DIRECTOR SPOTLIGHT: HANNAH MAY CUMMING AND THE CREATION OF HER POLITICAL HORROR FILMS

PSU FILM ALUM DISCUSSES HER CAREER

Writing horror film scripts from a feminist perspective with plenty of blood and carnage is not something anyone can do, but Hannah May Cumming is doing it in ‘70s retro style. Satirizing stereotypes of people of color, LGBTQ+ people and women is what makes her films both shocking in general and popular among her fan base. This is not for the faint of heart, but for Cumming it comes easy because horror is her first love. Cumming is reclaiming the ‘70s horror genre in the name of women.

Cumming is a writer, director and co-founder of Monstrous Femme Films—taking ‘70s campy horror films and giving them a feminist perspective with a sociopolitical message. Cumming graduated from Portland State’s film school in 2020. Her first film, Fanatico (2018), was in the neo-giallo genre and was a joint project with Sam Schrader, another PSU alumni. Her second film, Camp Calypso (2019), was a summer camp creative featurette. However, it was Baby Fever (2021), her ‘70s prom night prochoice body horror film co-written with Alex Hartwig, which put Cumming on the map.

Cumming was influenced in her early childhood by the retro vibe of the ‘70s. “Living in Liverpool definitely influenced my love of retro design and fashion, like being raised on the Beatles,” she said. “My grandma was, like, young in the ‘60s in Liverpool, and so that’s just always been an influential part of my film fashion sense and design.”

Cumming began filming with a flip-video camera when she was nine years old, bored, living in Oklahoma and trying to keep herself busy and creative. “Yeah, I lived in Oklahoma,” she said. “We moved there when I was five, and there’s not a lot to do there. And it was kinda the beginning of YouTube as well. So I got a flip-video camera and just spent my days outside making videos with my friends. And then, when we moved to Portland, it felt like maybe it could actually be a real career path for me because there is an industry here.”

As a PSU film student, Cumming was very involved with the program. She worked in the film office for three years, and she credited her creative and enlightened writing style to the program’s emphasis on film theory.

Cumming especially enjoyed working with Mark Berrettini and Kristin Hole, two of her favorite PSU professors. Hole introduced Cumming to the feminist film perspective, which inspired much of her work. She incorporates this and her love of horror in her filmmaking. “I took a film feminism class with Kristen Hole, and that changed a lot for me and guided me into filmmaking,” Cumming said. “I’ve loved the horror genre, like, my whole life. That has been my favorite genre of film since I was a kid.”

During her career, inspired by her passion and fueled by the PSU film program, Cumming decided to do a feminist remake of the ‘70s misogynistic films she loved, reclaim them and add a sexually empowering perspective. “[‘70s horror films are] very misogynistic films, so we’re redoing them because I love them,” Cumming said. “The style is amazing. The music is amazing—the lighting. But I think that the representation of women in them is very questionable.” Moreover, it was the recent horror film, Get Out, which inspired Cumming to embrace the political reality and proclaim the statement of her work. “I think that when I started looking at the horror films that I’d loved for my whole life through the feminist lens, I started realizing that they’re a lot deeper than I took them for at first watch,” Cumming said. “When Get Out came out in 2018, that movie really inspired me to look at the horror genre differently.”

Cumming gained experience in the film production industry in 2017 while working as a director’s assistant alongside Jacob Chase on the Portland-produced series Girl in the Woods. They shot all around Oregon, in places like Camp Namanu and Vernonia. Cumming observed Chase as he would capture pre-visuals on his phone, edit and then see what the scene would look like before shooting. “I learned about the importance of prepping and the importance of storyboarding,” Cumming explained. “He’s very organized. He’s very prepared. So I think that I did that right before I did Baby Fever, and I took a lot of stuff I learned from him and applied it to preparing for Baby Fever.”

The writing for Baby Fever occurred during the COVID-19 lockdown and was a Zoom-based co-writing experience between Cumming and Hartwig. “We were Zooming every day, and we had an outline for what we wanted the film to be and what we wanted each scene to be,” Cumming said. “And then, we would each write a version of the same scene separately, send it to each other, critique each other’s scene, pull what we liked from either scene, and then write a combined scene. We fought a lot. We’re best friends, though, but also, I think it’s important to fight and debate, and if you really believe in it, stand up.”

This is how Baby Fever was born. Baby Fever takes place in 1972, a year before Roe v. Wade, and the film premiered just four days after Roe v. Wade was overturned—poignant timing.

“It pulls from the ‘70s pregnancy horror and reflects the sociopolitical tension of the time,” Cumming explained. “So there were a lot of pregnancy themed horror films in the ‘70s because of Roe v. Wade. I had been feeling the anxiety around abortion rights the last few years, and that’s what I was channeling into this script, but we try to have a very serious message behind it as well—the message is choice. If you force a person to have a baby when they don’t want it, it’s not a baby, it’s a parasite, it’s an unwanted thing using you as a host in your body.”

The film follows the wanna-be prom queen, Donna (Helena Berens), who falls in love with school football star, Trip (Louis Llewellyn), and after having sex with Trip she finds herself carrying an unwanted parasite. If you like blood, gore and surprises, you are in for a treat.

When asked what Cumming would like her viewers to take away from her films, she replied, “All of my films deal with feminine rage. I think women are never allowed to be angry, or they are bitches, right? And they’re never allowed to be sad, or they’re too emotional. And I think that the main message of all of my films is to feel empowered in your emotions and feel valid in your anger because the world is not a kind place to women and to queer people. So I think that I just wanna create a space where people can feel seen and heard and validated in their pain.”

Cumming is currently working on a story about a local Oregon haunt, the Enchanted Forest in Turner, Oregon, and a feature version of Baby Fever Baby Fever is on the short film festival circuit and doing very well. It premiered at the Chinese Theatre in Hollywood, California for Screamfest, and went on to show in Brooklyn, NY; Manhattan, NY; and Manchester, England, where it won Best Short Film-Grimmfest in 2022. You can catch Baby Fever on Feb. 25 at the McMinnville Short Film Festival and Make Believe Seattle Film Festival March 23–26.