How female direc­tors are stak­ing their claim in horror

Hor­ror is not a genre in which female direc­tors are well rep­re­sent­ed. How­ev­er, the recent likes of Jen­nifer Kent’s The Babadook and Ana Lily Amirpour’s A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night were gen­uine break­out hits with unique voic­es. Their sto­ries had dis­tinct female per­spec­tives; the dif­fer­ence between those films writ­ten and direct­ed by women and those just helmed by women is the dif­fer­ence between some­one with an orig­i­nal vision and those who might sim­ply be direc­tors for hire. But why are there so few women work­ing in this genre?

One woman who is no stranger to mak­ing hor­ror films is Karyn Kusama. Her lat­est film, The Invi­ta­tion, is set at a din­ner par­ty where all hell breaks loose. Her first for­ay into the hor­ror genre was 2009’s Jennifer’s Body, which was writ­ten by Dia­blo Cody and has a very dif­fer­ent feel from the male-script­ed The Invi­ta­tion. The for­mer is all about female empow­er­ment and rela­tion­ships, while the lat­ter is a steady hand­ed kill film. Does the dynam­ic of women writ­ing the sto­ries as well as direct­ing them make a dif­fer­ence, and can this type of hor­ror be pop­u­lar enough to sell?

The Babadook’s unseen mon­ster was not as fright­en­ing as how Kent turned the stress­es of being a sin­gle mum while jug­gling a low-paid job into a para­noid creep­ing hor­ror. Touch­ing on the child’s fear of the bad par­ent and also the feel­ing as a moth­er that you might want to harm your own child, this film was a word of mouth hit. Unset­tling rather than plain hor­rif­ic, it touched a nerve with a wider audience.

Then there’s Amirpour’s vision of a young woman nego­ti­at­ing her place in a male dom­i­nat­ed soci­ety. We see her get­ting ready for a night out, putting on her make up care­ful­ly, danc­ing to her records and prepar­ing to leave the house; a rou­tine every young woman has gone through. Except in this instance her night out includes look­ing for her next meal. A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is filmed in a low-key and gore-free man­ner. There is a love sto­ry here but nev­er an overt­ly sex­u­al suc­cubus, an all too often pres­ence in male dri­ven hor­ror films. Even The Invi­ta­tion has its own point­less gra­tu­itous female ​‘mon­ey shot’, dis­turb­ing for its crass­ness rather than as a trope for dri­ving the story.

There are, of course, oth­er women direc­tors who have dipped their toe into the hor­ror genre. Oscar win­ner Kathryn Bigelow’s 1987 film Near Dark was her first major fea­ture and a wel­come addi­tion to the vam­pire canon. The late, great Anto­nia Bird’s Rav­en­ous from 1999 was a par­tic­u­lar­ly hor­ri­ble can­ni­bal sto­ry. But not many women seem to make it a con­scious career choice. And that’s a real pity because the unique per­spec­tive of what scares women is what scares every­one, and it’s impor­tant to have a more round­ed per­spec­tive and a vari­ety of view­points and voices.

On a more pos­i­tive note, next on the hori­zon is XX, a new ini­tia­tive of hor­ror anthol­o­gy films com­prised of sto­ries exclu­sive­ly told by women. Kusama is one of the film­mak­ers tak­ing up the chal­lenge, as is St Vincent’s Annie Clark and Box­ing Hele­na direc­tor Jen­nifer Cham­bers Lynch, who, despite her poor­ly received tale of the ulti­mate woman’s fear of being kid­napped by a stalk­er, has gone on to make a mod­est career as a hor­ror direc­tor in TV and film. Let’s hope XX turns out some high qual­i­ty mate­r­i­al, oth­er­wise it might appear to be a pass­ing nod to inclu­siv­i­ty in a medi­um that still prefers its women trussed up in biki­nis and cov­ered in blood.

The Invi­ta­tion is out now in the US.