At the beginning of your new film 1000 Women in Horror, you describe your early exposure to horror as existing in the terrain of your friends’ older brothers. Was there a particular moment, or film, that made you understand that horror was for you?

A lot of horror that I saw as a teenager, I saw at slumber parties. I’m in a room with ten girls, and suddenly we’re watching Nightmare on Elm Street, or Slumber Party Massacre, or April Fool’s Day. It wasn’t about the specific films, it was just an awareness of an unspoken sense of transgression, the feeling of working outside of gendered gatekeeping. My parents were Catholic, and they were very strict about age-appropriate films, so I wasn’t allowed to watch horror at home. But if I had to pick one formative horror moment, it would have been when I was seven or eight years old, and my dad felt that Apocalypse Now was appropriate for children to watch because of its anti-war message. And at the start of the video of Apocalypse Now, there was the famous trailer for Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, which is non-narrative; it’s just the shot of the elevator doors and blood filling the room. That was the first moment that I had a really visceral, frozen-in-terror reaction to horror. It wasn’t narrative, it was just that image completely out of context. It absolutely devastated me. 

That’s a common origin story, seeing something you weren’t meant to see, in a fragmented space that is devoid of context. It awakens something inside you.

Yes, and the feeling of transgression, that this isn’t meant for you, and yet you’re engaging with it. That’s horror in general, right? It’s transgressive at its core. The threat of open bodies, there is a kind of viscerally transgressive nature to horror, in that it’s dealing with things we don’t like to talk about. Gore films, slasher films, they’re all about the open body, in the way that pornography is about the open body. There is a taboo aura about horror. 

You make this point in your book 1000 Women in Horror that the film is based on. You explain that the genre is fundamentally democratic because we are all just sacks of meat. But despite the democracy of the body, it’s a battleground for gender politics and is profoundly undemocratic in the way that it’s been made and consumed since its inception. How do you hold those two realities at the same time?

There is a neutrality to these core elements of horror. We’re all bodies and bones and blood. But the tension is that horror is about othering, it’s about monstrosity built around othering processes. And that othering is often defined through sexuality, through race, through class. Gender has been a defining point of difference in the construction of otherness in horror. It’s not just boys versus girls though. At its essence, horror is more interested in tensions between masculinity and femininity. If you go back to Bela Lugosi in Dracula, or Boris Karloff in Frankenstein, these are racially othered actors, and they’re heavily feminized. These are not John Wayne tough guy characters. Their ethnicity adds to how they’re feminized. I’m much more interested in the tensions between masculinity and femininity in horror than I am between locked-down biological categories of male and female. It’s a much more complex space.

You describe the way that horror appeals to people whose identities have been defined by negation, a negation which can be multiple and layered. Are there multiple frameworks of negation by which you were attracted to horror?

I’m long out of academia, thankfully, but when I was coming of age at university, psychoanalysis was the go-to critical methodology about gender and horror. And that never really sat right with me. I never really bought into it, the Freudian idea that women are defined through lack, explicitly the lack of the phallus. That framework had a very strong hold for a really, really long time. But I do think that horror has always had a curious relationship with class. It’s not something that it’s focused on as explicitly, but I think it offers enormous scope to do so, because it’s often quite insidious. If you look at the Nightmare on Elm Street films, they’re all middle class. Slashers have always driven me a little bit crazy, because the majority of them play out in huge houses. But films like My Bloody Valentine and Happy Birthday to Me are really important because they work outside of that class difference. It’s really interesting with the Nightmare on Elm Street films that you’ve got this cast of middle-class kids, but Freddy is working class. You can absolutely talk about class anxieties as much as you can about gender anxieties in horror films. 

You say explicitly in the book that you view horror as an “elastic,” “fluid,” and “flexible” term. That’s something we’re very invested in at Bloodletter. As you were putting the book together, and as you were thinking through the film, were there definitions that were alive for you as you decided what you would classify as horror?

The late Australian film critic Lee Gambin, who was enormously important to the book and to the documentary, used to have a series of articles called Secretly Scary that I absolutely loved, which were about films that weren’t horror films, that were actually horror films. Films like Elmer Gantry, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, Bambi. I think you can experience a film as a horror film, even if it’s not a horror film. I watched Bambi when I was a kid. I will not watch Bambi again. Never. I’m not putting myself through that ever again. 

So, did you make those distinctions based on a feeling, a gut instinct?

Yes, and look, there’s also a gendering of genre. I’ve written a couple of books on rape-revenge films, and something that I’ve noticed is that rape-revenge films are often promotionally not called rape-revenge films. Instead, it’s a feminist revenge thriller, it’s a supernatural thriller. Isn’t a supernatural thriller a horror film? There’s a real gendering of genre that you find in these promotional labels. There are a couple of big rape-revenge films—textbook rape-revenge films—made by women, where the filmmakers have come out and said, “No, I don’t make those kinds of films. This is not a rape-revenge film. I’m above that.” Honey, this is a rape-revenge film. There’s a rape, and then there’s a revenge. That’s a rape-revenge film. It’s fine, we don’t think that you’re a knuckle-dragging troglodyte; it doesn’t mean you’re an exploitation filmmaker. Ingmar Bergman made The Virgin Spring, one of the most important rape-revenge films ever made. It’s okay, you can make an art film and it can be a rape-revenge film. There’s self-policing, and industry-policing of the labels of horror themselves. So that meant that when I pulled the book together, I could be fairly elastic, because it may be a film that, for me, is a cut-and-dried horror film. A supernatural thriller is a horror film. 

And let’s discuss the reverse, films made by women that are more fluid in their play with horror that are often policed by male viewers who say, “This is not horror.”

There’s a wonderful Australian filmmaker and academic called Briony Kidd, who used to run a great women in genre film festival called Stranger With My Face. And I quote her in the book, and I’m paraphrasing here, but she says, when men experiment with genre, it’s considered bold filmmaking. When women do it, they’ve failed genre. They’re told, “You didn’t obey the codes and conventions because you’re a woman and you don’t understand how they work.” A great example of this is the reception of The Bride, which, I have to say, I certainly would have liked to have loved it more. But I’m so glad that Maggie Gyllenhaal had space to take such a wild swing, and for me, there’s value just in that. I want women filmmakers to make crazy, insane horror films. Whether I like them or not is irrelevant. I feel the same way about Lynn Ramsey’s Die My Love. Take a crazy bold swing, and have space and support to take that swing. But so much of the negative press that I’ve come across on The Bride has implicitly said that Gyllenhaal doesn’t know what she’s doing, that she doesn’t understand how genre works. Whereas, if Quentin Tarantino or Eli Roth do that, they’re such transgressive edgelords, they’re rewriting the shape of cinematic language. Women don’t get that luxury. 

It comes back to this long-held assumption that women are interlopers, that women don’t belong in filmmaking. Certainly not in horror filmmaking. That it’s unnatural for women to want to work in this space. And I actually think that it is as pervasive today as it always has been. There are more women filmmakers now and they have more distribution opportunities, and we have these very high-profile awards, like Titane winning the Palme d’Or. Or the incredible run that Coralie Fargeat had with The Substance. These are hugely important, groundbreaking moments, and there’s no going back from that; the progress that these kinds of films have made is enormous. But at the same time, it’s like they’re anomalies, or a fluke. It’s a horror movie, and it’s made by a woman, can you believe it? There’s a space at the end of the film where you can just feel that weariness from the women filmmakers we interviewed, that they are still being told you don’t belong here, you’re an interloper. If you get it right, it’s a fluke. If you get it wrong, it’s because you don’t know what you’re doing.

I felt that double bind so intensely from the film. And it reminds me of the coverage of Sinners. If a horror film is made by someone from an othered community, success is somehow still framed as a failure.

The Variety coverage of Sinners’ success was insane. It was unhinged. And some of the critical response to Sinners was that it’s not really a horror film. I reckon vampires are pretty horror, mate. Weapons didn’t have that discourse surrounding it.

The documentary is organized around chapters in a woman’s life, from girlhood to aging. Has your relationship to horror changed over the course of your life and your career?

A lot. When we had our world premiere at the Melbourne International Film Festival, one of the questions that really stayed with me was, “What didn’t you accomplish in this film?” Donna Davies, the director, and I didn’t even need to look at each other, because it’s something that we discussed constantly. There is a complete dearth of films about menopause. I was deep in the throes of perimenopause when we were making this film. And I’d never heard the word perimenopause until I was in perimenopause. And we were asking, where are these films? How do we go from The Babadook to What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? What is happening in that space between? Any woman that’s gone through the ‘pause will tell you, it’s because you become invisible. You disappear. I had older friends tell me this when I was younger, and I thought it was metaphorical until it happened to me. When you hit menopause, you walk down the street, and people just don’t see you. You literally become invisible. We couldn’t think of any horror films that were explicitly about menopause. It’s deeply upsetting and deeply shocking, and I would love to say that’s the fault of the documentary. But it’s not. It’s the fault of horror. We have done such great work with Gingersnaps, and Carrie, Teeth, Hellbender: these great coming-of-age films about the body and bleeding and the visceral process of coming of age for younger people. But you jump to the other end, and there’s nothing. It’s chilling. 

Beyond that, we talk about motherhood in the documentary. I can’t imagine how I would have responded to The Babadook if I didn’t have a young child at the time. I’ve never been able to rewatch it, I find it so upsetting. Just bone-chilling. My son was about three years old when that film came out. And I just thought, what if I’m that mum? It put all my fears onscreen. Absolutely, horror changes at different points in your life.

I’m really glad you brought up motherhood. You have a very cute shoutout to your son in the documentary affirming your love for him, despite the fact that you are talking about the monstrosity of your experience of motherhood. I do the same thing anytime I discuss monstrous motherhood. It feels so transgressive that it needs to have a qualifier attached to it, it’s almost too dangerous. It’s as though horror and love can’t coexist.

Maternal horror is the only space culturally that I can think of where motherhood isn’t presented as this idealized, soft-focused romance. This is the best thing that will ever happen to you. Everything is pastel colored. Horror acknowledges that this is really hard, and it’s really weird, and your body does strange things. You’re not yourself. Your autonomy as an individual is now bound biologically to another human being. Films like The Babadook, and Prevenge, and Baby Blood, they ask, what if it’s not perfect? What if you don’t have all of these beautiful, happy, euphoric feelings about motherhood? I find them a relief. You’re not sleeping, you’re deranged, you’re just mental when you have a baby. And your whole concept of who your body is for, especially if you’re breastfeeding, becomes a question. If you’re a horror fan, being pregnant is really weird. It’s like, I’m being taken over by another spirit—that’s not good in horror. Whereas, culturally, we’re told, no, it’s this fantastic, wonderful thing. There’s this crazy tension. That’s one of the things I like about horror. It’s a space that I can go and be told, you know what, the world is kind of sucky and dangerous. It’s a safe space to have those thoughts.

There’s a section of the film where Kate Siegel gives an incredibly graphic description of a cesarean section. And even if people hate the rest of the documentary, I think that’s the moment people are going to leave with. It’s funny, and it’s true, and it’s honest, and it’s absolutely mortifying. It’s the opposite of the soft-focus, patting a bit of sweat off your brow vision of birth. It’s just body horror.

Despite the fact that horror is configured around otherness, you place emphasis in the book on the idea of horror’s “perverse pleasure of allegiance.” I think this is a valuable framework to talk about the film, where there is allegiance to the genre, but also allegiance to each other. Across all of your work, there is a deep investment in community and community building.

So many rape-revenge films are about women being isolated, and having to fight for themselves. The rape-revenge films that I find really interesting are when women form communities. It doesn’t happen very often. It’s often not in horror, but in action films, like Act of Vengeance or The Ladies Club, which is absolutely not a horror film. But there’s an amazing scene from Midsommar where Florence Pugh’s character is howling, she’s just inconsolable, and she’s joined by other women, and they all weep together. That one moment is just extraordinary, and articulates something that I think is very hard to articulate in words. And this is reflected by the women-in-horror community.

The idea of horror as a space that affords power to the outsider is very specific to your love of the genre. How has horror informed your own sense of agency?

Probably not in ways that are explicit. But horror has given me a language. I’m autistic, and I was diagnosed very late, as a lot of people, especially a lot of women, are. Horror has really given me a language to respect and articulate the sensory and the embodied experience of life.

That feels so connected to the way you describe The Texas Chainsaw Massacre in the documentary Chain Reactions. You start with color, and move to the film’s surrealistic qualities, and that’s the space your analysis stems from. I notice a consistent theme of reflecting on fine art in your film criticism. As a result of that, does horror originate in the body for you, in the same way that fine art hits your senses first?

When I was younger and more academic-leaning, I had a lot of hifalutin theoretical arguments for why we like horror. And as I’ve gotten older, I’ve just thrown them all to the wind. It’s sensory seeking. In the same way that I’m blown away by a Caravaggio painting, I’m blown away by the trailer for The Shining. I feel it before I cognate it. I think that’s why a film like Dario Argento’s Suspiria, which I’ve written a book on, is so enduringly compelling. A friend of mine watched it for the first time, and was like, “I didn’t really get it, because it was obvious that it was about witches, because the song at the start was Witch, Witch, Witch.” I didn’t know what to say. Were you watching this for the story? I can’t even imagine what the experience of watching Suspiria for complex character development and sophisticated narrative arc would be. That film is about sensory experience: this immersive, dizzying, compelling, embodied experience. What would be left of any of Argento’s films if you went into them with that kind of way of thinking? These are films that you feel. You feel horror before you think horror. And in that way, it’s very much a body genre. Pornography theorists have argued similar things. Linda Williams identified the category of body genre, such as porn and horror, as an embodied experience. Even horror films that have no gore, like a haunted house movie, always present a visceral threat. If a horror film impacts you, you feel it physically. You might not get actual goosebumps, but you still have that frisson. It’s a physical reaction. 

Perhaps there’s a connection to be made about the way that feelings are denigrated as feminine, while intellectual analysis is privileged as a more masculine, and more valid form of critique.

I go back to Lee Gambin. He was a queer film critic, and he loved horror, he loved soap operas, he loved musicals, just loved them. Loved them, loved them, loved them. I wrote an obituary for him when he died, and I realized the thing that united Lee’s passions was that he just loved big feelings. And I think that that’s what horror is, and going back to what I was saying before, I used to have these very sophisticated, highbrow ideas about horror and engagement, but I think they’ve actually become simpler. I just really like big feelings. We live in a world where big feelings are discouraged; you have to keep it together, you have to be restrained, especially if you’re femme. You have to be demure and ladylike, and if you’re not, then you’re shrill or hysterical. And horror is a space for these enormously big feelings to play out in a context that is completely acceptable. 

In thinking about your body of work, the word that comes up for me is abundance. You look at the genre with such an abundant perspective, and the way that you theorize is quite abundant. Even the title, 1000 Women in Horror, is designed to elicit the response, “Wait a second! There’s more than a thousand!” Your thesis on rape revenge is that there’s a multiplicity of viewpoints on the genre because women’s experiences of rape are varied. Your description of feminism is that it’s an organizing framework rather than a limiting definition. You even end the introduction of the book 1000 Women in Horror with space for people to list filmmakers you didn’t include. I think it’s a radical way of doing film criticism. Allowing space.

I’m quite dismissive about my experience in academia, like, I’m a recovering academic. When I was doing my master’s thesis, and even my PhD, I came to horror through the critical field of melodrama. And one thing that’s really central to melodrama studies is the notion of excess. In bringing melodrama and horror together, what was fundamental to me was this idea of excess. Glut. What is excessive? What is over the top? This idea of excess has really stayed with me from those early days, twenty years ago. Rather than looking at excess as too much, I celebrate the excess. Let’s celebrate the too-muchness. Let’s embrace it, let’s acknowledge it. Not to dismiss it, not to write it off as tacky, or overdone, or overwhelming, or unimportant. Let’s look into that abundance. I do actually think that’s one of the most enduring legacies from my very, very early academic days.

What is your relationship to filmmaking now? You’ve spent so much time researching and writing about other filmmakers, and curating film as a programmer, and now you have a feature credit writing this documentary. Where are you positioning yourself in relation to filmmaking after this project?

I used to do a lot of film festival reviews, like five in a day, and I loved it. It’s like bootcamp, but it has a shelf life. I knew that it was coming to an end when I was in conversation with more filmmakers than film critics. And my friend James Shapiro, who used to be a programmer for Fantastic Fest, once said, “It’s really hard to make a movie.”  And that has really stayed with me. The idea of giving a film a negative review because I do or don’t like it seems beside the point to me now. It’s so hard to make a film, especially a self-funded indie film, and whether it’s good or not is less interesting to me than the fact that, oh my god, you made a film! That’s incredible! I’ve always been partial to long-form writing. I much prefer writing a long book than a short review. I have a new book that is about to be announced, which is about the soundtrack for the Blair Witch Project, called Josh’s Blair Witch Mix, which nobody knows about. It’s an incredible album. And it goes back to my early days in music criticism—before I did film, I was a music critic. But in filmmaking, I was lucky enough to be involved in Kier-La Janisse’s Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched, and I spent quite a lot of time with Alexandre Philippe working on Chain Reactions, and obviously Donna Davies on 1000 Women in Horror. Seeing how the sausage is made, you kind of can’t go back from that. So, I’ll keep writing books, because I love writing books. They’re like my mental health plan. But 1000 Women in Horror has given me a taste for asking, okay, well, what kind of shape can my work take?