As a new collection of short horror films by women hits the cinemas, we meet the young filmmakers proving the genre doesn't have to be misogynistic

Horror movies and feminism, at first glance, don’t seem like natural bedfellows. On-screen women are regularly terrorised, chased, drenched in blood, mutilated and murdered in the name of cinematic scares. Unpleasant things happen to male victims too, but traditionally it’s been the girls who get the really nasty deal. Alfred Hitchcock’s famous maxim, employed to the full in suspenseful classics such as The Birds and Psycho (and, it seems, in the director’s unsavoury private life too) was “torture the women”.

You might not agree with the post-Freudian musings of scholar Barbara Creed, who reads a male fear of toothy, castrating vaginas into various movies (amusingly, the 2007 horror-comedy Teeth plays with this idea in a more literal sense). But it’s hard to deny the wider truth: in male-directed horror, female bodies and characters are often either brutalised or turned into primal, biology-fuelled beasts. Sometimes, like poor Carrie White, they get to experience both fates in the same movie.

This isn’t to say that these films aren’t enjoyable, or valuable. Horror has always pulled in fiercely passionate female audiences, and dismissing it as simply misogynistic reflects neither the inventiveness of the genre, nor the expansive capacities of female taste. Whether it's seductive vampires, knife-wielding maniacs or simply gore galore, female audience members have always relished the sinister side of cinema – and always will.

Being a devoted horror fan is one thing, but in recent years we’ve seen a number of women step behind the camera, as part of what has been called a "new wave" of female horror directors. Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook, for instance, combined traditional scares with a moving tale of grief and mental illness, while Julia Ducournau’s Raw used a veterinary school setting – a frightening hotbed of sex, desire and everyday gore – to spin a skin-crawlingly intimate family cannibal tale.

The Babadook smashed open a window to reveal a bunch of female directors who had all been sat in the dark, making great work in the shadows

“The horror genre has always explored womanhood in various ways, whether through sexuality, motherhood or female neurosis, but the majority of the time it is through a male, and at times exploitative, lens,” says Canadian director Amelia Moses, when asked if there’s such a thing as a “feminist” horror movie. “On top of that, it's also a genre with a history of its female characters being included solely for sex appeal or as nameless victims of violence.”

Skin-crawling: Julia Ducournau's 2016 film Raw was set in a veterinary school

Moses is one of 10 female filmmakers whose work is being shown in cinemas around the country this month, as part of We Are The Weirdos, a Halloween screening series organised by horror collective The Final Girls. She believes that horror's complex history makes it a particularly rewarding challenge for female directors.

“I think it's a significant genre for female filmmakers because there's a sense of reclaiming those narratives and subverting those tropes in order to make a statement,” Moses explains. “I think a ‘feminist horror movie’ doesn't necessarily have to reclaim and subvert the genre, but it does have to feel like it's moving forward in terms of gender representation.”

Moses isn’t sure whether the new run of female-centric films is really part of a wider trend, or whether she’s just become more aware of the female horror community of late.

Danny Devall in Prano Bailey-Bond's We Are the Weirdos film 'Shortcut' credit: Film 4

“In recent years there seems to be a resurgence of more complex horror films, and a lot of female directors are present in that wave, like Julia Ducournau, Jennifer Kent or Karyn Kusama [director of The Invitation]. Even a film like The Witch, which was directed by a man, has a more feminist edge, which I find really fascinating.”

The short films in We Are The Weirdos are remarkably varied. Natasha Austin-Green’s compelling Dead.Tissue.Love combines the voiceover musings of a necrophiliac (a thoughtful, reflective, young-sounding woman) with subtly suggestive, gently disturbing imagery. Brazilian director Julia Zanin de Paula’s A Mother of Monsters takes inspiration from a Guy de Maupassant story. And Moses’s own title, Undress Me, is thematically reminiscent of Raw, using body horror and a campus setting to explore the aftermath of a sexual encounter. It’s visceral, and graphic – but it’ll also make you think, with uncomfortable directness, about your own anxieties surrounding sex and sexual experience.

Welsh director Prano Bailey-Bond, meanwhile, has contributed the short-but-not-very-sweet Shortcut (available to watch on All 4), which comes complete with a nasty twist for its male protagonist – and a delicious sense of dread building up to it.

Prano Bailey-Bond: 'Horror is a great place to explore and express feminist ideas'

Bailey-Bond, who has also directed music videos for Autoheart and Imelda May, was inspired as a teenager by David Lynch movies – “to me they are the most frightening and primal of all films; they burrow somewhere deep into your psyche” – as well as films by Dario Argento and Lucio Fulci. But she also admired American Psycho for years without realising it was directed by a woman, Mary Harron. “I suppose back then I wasn’t even thinking about whether directors were male or female; I just loved the films that I loved, and I knew that directing was what I wanted to do – my gender never crossed my mind in relation to my ambition.”

Now, however, she agrees with Moses that the hailed breakthrough of various female horror directors has less to do with their gender, and much more to do with the exciting new directions their work is taking.

“Films like Raw by Julia Ducournau and A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night by Ana Lily Amirpour are so fresh and cool and audiences are hungry for that kind of stuff,” says Bailey-Bond. “I think The Babadook started a shift towards female-led horror by being so well received and tackling issues of mental health and motherhood so profoundly; she’s smashed open a window to reveal a bunch of exciting female horror directors who had all been sitting there in the dark, making great work in the shadows.”

'Fresh and cool': a scene from A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014)

She cautions, too, against lazily lumping all female-directed titles into a “feminist horror” category. Doing so could in fact reinforce the idea that women working in horror are only a niche interest or a flavour-of-the-month novelty, rather than a group of professionals simply doing their jobs and making art for everyone.

“Horror is a great place to explore and express feminist ideas because it provides a catharsis, and women have a lot to say and a lot to be angry about, so horror is the perfect ground to find a release,” Bailey-Bond says. “The thing that slightly bothers me is when films are branded as ‘feminist’ simply because there’s a woman directing the film and a woman in the lead role."

“As a female director, sometimes people can read feminist angles into your work that aren’t intended – you’re simply telling a story, but because you’re a female storyteller people put a different set of goggles on to look at it. Hopefully as it becomes more and more normal for women to be telling stories about women, and men, this will shift, and the landscape will become more balanced; a woman telling a story about a woman will be ‘a story’, just like a man telling a story about a man is.”

We’re not quite there yet, she adds: “So for now I would say that a feminist horror movie is one that sticks up for women’s rights, shines a light on gender inequality or promotes an equal view of women”.

But for Halloweens future? Let’s hope that we’ll no longer be discussing the latest “wave” of female directors, and that these talented emerging voices will have become, if not exactly mainstream – horror never wants to be mainstream – then at least unremarkably ubiquitous.

For information on We Are The Weirdos screenings across the UK, visit thefinalgirls.co.uk