Spook Yourself Silly With These Lady-Directed Horror Films

Ms. in the Biz put together a list of ten lady filmmakers making scary-ass films after Marcy Boyle and Rachel Holzman of Nobody Can Cool wrote to her with these intriguing (and very spooky!) (okay, not really) points:

Women directing big budget genre movies are scarce, [and] many women are making low budget horror/thriller films but they aren’t getting the attention they need to advance to big studio movies or bigger profile independents. As Heidi Honeycutt noted regarding the ABC’s of Death 2 (a horror film anthology in production using a different director for each letter of the alphabet) only 2 women were hired to be part of the anthology of 26 horror directors participating in the project. In a response to Heidi’s article, the producer of that film, Ant Timpson, acknowledges that the invisibility of women directors (with a few famous exceptions) is a problem, and he basically says that the boy’s club of horror directors was the hiring pool.

The perception by studios/financiers is that genre movies are made by fanboys for fanboys. This misconception that women do not like genre movies is now being challenged by female moviegoers contribution to recent successes of horror/suspense films (see Johanna Schneller article). However, women who find outside financing and make low budget indie genre films need more attention and exposure for their films that would allow them to move up to bigger, career building film jobs.

Check out Ms. in the Biz list of ten horror/thriller films and maybe we should try to watch them all tonight. But first lock your windows. And your doors. And push chairs against them. Big-ass chairs.