– showcasing horror cinema directed, written, or produced by women.
The Miskatonic Institute & Final Girls Berlin Presents: GHOULS TO THE FRONT: RETHINKING WOMEN’S HORROR FILMMAKING - with Alexandra Heller-Nicholas
The Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies is proud to present this special encore class with film writer and scholar Alexandra Heller-Nicholas (1000 Women in Horror, 1895-2018) at Berlin's Final Girls Film Fest.
While the growing noise in recent years surrounding the inequalities facing women filmmakers has been very welcome, when it comes to horror especially there’s often a subtle suggestion that women who make these kinds of films are some kind of novelty, a cute little curio often approached by mainstream critics with an unspoken air of “can you believe women today even make horror films?”.
Scratch beneath the surface, however, and as any horror fan worth their mettle will tell you it is hardly a new phenomenon. But outside the usual suspects who appear with near-uniform regularity on the token listicles that pop up every time a woman-directed horror film makes a splash, there is a long, diverse history of women’s filmmaking in the horror genre.
While researching and writing her book 1000 Women in Horror, 1895-2018, Australian film critic and author Alexandra Heller-Nicholas was struck by the scope of women’s horror filmmaking. That scope lead to some important – and sometimes difficult – questions: are horror films made by women necessarily ‘feminist’? What do we mean when we talk about ‘feminism’ anyway? Do women make necessarily different kinds of horror films to men and represent violence in different ways? And who has told us which women horror filmmakers’ matter – and, through their omission from popular memory, which ones don’t?
Rather than presenting a singular alternate history of women’s horror filmmaking, Heller-Nicholas seeks to blow open the way we think about this subject more broadly, looking at a range of examples from around the world from in order to think through ways we can collectively rethink the history of horror more broadly to be more inclusive, more representative, and more fun.
Alexandra Heller-Nicholas is an award-winning film critic, author and academic. She has written eight books on cult, horror and exploitation film with an emphasis on gender politics including Rape-Revenge Films: A Critical Study (McFarland, 2011), the Bram Stoker Award nominated Masks in Horror Cinema: Eyes Without Faces (University of Wales Press, 2019), and, most recently, 1000 Women in Horror, 1895-2018. Alexandra is a member of the Alliance of Women Film Journalists, the Australian Film Critics Association, and on the advisory board for the Miskatonic Institute for Horror Studies. She holds a PhD in Screen Studies from the University of Melbourne and is a Research Fellow at RMIT University and an Adjunct Professor at Deakin University. Follow her at: Twitter @suspirialex Website: thebluelenses.com