Female Horror Directors: Brief History of Cinema Issue #6

 

The directors of the anthology horror film XX (2017)

Women’s Visions of Horror: The Female Directors of Scary Movies

A Brief History of Cinema Issue #6

 

A rarity in the horror genre for most of its history has been the female director. In modern Hollywood, directors of all gender expressions have far more opportunities to direct films of any genre or subject, but horror cinema has been dominated by male visions and voices for over a century. Looking back, though, there have been some pivotal scary movies directed by women. These women have helped pave the way for future directors, and crafted unique tales of suspense and terror that still stand out today.

In the first seventy years of cinema, there are a scattering of horror directing credits for women, such as Stephanie Rothman, who co-directed Blood Bath (1966) and later directed The Velvet Vampire (1971), and Brianne Murphy who directed Blood Sabbath (1972), but I’m going to start at the beginning of the 1980s, because that was truly the decade in which women got a noteworthy start in the genre, beginning with a shockingly vile piece of trash directed by Barbara Peeters and distributed by Roger Corman’s New World Pictures, called Humanoids from the Deep (1980).

 

1980s

Humanoids starts off in a pretty upsetting way. A fisherman watches his son get dragged under the waves and killed, then their entire boat explodes in an exaggerated fireball. Right after that, the main character’s Golden Retriever crosses paths with a humanoid on land, and they find the dog dead and mangled on the beach the next day. Every other fisherman’s dog in the town is killed except for the one Indigenous man who lives there, but his Husky doesn’t survive for long, either. The town is descended upon by amphibious mutations with a particularly disturbing agenda: kill all the men and rape all the women. Aside from this aspect, it’s a generic monster movie that culminates in many humanoids attacking the townsfolk at the annual salmon festival.

The humanoids look derivative of Creature from the Black Lagoon’s Gill-Man, but the design is pretty good. It’s in the way they are plainly shot that makes them less impressive than they could have been. The monsters were created by Rob Bottin, two years before he made the incredible creature effects for John Carpenter’s The Thing and one year before some of the best-looking cinematic werewolves for Joe Dante’s The Howling (Dante was originally offered Humanoids but declined to direct). It shows how a skilled director’s eye can make a big difference to how convincing a special effect may appear. With that said, Peeters found a way to make it seem as if there were many humanoids throughout the film when they only had three suits to work with. It’s difficult to know just how much of the decision-making she ultimately made, given the widely known controversy about the film’s post-production and final cut.

Humanoids from the Deep was always intended as a standard, exploitative creature feature, but Roger Corman wanted the rape scenes to be more explicit. According to Corman, Peeters did well enough directing the violent deaths of the male characters but skimped out on showing the creature-on-women brutality, so he brought in another director to shoot more footage, which was inserted into the film without the cast or director being informed. After she was shown the final cut, which was renamed from its production title Beneath the Darkness, Peeters wanted her name removed from the film, but was denied. She never directed another horror film after that. There’s lots of gore and lots of nudity, and even by today’s standards it comes off as gratuitous and uncouth. While not particularly original or creative (the ending rips off Alien), it’s still an entertaining, if problematic, monster movie.

The Slumber Party Massacre (1982) was originally written as a parody of the slasher genre by Rita Mae Brown, but it was made as a straightforward slasher movie, produced and directed by Amy Holden Jones. The final product is a completely different kind of film from Humanoids, partly given it was developed primarily by women, though funnily enough, it was also distributed by Roger Corman’s New World Pictures. It’s perhaps not too surprising that it bears many similarities to a later slasher film, Scream, given its origins as a parody, but that origin also means it has a number of dark jokes and gags, and is purposefully funny while also being scary—or at least attempting to be the latter. A maskless male killer torments and kills a group of high school girls one by one with a power drill. The girls are typical teen victims, but they are not helpless. Two boys (who were spying on them earlier) hang around for a while and try to help, but they are quickly dispatched, and the final girls must fend for themselves against the maniac.

This one is a mixed bag, with moments of greatness and originality, but also annoying clichés and dull dialogue. It’s also extremely unsubtle—not that slasher movies are typically subtle pieces of art, but a man trying to drive a power drill, the most phallic of all slasher weapons, into a woman is unmistakably meant to invoke rape as well as murder. Mixed bag though it may be, the pace is fast, the kills are bloody, the nudity is plentiful, and moments of comedy mixed with suspense are achieved, like when a character opens the fridge to get a snack and looks away as the audience sees a dead body about to roll out onto the kitchen floor. T.S.P.M. also a) was financially successful, b) staked a claim in the annals of memorable 80’s slasher movies, and c) started its own franchise plus a spinoff franchise which continued the trend of having a female director at the helm, with Sorority House Massacre (1986) directed by Carol Frank, and Slumber Party Massacre 2 (1987) directed by Deborah Brock.

One of the horror movies directed by a woman that stands out from later in the decade is one I have unfortunately still not seen. Near Dark (1987) is the only one of these films, as far as I know, directed by someone who would later go on to win an Academy Award for Best Director (directing 2008’s The Hurt Locker). It was only Kathryn Bigelow’s second feature film, but Near Dark has a reputation for being one of the best vampire films of the 1980’s. Another completely different horror film released the same year was Blood Diner (1987), which I have seen, and have reviewed (links will be included at the end). Director Jackie Kong made several low budget films throughout the 80’s and typically included humour in them, but Blood Diner was a unique combination of some seriously twisted horror content with comedy ranging from absurd to revolting. She made her directorial debut with The Being (1983), which was also a horror flick, but she will always be remembered for Blood Diner by those who know of her work.

The last director from this decade is Mary Lambert, who directed one of the best adaptations of a Stephen King story in a decade that saw a total of ten films based on his works (it was the peak era for his novels but even more adaptations would be made in the coming decades). King wrote the screenplay for Pet Sematary (1989) and had final say on who would direct it. He picked her because of her enthusiasm for his writing, and I think it was a wise decision on his part. Of all the horror movies I’ve covered so far, Pet Sematary seems the truest to being a straight-up scary movie, with chilling atmosphere, jump scares, gore, suspense, and memorably disturbing imagery. Lambert went on to direct a sequel without King’s involvement, and the franchise returned to featuring a female director with the prequel Pet Sematary: Bloodlines (2023) (Lindsey Anderson Beer).

 

1990s & 2000s

The 90’s were defined by bad sequels for female horror directors. Kristine Peterson directed the third entry in the Critters franchise, which did not get a theatrical release, but Critters 3 (1991) isn’t the worst of the sequels, though that isn’t exactly a compliment. Another direct-to-video sequel was Howling VI: The Freaks (1991), directed by Hope Perello, marking the only one of the seven widely panned sequels to not be directed by a man. As already mentioned, there was Mary Lambert’s Pet Sematary Two (1992), and another unrelated sequel to a Stephen King adaptation came at the end of the decade: The Rage: Carrie 2 (1999), which didn’t even start out as a Carrie sequel. It was an original concept later retooled to function as a belated (and pointless) follow-up, and the original director quit, which meant Katt Shea had to reshoot footage after already coming onto the project with little time to prepare. I certainly don’t think the film’s box office failure should be pinned on her.

One of the highest profile horror sequels of its day, Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare (1991), was branded as the last entry in the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise. Rachel Talalay had been involved in previous Nightmare films and took on directing duties with the intent to infuse more humour into this “final” one—which is part of the reason Freddy’s Dead is one of the worst, if not the worst, of the Nightmare sequels. The concept was already worn out and the creativity had started to dwindle before this one, but if steering Freddy away from a mix of terror and dark humour into total goofiness is what it took for Wes Craven to come back to the series with New Nightmare, then so be it, because that one was awesome. One interesting detail is the film contains 3D sequences, which makes it the only example of a 3D horror film directed by a woman.

The only other notable sequel from the 90’s was Slumber Party Massacre III (1990) (Sally Mattison), and the only original horror movie that stands out later spawned a TV series helmed by the guy who wrote the screenplay for the movie: Joss Whedon. Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992) was directed by Fran Rubel Kuzui, but it is more of a horror-comedy hybrid, just like the show that followed. Whedon apparently wasn’t content with the direction his script took, and the show is now far more well-known than the film. It received mixed reviews and wasn’t a huge hit. At the turn of the century came an adaptation of an unusual novel by Brett Easton Ellis called American Psycho (2000), which was adapted into a screenplay by Mary Herron and Guinevere Turner, directed by Herron. Some argue it’s better than the book, but like Buffy, it isn’t a pure horror film, though features one of the most compelling depictions of a serial killer ever brought to screen.

As we leave the 2000s behind and enter into a very different decade for the female horror director, there’s one last example that was dismissed upon its release but has since undergone reevaluation as an important example of feminist filmmaking in a genre that, as has been demonstrated thus far, lacked strong female perspectives for far too long. Jennifer’s Body (2009) was directed by Karyn Kusama, from a screenplay by Diablo Cody (who won the Oscar for Juno two years prior) and starred Megan Fox as the titular character. Fox was hot off Transformers and was viewed at the time as simply being eye candy in a derivative mix of demonic possession and teen angst. While I still think the execution was not particularly great, the ideas within the movie are interesting twists on horror tropes, and in a decade that sorely lacked original stories compared to useless remakes and sequels, at least it tried to be something unconventional. 

 

2010s

A new generation of ladies brought their talents to the horror genre and helped revitalize it after two decades that were filled with more crap than craft, though it wouldn’t be until a few years into the 2010s that a true gem would emerge. Catherine Hardwicke had worked in the industry for years before she directed her first film in 2003, then she became interested in directing the adaptation of the hugely popular novel Twilight a few years later, which was horror-adjacent what with it being a vampire romance tale. The success of Twilight is what led to her involvement in Red Riding Hood (2011), which was a darker, more mature take on the classic fairy tale, with a werewolf in place of a regular wolf, though the film was not a critical or financial hit.

Even though it was interesting to have a woman behind the camera for Carrie (2013), another adaptation of Stephen King’s novel (originally adapted in the 70’s by Brian De Palma, which this one is essentially a remake of), King himself asked why anyone would bother when the original was (still is) so good? The Carrie remake, directed by Kimberley Pierce, was unnecessary, but the recasting was good. Luckily this decade had far fewer sequels and remakes compared to the previous two (from women, at least), with only a couple more worth mentioning: Rabid (2019), a remake of an early David Cronenberg flick, directed by Jen & Sylvia Soska, and a second remake of Black Christmas (2019), directed by Sophia Takal. There was Chained (2012), from Jennifer Lynch, Honeymoon (2014) from Leigh Janiak (more on her soon), and Jennifer’s Body director Karyn Kusama returned to the genre for a comparatively darker film, The Invitation (2015).

The one that stands out the most, to me, is the international success The Babadook (2014), from Australian writer/director Jennifer Kent. Essie Davis gives an incredibly commanding performance as single mother Amelia, tormented by her awful son Samuel (Noah Wiseman) and a boogeyman-inspired monster from a remarkably disturbing children’s book. Not only is the film ominous, haunting, and genuinely unsettling from beginning to end, Kent brings a visual distinctness to the way everything looks, with the inside of the house standing out in particular. There is no reliance on cheap jump scares or excessive gore, but rather memorable imagery and drawn-out suspense. It messes with the viewer psychologically, as well, in some of the ways other great directors like her had done before (Kubrick with The Shining, Friedkin with The Exorcist, and Demme with The Silence of the Lambs). While Kent may have been influenced by horror classics, she was able to craft a very original and highly effective horror film for a new generation.

The Babadook is the standout from a female director in the 2010s for me, but there were still other films with women behind the camera that were hailed by critics and audiences alike. Julia Ducournau made her feature directorial debut with the French cannibal film Raw (2016), and Rose Glass made her debut with the A24 religious-angled Saint Maud (2019). The anthology film XX (2017) features four segments directed by four different women, including previously mentioned Karyn Kusama, along with Annie Clark, Roxanne Benjamin, and Jovanka Vuckovic. While there are still a couple stinkers to point out, like The Bye Bye Man (2017) from Stacy Title and The Banana Splits Movie (2019) from Danishka Esterhazy, I prefer to see a higher number of unsuccessful original films over unsuccessful remakes of other better movies. Oh yeah, the Banana Splits director also directed a made-for-TV remake of Slumber Party Massacre (2021)…

 

2020s

For the first half of the 2020s, a couple female directors have returned to the genre of horror, and newcomers have continued to find success, telling ever more diverse stories. Titane (2021) was Julia Ducournau’s follow-up to Raw, taking the premise of Queen’s song “I’m in Love with My Car” to a whole new level. The psychological horror film Censor (2021), about a stringent film editor in the 1980s who investigates a strange mystery surrounding her missing sister, was directed by Prano-Bailey-Bond, who also co-wrote the very original screenplay. Candyman (2021) was advertised primarily as being “From Director Nia DaCosta” which was pretty cool considering it was only her second movie and could have just as easily been marketed merely on the grounds of being a sequel to the 90’s original directed by Bernard Rose.

Another lady who returned to the genre was Leigh Janiak, who directed not one, not two, but three films based on R.L. Stine’s Fear Street books. While the Fear Street Trilogy (2021) was not groundbreaking by any means, they proved to be an entertaining trio of horror throwbacks to stream on Netflix in a summer that was still catching up from pandemic setbacks the year before. These half-dozen movies I just covered were all released in 2021 alone! The spike in numbers might have been a result of the pandemic, but even so, there has been a welcome influx of female directors (forgive the pun) taking a stab at indie horror/thrillers, to stellar results.

Fresh (2022), directed by Mimi Cave, was another directorial debut that was well received. Bodies Bodies Bodies (2022), directed by Halina Reijn, also did well, and so did Deadstream (2022): a found footage flick released straight to Shudder, directed, written, produced, and edited by husband-and-wife duo Vanessa and Joseph Winter. Another streaming standout was Run Rabbit Run (2023), from Diana Reid over on Netflix, and finally, released simultaneously in theaters and on Peacock just in time for Halloween was the long-awaited Five Nights at Freddy’s (2023), which is one of the most significant horror flicks of recent years. Critics trashed it, but fans were eager to see it, and it became the highest grossing Blumhouse film of all-time, thanks in no small part to co-writer and director Emma Tammi working closely with game creator Scott Cawthon to deliver something that brought fans in, which isn’t always easy to do with movies based on video games.  

We haven’t even made it halfway through this decade and already there are just about as many well-reviewed horror movies directed by women as there were in the entirety of the previous decade! If the horror genre continues going as strong as it has in the first half of the 2020s, I’m sure we will be in for even more entertaining and disturbing films from new and returning female horror visionaries. This brief history of cinema is by no means complete, and while it does not yet go very far back in time, there are already new scary movies in the works with female directors at the helm coming soon. I bet it won’t be long before one of them gives us a bold new vision of horror.

 

Related Reviews:

Blood Diner (1987) Review:

http://cccmovies.blogspot.com/2023/10/blood-diner-1987-review.html

Pet Sematary (1989) Review:

http://cccmovies.blogspot.com/2016/10/pet-sematary-1989-review.html

Critters 3 (1991) Review:

http://cccmovies.blogspot.com/2022/10/critters-3-1991-review.html

American Psycho (2000) Review:

http://cccmovies.blogspot.com/2021/10/american-psycho-2000-review.html

Fear Street Part One: 1994 (2021) Review:

http://cccmovies.blogspot.com/2021/10/fear-street-part-one-1994-2021-review.html

Fear Street Part Two: 1978 (2021) Review:

http://cccmovies.blogspot.com/2021/10/fear-street-part-two-1978-2021-review.html

Fear Street Part Three: 1666 (2021) Review:

http://cccmovies.blogspot.com/2021/10/fear-street-part-three-1666-2021-review.html

Candyman (2021) Review:

http://cccmovies.blogspot.com/2021/10/candyman-2021-review.html