Original subtitles

- There's this crazy idea that horror is not for women

or that women are not fans of horror.

[screams]

- There's some deluded idea that--

that talking about gender and horror is somehow

a contemporary phenomenon.

It's like, sit down, little boys.

The grownups are talking.

- There's a whole tribe of women who are just so into it.

[screams]

[laughs]

- We're expected to behave certain ways in real life.

But in horror films, no holds barred.

And no mercy, either.

[grunting]

- Like, each of us thought we were, like, the weird kid.

And now we're realizing that there's

so many other weird kids.

[screams]

- As a woman, is there some transference

that I feel when I watch a woman in jeopardy

and I can relate to that?

- No! I can't stand it!

- Women have been integral to horror since the beginning.

- I command you to get up!

- Women practically invented the horror genre.

- We've been gracing the front of horror movies

for a very, very long time.

And you can't have horror without women.

It's not possible.

[music playing]

- ♪ I don't need another person ♪

♪ To tell me what to do ♪

♪ I don't need another person ♪

♪ To tell me where to go ♪

♪ I don't need another person ♪

♪ To tell me how it is ♪

♪ I don't need another person ♪

♪ Like you, and you, and you ♪

♪ And no, not again, no ♪

♪ Come on, come on ♪

♪ No, not again, no ♪

♪ Come on, come on ♪

♪ No, not again, no ♪

♪ Come on, come on ♪

♪ No not again, no ♪

♪ Come on, come on ♪

♪ No, not again, no ♪

♪ Come on, come on ♪

♪ No, not again, no ♪

♪ Come on, come on ♪

♪ No, not again, no ♪

♪ Come on, come on ♪

♪ No, not again, no ♪

- We live in a world where so many cultures have very

strict, regimented ideals and expectations

about what it means to be a woman

from the cradle to the grave.

And what horror does, I think for me at its very best,

is it questions those.

It subverts them.

It transgresses them.

- All the sort of social roles that women have been

conditioned to play over time, they're all subverted,

they're all questioned in horror in spectacular ways.

- Horror is such an interesting way

of, you know, looking at the world, a critique of society.

But you do it with zombies.

- Horror movies have always been about the body,

and those bodies have always been gendered, whether we

like to admit it or not.

- As a female filmmaker, a female storyteller,

we have a lot of fears that we want to talk about.

- Women live a life of a horror movie.

Different incarnations.

The pre-pubescent stage, their ingenue stage.

When they're, like, very fuckable.

Am I allowed to curse in this?

Then a fuckable mom.

And then your time of being fuckable wanes.

All of this through the male gaze.

The only difference is in the movies,

they condense everything into two hours.

Well, if you're lucky, two hours.

[eerie music]

- Whether it's Barbie dolls or little baby dolls,

I think that for girls growing up,

dolls are about the objectification

of women at the various ages throughout their life.

And we learn to be objects.

We learn to be adored, and we learn to be things.

- You see, Claude and I were just playing a game we made up.

- "The Bad Seed" is fucking mental.

It is off the chain unhinged.

- Mother? - Hmm?

- Is it true that when blood has been washed off anything,

a policeman can still find if it's there?

- The film is about a little girl, Rhoda, who looks perfect.

She looks like a doll. She has a doll.

They have the same sort of hair.

You know, the little fringe and the braids.

- What have you got on your shoes?

- I run over my heels.

And Mother had these iron pieces put

on them so they'd last longer.

- Everybody comments on how good her manners are.

- Well, isn't she a little sweetheart?

- Thank you.

- She also happens to be a killer.

- I had to hit him with the shoes!

What else could I do?

- But do you realize that you murdered him?

- But it was his fault!

- And the only person who's aware of this

is her mother, who is deeply, obviously

very upset about this.

- Oh, I've got the prettiest mother.

I've got the nicest mother.

That's what I tell everybody.

- Rhoda believes that if she lives her life playing nice,

being this polite little doll-like girl child, that she

can get away with anything.

And really, up to a point, she does.

- Good night, sweetheart.

- Good night, Daddy.

- I did have a doll as a child when I was a kid.

My Buddy was a thing.

And my parents got me a My Buddy doll.

And I'm not going to sing the theme song,

but I do remember the theme song.

- ♪ My Buddy ♪ My Buddy ♪

♪ My Buddy ♪

♪ My Buddy ♪

♪ Wherever I go, he goes. ♪

- And I carried that little guy around

with me freaking everywhere.

And around the same time, I think "Child's Play" came out.

- I'm your friend till the end.

Hidey ho.

- I love Chucky in a weird frickin' twisted sense.

I like the idea that, like, My Buddy doll

might come to life someday.

Hopefully not try to kill me and my family, but--

[screams]

It was appealing to me that, like, a doll

could actually come to life.

It's scary in a thrilling way.

And again, I want to recreate this feeling,

and how can I do that?

- Hi, Megan.

I'm Katie.

- It's nice to meet you, Katie.

- The whole relationship between little girls and dolls

or robot-like dolls has been shaken quite dramatically

by the absolute insanity that is "Megan," which

was written by Akela Cooper.

- Oh, shit.

- "Megan" is about a little girl who loses her parents

and is taken in by her aunt who works

at an advanced toy company developing, like, AI toys.

And because she's still grieving

the loss of her parents and her aunt is busy,

she gives her the newest prototype, Megan,

to befriend her and actually test

out how well the doll works.

And unfortunately, the doll works too well

and some deaths are involved.

- How could you kill someone?

- I didn't kill anyone, Kurt.

You did.

[explosion]

- I received a doll as a present when I was a kid.

And I stood at the top of our stairs and I said,

I hate this baby.

And I threw it down the stairs.

I wasn't big on dolls.

And I still have trouble finding them scary.

But then there are movies that will come out

that I am very impressed by.

The Annabelle movies, I think, are really great

and do an amazing job of making a doll scary.

- One of the first films that I think about when I think

about girls and dolls and horror is

"Interview with the Vampire."

- Another doll?

I have dozens, you realize.

- So much of that film, just in terms of sheer runtime,

is about Claudia and her relationship

to Louis in particular, but also just

her journey and her identity.

[playing piano]

[low piano tone]

- Claudia, what have we told you?

- Never in the house.

- And she is very much brought on board to join the group

as a kind of human doll.

- You dress me like a doll.

You make my hair like a doll.

Why?

- As she's aging, she becomes angrier and angrier and angrier

when she realizes that her body isn't going to become a woman.

And that Louis and Lestat are treating her like a human doll.

- You made us what we are, didn't you?

- Stop her, Louis.

- Did you do it to me?

- Not just in horror, but in screen culture more broadly,

little girls are used as a cipher or a kind of shorthand

symbol for innocence.

So in horror, it's bad if something happens to somebody.

But if it happens to a little girl, it's even worse.

And I think a really good example

of that is "Hereditary."

Because what happens to the little girl in that film

is horrendous.

And it would be awful regardless

of who that character is.

But the fact that it's a little girl

makes it so much worse, so much more agonizing.

[tires screeching]

This relationship between little girls and innocence

and vulnerability is really interesting in horror

when it comes to reflecting back on screen culture itself.

So at the beginning of "Us," we have a little girl and her dad

wins her a Thriller t-shirt.

And there's that little kind of squabble between her parents

about whether it's appropriate.

- That shirt better not give her nightmares.

- Get in trouble for winning my daughter a t-shirt.

That's a new one.

- And there's a beautiful image of her wandering off

and she has her candy apple.

And of course, she's about to get lost.

And what happens to her when she's lost

becomes the core of that film.

We see this too, in "Poltergeist"

with little Carol Anne in that iconic

scene with the television.

And it really emphasizes this idea

that little girls are particularly

vulnerable, particularly open to exploitation

to the evils that can come through the screen.

- They're here.

- Scenes like these from "Us" and "Poltergeist"

play with the anxieties we have even just

at the thought of little girls being exposed to horror movies.

But of course they are.

And in many cases, even grow up to make their own.

- I promise, we're better than ever.

- I grew up in the middle of nowhere in rural Pennsylvania.

It was basically Romero country.

[screams]

"Night of the Living Dead" played on, like, all the time

on, like, public access.

So that was, like, literally one of the first movies

I remember seeing as a kid.

[screams]

- When I was little, when we'd be getting

ready for these Halloween parties,

we'd sit on the floor in the living room.

We'd have newspaper laid out.

And my dad grew a pumpkin patch.

And we would harvest the pumpkins.

We would carve them together the night before the party

and watch Universal monster movies.

- You have those, and I'll have these.

- "Frankenstein."

"Dracula."

"Bride of Frankenstein."

[screams]

"Wolf Man."

[growls]

"Creature."

[screams]

You name it, we watched it together.

- My sister being 10 years older

than me, she was a teenager when she was babysitting us.

And she did not give a flying fuck what she was watching

when she was babysitting us.

And I came downstairs, and my sister

was watching "Hellraiser 2."

[eerie music]

♪ ♪

And it freaked me out.

- Don't be scared of me.

- And I just, like, turned around and went back upstairs.

But I've always just, like, loved

horror from a very, very probably

inappropriately young age.

- I was very into suspense, and I loved Hitchcock.

[squawking]

- Help me!

Help me!

- Some of the horror stuff I saw

was just stuff I saw on afternoon TV.

They used to show amazing things on afternoon TV that

should be censored, really.

[screams]

- When I saw "The Shining."

That also haunted my dreams.

- Here's Johnny.

- So I was traumatized as a child.

I think now, that's why when I watch horror,

it comes with a certain tough skin that makes it thrilling.

- What is more innocent than young girls?

- Come play with us, Danny.

- There are so many elements that go into "The Shining"

that make it tick and make it such a famous horror movie.

But for me, and I know I'm not alone here, it's the twins.

They're just unforgettable.

And there's a strange tension there,

because they're monstrous and they're terrifying

and they're scary.

But they're actually not monsters.

They're victims.

- What's the most awful thing that could happen to innocence,

is destruction.

You know, we see the young girls in the hallway,

and we see their bodies axed to death and blood

all over the hallway.

- It still gives me goose pimples when I think about it.

So good job, Mr. Kubrick.

- I think I must have been 10.

That's when "The Exorcist" came back out.

Remastered, new sound, new color.

Deleted scenes.

[gasps]

- My god.

- I said, "Mom, I'm turning 10 years old.

And I want to see The Exorcist, because I'm old enough."

So my mom was like, okay.

[screams]

Little did we know we were going to come out crying.

I thought Linda Blair was under my bed.

I thought Linda Blair was in the closet.

I thought Linda Blair was outside my bedroom.

I thought Linda Blair was in my classroom.

- Do you know what she did?

Your cunting daughter.

- It was something about that feeling that has stuck with me.

Wasn't until many years later that I knew

I wanted to be a filmmaker.

I remembered that feeling.

A horror movie can follow you home.

- Because she's possessed by a demon,

it allows the movie to show this 12-year-old girl writhing

in a bed in her nightgown, being

tied to the bed by priests, masturbating with a cross.

- Let Jesus fuck you!

Let Jesus fuck you!

- Her body is breaking.

Her head is spinning.

The movie does all sorts of crazy things to this girl.

But it's because she's possessed by a demon

and we're trying to get the demon out.

- Is there someone inside you?

- Sometimes.

- Watching this innocent little girl talk about somebody

being inside her and that she has no control over it,

we're talking about much grander themes

than just possession here.

- How long are you planning to stay in Regan?

- Until she rots and lies stinking in the earth.

- The horror of "The Exorcist" is

about the horror of what happens

to a little girl's body.

There's no way to think of that film

and not look at Linda Blair's actual physical body

as a kind of battleground for power and for male power

to play out on.

[splashes]

- There is this fear that girls are dangerous if they

get too close to each other.

I think societally, there is a fear that their friendships

can turn dark easily.

And in the horror genre, this is explored a lot.

- There's a cluster of horror films

that do really exciting, interesting

things with the idea of toxic friendships when you're young.

Films like "Heavenly Creatures,"

"Don't Deliver us from Evil," "Poison for the Fairies,"

films like those are really important because they really

get to the heart of this very insular,

sort of world building project that friendships can become.

[laughs]

[screams]

- "Poison for the Fairies" is a Mexican film from the '80s that

is about two little girls, one of whom is,

like, the new girl in class.

And this kind of girl that has difficulty making friends

seizes upon this new girl and is like,

you are going to be my new best friend.

And by the way, I'm a witch.

They perform, like, a black magic ritual in the attic

and they're cursing the teacher.

And then, by coincidence, the teacher dies.

The girl who says she's a witch is like, aha, you see?

My spell worked.

And so then the other little girl

is terrified of her friend.

[cackles]

- "Poison for the Fairies" works best

when it blurs the lines between doubt

and trust in a friendship.

And it's something very specific,

I think, to the experience of childhood,

where your friends are your world.

And when that friend is questionable,

you don't know who to trust.

Do you trust yourself?

Do you trust them?

Really what I think is at the core of the representation

of little girls in horror is about agency,

is about, how much is too much freedom to give little girls?

And we get kind of stressed out when little girls are left

to fend for themselves, when they're not

controlled and controllable.

- No!

Don't!

- And we need to chill out.

We need to acknowledge that these are people,

and that they have agency, and we should respect that.

And that doesn't just go for the representation

of girls on film.

We look at somebody like Emily Hagins,

who was 12 years old when she made a zombie film called

"Pathogen" with her mates.

- Please!

Please, God, no!

Please, God, no!

- Little girls can do a lot when they're

given the freedom to do so.

[rock music]

- Adolescence.

A time of horror for many.

As people go through pubescence,

that is a time of such change, with adulthood on the horizon

and all of the fears surrounding coming of age.

It's little wonder that there are so many

coming-of-age horror films.

[eerie music]

♪ ♪

- When I think about horror movies with standalone scenes

that really shook me to my core,

one of the first that comes to mind is

the very beginning of the Japanese horror

film "The Suicide Club."

And it's just a bunch, you know,

of schoolgirls on a train platform.

They're just hanging out.

They're in uniform, chatting happily to each other.

There's an announcement that the train's coming.

The girls join hands.

The train gets closer, the girls take a step forward.

And just before the train arrives, they jump.

Something about the fact that it's

this sort of critical mass, this unified

force of these girls at that particular age,

that they can't be controlled.

And that they're sort of doing this thing that is

completely incomprehensible.

The power in that scene is extraordinary.

- The most dangerous and powerful

creature on this planet is a post-pubescent female.

Because she could truly destroy everything,

and she has no idea.

And so the world works very hard to smush women in that age

into little boxes so they don't go around destroying men,

which is what they could do.

And the place I would go is "Carrie."

- Finish to Carrie.

She'll blow it.

- Don't blow it, Carrie.

Hit it!

- Oh!

Carrie!

- Of course, it's the story of a girl

who's raised by a single mother who's very strictly religious.

The opening of the film is like slow motion.

It's like in the girls' locker room,

and they're all, like, having fun and they're naked

and they're flicking each other with their towels.

And it's like, oh, it's so fun to be a teenage girl.

And then the camera goes in on Carrie in the corner,

and then the blood comes.

It's like, whew.

It's like a bait and switch.

It's like an acknowledgment that this is a fantasy.

That this is not what being a teenage girl is like.

It is not this slow motion, you know, fun-loving fantasy.

It's really this horror of your body changing.

- Help me!

- You know, just suddenly feeling out of touch

with other people and there being so much scrutiny

of the speed at which different girls

develop, you know, or become sexually

aware or sexually active.

Carrie's story becomes one of discovering her power.

And her power in the course of this story

is depicted as a supernatural power that

is triggered by menstruation.

[tires screeching]

[explosion]

- My most favorite scene is definitely dumping

the pig's blood on her.

Where all you hear is just the hitting of the bucket, empty.

[tapping]

That is such an impactful way to feel what she feels.

She's cut out the entire audience

of people laughing at her, bullying her, belittling her.

[thuds]

- In each successive viewing, it's kind of perverse,

but I'm like, yeah.

Like, burn the whole gym down.

- What Carrie's doing isn't really--

it isn't, like, the best thing to massacre your entire class.

But there were times when I was like, if I could

just have a little of that power,

maybe they'd leave me alone.

- Creepy Carrie! Creepy Carrie!

[laughs]

[groans]

- The ending when her hand comes out of the earth.

[screams]

People talk about that as, like, wow, that scared me.

And I thought about "Carrie" for the next month.

And I don't know, I have this feeling

of like, hopefully she got out and did some other stuff.

- Oh, gross.

- "Ginger Snaps" is a really essential

film to think about when we talk

about menstruation in horror.

- You got some on you.

- Nice.

- Ginger's transformation occurs not just

through the bite of the werewolf,

but through getting her period on the same day.

[screams]

- Ginger!

- And that film is really interesting,

because on one hand, I think it's quite tragic.

There's a sort of inevitability that Ginger's journey will

take her to where it goes.

- I'm not dying!

[screams]

- But at the same time, it's very, very funny.

And the way that it talks about menstruation and periods

is amazing.

- A thick, syrupy, voluminous discharge is not uncommon.

The bulk of the uterine lining is shed

within the first few days.

Contractions-- cramps-- squeeze it out like a pump.

- So things like "Ginger Snaps" and "Teeth."

[screams]

And the film "Hellbender," that are often dealing with girls

coming of age and it coming with some kind

of-- like a power, some kind of potentially destructive power.

- Please, help me.

[monstrous scream]

- I'm kind of obsessed with menstruation.

And I'm always trying to fit it into movies.

So for me, there was a backstory to the Hellbenders

that they should menstruate from their mouths.

Then I thought, well, let's just remove the vagina and make

it-- it's all about the mouth.

Hellbenders are created by eating another Hellbender.

There's a lot of menstrual interpretation

that can be had there.

I love talking blood, particularly the kind

that those with the womb create.

- One of my pet peeves is when male filmmakers

do horror films about girls getting their periods.

It drives me insane because it, like, turns it into like this,

like, mystical, magical thing.

And it's just like-- it's just awful.

Don't get me wrong, I love "Carrie."

It's one of my favorite movies.

But like, that was not what getting my period was like.

So one of the things that we did with "Black Christmas"

is just like, what if we just had

a girl who's like on the rag and she uses a diva cup?

- I have a final in 10 minutes, and I can't find my diva cup.

- How do you lose a diva cup?

- With abandon.

- And like, we just make it as like a normal thing

that's in the story.

And it doesn't have any magical implications whatsoever.

It's just like a regular burden that a cis woman has to deal

with every once in a while.

- "The Craft" is a movie about

four girls who discover they

are witches, one of whom is an actual natural witch,

and the other three are kind of, like, self-made witches.

- You ever heard of invoking the spirit?

- No.

- The four of them are able to come together and, like,

share their power and kind of, like,

take back some of their lives.

[laughs]

- Wow.

- I was getting all my friends to play light as a feather,

stiff as a board at sleepover parties.

[knocks]

- I got clean towels for everyone.

[yelps]

- And I'd be like, let's go to the graveyard after school

and do seances and things like that.

[electricity roars]

- Just absolutely loved seeing another curly

haired black girl on screen.

- And I ask for the ability to not hate those who hate me.

Especially racist pieces of bleached blonde shit

like Laura Lizzie.

- I had actually started wearing my hair natural.

So like, my mom started like, chemically, no more perms.

No more hot comb.

Not straightening my hair.

Just, like, wear it curly, let it air dry.

And the first time I wore it natural to school,

like, one of my white classmates-- like,

I'll never forget this.

She looked at me and she's like, it

looks like Akela has a bunch of spiders in her hair.

And I was just like, I thought I looked cute.

And that obviously affected me.

And it's just like, I kind of, like,

adjusted how I wore my hair from there.

But seeing Rachel True in "The Craft" and, like,

having the white bully character

also like mock her hair, it's like, okay, I'm not alone.

- Oh god, look, there is a pubic hair in my brush.

Oh, no, wait, wait.

That's just one of Rachel's little nappy hairs.

- That's always stuck out with me with that movie.

It's like, there's someone else in the world who's

going through this, and hopefully she'll get through it

and hopefully I'll get through it as well.

But also, it's just like how female friendships can form

so tightly and then just become so toxic

so quickly when they become not friendships,

but these co-dependent relationships.

- There's Jennifer.

Only back then, we were tight.

Sisters, practically.

People found it hard to believe that a wait like Jennifer

would associate with a dork like me.

- This is a movie made for me that

doesn't make me feel like I'm the kind

of, like, token woman in the room

full of, like, horror dudes.

- They're just boys. Morsels.

We have all the power.

Don't you know that?

These things, these, are like smart bombs.

Okay?

You point them in the right direction, and shit gets real.

- It has, like, such a fun energy to it.

It's funny.

It's scary.

[monstrous growl]

But it's also the perspective.

The perspective is from Needy's point of view.

Even the fact that her name is Needy is fucking amazing.

[gasps]

The combination of Diablo's script and Karen's direction

of that movie made it this kind of like "Clueless"

for horror kids.

- She can fly.

- She's just hovering.

It's not that impressive.

- This is just kind of this super fun horror movie

that is about being a teenage girl

and about living in the body of a teenage girl

and what that's like and what those

intense female relationships are like in that age.

- Her marketing for that film was so fucked up.

- You look really pretty.

- Megan Fox plays a half-naked demon who kills a bunch

of guys in her high school.

But really, you stopped listening after Megan

Fox half-naked demon.

- They were just trying to, like,

make it seem like, oh, okay, this is all about, like,

Megan getting hot and naked.

It's just, like, imagery that just doesn't

represent the movie at all.

There were still a lot of cis straight white men

who were doing the marketing.

Just like, they didn't get it.

And everyone needs to get it for these movies

to find their audience.

- I've killed before.

It's for cutting boxes.

- Middle school and high school was a horrible time for me.

It makes me a little emotional to talk about it.

But I was bullied so horribly.

A lot by women, and also by men.

My best friend in the whole world, I would go to her house.

We'd watch horror movies late at night.

I have this vivid memory of renting "American Psycho."

I realized when I saw the director credit

come up that it was a woman.

And I was like, Mary Harron, who is she?

I need to find out.

And then I started to kind of pay more attention.

I remember watching "Near Dark."

- I asked you once if you listened to the night.

Now listen to me.

- And I was like, Kathryn Bigelow?

Who is she?

And Mary Lambert with "Pet Sematary."

And we were having a sleepover.

What's this movie?

"Slumber Party Massacre." This looks cool.

Amy Holden Jones?

I just was like, oh my gosh.

Women make horror movies.

That's what I want to do.

[screams]

- It was around this time that we

were in the middle of the late '90s teen slasher craze.

And so I discovered movies like "I Know

What You Did Last Summer."

[screams]

And "Scream."

[yelps]

And "Urban Legend."

[screams]

And I became obsessed with horror.

And horror kind of became my friend.

- Name the killer in "Halloween."

- No.

- Come on.

It's your favorite scary movie, remember?

He had a white mask.

He stalked the babysitters.

- I don't know.

- I started to realize, through movies like "Scream,"

which have so many references to the movies

that came before it.

- They're all the same.

Some stupid killer stalking some big breasted girl

who can't act, who's always running

up the stairs when she should be going out the front door.

It's insulting.

- I started to realize there was

this whole genre and many, many more movies for me to discover.

So over the course of my teenage years,

I just poured myself into horror movies

and started discovering the influences of those movies.

- Jason?

- So the final girl is a really key concept in horror.

And it was coined by Carol J. Clover in her book,

"Men, Women, and Chainsaws."

Final girl is the girl who survives.

She's the girl who fights back.

She's the girl who kicks ass.

[whirring]

- Yeah!

All right!

- She might be crying, she might be screaming.

[grunts]

[screams]

She might be covered in blood and guts.

[growls]

[squelches]

But she survives.

And she often watches her friends die.

But she keeps going.

- I grew up with final girls.

I love them in horror films.

When women weren't protagonists of any movies,

horror films were always a place where you could

find a lead who was a woman.

[yelps]

- Horror is full to the brim of amazing final girls that

are interesting for where they overlap

and for where they deviate.

We have Nancy in "Elm Street."

We have Jess in "Black Christmas."

We have Sally in "Texas Chainsaw Massacre."

And of course, we have Laurie in "Halloween."

- I killed him.

- You can't kill the boogeyman.

[screams]

- Jamie Lee Curtis is a really obvious person to go to when

we talk about the final girl.

Because we see her as Laurie in "Halloween"

when she's a teenager.

But we follow her through those films,

right through to when she's much,

much older, when she's a grandmother.

And it's incredible.

It's an incredible career arc, both for Curtis, but also

as a character arc for what happens

when the final girl ages.

- Nancy.

Nancy.

- There's so much to love about "Nightmare on Elm Street."

But I think it goes without saying

that that first film just wouldn't be what it

is without Heather Langenkamp.

- She came in, and we loved her immediately

because her beautiful, fresh face.

No makeup, freckles, beautiful blue eyes.

And just a girl-next-door look.

- Hello?

- Why don't you believe me now, Nancy?

[screams]

- What was so profound, because she was so sweet,

is how she took on the burden of fighting

Freddy in the dreams.

- Come on and show yourself, you bastard!

- And so she fought him.

- No! No!

No!

No!

[screams]

- She's dead and he's dead.

And oh my god, poor Bill!

Oh, god!

- "Friday the 13th" is full of lots

of really interesting final girls, and they

change from film to film.

- Think about it moving and make it move.

- So we get these different representations

and different ideas about what the final girl is

and what she can do.

- Let him out of there, Rick.

- Megan.

Don't clown around.

- I'm not the one with the funny red nose.

- I think there's something cool about watching

a final girl just reach the end of her fucking rope

and, like, beat the shit out of the monster or the bad guy.

And it's a release.

And it's a much-needed release for a lot of people.

Not necessarily even just women.

It's like, Black people, the gay community.

Like, anyone who is like facing the fact that you can't

just walk out of your house and exist

without some overt threat.

And you kind of need that. - The final girl

concept is more important in a way than actually any

particular incarnations of it.

Because what it did was entirely divorce the sense

that a spectator will identify most

with a same gendered person on screen.

- Shit.

- In some ways, anyone can be a final girl now.

Because the idea of a one-to-one

relationship between viewer and character has been turfed.

- Agnes.

Agnes, don't.

You know what we did, Agnes--

[screams]

- So Bob Clark's original "Black Christmas" involves

a group of sorority girls.

And they live in a house, and it's

about Christmas break time.

When an unseen man sneaks up into their attic

and starts giving them horrific phone calls, terrifying them.

- My fat cock--

- Oh, why don't you go find a wall socket

and stick your tongue in it?

That'll give you a charge.

- I'll stick my tongue up your pretty pussy.

- You fucking creep!

- I'm going to kill you.

- What films like "Black Christmas"

do that's so important is that they feed into much bigger

issues than those specific to the experience

of high school or college alone,

but to women more broadly.

- I'm going to have an abortion.

- You can't make a decision like that.

You hadn't even ask me.

- I wasn't even going to tell you.

- People still don't want to talk about abortion.

They don't want to talk about women's rights.

They don't want to say it explicitly in the same way

that Bob Clark was saying it.

- ♪ Up in the frat house, one true fact ♪

[crowd hollering]

- ♪ And that is that I got attacked ♪

♪ Up in the frat house, shit went down ♪

♪ And I'm telling everyone in town ♪

- There were a lot of things that

were going on in the world.

Brett Kavanaugh is on TV crying and screaming

that he likes beer.

And his fraternity is in the news.

And all of these other fraternities are in the news

because, like, of all of the assaults.

- Wait.

- Helena?

- It was just like, here's the things that

are making me mad right now.

- We're in the middle of something.

- Do you want me to leave?

[scoffing]

- You bitches are all the same.

You act like you want it, but you're all a bunch of teases.

- We wanted to see what would happen if there wasn't

just one exceptional woman.

What if a lot of women live?

- You messed with the wrong sisters.

- Horror movies are often about getting people separated.

And I really enjoy it when in horror, the characters are

like, no, let's band together.

- Suck my--

- The way that we approached it was that there

is no exceptional woman.

People survive because they stay together.

- What we see in movies like this is,

yeah, learning to be an adult woman is really fucking hard.

But if you play it smart and with an appreciation

of community, you don't have to go it alone.

It's sort of part of that transgressive, subversive

energy and excitement and power of what horror is

and what it can do.

When you get to adulthood, that's when shit gets real.

You've survived girlhood, you've survived adolescence.

And suddenly, you're out on your own.

You have all this freedom and this agency.

But there's real dangers that you haven't experienced before.

And it's chaos.

- Hey, you want a beer?

- Or do you want to smoke some pot?

- Or we can have premarital sex.

- Horror has a very special and I think quite broadly

underrated way of dealing with women's sexual agency,

films that really demonstrate quite vivid and intense

and wonderful displays of sexually autonomous women.

Even if things don't work out great for those

women at the end--

--when it comes to sexual agency and women in horror,

I think the vampire is almost like a go-to character.

Because we have these incredible films,

especially in the terrain of lesbian vampire films.

You know, we have the Karnstein Trilogy from Hammer.

We have "The Hunger."

We have "The Velvet Vampire."

And in those films and many others,

we have this really interesting phenomena where these women are

just so comfortable with using their lovers,

whether they're men or women, as these kind

of tasty sexual snacks.

[whimpers]

- "Tenebrae" is a particular favorite of mine.

And the figure of Eva Robins is a fascinating one.

And it definitely wasn't super clear

or made super clear to wide audiences that Eva Robins is

a trans woman and that she represents

the fear of the phallic woman.

And as she put the heel of her red stilettos

into the mouth of some poor fellow who I'm

sure didn't have it coming--

cough, cough-- there was something vengeful there

that was very attractive.

- "Trouble Every Day" is a really useful film to think

about the connection or the relationship between the vamp

and the vampire in horror.

The director of that film, Claire Denis,

once described that movie as when a kiss becomes a bite.

[yells]

Critics have talked about it as a cannibal film

or a vampire film.

And it's almost neither here nor there.

Because when you think of that movie, what you think of

is just screaming, bloodied Beatrice Daal fucking a boy

and eating him.

- "A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night."

Just the title alone, you're already

turning the idea of the frightened girl

walking home alone at night.

Well, that girl is the one to be feared.

[crunches]

[screams]

- And you're very, very nervous about what she's going to do.

Which is kind of the reverse of what happens in most movies.

- For a woman, there is a sense of recognition

when it comes to horror.

I've always thought I didn't have

to dig that deep when I was performing

even the craziest of things.

Even being dragged off by an angel vampire creature

and then eaten alive in a graveyard.

To me, it's just a sidestep from the types

of sexual assaults I have experienced in my life.

And I'm talking gray-area sexual assaults--

not, like, strange man in a mask drags me down an alleyway

and rapes me.

I'm talking about like, I didn't really

want to hook up with this frat boy, but I was drunk

and I didn't want to go home.

- Fear is something we live with every day.

I walk out my door, and I have to think about, okay,

where am I going?

- Want a ride?

- What do I have with me if I need to defend myself?

- And it's really unfortunate that we

have to think about that.

Even something that's a mundane task--

going to the grocery store, going

for a walk around the block, going to the movies.

- Whatever it may be that is something a man might not think

twice about doing is something I think about

if I'm going to be okay going to and from that thing

I need to do.

- We are just cultured and we are just conditioned

to filter that as okay.

And it's fine.

And you start walking around going

like, I think the world is a terribly

scary and dangerous place.

But no one else is acting that way.

And then you get to watch a horror movie

like "Last House on the Left."

- Hell yeah.

- And revenge becomes something cathartic.

[screams]

- Rape revenge is obviously a very complex, very thorny,

very challenging subject.

[soft grunting]

- That's so sweet, it's painful.

Oh god.

- It's across a whole bunch of genres.

But when it comes to horror, and especially

supernatural horror, we're really

focused on the body in horror in a way

unlike any other kind of genre that does very, very

interesting things about gender politics

and has interesting things to say

in sometimes quite sophisticated

and really confronting ways.

- I love "Revenge."

I think it handles the rape revenge movie in a really

smart way, so you're really relating

with the lead character.

But then it does focus on the violence

as she gets the revenge, which is fun to watch.

- Listen, Lexi--

[gunshot]

[screams]

[gunshots]

- When she flips and just completely takes revenge

on what people have done to her and goes on this, like,

murder spree, it's a release.

[screams]

And you're cheering her on.

It's horrible what's happening.

There's blood everywhere.

It's so gory.

[clicks]

[gunshot]

- But the thing that scares me more than a woman

being able to enact revenge and go on this killing spree

is like what the cost is for that character.

- For myself, it really was cathartic.

Because these are things that we can't do in real life.

- It's instructive in the horror context

to look at rape revenge films that

have been directed by women.

Because they're quite diverse, and I don't think

we really give them credit for that.

- You can just go home.

I won't be done till tomorrow night.

[moans]

- We have the Soskas' "American Mary."

- What we're going to do with you today.

- A really interesting example is "Evangeline" by the Canadian

filmmaker Karen Lam.

Rape revenge films often isolate women.

It's often about women by themselves

fighting back against rapists or somebody

acting on behalf of that woman.

What is really interesting to me

is when we start having communities gather

or women joining forces.

There's a rape revenge film, a supernatural rape revenge film

from Japan, called "Kuroneko" from the 1960s,

which is about a mother and daughter

who are raped and murdered by traveling samurai.

And as ghosts, as spirits, they come back to seek vengeance.

[screams]

It's almost a default now, when thinking about women

and community, to think of that famous

scene from "Midsommar," where Florence

Pugh's character is crying.

And the women gather around her.

They almost become one sort of single organism.

And they weep together.

[wailing]

- The strong woman trope is a trope

that I'm trying to actively make

more nuanced, especially for Black women protagonists.

So I think it's important to have final girls

and women protagonists in these genres, darker genres,

who also--

you're juxtaposing that with vulnerability and softness.

- Is Tamara home?

- You already came by here.

- Women-centered home invasion films have

a very long history in cinema.

We have "The Lonely Villa," probably one of the first

home invasion films ever made.

And of course, we have in 1913, the film "Suspense,"

which was co-directed by Lois Weber

and also stars Lois Weber.

Later, we have home invasion films about women like "Wait

Until Dark" with Audrey Hepburn and "Lady In A Cage"

with Olivia de Havilland.

- The home invasion is a very real fear.

Some of the films that are strongest in that area

are the ones that do play with the irrational fears on top

of the rational fear of having your home invaded

or penetrated, if you like.

[thuds]

- Welcome home.

- For example, "The Entity," in which

Barbara Hershey is terrorized by some supernatural force.

And that terror assumes horrific sexual dimensions.

[muffled scream]

- "Lucky" is a film directed by Natasha Kermani that was

written and stars Brea Grant.

And it's such an extraordinary exploration of the idea

that male violence is almost ambient.

- "Lucky" is a surrealist slasher film in which May,

the main character, is attacked by the same

man every night and people think it's just normal.

- I can't change it, May.

This is just how things are.

- This is not how things are.

- Yes, it is.

Every night, a man comes to our house and tries--

- No, shut up!

Stop talking!

- I wrote the film after I was attacked.

And it was part catharsis, a little bit therapy.

I would tell people what had happened to me.

And every woman I know would go, yeah.

Because it had happened to them, too.

- Ted?

Ted?

- I was being interviewed by an officer,

telling him what happened.

And he said, you know, you're just really

lucky you didn't get raped.

That's not lucky.

I don't think that's lucky.

[screams]

- We understand that this one woman's experience that

we've been tracking is the experience of every woman

in this nightmare universe, in this "Alice in Wonderland"

wacko reality that we're in.

- I find so often in history, people

blame women for being these delicate creatures.

And yet, they subject us to so much pain and so

much judgment and so much oppression

and expect us to bear it.

And they get all fucking surprised when we fall apart

or when we break down.

And even then, they can't bear to respect the beast

inside of us, the monstrosity that we

all have repressed within us.

They can't even respect that.

And they say, oh, she's fucking hysterical.

- That's why something like "Helter Skelter"

is so powerful.

Just living up to expectations of what an ideal woman

should be is a job in itself.

It's such a release when you let go of all the bullshit,

even if it comes with violence.

It's just fun to watch.

But on the other hand, there's so much

going on in terms of the gender politics

and these other dynamics that are at work in this movie.

- I think that watching horror films

and seeing that a woman can crumble, a woman can decay,

a woman can transform into a fucking beast

is kind of cathartic for most women.

[rock music]

- My first horror film I was a fan of was "Alien."

The first half of that movie is Ripley

dealing with a series of men who are trying to gaslight her.

- You're guaranteed by law to get a share.

- What?

- Why don't you just fuck off?

- What?

- And they say, we need to bring

this astronaut onto our ship.

[shrieking]

And Ripley's like, no, that's a legitimately terrible idea.

- Open the hatch.

- Wait a minute.

If we let it in, the ship could be infected.

You know the quarantine procedure.

24 hours for decontamination.

- Ripley's making the right decision one after another.

And it's a terrifying movie.

[screams]

But these were the role models I had in my life

starting there.

- As an actress, I would be sent these scripts.

And at some point, I would have to turn

to the often male writer or director

and say, does my character have a job?

They were just there because they were somebody's girlfriend

or somebody's mom or, you know, they

played some role in relationship

to this male protagonist.

But you didn't know what they did when they left there.

You didn't know how they made money.

And unfortunately, we live in a capitalist economy.

So like, women have to make money in order to survive.

And it becomes part of our identity.

- So tell me everything.

- There's two really interesting

films about women and work that came out around the same time.

And they both involve Brea Grant--

"The Stylist."

and "12 Hour Shift."

- Can't wait to see this with a dress.

- Neither can I. Can you send me a photo?

- Oh, yeah.

- "The Stylist" is awesome.

It combines everything you love about "Maniac--"

--with everything you love about "Single White Female."

- Maybe we could get together tonight with your bridesmaids

and we could talk about how you want their hair done.

And then you--

- Claire, honey, this is a lot.

- And it does it in this super stylish way

as you're watching this girl, who's a hairstylist.

[laughs]

And she starts to become obsessed

with one of her clients.

- Claire, are you okay?

- No.

- "12 Hour Shift" is a dark comedy

about a bunch of nurses who are selling

organs on the black market.

- I like to use the soda to keep 'em extra cold in here.

I always say, keeping it cool is the key to my job.

I made that up.

- It all takes place over the course of one

12-hour shift when things go horribly

wrong with their schemes.

- Freeze, motherfucker!

Oh.

Sorry.

Heard a noise.

- Both really amazing films when it comes to thinking

about women and work.

Because it's about how women can be taken for

granted in their jobs.

- We agreed on 100 for the overnight rate, right?

- No, it was, um, it was 150.

- Oh, okay. 150.

- Horror films about women working in service jobs

in a domestic context are really interesting,

because there's this blur between the home

and professional life.

- My mom is a writer.

My first feature, "Nanny," is loosely based on her

trajectory, having to put her dream of writing on the side

to be a domestic worker.

- Rose is in bed.

- Great.

Everything went smooth? No tantrums?

- No, no. None at all.

- She is so relaxed with you.

- "Nanny" is a horror film about a Senegalese woman who

works in New York as a nanny to a very, very wealthy

couple and their young child.

And the woman is working very, very hard

to raise money so she can bring her own child over

to be with her.

- Hi, Mama.

[speaking Senegalese]

- My mom has just always been, like, this barometer

of ambition for me.

Her entryway into domestic work really

opened my eyes to the ways that certain labor is not valued--

- She has not paid me what I am owed.

- --when the reality is a lot of these women who work

in the domestic workforce are keeping

our entire society afloat.

- Since I've started, I have been buying her food

or making some of my own.

Did you ever wonder how your child was eating?

Are you too busy to care?

- This is the invisible labor.

And so, at first I approached it

as a straightforward drama about an African woman

in America.

- I miss my country.

Every day.

The good parts.

- Do tell me about the bad parts.

- And then as I started to really dig into my influences,

I wanted to couch it in genre and folklore.

I started to incorporate West African elements that spoke

to the spiritual world, like being given that permission

to tap into your own culture and the specificity that makes

your protagonist's journey just as universal

as any American protagonist.

- When I read "Shadow in the Cloud," it resonated

with me on many levels--

as a woman who is underestimated

or gaslit or whatever, all the things

that we know growing up to exist in this world

and be a success in this world.

- Roseanne Liang's "Shadow in the Cloud"

sort of historicizes the idea of women and work,

because it focuses on a woman who's a pilot

during World War II.

And she has a special project that she is sent on.

And she is placed on a plane, this old rickety plane,

with a big group of horrible men.

These guys are shitheads.

And so she's trying to deal with the fact

that gremlins are taking over the plane.

It's like a wonderful, fun popcorn movie.

[shouting]

[roars]

But at the same time, she's sort

of juggling that with the fact that these guys around her

are just dicks.

- Can we get back to the subject at hand?

Did you say winged dame?

What do you mean, winged?

- Her arm's broke.

- Who gives a crap about her arm?

How's her ass?

- The way that you talk to people,

the way that you make yourself known, is different for women.

- I'm assigned to this flight.

- This isn't a joyride, missy.

Get off now!

- What the hell is going on back there?

- I'm commissioned to this flight.

- Get off my fucking plane!

- Some of the themes in the film are about what it takes

to get your job done as a woman in a male-dominated workplace.

- Do not touch me again!

- Ho, ho, ho, ho!

- You all right there, Jack?

- Someone watches it and goes, oh.

Oh, no.

That's very similar to something

that happened to me or something that I've experienced

or that my friends have experienced

or that my mother has experienced,

my daughter has experienced.

Everyone around me has experienced.

You realize, oh my god, I thought this was history.

But it's our present.

[screams]

[thuds]

- "Sensor" really shows this kind of collapse and this

transformation that a woman goes through when the entire

world is turned against her.

- I think I might have worked out where she is.

- Oh, please, Enid.

Not this again.

- She was looking for her sister.

And everyone's just like, let's just have dinner instead.

Couldn't we just enjoy a lovely family dinner?

- I don't want to grow old wishing for a happy ending

that we all know might never come.

- So are you deciding that she's dead?

- Not recognizing that she is on the brink of collapse

and that she is taking her work so seriously because she's

using it as her drug.

And all of these things just point to me how we women are so

ignored and we're so outcast.

And we're not taken seriously.

And then whenever we flip out, then everybody

is like, well, where the fuck did that come from?

- When watching movies about horror film production,

we can gain a new respect for the actual work

that so many women do in front of the camera, too.

Someone like Isabelle Adjani in "Possession"

is such a powerful example of a film

making us aware of just how hard

women work in making horror.

[screams]

- We have to talk about "Possession."

There are times when I think to myself,

what happens if I'm gross on camera?

What happens if I embarrass myself or others?

And then the only thing I think of is the ultimate inspiration,

which is "Possession."

- What's going to happen to us?

- It's up to you!

- Then stop coming!

- I have to go!

- I'll follow you!

- Don't even try!

- You'll never stop thinking about it.

There is no end to what this woman does.

[gasping]

- Hats off to Isabelle Adjani for giving

one of the most committed performances ever captured.

It hits a certain manic pitch early on and sustains it.

And the sequence with Adjani in the subway, shrieking,

is indelible, and it's something I actually

find incredibly hard to watch.

If I watch that at home, I'm very

conscious that the neighbors could

call the police at any moment.

[shrieking]

- It's stating the obvious to say that this

is one of the most memorable performances in horror film

history.

[shrieking and gasping]

- And in that U-Bahn scene, what looks like someone giving

birth blurs with the fact that we're watching a woman

at the peak of her professional craft acting

the living shit out of it.

[screaming]

- Maternal horror is one of the very, very rare areas,

not just in screen culture, but culturally across the board,

where we get to acknowledge that maybe being a mother

isn't always perfect.

The bodies of pregnant people become a kind of site

or a forum for a whole bunch of anxieties

and tensions around gender politics to play out.

I love my son.

I love you, baby, if you're watching.

But I have to say, my experience of pregnancy

and especially of giving birth, it was not pastel colored.

When I think of filmic representations

of my experience of giving birth,

the first thing that comes to mind is Sergio Martino's film,

"All the Colors of the Dark."

At the very beginning of this film,

there's this sort of nightmarish kaleidoscopic

horror show that's like, people screaming and, whew,

kind of lurid hysteria.

- When you're pregnant, it's kind of a horror movie--

even if you're very happy to be pregnant, as I was.

Your body suddenly changes, like ugh.

It's very like, oh, I'm a Cronenberg movie.

Suddenly, whew, there's something

inside me that's poking out.

- Oh.

Motherhood is a horror movie, just those first six months.

Every single mother is a final girl.

They should all get the pin.

They've all made it through.

It is the most insane thing that ever happened

to me, because I was right in my horror career

when that happened.

My mind was in indie horror.

Anyone who isn't ready to hear about body horror, pause.

Forward like a minute maybe?

Okay, so my first child, I tried to push

and it didn't quite work.

[tearing sound]

And they had some concern that he had a fever.

His heart rate was dropping.

So everything's fucking terrifying.

And they're like, boom, it's time for a c-section.

I have no understanding of what that means.

I am wheeled into a room, my arms

are strapped down like a cross, because oftentimes when someone

cuts into your body while you're awake, unintentionally,

you will try to stop them.

[moaning]

They bump up my spinal block.

You think, oh, I'm numb from the waist down.

No, no, no, Nanette.

No, no.

You're not numb from the waist down.

You just don't feel pain.

You can still feel pressure and the feeling of being cut,

and that makes you very nauseous.

So we're in a horror movie already.

I'm chained down and I'm puking and screaming.

- Get it off!

Come on!

- You feel it cut into you--

[groaning]

- --and then you feel a bunch of hands enter your body.

And they're inside of you.

There is no way to describe that.

Women who have a c-section know what I'm talking about.

And then you won't lift the baby out.

They first move all of your organs.

And then they put a little cut in your uterus,

and then they squeeze the baby out like a pimple.

It's really intense.

And then a baby fucking comes out,

and they're like, love it, mom!

Love it forever.

[both shrieking]

- And you're like, it's great.

Oh, god, he's so beautiful.

Except he's covered in fur and howling

like a freaking werewolf.

And he's blue.

[baby shrieking]

- Oh my god.

[doctor screaming]

- And you're still puking.

And then they decide that they need to cauterize the wound,

and so they use a cauterizing and you

smell your own burning flesh.

Smells like bacon.

And then they sew you up.

And then they throw you into recovery and hand you a baby

and go feed it.

[eerie music]

And then there's crying in the house

in the middle of the night and you're not sleeping.

And there's like, when there's not crying,

there's phantom crying, where you think of it.

People are trying now to really talk about it,

but we haven't quite got there, because I think

they're afraid that if women really knew,

they wouldn't do it.

And to that I say, fuck all men, because women

do everything all the time, even though we know

it's going to be terrible.

- The first film I saw, which really affected me profoundly,

which I saw when I was a young teenager,

was "Rosemary's Baby."

- God is dead!

Satan lives!

- If I could really name a single film that influenced me,

it would be that.

And I know Polanski is very controversial,

and I'm not defending his personal behavior.

"Rosemary's Baby" was the first film I saw, which was truly

from a woman's point of view.

- Read what they do, guy.

They use blood in their rituals,

and the blood that has the most power is baby's blood.

And they don't just use the blood.

They use the flesh, too.

- Rosemary, for god's sakes!

- It really taps into the nightmare that

is being a pregnant person and somehow automatically

becoming infantilized.

- Do you hear a baby crying?

- Why, no, I don't, dear.

Now you come and get into your bed, now.

It's time for you to take your pill.

- The lengths that people will go to touch you and pat you

on the head and treat you like an idiot

because you're pregnant.

- We're your friends, Rosemary.

- There's nothing to be afraid of, Rosemary.

Honest and truly, there isn't.

- This is nothing but a mild sedative to calm you down.

- And there's just the way that she's being patronized,

almost eradicated as a person.

If you're feeling that the world is not necessarily sunny

and good, and that there's things that you

should be suspicious of, "Rosemary's Baby"

is the film for you.

- I've been waking up every morning with this crazy

old-school idea about sacrificing your first born

son for fame or something.

- Stewart Thorndike's movie, "Lyle," which is the--

the reductive way of discussing it, is that it's a lesbian

version of "Rosemary's Baby."

And it is that.

The director, Stewart Thorndike, is a queer director.

And she is also a mother.

But what's interesting is that the character played by Gaby

Hoffmann in "Lyle" is very different from

Rosemary in "Rosemary's Baby," because Rosemary

is kind of like--

things are happening to her and she's kind of freaking out

and she doesn't know how to react,

whereas Gaby Hoffmann's character in "Lyle"

is very forceful.

And in certain parts of the movie,

she becomes hostile because she's

so protective of her child.

- Get away from me!

Get away from me!

- What? - Leah.

- She did it.

I told you and you wouldn't listen to me.

I kept telling you that there was something wrong.

You never listened to me. - Calm down, stop.

- There were other things, too.

There was a baby and a little boy named Andrew who was like,

nine years old.

- "Lyle" is absolutely acknowledging

that it is riffing on "Rosemary's Baby"

very directly.

But because they're a lesbian couple,

Gaby Hoffmann's character has to be

inseminated by somebody else.

We discover there actually is a satanic conspiracy afoot.

But there's still an acknowledgment

that a male child is worth more than a female child.

- Two girls for one boy.

- With all of the progress that we think we've made

and all these rights that we now have,

they have to sacrifice two female children

to be worth what a male child would be worth to the devil.

Even in this totally feminist movie,

there's still an acknowledgment that we're not there yet.

- There's a tremendous amount of anxiety in some quarters

about the idea of motherhood and the sorts of bodies

and people and gender identities that are attached

to the figure of the mother or a parent,

full stop, who gets to raise children, but also

who gets to bear them.

And transmasculine people increasingly

are bearing children.

And there's plenty of scope for anxieties about queer parents

to be explored in horror, probably ideally by queer

filmmakers more than by straight, middle class,

heteronormative male, middle aged folk.

- Tadder?

Tad?

- A movie like "Cujo," Dee Wallace

is going to take on a killer dog to save her child.

- I want my daddy.

I want my daddy.

- All right, I'll get your daddy!

- Her performance in that film is so incredible,

and you feel that fear.

It's that fear that that mother feels, that her child

could get eaten by this dog.

- "Cujo" is such an important film about motherhood,

because it's not just about the passion and the intensity

and the lengths that a mother will

go to to protect her child.

It's also about the fact that mothers sometimes

get things wrong, that they're human

and that they make mistakes.

- Come on, then!

- I was amazed by, with all the feelings

of love and patience and tenderness

that comes with motherhood,

there was also a savagery behind it,

because I knew that I would not hesitate

to kill someone or try to kill someone

if they came after my child.

I would do anything to protect this baby,

and that was a surprise to me.

This potential for violence rose when I became a parent.

- Where'd you get this?

- On the shelf.

- "The Babadook" is a horror film that I have a lot

of trouble revisiting, not because I

don't think it's great, but because it

was just too close to home.

My son was maybe two or three years old

when that film came out.

And all of my fears were on the screen.

- I can't stand being around your son.

- I can't believe you just said that.

- You can't stand being around him yourself.

- This acknowledgment that it's not automatic,

that not every woman is going to be great at being a mother.

- Give it to me!

- In one way, it was comforting to know that,

but in the context of "The Babadook,"

it gets pretty extreme.

- You little pig.

Six years old and you're still wetting yourself.

- And it still chills me to the bone.

But it speaks to a very real truth, a very deep fear.

- I don't know why I said that.

It was terrible.

I've had absolutely no sleep.

I didn't know what I was saying.

- Jennifer Kent made a film about a mother

trying to take care of an autistic child

and being haunted by this crazy top hat monster.

- I think that what Jennifer Kent is saying about motherhood

in "The Babadook" is that it is not always a joyful experience.

There are phases of your life where you

might hate your loved ones.

You may hate your children.

You will come to love them again.

You still have to come to terms with all of that,

because there is a person who's depending on you.

Their life depends on you.

And so it's not always like how James Cameron depicts

motherhood in the movies.

It's not like Sigourney Weaver, finding

this little girl and being like, I

must protect her in "Aliens."

It's not always natural, because for Essie

Davis's character in "The Babadook," it's not natural.

It doesn't feel natural, it doesn't feel right.

But there's still a sense of duty,

and she still can overcome it, and she still can

protect her child and herself.

But there's going to be peril along the way.

- If you touch my son again, I'll fucking kill you!

[roaring sound]

[screaming]

- I love challenging the idea of what it means

to be a good mother, to be a good sister,

to be a good human, but in this case, a mother

with a troubled past and a difficult child.

And the extent that not only the mother is willing to go to,

she almost kills her kid.

- Let me in, you little shit.

Let me in!

Let me in!

Let me in!

- We live in a society that professes

to love mothers and support mothers,

but the actions show otherwise.

- We are required to come back in a week

to talk through your options.

Here's my card.

- Mom!

I think I'm going to vomit.

- So I think it becomes a horror story for so many women

in different iterations, whether you're actively

pregnant, or you have a child that you don't love,

or you have a child that you resent,

or your child isn't here with you.

Like, there are so many iterations that I

think are ripe for horror.

- "The Babadook" and "We Need to Talk About Kevin"

are an interesting pair of films in terms

of a mother and child.

- Okay.

Here we go.

Okay?

Okay?

- A mother fearful of a child being abnormal--

- Isn't that a weird thing to collect?

- I don't like stamps.

- Perhaps where they differ, "The Babadook"

mother is projecting a lot onto that child.

- The Babadook did it, Mum.

- Yes, the child misbehaves at school,

misbehaves around family.

But a lot of the fear being brought

into the domestic sphere is the mother's own doing.

Whereas in "We Need to Talk About Kevin," the kid seems

pretty clearly off the leash.

- We're going to dinner.

- I was hungry.

- Lynne Ramsay, I think that she's

just so masterful at thrillers and cross genre and tension.

- Doesn't Kevin go to Gladstone High?

- That movie is just so intense.

The definition of how you're supposed to love your child,

and also what if your child ends up being a serial killer?

And how do you deal with that?

- Films like "The Babadook," "We Need to Talk About Kevin,"

and "Prevenge" really challenge assumptions we might make about

the experience of motherhood.

It's a peculiar experience being a horror fan

and having been pregnant, because when we think

of having another person inside you,

we think of possession movies.

We sort of default to things that are not positive.

- If you loved him, finish the job.

- "Prevenge" is a film about how weird it can sometimes feel

to be pregnant and to be faced with the whole

concept of life and mortality.

- You're getting better at this.

- Do you think so?

- Oh, yes.

- How being pregnant sort of sharpens the awareness of what

being alive really means in the face

of the inevitability of death.

- It's a cutthroat world, you know.

[rock music playing]

- It's a hard thing to talk about aging.

We shy away from it.

We don't want to face it.

It's painful.

One of the most painful things, and somewhere

that we're all headed for, unless we die young.

- I can't believe how old I am.

I look and I go, God, I'm really--

what are those wrinkles?

And then I kind of, when I have my inner joy, I look great.

- I don't want to die, Elise.

- You have a long life ahead of you.

I cross my heart.

- You're never too old to express yourself.

I'm not ashamed of it at all.

I love it.

[cocks gun]

- No more games.

- I wanted a story where the old ladies are the heroes,

where the older age, the wise age,

are the ones that kick ass.

- Let's go introduce ourselves to this pinche gringo.

- "Bingo Hell" tells the story about the community of Oak

Springs, this small, small community

in the most ghetto side of the city

where it's being gentrified.

But those wacky seniors who refused to be gentrified

decide to stay.

But little did they know that their beloved Bingo Hall was

going to be bought by somebody much more powerful than

money itself.

- Welcome to our house!

Puta!

- It was so inspired by my abuela, my grandma.

I wanted to make a movie where she can sit with me

and see herself as the hero.

And I don't think we have that enough in horror movies.

- Some of the most indelible characters in horror

are aged women, or women of a certain age,

but then perhaps a bit older still.

And hence terms arising like hagsploitation

for those sorts of films like "Whatever

Happened to Baby Jane?"--

[screams]

- --where one-time glamour pusses like Bette Davis

and Joan Crawford get to duke it out in the cattiest,

bitchiest way imaginable.

- Like, I should be horrified more than I am, sort of camply

entertained as well.

But the sight of the aged figure

is one that is horrific, or regularly depicted as horrific.

- There's plenty of room at your place.

- No, it's not about room.

She has to be watched.

- Well, isn't that how it works?

Your mom changes your nappies and then you change hers?

- The film that affected me the most, probably,

was "Relic," by an Australian director

called Natalie Erika James.

It's such a profound movie.

I also had a mother with dementia.

And the pain of watching someone who'd

been very beautiful and vibrant and very brilliant

in sort of decline.

It caught the dreamlike and surreal

nature of what is really common to everyone's

experience of aging.

It is like a bad dream. It is surreal.

- I'll do it myself.

- You've hurt yourself. Just--

- No! Get out!

- Stop.

- Get out of here! Get out!

Get out!

- I think madness is a very scary thing to me,

losing control over your own mind.

- It's my room! It's my house!

Get out!

- Old age is its own horror movie.

And then with a parent, you watch them,

almost in front of your eyes, suddenly sort of disintegrate.

It created this tangible but quite beautiful, I think,

experience of the horror of aging and dementia.

- Stop! No!

- The aging female body is often a site of horror,

and that extends well beyond the filmic sphere,

rightly or wrongly.

- It's easy to dismiss horror as being

kind of backwards or regressive when

it comes to the representation of older women.

Maybe I'm a glass-half-full kind of person,

but for me, what's more important is

that women do stuff, even if they're monsters.

They have agency and they have power.

And it might be dark power, it might be fucked-up power,

but they do stuff.

- "Hausu" is an absolutely wackadoodle Japanese film.

It's about a group of young schoolgirls

who travel to a country house owned by one of their aunties.

And they don't realize that she's actually a spirit.

And she has been driven to this sort of homicidal mania

by the memory of her fiancé, who died during World War II.

Now, the girls don't realize that any of this

is going on until they all start dying one by one.

And the spirit of the aunt actually

takes over one of the girls.

[speaking Japanese]

And on one hand, we have this really

great, vibrant, energetic film that-- it's

just so wild to watch.

[screaming]

But on the other hand, we have this sort

of undercurrent about memory and the war, which you don't

really pick up necessarily on the first time

that you watch it.

But you really feel it the more times that you view this film.

The young generation have forgotten the war

and they don't have the same emotional scars

that the older generation do.

[psychotic laughter]

I have a real soft spot for horror movies

that put young girls or young women in very, very

sharp contrast with older women,

and to show who has the power and who has the agency,

and what meanings can we draw from these about gender

politics more broadly.

- Miss Tanner, I have something to tell you.

- Squawk, squawk. Polly parrot.

- Who said that?

Shut up!

- That's enough of these little games for the moment.

- "Suspiria," of course, is set in a ballet school,

and that film effectively pits two generations

of women against each other.

We have the older women, the coven,

the witches, and the younger women, the ballet students.

And while the older women are clearly

monstrous in comparison to the beautiful young women,

they're powerful.

It's a film about different kinds of women's power.

What is so enduring about that film is that it's about what

kinds of power women have at different ages

and how it changes in old age.

- I love "Suspiria."

It is a fairy-tale fever dream about a girl played

by Jessica Harper, who is the new girl

at a German dance academy.

And she discovers that her classmates

are being killed one by one.

[screaming, clatter]

And she decides to get to the heart of what is going on.

What's really cool about the movie

is that it's primarily a female cast.

The bad guys are also women.

You have the girls helping each other, passing information

to each other to try to figure out what's going on.

And then you also have the women

of the coven who are working together to kill the girls.

So in ways, it's like women supporting women.

Going off the fact that it was influenced by Snow White,

you do have this dichotomy of the young maiden

and the old crone.

And the movie explores age.

And it makes sense, because it does

take place in a dance academy.

It is about ballerinas.

And in that world, you age out of it really quickly.

- And 1, and 2, and 3, and 4.

- "Suspiria" is obviously sensitive

to the whole idea of youth that makes the young

women viable ballerinas.

But what makes it so interesting

is how it also delights in showing us these older

women who refuse to disappear.

They just become empowered in different ways.

We're really lucky in horror, I think,

where we don't necessarily throw out women

once they reach a certain age.

I think of people like Barbara Crampton, who's surely

doing some of the best work that she's

ever done in her career now.

- I feel more alive than I have in years.

- We can add to that list Brinke Stevens.

- I prefer that you address me as Mother.

- Debbie Rochon--

Debbie Rochon directed a film called "Model Hunger"

with Lynn Lowry, which is so much fun.

But it's precisely about issues about aging and getting older

and feeling redundant, and feeling

that you're being replaced by younger women,

and what you do about that.

And in her film, the answer is violence.

- What have you done?

All you have done is to constantly explore

new ways to exploit women!

You fuck with our minds just so you can fuck with our bodies!

- I think it's a really nice fuck you to these little men,

these sort of little small boys who insist

that horror is only for them.

But horror is for everyone, because death is for everyone,

no matter who we are.

The best-case scenario is that we might live to be really old.

Most of us will just get really sick

and die, breaking the hearts of those who love us.

If we're lucky, we'll end up crumbling

and turning to dust like at the end of "The Hunger."

I mean, is that the best-case scenario, that all that's left

is a faded photograph of someone that we used to be?

[creepy music]

- Famously, the film industry has subjected

women to any number of indignities and impediments

to progress.

- I've talked to my friends who are men that direct,

and then I've also talked to my friends

that are women that direct.

And there is such a clear difference

in terms of some of the things we deal with on a daily basis.

I've dealt with so much gaslighting that it's comical.

I'm laughing about it, because I've dealt with it so much,

to the point where they, whether it

be a producer or whomever, makes you believe it.

Like, oh, do you really want to do that?

Do you really want that shot?

And it's like yeah, motherfucker,

I made the shot list.

Yeah, of course I want that shot.

I've come so prepared.

And then they just-- it's like they just want to plant

these little seeds of doubt.

- Raising your hand every time there's

a microaggression just isn't possible,

and it's not worth my time.

It's not worth most people's time,

just because it's exhausting.

We all have work to do.

I just don't have time to deal with this person's

rude comments.

It's weird to need to make that choice.

But that's kind of what I see happening, at least in my life.

- In the beginning, people laughed in my face

when I said I was making a film.

Oh, that's cute.

You know, making a film is hard.

And I was just like, well yeah.

Like, so is fucking getting out of bed

and taking care of your children, your husband, and

your job, and the household.

I didn't need a fucking dick to hold the camera.

In fact, I think it would be pretty hard to hold

a camera with your cock.

- For people who are not the traditional idea

of the director, John Ford with a

megaphone out on the fucking tundra.

I didn't see myself as a director early on,

is because I never saw female directors.

[screaming]

- "Eve's Bayou," Kasi Lemmons.

It was one of the first times that I

saw on the screen black folklore

being weaved into genre.

Seeing a woman who looks even remotely like me executing this

was so pivotal for me.

- 68, take two, mark.

- As an actor, I worked with a lot of mediocre directors.

None of them were women.

I didn't feel like they had something to say.

I feel like they were driven by their egos.

Action!

But I think, hopefully, some of those people

are being phased out and we're replacing them with people who

really are inspired to do this job,

and do it in a way that is smart

and interesting and new and inspired.

I won't name names.

- It's not just about women who are actresses,

or women who are directors.

Some of the biggest horror films that we have would not

be what they are without the women

involved in a producer role.

I'm thinking Debra Hill in "Halloween"

and of course, Sara Risher and "The Nightmare on Elm Street"

films.

- I started as a studio executive.

And I became then President of Production.

And there were very few other presidents

of production at that time.

- I'm going to go and get the guy who did it.

And I want you to be there to arrest

him when I bring him out, okay?

- When I got on the set and I was needing to boss people

around, as a producer sometimes has to do,

that could be difficult. Because it's

like a construction site.

It's very male.

- Where are you?

- Everything's going to be all right.

Everything's under control.

- Get my father, you asshole.

- It's only recently that diversity has happened a lot,

where women get roles as directors.

- There has been a tremendous amount of

inclusion, gratefully.

There's still a lot of lingering prejudice, which

people pretend they don't have, which is even more

unnerving some of the time.

- It definitely feels like there's more female-directed,

female-produced movies now than when I started.

[roaring]

[screams]

- Women are not new to horror filmmaking.

Two extremely influential examples that come to mind are

Germaine Dulac with "The Seashell and the Clergyman"

from 1928, and Maya Deren from the 1940s

"Meshes of the Afternoon."

Extraordinarily influential films

with plenty of horror in them.

- I think we should also take a step back and take

a bird's-eye historical view of horror storytelling,

and see that women have always been a part of this legacy.

Scheherazade doing a book of "A Thousand and One Nights."

So there's horror storytelling right there.

And then you have Mary Shelley writing "Frankenstein."

You have Shirley Jackson doing horror in the '40s and '50s.

In so many ways, women have always

had a seat at this table.

And so for my generation of filmmakers coming,

it's more like we're reclaiming the seat than making new space.

It's space that's always been there

and it's just there to be claimed and maybe repositioned

at the head of the table.

- Can you believe that bland and lovely brow

conceived of Frankenstein?

- Well, why shouldn't I write a monster?

- The influence of Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein"

on horror cannot be underplayed.

And it's not just the story of "Frankenstein"

and how that's impacted horror, it's also Mary herself.

And there are these horror films that are about Mary

Shelley writing "Frankenstein," things like "A Nightmare Wakes"

and Ken Russell's "Gothic."

- My story is a story of creation of a creature who's

racked with pain and sorrow and hunger

for revenge, who haunts his mad creator and his family

and his friends.

- Mary Shelley was goth as fuck.

[mysterious music]

[baby crying]

She understood fear in a really kind of personal way.

Are you going to survive childbirth?

How are you going to survive this really

tumultuous marriage?

- You spiteful, jealous man.

- The life of an artist.

- My novel!

That was my world!

- I was your world.

- These awful things that are going on with her.

And when she writes "Frankenstein,"

that's coming from an extremely personal place.

And it's also setting the tone, I think,

for a lot of great horror that follows it.

- Mary Shelley is the progenitrix

of horror, and especially body horror and mad scientist

horror, and that nexus of science fiction and horror,

the fear of what's possible.

- Of recent horror, I would say the one that's blown

my mind is "Titane."

This character, spoiler alert, has a sexual relationship

with a car--

[grunting]

--and then comes to be impregnated by that car,

and it's taking over her body.

And essentially it's like, making her no longer human.

- "Titane" is in a world of its own.

It's just like, through one character's lens who is also

a psychopath and a murderer.

[screams]

She also becomes something beyond gender, both a mother

and a kind of sexual temptress, but also enjoys

the kind of masculine attributes

of being like a fire person.

- Julia Ducournau is clearly one

of the leading lights of horror in the 2020s,

and no doubt beyond.

"Titane" won the Palme d'Or at Cannes.

Films directed by women routinely

do not win such prestigious awards in the first place,

let alone for making a body horror film that confounds

any number of expectations.

- What are we supposed to do now?

- Horror filmmaking has been so much through a male lens

in really the history of cinema,

and it made me very excited to see

what's to come as we see more women

working in the horror genre.

- And here we are.

I wrote a book called "1,000 Women In Horror."

And the joke of that book is that, of course, there's more

women in horror than 1,000.

You'd be forgiven for believing that women in horror

is a new interest, is something that

is a sort of recent phenomena.

But this is not true.

It's only been in recent years, however,

that these films have been exhibited and distributed

widely, that major publications have started focusing on them.

And very importantly, this is really largely

to do with the extremely hard work of an international group

of women that have spearheaded the women in horror movement.

It is a feminist activist movement very

much in the tradition of something

like Riot grrrl in the 90s.

- I love that "1,000 Women In Horror" exists,

that that book exists, and that it's sort of reminding

everyone, oh yeah.

This is a group of people that are not represented

as much as they should be.

- I'm just trying to put more women on screen who also are

really afraid, and being as human and kind of flawed

as possible.

- As I've seen the change of how diversity,

of how new voices and unrepresented voices are being

so welcomed in the industry and more than anything,

the horror community.

- I'm very happy with how things are going.

If you look at how it changed, it's been extraordinary.

- There are more people who are open to letting

a woman helm films.

There are more people who are interested in having

female protagonists and seeing stories

from a woman's point of view.

- It's finally hitting people that there's only so much

of a white Western perspective people can take before things

get a bit boring and stale.

- They kind of came around to realizing.

It's like, yeah, when it comes to other cultures

and other genders and other sexualities,

we can't just have cisgendered straight white men

writing all of this.

- I just crave a variety of representation

that can be inclusive of trans people

being as monstrous as anybody else.

- As women, as trans people, as queer people,

tapping into what the horrors are that we're navigating, I'm

just excited about horror not being literally these jump

scares and these tropes, but like evolving them

into something that feels much more contemporary

and much more nuanced.

- I mean, for fuck's sake, we're

50% of the goddamn population.

Like, is it so strange to see a woman as a protagonist

or to hear her story?

- Why should we wait for anyone to give us

permission to do what we want?

[groaning]

- You underestimating me is going

to do me favors, because I'm going

to show you what I'm made of.

[gunshot]

- We're here, and we're not going anywhere.

- There's a lot more to say on the topic.

[chuckling]

[heavy metal music]

♪ ♪