Drew Barrymore is joining the female horror… | Little White Lies

Women In Film

Drew Bar­ry­more is join­ing the female hor­ror revolution

18 Sep 2017

Words by Sofie Steenhaut

A woman with blonde hair, wearing a beige knitted jumper, laughing and speaking on a mobile phone.
A woman with blonde hair, wearing a beige knitted jumper, laughing and speaking on a mobile phone.
The all-female Black Rose Anthol­o­gy is a nec­es­sary cat­a­lyst for achiev­ing gen­der equal­i­ty in the genre.

In case you haven’t noticed, women love hor­ror. More specif­i­cal­ly, young women love hor­ror. Some say it allows them to escape from the real threat of vio­lence they face. Oth­ers the­o­rise that the appeal lies in the sub­ject mat­ter. As film pro­fes­sor Shel­ley Stamp notes, Hor­ror, more than any oth­er film genre, deals open­ly with ques­tions of gen­der, sex­u­al­i­ty and the body.” What­ev­er the rea­son, it remains a fact that women have long made up a sig­nif­i­cant por­tion of the audi­ence for hor­ror movies.

Despite this, women are scarce­ly found on the oth­er side of the screen. Tra­di­tion­al­ly female direc­tors and writ­ers have been under­rep­re­sent­ed in hor­ror even more than oth­er gen­res. In recent years, how­ev­er, film pro­duc­ers and TV net­works final­ly seem to have caught on that some­thing needs to change in order to sat­is­fy their audi­ence. Today female direc­tors are increas­ing­ly tak­ing con­trol of the nar­ra­tives that his­tor­i­cal­ly have been imposed on them. 

The Black Rose Anthol­o­gy is one such project. The hor­ror series is a copro­duc­tion between Drew Bar­ry­more and Nan­cy Juvonen’s pro­duc­tion com­pa­ny, Flower Films, Scream co-showrun­ner Jill Blotevo­gel and CBS Tele­vi­sion Stu­dios, and has been picked up by The CW. Hav­ing pro­duced female-led nar­ra­tives in the past (How to be Sin­gle, Whip It) Bar­ry­more and Juvo­nen want to go even fur­ther with The Black Rose Anthol­o­gy: it will be exclu­sive­ly writ­ten and direct­ed by women.

Each hour-long episode will explore basic human fears from a female point-of-view: guilt, jeal­ousy, repres­sion, para­noia, insan­i­ty, sex­u­al obses­sion and sur­vival. The project bears some resem­blance to the all-female anthol­o­gy hor­ror film XX, which pre­miered at the 2017 Sun­dance Film Fes­ti­val and includ­ed chap­ters by Karyn Kusama and Annie Clark aka St Vincent.

The CW’s pri­ma­ry objec­tive is to attract a female audi­ence to the net­work. When I got here, we were 70 per cent female to 30 per cent male,” net­work pres­i­dent Mark Pedowitz has said. We’re now 5050… I think the bet­ter mix is 55 – 45, female to male. So we’re try­ing to bring more women back to us.”

From Jen­nifer Kent’s The Babadook, to Ana Lily Amirpour’s A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, to Julia Ducournau’s Raw, to Alice Lowe’s Pre­venge, female direc­tors have been shak­ing things up in the hor­ror genre of late. Rolling Stone has dubbed this rev­o­lu­tion the rise of the mod­ern female hor­ror film­mak­er”. In this regard, all-female films and tele­vi­sion series are a nec­es­sary cat­a­lyst for equal oppor­tu­ni­ties for women both in and beyond the hor­ror genre.

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