Danse Macabre: Filmmaker Karen Arthur on The Mafu Cage (1978)

By Alexandra Heller-Nicholas.

I find that there is an emotional energy in a theater piece [the basis for The Mafu Cage] and that the relationships are so much stronger and more connected. I always use the concept that you have to see in film and so therefore I took the liberty of making Ellen (Lee Grant), who is the more mature, inward character, sophisticated and otherworldly….”

In 2020 I published a book called 1000 Women in Horror, 1895-2018, and even as recently as this I was still taken aback at how many people even today treat the idea of a woman-directed horror film as a novelty. Recently published scholarship such as Heidi Honeycutt’s exhaustive I Spit on Your Celluloid: The History of Women Directing Horror Movies (2024) does an enormous amount of heavy lifting when it comes to writing women back into their long unacknowledged place in the genre’s broader history.

And yet looking back, in many ways women filmmakers working in the horror space have long been hidden in plain sight, at least critically speaking. Robin Wood championed Stephanie Rothman at the 1979 Toronto Film Festival and associated writing, positioning her as a key figure alongside Wes Craven, Bob Clark, George A. Romero, Brian De Palma and David Cronenberg. And although long out of print, Calvin Thomas Beck’s 1978 book Scream Queens: Heroines of the Horrors warrants much more attention than it currently receives, if only for the fact that he bookends his focus on women in horror with two filmmakers; French early cinema pioneer Alice Guy, and (again) Stephanie Rothman.

But if there is one book that heralded the more recent renaissance of Karen Arthur’s sophomore film The Mafu Cage, it is without doubt Kier-La Janisse’s groundbreaking House of Psychotic Women: An Autobiographical Topography of Female Neurosis in Horror and Exploitation Films (2012/2022). Enthusiastically championed by so esteemed a supporter as Janisse, The Mafu Cage found a whole new audience who were broadly astounded that such an objectively impressive film could have gone so long without the recognition it deserves as a key film of the North American indie horror wave of the 1970s.

Adapted from French playwright Eric Westphal’s Toi et Tes Nuages (“You and Your Clouds”) which originally stormed the French theater world with no less than Anna Karina in one of the lead roles, Arthur’s reimagining stars Carol Kane as Cissy and Lee Grant as Ellen, two adult sisters struggling to adapt to the rapidly deteriorating mental health of the former. Sharing a large run down bohemian mansion in the Hollywood Hills, the emotionally stunted Cissy turns her attentions towards her artwork, unresolved daddy issues, and a worrying trend of lovebombing pet monkeys (the “mafu” of the title), none of whom live long due to Cissy’s increasingly disturbing violent meltdowns.

Starring two of the finest screen actors of the era and garnering Arthur her second feature film credit after her still jaw-dropping debut Legacy (1975), in The Mafu Cage Arthur crafts a dark and captivating world of two sisters spiralling downwards into what feels to be an almost inevitable decent. With its world premiere at Cannes’ esteemed Directors Fortnight, European audiences embraced Arthur and her work, but it has taken English-speaking regions a little longer to catch up.

In the lead-up to The Mafu Cage, playing as part of the Also Starring…Carol Kane series at New York’s iconic Metrograph cinema in mid-August 2024, Arthur kindly took the time to talk to us about both the film itself and her broader, extraordinary career.

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Alexandra Heller-Nicholas: I’d love to hear more from you about the play that The Mafu Cage is based on, Eric Westphal’s You and Your Clouds. How did it come to your attention, and what was the process of adaptation like? Looking back in retrospect, how do you frame the relationship between the original play and your finished film?

Karen Arthur: I saw the play that The Mafu Cage is based on, which was called You and Your Clouds (Toi et Les Nuages) by Eric Westphal, in Cambridge, England, and at the time I was looking for a horror film to make because I had made Legacy and it was such an art film that I felt I had to try to move into a commercial world, and at the time horror seemed to work. When I saw You and Your Clouds, I was really struck by it because of course it was small enough and close enough that I felt I could make a very hermetically erotic piece.

Eric lived in Paris. I went to meet him and got the rights directly from him. He made us oysters and white wine. I hate oysters, but I ate them. I’d do anything to get the rights. I had him come to the screening in Paris and when it was over he was kind of gobsmacked by it. It’s always hard when you see something taken from one persuasion turned into another, but he was quite impressed and I wanted it to be close to the play because I was taken with his work, and I wanted to put that on film.

I’m really fascinated that both Legacy and The Mafu Cage started as live performance pieces, and that you do really maintain that kind of electric energy—that feeling of ‘liveness’—in your film adaptations. Can you talk to me a little perhaps about this kind of energy?

Having started my career as a dancer and then as an actress, the whole idea of theater was where I came from so it wasn’t unusual that I would go to the theater for inspiration. Legacy and The Mafu Cage came from theater pieces. I find that there is an emotional energy in a theater piece and that the relationships are so much stronger and more connected. I always use the concept that you have to see in film and so therefore I took the liberty of making Ellen, who is the more mature, inward character, sophisticated and otherworldly i.e. the observatory and looking at the moon and the sun, and then that gave me a visual plane for her.

In the original Cissy was a writer and I turned her into an artist because writing is boring for film and art is wonderful and I had seen in Bellevue and in London people who were on the brink of sanity who drew because they couldn’t talk about their psychotic experiences, so they drew them and I found those paintings so original, so frightening, so Bacon-esque, and I thought, “well this is perfect”. And as you could see, the very end piece is quite stunning in the drawing of her emotional and insane state.

I was fascinated to read that your origins were as a dancer, and was reminded of Karen Pearlman—the wonderful film editor and author of the book Cutting Rhythms: Intuitive Film Editing—who also came to film from a background in dance. Aside from perhaps Maya Deren and Gene Kelly, dancers who become filmmakers isn’t something that is widely discussed, and I would love to hear both your thoughts on this more broadly and also of course how it taps into your own experience and background?

I didn’t know about the book you were speaking of by Karen Pearlman, but I should take a look at it. Maya used to be a mentor of mine. Gene Kelly actually directed me in my first film as an actress, and he was a miserable prick who treated everybody terribly and just broke my heart because of course I was a dancer and oh my God, to work with Gene Kelly! Well, he was disgusting.

I think dance is very important to my style as a filmmaker. If you notice, I do enormously long dolly shots. Once I got into television, where I was really able to exercise that, I would do 10-minute takes without any coverage and that’s because I love to move the camera and I love to keep the actors on their feet and then stop them when I want to come in for punctuation for a close-up or something like that, so the dance has really been a part of my life and a part of the way I think about existence—and so obviously it’s a part of my film life as well. I think that’s more visible in my television work and later work than in my earlier films.

The making of The Mafu Cage sounded really wild; is it true that there were issues with Budar the chimp who would flip out if he was around women who were menstruating?!

Yes, it’s true. There were issues with the monkeys. A lot of animals really have a problem when women are menstruating and because almost all of the crew were females, and if you were menstruating you could not get near the chimp. Or I shouldn’t say chimp, he was an orangutan, Budar.

So yes, that was an issue, but also the issue was Carol; she bonded with Budar as you can see in the film, and he loved her. They became good buddies and the last scene was the scene where she was beating him with a plastic chain. He wasn’t hurt by her, but he was upset because she was angry, and obviously her fury came out as she was pretending to strike him and it scared him and upset him so much and he actually bit her on the leg and we rushed her to UCLA. We shot that at the very end and she didn’t have any more scenes with him, but I should’ve realized that her fury would be upsetting to him. I should never have allowed them in the same cell together given the fact that emotionally she was going to go over the brink, of course that would upset him.

I think dance is very important to my style as a filmmaker. If you notice, I do enormously long dolly shots. Once I got into television, where I was really able to exercise that, I would do 10-minute takes without any coverage and that’s because I love to move the camera….”

I noted that on an audio commentary for The Mafu Cage, you noted that you probably had gender parity on the film when it came to the crew. That is extraordinary to me, and something that today is still quite an accomplishment. How do you feel in terms of things like this about progress?

I kept thinking when I was a filmmaker that women were making films. It wasn’t until I kind of really looked around that I realized that that was not true in America. It was true far more in Europe and when I would go to various film festivals, I would meet women filmmakers from all over the world. Those were valuable times and we shared our experiences and inspired each other.

I sort of don’t believe that we need to have 100% women staffing or in programming, but 50% is OK. You know, we don’t need it all. We just need the freedom to have an equal playing field, so that’s what I attempted to do.

Not so much in television, because it was very difficult; in my day there were no female gaffers. There were no female Best Boys. You know, it took a while. But if I could get a female AD or a female focus puller or whatever, I tried to bring them into the fold into the work I was doing in television, which was, of course, a much more male-dominant dominated field.

The Mafu Cage today quite rightly is considered as a kind of rediscovered jewel of 70s American indie horror, but I’d love to hear your thoughts on how you perceived the film in terms of genre at the time. Did you—and indeed, do you still—think about it in terms of horror traditions, or something broader or different?

MoMA played Mafu Cage not long ago, a year ago I think, and I was really struck by how the audience reacted. They really appreciated the film, so you know when you say that it’s a rediscovered jewel, I believe so. Every place it’s played lately—and it has played quite a few places now—it’s kind of being rediscovered.

The reviews on it are just spectacular from the audience, so it definitely touches a nerve and it makes me so happy after 46 years that my little girl has grown up and people love her. I don’t know anything about making a horror film and obviously what I did was I wound up making another fucking art film, but there you go. I thought it would be commercial and that’s what I was trying to do, and I don’t think I succeeded.

I believe both Legacy and The Mafu Cage were initially embraced much more by European festivals, distributors and critics than American ones. Why do you think this was the case? (I love the story about you being on stage with François Truffaut when The Mafu Cage played in the Directors Fortnight at Cannes!)

Both of my films—and Lady Beware as well—were really widely accepted by European standards, and they’ve all played repeatedly in festivals all over the world and all of them have had good runs in Paris and in London, and you know your major cities—never in the states. Back in the day, I didn’t know how to market it, and it was ripped off so many times by people in the online world changing the name, like Don’t Ring the Doorbell, I mean hysterical shit.

But Europe yes, and Directors’ Fortnight was absolutely amazing in that the 10th anniversary of Directors’ Fortnight was the opening night of The Mafu Cage, and when [Jean Luc] Godard and all of those enormous filmmakers came out on stage—there were 10 or 12 of them, something like that—and grab my hand and we stood there together on the stage and I looked right and left. I mean, that was a night to remember, I can tell you that.

I understand that you were the third woman after Dorothy Arzner and Ida Lupino to become a member of the Directors Guild of America. How did this happen, and—in particular relation to Lupino especially—why do you think actors make such great directors?

I think actors understand, obviously, the emotional core of their characters and how their characters work with the story, and because they’re telling a story as an actor. I think they are very acutely aware of how a film progresses because they are aware of their place in the story, they don’t necessarily make the most visual directors, but every director has their own style and their own abilities that they use to enhance whatever their skills are as directors, so I do think that they are very in tune to the process, and therefore to the emotional reality and truth of the of the story.

I often think of a wonderful quote from you in the October 1987 issue of American Film magazine where you say “What’s it like to be a woman director?” “Well, it’s like being a director, thank you very much. I just wear pantyhose and you don’t”. In this spirit, who were your biggest influences when it came to directing specifically?

I was never classically trained as a director—not that everybody is or anybody is—but I saw and devoured art films. I just devoured them, and John Bailey, who was my first cinematographer, was a great historian and he and I would talk for hours and hours and hours about the great French films or Russian films, or whatever, and I was also growing up making movies at a time when Hollywood was rediscovering or discovering young filmmakers and had given up on commercial films. They weren’t doing well, so all of the studios were reaching out at that time for young directors with great ideas, and that’s where of course Spielberg and etc. were born into it. I actually tied with Spielberg—I forget the year, probably in the late 70s—for Best New Director by the Los Angeles Film Critics, and that was quite exciting.

I was under contract at that time to Universal writing Lady Beware or working on Lady Beware, I was there with Verna Fields when all of the boys were there, and I was the right age but the wrong gender, so I was put in turnaround whereas the other men went on to succeed greatly, and I have watched their success with great admiration and a little twinge of jealousy. I wish it could’ve been so for the women as well.

There’s such a fantastic chapter about you and your work in Maya Montañez Smukler’s amazing 2018 book, Liberating Hollywood: Women Directors and the Feminist Reform of 1970s American Cinema. I really love how this book in part seeks to sort of present an alternate history of US cinema of the 70s to the dominant New Hollywood sausage fest but focusing on women who were making quite diverse movies at the same time. In retrospect, how aware were you at the time of other women directing films in this same space?

During the time I was making films, other female filmmakers were coming up. I mean Joan Tewksbury, there were so many of them. I’m sorry I’m not gonna remember all the names right now. I was in the first year AFI Directing Workshop for Women along with Anne Bancroft and Maya Angelou and Margot Kidder and Susan Oliver and Lynn Lippman, the list could go on and on. It was a great honor, and it was giving women an edge, and that was all due to Jan Haag, who was at that time AFI’s Admission and Awards Administrator and began the program.

It was wonderful, and at that time I could see various women starting their careers; Joan Micklin Silver (who would introduce me to Carol Kane, you know) and Lee Grant I knew from that, and it was from the workshop I was able to get her on board for Mafu Cage, so it was an important time for women starting to cut their teeth and then it just grew and grew, but never to the extent that I hoped it would, although we’re getting there bit by bit.

I’ve read various things about your less than positive experience with major studios and the feature film follow up to The Mafu Cage, Lady Beware (1987). I’d love to hear about this from your perspective now, especially considering you have gone on to really flourish working in television in the years since.

The feature world never really embraced me. Lady Beware was a terrible experience. The people that put the money in for it were horrified by what they saw; how Diane Lane’s character was provocative, how erotic the film was, and they took it away from me and gave it to another editor—a female editor—and she, she really eviscerated it in their name.

I have an original old three-quarter inch of my cut, but their cut of Lady was not what I intended. It was so watered down and they lost the emotional line. I stayed in the cutting room and tried to make a difference, and I did in a lot of instances, but she had her marching orders and cut it to shreds.

But television has been very good to me, and I have had a very long 40 years with my husband, Thomas Neuwirth, who’s a cinematographer you know, so we had quite a life and we had quite a time making all these films. I never made a television film that I didn’t believe in. I never made anything that was against women, or that would be pejorative in any way, shape, or form, only supporting women and their efforts and pursuits.

I’m very proud of all of the films that we made in those years. We lived in Nassau Bahamas and made documentaries on the visual artists there so we continued on for another 10 years doing that, and I’m back directing theater again now, so full circle.

Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, a contributing editor to Film International, is a film critic from Melbourne, Australia, who frequently contributes to Fangoria and has published widely on cult, horror and exploitation film including The Giallo Canvas: Art, Excess and Horror Cinema (McFarland, 2021), Rape-Revenge Films: A Critical Study (McFarland, 2011) and the 2021 updated second edition of the same name, Found Footage Horror Films: Fear and the Appearance of Reality (McFarland, 2015), the single-film focused monographs Suspiria (Auteur, 2016), Ms. 45 (Columbia University Press, 2017) and The Hitcher (Arrow Books, 2018), and two Bram Stoker Award nominated books, Masks in Horror Cinema: Eyes Without Faces (University of Wales Press, 2019) and 1000 Women in Horror (BearManor Media, 2020). She is also the co-editor, with Dean Brandum, of ReFocus: The Films of Elaine May (Edinburgh University Press, 2019), Wonderland (Thames & Hudson, 2018) on Alice in Wonderland in film, co-edited with Emma McRae, and Strickland: The Analogues of Peter Strickland (2020) and Cattet & Forzani: The Strange Films of Cattet & Forzani (2018), both co-edited with John Edmond and published by the Queensland Film Festival. Alexandra is on the advisory board of the Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies, and a member of the Alliance of Women Film Journalists.