’m putting myself at risk of asking something adjacent to the most cliche interview question of all time, but I have to know: if you did have the opportunity to include one woman in horror from the past—perhaps one who is no longer with us—who would you pick?
I have been doing a tonne of press for this film and had already done a fair amount for the book a few years ago, and I honestly haven’t been asked this before! I don’t even have to pause to think about this: Debra Hill, the legendary producer behind a lot of John Carpenter’s biggest films, who tragically died of cancer in 2005 in her mid 50s. She was so talented and so intuitive, and so many of the things we talk about in the doc you can see were really driving fascinations in her own work. The way that she was so central to the dynamics between the girls in Halloween (1978) reveals someone who really got it: I don’t think horror would be what it is today without her legacy. It’s so cruel she died so comparatively young.
Ellie Dean is an independent scholar based in Australia.