This is Hallowe'en 2010, Pt. 1: All The Scary Ladies

[handful_ofdust]

Still endlessly bashing my head against the back half of Chapter Fifteen, though it's certainly getting better. But pgtremblay's handy-dandy recent run-down of 74 Best Horror Films, along with this link (http://en.wordpress.com/tag/genre-countdown-horror/), naturally got me thinking about the fact that I haven't done a similar list in a couple of years now, so I'm going to--in three parts. Because I'm an idiot/thsi is my genre, and I can't really stop myself, I guess.;)

What I wanted to start with, though, was an interesting dichotomy I've really only begun to notice over the last little while: That although one could make a case for horror having become a slightly more equal-opportunity source of gendered monsters over the last little while (Sadako, Samara, Kayako, Ginger Fitzgerald, Mary Shaw from James Wan's unappreciated Dead Silence, Beatrice Dalle's The Woman from A L'Interieur, etc.), as well as being increasingly "dominated" (or so various fanboys would have you believe) by the Final Girl/Ripley-esque tough chick character protagonist trope, there still aren't even enough known--let alone well-known--female horror directors to make up a Top Ten list.

Yes, I'm sure people will immediately rush to quote the Big Two Marys at me--Mary Lambert for Pet Semetery, and/or Mary Harron for American Psycho. Except Pet Semetery, for all its inherent jolts, is a pretty deadly affair--one of those classic King-adaptation mishmashes which ends up badly cast and crappily paced, half of it lit like Ray Bradbury's Storytime Theatre, the rest like a plastic-ass carnival dark-ride. And American Psycho is frankly stranded halfway between sexual-political satire and outright black comedy, as Harron herself would tell you. It's like hailing Roberta Findlay as a feminist icon for directing Snuff.

Granted, stuff slips between the cracks all the time--films are categorized as being outside horror as a genre, hailed instead as "foreign", "noir", "art-house", "experimental", "thriller", or sometimes even just straight-up "drama". But just for fun, here's what comes to mind when I think of female-led (screenwriter credits are always welcome, but set aside for the nonce--sorry, Karen Walton, Jace Anderson and Daria Niccolodi!) horror movies:

Near Dark (Kathryn Bigelow)
Ravenous (Antonia Bird)
Trouble Every Day (Claire Denis)
Surveillance (Jennifer Lynch)
Roman (Angela Bettis)
Organ (Fujiwara Kei)
In My Skin (Marina de Van)
In The Cut (Jane Campion)
Fat Girl (Catherine Breillat)

And that's only with me reeeally stretching the boundaries with those last two, though I'd argue that In The Cut has Nic Roeg-sized time-shuffling and sexual content issues, while Breillat's emotional cruelty approaches Michael Hanneke levels even before you get Fat Girl's wrenchingly weird last scene. Oh yeah, and Rachel Talalay and Katt Shea Whatsername who did Poison Ivy, I suppose, but I am trying to think of genuinely scary stuff, here. Even considering you've got three guaranteed classics and three absolute freakshows making up the rest of the weight, it's still pretty denuded.

So what the actual fuck, guys 'n' gals? Did I miss anything you'd want to see in there? Care to tell me your thoughts, in general? Is it just that there are so few female directors at all, and that horror isn't coded as a female-friendly genre? Or...I dunno. Jump in!

P.S.: Also, if you want explanations re the stuff I cited, do feel free to ask. You can find my review of Trouble Every Day, for example, up at Fearzone, here (http://www.fearzone.com/blog/cool-trouble).

Amended to add:

Jennifer's Body, Karyn Kusama
The Velvet Vampire, Stephanie Rothman
The Mafu Cage, Karen Arthur

Comments

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

Very interesting post. And no, I can't think of any additions (I also haven't seen any of the movies you list except for the end of Fat Girl... I really need to see Ravenous).

Let me know if I'm totally mistaken here, but I've always been amazed when female directors surface at all, in any genre. And horror does give me the impression of being really into the classic image of the macho/weird horror director who is capable of "truly disturbing stuff" - much like some (ill-informed) people think only men write horror, because it's just too Xtreme for a woman's mind. I don't know, that's just my impression.

[handful-ofdust.livejournal.com]

I think you would love Ravenous, personally. But I'd love to see what you thought of everything/everyone else here, too (especially Fujiawara Kei, who co-starred in the original Tetsuo: The Iron Man, and is just a startling brand of Brechtian/Grand Guignol body horror theatre-nerd weirdo).

And no, I don't think you're wrong, considering how making films generally is often seen as an act of macho dominance. But I also wonder whether women worry more about being tarred with the genre brush, assuming that if they start off in a certain place, they're almost surely doomed to stay there, like the way so many female directors get automatically slotted into relationship movies/comedies, no matter what they're actually interested in. Good example, and someone I totally forgot: Penelope Spheeris, whose spree-killer movie The Boys Next Door was lost in the shuffle after Wayne's World.

[handful-ofdust.livejournal.com]

Oh, and in the 1950s Ida Lupino became the first woman ever to write and direct an acknowledged film noir: The Hitch-Hiker. It's pretty pitch-black. I always wondered whether or not it was an influence on Eric Red's script for The Hitcher.

He was tough... a good soldier oughta be.

[cucumberseed.livejournal.com]

Ravenous is an amazing movie.

[sovay]

Or...I dunno. Jump in!

I haven't even vaguely the expertise to contribute to this conversation, but since I recognize only five of the films you name (Near Dark, Ravenous, Trouble Ever Day, In the Cut, Fat Girl) and have actually seen none of them, I'm going to take notes.

[handful-ofdust.livejournal.com]

As intertribal's been pointing out to me, a surprising number of things are available on Youtube. I wouldn't be surprised if you could at least find chunks of most of the above...

[moon-custafer.livejournal.com]

Possibly due to you*, I've come to think of horror as almost an inherently female genre, at least on the written-word side of things.


*and Mrs Radcliffe, Mary Shelly, Shirley Jackson, etc....

[handful-ofdust.livejournal.com]

Ha! Well, thanks, but we're actually in the minority there, too. Better-represented, though, for sure...

[moon-custafer.livejournal.com]

My logic may also be something like: "Of the human genders, which is the one for whom it is perfectly normal to grow an internal parasite, eject it in a flood of blood and gore, and then embrace it and care for it?"

[handful-ofdust.livejournal.com]

That would be us!;)