I Spit on Your Celluloid: The History of Women Directing Horror Movies

In this comprehensive debut study, journalist Honeycutt examines how contemporaneous attitudes toward women have shaped female filmmakers’ contributions to the horror genre. She contends that though early 20th-century France was marked by conservative gender norms, Alice Guy-Blaché was able to become the first woman to direct a horror flick (1913’s The Pit and the Pendulum) and establish herself in the country’s film scene because directing movies wasn’t yet considered a prestigious profession. The sharp analysis elucidates how women filmmakers have both pushed back against and perpetuated sexist genre tropes, sometimes in the same movie. The Slumber Party Massacre (1982), for instance, was written by feminist Rita Mae Brown as a satire of the phallic imagery and sexual puritanism of slasher films, only for director Amy Holden Jones to bury that subtext by shooting the script as a traditional genre exercise. Elsewhere, Honeycutt discusses how Mary Harron’s American Psycho (2000) toned down some of the source novel’s violence so that the satire might “come through more clearly,” and how Jennifer Kent drew inspiration for The Babadook (2014) from a friend whose three-year-old son was terrified by an imaginary monster man he reported seeing around the house. Insightful and encyclopedic, this is a bloody good time. Photos. (Aug.)