All-female hor­ror anthol­o­gy XX is a wor­thy project poor­ly executed

Hor­ror cin­e­ma has often been the object of vir­u­lent fem­i­nist cri­tique. This comes as no sur­prise since from the ear­ly days of the genre, pre­dom­i­nant­ly male hor­ror film­mak­ers have con­tin­u­ous­ly por­trayed women as vic­tims, at the mer­cy of goth­ic vam­pires, giant goril­las, chain­saw-wield­ing psy­chopaths and more.

It’s tempt­ing to con­clude that hor­ror movies are made by and for peo­ple who hate women and enjoy their suf­fer­ing. Yet this is to sim­pli­fy the com­plex plea­sures of hor­ror and to cast all female fans as masochists. Evolv­ing rather in a high­ly alle­gor­i­cal reg­is­ter, the genre fre­quent­ly uses onscreen vio­lence and vic­tim­i­sa­tion to sat­is­fy a vis­cer­al curios­i­ty about the body and explore the oppres­sive nature of social con­ven­tions regard­ing gen­der, sex­u­al­i­ty and identity.

Despite a rich his­to­ry of women in hor­ror, anthol­o­gy hor­ror films have done few favours for female direc­tors. Recent iter­a­tion the V/H/S fran­chise fea­tured none across three instal­ments while the two ABCs of Death films show­case a com­bined total of five female film­mak­ers across 52 shorts. In a cli­mate in which the likes of Ana Lily Amir­pour, Julia Ducour­nau, the Sos­ka Sis­ters and Karyn Kusama are flour­ish­ing, it cer­tain­ly feels an uncom­fort­able sta­tus quo worth chal­leng­ing. XX, the first ever all-female anthol­o­gy hor­ror film, explic­it­ly sets out to do that.

Jovan­ka Vuckovic’s open­ing short ​‘The Box’ is by far the best. After her son peers into a box held by a mys­te­ri­ous stranger, a wife and moth­er sees her per­fect fam­i­ly swift­ly suc­cumb to a strange starv­ing spell. The film’s slick pro­duc­tion val­ues and lev­els of dread are unfor­tu­nate­ly not matched by the sub­se­quent three shorts, with the next part, direct­ed by musi­cian Annie Clark, prov­ing par­tic­u­lar­ly poor.

Quite besides the hypocrisy of giv­ing a pop­u­lar musi­cian a cov­et­ed spot in a film for women direc­tors, the result­ing short ​‘The Birth­day Par­ty’ is ama­teur­ish in its exe­cu­tion. A dark­ly com­ic alle­go­ry about the pres­sure which sub­ur­ban moth­ers strug­gle under, it fails to match the creepi­ness sug­gest­ed by Clark’s jar­ring­ly dis­so­nant sound­track. Rox­anne Benjamin’s ​‘Don’t Fall’ aims for a more clas­si­cal Amer­i­can slasher/​monster movie aes­thet­ic but proves incon­se­quen­tial, while final short ​‘Her Only Liv­ing Son’ is the most tech­ni­cal­ly accom­plished, but proves frustrating.

Direct­ed by The Invitation’s Karyn Kusama, the short touch­es on mater­nal themes via body hor­ror, with the moth­er of a young man grow­ing increas­ing­ly afraid of who – or what – he may become. Despite an effec­tive open­ing, the film ends on a note of sym­bol­ism too ambi­tious for the short for­mat, bring­ing the anthol­o­gy to an end on some­thing of a bum note.

Framed by pret­ty banal ani­ma­tion, the film as a whole reflects a rather lim­it­ed vision of wom­an­hood, with three shorts focused sole­ly on moth­ers. That XX proves patchy is a dis­ap­point­ment, par­tic­u­lar­ly as it is a noble project. We can only hope that future instal­ments in a pos­si­ble fran­chise (?) will do more jus­tice to the the­mat­ic poten­tial of hor­ror as a genre for and about women and their place in the world.

XX is avail­able on DVD from 8 May.