In cinema, the genre has also provided a perennial springboard for rising stars, both behind and in front of the camera. So is the gender landscape of horror changing? Anyone with a sense of history knows that from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House and Anne Rice’s Interview With the Vampire, the gothic romance has always depended on women writers and readers. ‘Explicitly challenges stereotypes’: Ana Lily Amirpour’s Girl Walks Home Alone at Night. In 2012, the deliciously twisted American Mary by sisters Jen and Sylvia Soska raised the roof at FrightFest, the UK’s world-renowned horror showcase which has also premiered films ranging from Kerry Anne Mullaney’s The Dead Outside (2008) to Axelle Carolyn’s Soulmate (2013), Ruth Platt’s The Lesson (2015), and Kate Shenton’s Egomaniac (2016). In the decade since that article was published, we’ve seen such female-helmed horror hybrids as Kusama’s satirical high-school nightmare Jennifer’s Body (2009) written by Oscar-winner Diablo Cody Leigh Janiak’s marital-meltdown weirdie Honeymoon (2014), a cross between Andrzej Zulawski’s Possession and The Evil Dead and even Anna Biller’s Douglas Sirk/Jess Franco mash-up The Love Witch. Similarly, at the Sundance film festival in January, whoops and cheers greeted the premiere of XX, a female-helmed horror anthology described by one of its makers, Jovanka Vuckovic, as a “historic moment… created in direct response to the lack of opportunities for women in film, particularly in the horror genre”, which, she argues, was “badly in need of new perspectives”.īack in 2007, a Guardian article by Emine Saner entitled “Everything but the ghoul” argued that “there just aren’t enough female directors in any genre, but especially in horror”. Last October, an article in Rolling Stone magazine hailed “the rise of the modern female horror film-maker”, charting a course from The Babadook to Raw via Karyn Kusama’s 2015 chiller The Invitation, and arguing that a new wave of “horror films helmed by women… have helped elevate the genre by opening it up to stories that unsettle audiences in new and different ways”. That such genre-refreshing films were directed by women has not gone unnoticed. Drawing on sources ranging from Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s 1934 oddity Crime Without Passion to Jonathan Glazer’s uncategorisable Birth, Prevenge managed to be maniacal and melancholy, creepy and funny – often simultaneously. Grief and transformation are also at the heart of Prevenge, a homicidal antidote to What To Expect When You’re Expecting, written and directed by leading lady Alice Lowe while herself heavily pregnant. In 2014, Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook had been my pick of the year – a spine-chilling fantasia which drew on folk tales and silent film techniques as it subtly unpicked the grief and paranoia of a single mother, habitually projecting her fears onto her lonely child. At the end of 2015, my yearly Observer list of the 10 best films released in UK cinemas featured both Carol Morley’s eerie The Falling and A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night, an electrifying Iranian-American vampire western which writer/director Ana Lily Amirpour described as being the love-child of Sergio Leone and David Lynch, with Nosferatu as a babysitter. As all great horror films should, it touches a nerve – simultaneously repelling and seducing its audience, sucking us in and spitting us out.įor horror fans, Raw is the latest in an encouraging wave of genre-bending movies which have twisted familiar tropes to new and unsettling ends. Like Claire Denis’s controversial 2001 shocker Trouble Every Day, Raw takes an intimate approach to the taboo subject of cannibalism, sinking its teeth into the sins of the flesh. It’s a deliciously horrifying vignette, squirm-inducingly squishy, yet somehow bizarrely sensual. There’s a moment in French film-maker Julia Ducournau’s prize-winning feature debut Raw in which a young vegetarian (ethereally played by Garance Marillier) finds herself unexpectedly ravenous at the sight of a severed finger.
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