by Maria Lewis
We’ve spoken in this column before about how challenging it can be as a female horror movie lover. Outside of the Final Girl and rare, glorious, women-driven horror flicks like The Descent and Ginger Snaps, ladies have been forced to see themselves in horror usually at the end of a knife. Running up the stairs when they should be running out the front door, women have historically been in horror to be a) killed b) please the male gaze or c) be killed while pleasing the male glaze. Yet we’re nearing an interesting point in the genre world: a different kind of woman is stepping in front of the camera and actual women are stepping behind it.
This year alone there’s a whole swag of female driven and female directed horror movies including Raw, Berlin Syndrome, Bitch and XX, to name a few. And now, there’s an Aussie film festival – driven by women – trying to give feminist horror the leg up it deserves. For Film’s Sake – formerly World Of Women – is a film festival kicking off in Sydney later this month and is designed specifically to shift the spotlight on to female and minority filmmakers. A big part of that, thankfully, is horror. “We’ve been in the position for so long where we’ve been told by filmmakers – and largely male filmmakers – ‘here is my art, this is good art’,” says festival director Sophie Mathisen [pictured with moi]. A filmmaker in her own right, she wrote, directed, edited, produced and starred in the critically acclaimed drama called, well, Drama. She was also one of the Lead Hotdogs™ in that famous protest at the 2017 AACTA Awards where a legion of women crashed the red carpet dressed as hotdogs to protest what a “sausage fest” the Australian industry is.
Phallic symbolism aside, Mathisen and her cohorts have organised an entire night of the festival’s five days dedicated to and celebrating women in horror: Fright Night. Having watched “an amazing amount of really good films” in a bid to select content for For Film’s Sake, Mathisen says she’s proud to stand behind the menu of horror films that made the final cut. Front and centre is XX – an anthology of horror shorts directed by and starring women such as Aeon Flux’s Karyn Kusama and Heavenly Creatures’ Melanie Lynskey (just to start with). Included on our list of most anticipated horror films of 2017, one of XX’s directors Roxanne Benjamin is also making the trek over from the US for the event. The bad-ass titled Bitch is on the line-up: directed by Marianna Palka, it follows the story of a woman who assumes the psyche of a vicious dog. And for dessert, a retrospective screening of Kathryn Bigelow’s vampire cult classic, Near Dark, which is celebrating its thirtieth anniversary. For Mathisen, it was crucial to champion horror films that are sometimes “traditionally overlooked” as part of an unending discussion about gender representation in the business. “I’m super interested in anything that is blending reality and identity and artifice,” she says.
The long and short of it is, female horror fans have been desperate to see something like this designed by women like them forever. Yet this isn’t just something ladies have been demanding: there are thousands of men out there who have been patiently waiting for horror to shift from the sometimes overwhelmingly masculine, frat boy attitude that not only restricts the storytelling but bores the audience. Now that there’s an event doing just that and the most important thing you can do to guarantee that it keeps happening is get out there and support the hell out of it.
Maria Lewis is a journalist and author previously seen on SBS Viceland’s The Feed. She’s the presenter and producer of the Eff Yeah Film & Feminism podcast. Her debut novel Who’s Afraid? was released in 2016 with the sequel – Who’s Afraid Too? – out now. You can find her on Twitter @MovieMazz.
