You used to really be scared here.
Johnny!
You’re still afraid.
Stop it now, I mean it!
They’re coming to get you, Barbara!
Stop it. You’re ignorant.
Well, when I was 11 I went and saw "Halloween 5" in the movie theater, and Michael Myers scared me.
But there’s also…that’s the movie where Michael Myers takes off his mask. He was, like, really handsome.
I didn’t realize it until I was on a panel recently that this clicked for me. And I was like, that was a formative moment.
My encounters with horror started shortly after watching "Predator" for the first time.
I had a dream where I was the Predator. My parents were like, we can’t watch scary movies anymore.
I think I was about seven. And the first horror film that I remember watching, especially alone by myself,
was "A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master." I’m seeing, for the first time, a girl like me,
who was really shy, become this powerful person and defeat the antagonist.
This kind of origins of, like, feminist sensibilities, too.
It’s hard for us to see bodies being pierced and invaded on screen because that’s so personal.
So I think, sort of, what horror does is it creatively allows us to process grief and trauma, and it also thrills us
in a way that we’re able to handle it. Whether the film has been directed by a man or woman,
it’s ideas of, like, bodily autonomy, assault, dread.
Horror is one of the most powerful tools that we have to kind of figure out this mess that we’re in.
It’s a very brief period of time, the slasher period, but it has almost completely defined for people what a horror film is.
It’s the naked lady. It’s don’t have sex and you get killed, and all these things. So I think horror films have defined
how we talk about them, and now we’re trying to untangle ourselves from that mess.
Not in my movie.
Hello? Hello?
"Black Christmas" would be considered the first slasher film. I think of it as being the bridge between the Italian "giallo" film
and the American slasher film. And you can see its influence a lot in films like Halloween, particularly.
But it’s one of the first sorority-sisters-in-a house…it’s based on a true story,
but also the myth of the babysitter with the man upstairs.
And also, a through line through "Black Christmas" which is really interesting is the main character, Jess,
is pregnant and is asking for an abortion.
You can’t make a decision like that. You haven’t even asked me.
I wasn’t even going to tell you!
That really extends to ideas about a woman’s body, internally and externally, and who has control over those bodies?
Is it the boyfriend? The police? They have to save you? Is it the killer in the attic?
And so it’s a confluence of all these things that make it so interesting.
I mean, I think the original "Black Christmas" addresses women’s issues very positively, but in the new one
there is a sense of sisterhood amongst the people that are fighting with each other.
I think that it shows that women are very powerful in their own bodies and in their own lives.
And I think that’s sort of different than what we’ve seen in the past, of, this woman’s just been brutalized
for an hour and a half, and then she leaves at the end. But what happens to her after that? It’s not good.
The final girl is the one who doesn’t die. She survives long enough to either kill the monster herself
or facilitate some kind of—usually male—hero intervening to kill the monster.
One of the first scholars I met doing this work, she was disgusted by the idea of the final girl,
because she’s just like, how many times is this woman going to be put in the situation where she has to fight a killer again and
again and again? How empowering is it to be a final girl if this is constantly your story, if you’re constantly barraged by this?
These are films written and directed by men, and this is a woman scholar thinking this is not fair, this is not right,
this is not just. You know, there’s only so much a person should bear.
The final girl is deafeningly white. I think we need to examine that and to think about why the final girl keeps
appearing through whiteness. Carol Clover, when she theorizes the final girl, she says it’s the first instance where a primarily
male audience is being forced to identify across their gender and identify with a woman. But if you have studied American
literature that’s actually not the first genre that asks you to do that. The first genre that asks you to do that is the captivity
narrative. So white women being taken by Indigenous peoples, coming back to colonial society
and then writing these kinds of long, biographical, maybe questionably made-up pieces about their experiences
of going through and seeing all of these horrific things and then surviving being the one to make it back to society,
living through all the monsters. And now that I’ve seen that, I can’t really un-see that.
And I don’t think the solution is to just, like, plug Black and Brown and Indigenous bodies into the position of the final girl,
because then all you’re doing is, you’re saying, you too, if you engage in these kinds of colonial, extractive ways
of looking and producing knowledge, can dance the dance of white supremacy, right? So there’s
something that needs to change about the kinds of stories that we’re going to tell that need to be fundamentally different.
I have a lot of conversations with filmmakers who are saying they’re genre-fluid or genre-adjacent—
using elements of horror because that’s the way in which you can explore something so well, but
combining it with other narratives to make an impact.
Still don’t see why it has to be a girl.
"Rhymes for Young Ghouls" is a kind of post-apocalyptic heist film about a girl named Aila
who is growing up on the fictional Red Crow reservation. She sells weed to stay out of residential school, but
unfortunately one day the Indian agent beats up her dealers, robs them, and leaves them without the money
money they need to pay their kind of tax that they’re using to stay out of residential school, leading to some kind of
unforeseen and really traumatic outcomes for her. Up in Canada, they call them residential schools.
Down here in the US, we call them boarding schools. And I know this language is going to sound strong, but they were basically
prisons that Indigenous children were kidnapped and taken to against their will, against their family’s will.
Part of what the film shows is the intergenerational impact that these schools have had on Indigenous communities.
Horror is a really useful genre to think through a kind of national memory, because it can show, actually, what for some seems
like a shiny, jazzy Western or musical or happy-ending story for another community
is actually an apocalypse or is actually a nightmare.
What I’m seeing more with Black women who are filmmakers is that…I’m seeing them do the more deep dives
the more psychological things, the more issues with intergenerational trauma and how that manifests.
For example, "Master" is about two characters and their trials and tribulations as Black women
on this predominantly white Ivy League type of campus. The character played by Regina Hall
she’s finding these relics from the past, people who’ve lived there who’ve never really considered,
yeah, having a mammy cookie jar is maybe not very inviting for this Black master character.
So it’s these little things that Mariama Diallo puts in that film that make you go,
oh yeah, she’s feeling the weight of the history of white supremacy.
To really get deep and to really get under your skin, Black women are really doing that
on a level I’ve never seen before in horror.
I don’t feel like we need to see any more white women being topless and stabbed.
That’s the problem, sort of, with film in general, and representation on screen
and behind the camera matters so much. And I just think it’s increasing opportunities for people to make things.
And I’m really happy to see more than just one type of person come out.
I hope that more non-white people, especially women, get to get mainstream attention with horror
films so people stop thinking that it’s just white boys in black T-shirts making horror films.
That’s what I want to happen. That’s what I hope happens.
It’s taking a while for film to catch up. While we have a strong community of Indigenous filmmakers now,
and we still don’t get a ton of resources. So, you know, Jeff Barnaby’s "Blood Quantum" was the highest-budget
Indigenous-made film in all of Canada, and the budget wasn’t that high. Building more space for Indigenous
people to tell their stories and changing how films get made is really what needs to happen next.
For me, horror films are also like magic. They take a lot of boldness and creativity and some madness to make these films.
And they’re very special and people are very committed and creative in the way that they tell these stories,
because these are heavy topics and these are heavy, heavy issues to deal with. And they’re very personal,
but they’re done in ways in which we’re grossed out
We’re happy. We’re laughing, we’re entertained. And there’s also just beautiful artistry.