ISSUE 6
Cat Smith’s horror programme for this month’s Reel Women event, at the Cambridge Arts Picturehouse, is a great showcase of indie horror talent. Let’s have a look at what’s in store - and where to look for some feature-length films from other great female filmmakers, once these shorts have whet your appetite. Dating site OK Cupid’s algorithms have shown that a shared love of horror films is one of the best predictors of a steady love match, so romance could well blossom tonight, amid the screams. There won’t be a dry seat in the house... A desperately lonely heart beats at the core of MAUVAISES TETES (BAD HEADS), featuring on this programme of scary shorts. Rebekah Fieschi brings vintage 1930s MGM style to a story reminiscent of Lucky McKee’s MAY. If the “make do and mend” approach to romance seems legit to you, you might want to seek out a copy of P.J. Woodside’s feature FRANCES STEIN - not on the programme but worth tracking down. Everybody loves a mad scientist and this is a great addition to the subgenre. P.J. wrote, directed and stars in this feature. Frances Stein is a notoriously brainiac who sacrifices everything to realise her new breakthrough in biochemical research - and there’s an easter eggy nod to THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW among the supporting characters. Frances’ Cronenbergian attempts to create artificial life start attracting attention, and soon we realise that she has darker plans for her creation than anyone could have imagined.
postpartum
With plot twists aplenty, this indie cyberpunk retread of Mary Shelley’s most famous story transcends sci-fi horror and develops into a compelling noir drama. Another classic in the same body horror ballpark as BAD HEADS is the Soska sisters’ AMERICAN MARY, starring Bette Davis lookalike Katharine “GINGER SNAPS” Isabelle. Here’s hoping the UK’s penniless trainee doctors don’t follow in medical student Mary’s footprints - she pays her bills with money made from increasingly unconventional plastic surgery commissions. Tristan Risk appears as Beatress, a woman who’s had facial surgery to make herself look like a terrifying real-life Betty Boop.
... a heady nightmare of plastic wrap and impending doom ... Risk also stars in Izzy Lee’s upcoming film INNSMOUTH, a Lovecraftian throwback to 70s genre horror with an almost all-female cast... and you can see one of Lee’s horror shorts at this month’s Reel Women horror event. POSTPARTUM was first conceived as a horror comedy, but the script grew darker by the page and the result is a heady nightmare of plastic wrap and impending doom. Some say that film critics are just a bunch of embittered filmmaking wannabes - not so Lee, who also reviews for Rue Morgue, Diabolique, TwitchFilm and Fangoria as a tireless, blood-soaked cheerleader for the genre.
Do you like Canadian horror films? There’s BLACK CHRISTMAS, CUBE, GINGER SNAPS, THE LITTLE GIRL WHO
LIVES
DOWN
THE
LANE,
RESIDENT EVIL and SCANNERS, to name a few Take One favourites. The guest list for Karen Lam’s Canadian short THE MEETING comprises four
the meeting
serial killers, looking for redemption.
It’s not so often that we see a serial killer experience conflicted emotions and one of the most famous cinematic crises has to be the iconic confession scene in Mary Harron and Guinevere Turner’s AMERICAN PSYCHO. Turner told Dazed magazine, “I very much think it’s a feminist film. It’s a satire about how men compete with each other and how in this hyper-real universe we created, women are even less important than your tan or your suit or where you summer and to me, even though the women are all sort of tragic and killed, it’s about how men perceive them and treat them. “ Kate Shenton’s contribution tonight is a short horror comedy about a gimp, a dominatrix and an alarm clock. A dominatrix takes a break from her gimp, only to choke to death on a piece of macaroni. Part health and safety warning, part horror and part black comedy, we think you’ll love this one.
gimp
SLUT
Chloe Okuno’s SLUT is all about a naive young girl who just wants to impress the boys. Most schoolgirls have felt the pressure to be perfect, or to rebel against patriarchal expectation, or more likely a mixture of both - and in 2009 JENNIFER’S BODY treated the same issue in a different way. This supernatural horror comedy was written by Diablo Cody and directed by Karyn Kusama. In the spirit of HEATHERS, it’s not so much a feminist fable as an exploration of the uniquely and cruelly internecine relationship that can develop between two young women - after you watch it, you’ll never be able to look at a Claire’s Accessories BFF charm without shuddering. Rounding off the Reel Women programme is Yolanda Ramke’s zombie thriller CARGO, which juxtaposes a helpless infant against a zombie apocalypse - but did you know that there’s a zombie feature written by a kid? Emily Hagins wrote and directed PATHOGEN at the tender age of 12!
cargo
Our editor Rosy Hunt spoke to
Jill Sixx Gevargizian,
a
producer and director of ghastly horror shorts, about her film GRAMMY which screens at tonight’s Reel Women event. RH: Looking at trends in horror – vampires in the 80s, slashers in the 90s, zombies in the 00s – this could be the season of the witch. What drew you to the trope of the wolf in grandma’s clothing? JG: I co-wrote GRAMMY with my good friend Jill Towerman. We were out of town at a horror convention getting dolled up, and I may be being a little spoiler-y here, but I said the phrase, “I need to put my face on.” She mentioned how her grandmother always used to say that, and she didn’t know what it meant so it freaked her out as a kid. A lightbulb went off in my head. I said, “we should make a movie about…” I can’t say more or I’d give away the ending. But it means a lot more to me than what it looks like on the surface. It has a feminist political message about the pressure society places on women to wear makeup, and a joke on what we are underneath. Plus I really like that this concept involved a cast of an older woman and a child [Hala Finley], not the typical age range in horror. [cont’d]
INTERVIEW WITH JILL GEVARGIZIAN CONTINUED RH: You have to have ovaries of steel to make a film which runs under 2 minutes – it must be deceptively easy, getting under our skin and building suspense in such little time? JG: I agree with you! Super-shorts are fun because it’s basically one punchline, one scare. I think that can be very hard though. I think people have very short attention spans these days, especially when browsing Facebook. So I wanted to make something that would work well in that space. We just happened to find the perfect concept for it. RH: Did you have an actor in mind for “Grammy” and work around her, or did you have to pick and choose someone who fit the bill? JG: At first I actually contacted my great aunt about the role only to find out that she is a member of SAG and admittedly I didn’t want to go through the hassle of making this a SAG production. My trusty local filmmaking friend Patrick Rea, who I call on for help all the time, suggested Marilyn Hall. Once I met her I know she was perfect. She is a firecracker! She really had fun with the prosthetic makeup done by the master artist Colleen May, who has worked on all my films! RH: Are you still working with the writer of your short CALL GIRL on developing it into a feature? JG: The CALL GIRL feature is completely in the hands of the writer, Eric Havens. He’s been working on it off and on. It’s nothing we are seriously trying to develop right now. I do have a new short film coming out later this year, THE STYLIST, that he and I wrote together. It’s a drama-horror about an extremely disturbed hairstylist, starring the incredibly talented Najarra Townsend. I am very proud of it and can’t wait to get it out there.
READ THE FULL INTERVIEW AT TAKEONECFF.COM
RECOMMENDED READING TAKE ONE FAVOURITE: The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film (Collection of essays from writers including Linda Williams, Barbara Creed and Lucy Fischer) This is a decent springboard for exploring the idea of gender in horror cinema, as well as examining Freudian and post-modern perspectives. It’s a big book with 21 scholarly (and reasonably lucid) essays, and plenty of black-and-white movie stills. The authors use a variety of theories to survey the history of horror/slasher movies and the work of individual directors, and offer analysis of a number of movies - the treatment of “Alien” is particularly good. REEL WOMEN FAVOURITE: Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (Carol J. Clover) From its first publication in 1992, Men, Women, and Chain Saws has offered a groundbreaking perspective on the creativity and influence of horror cinema since the mid-1970s. Investigating the popularity of the low-budget tradition, Carol Clover looks in particular at slasher, occult, and rape-revenge films. Although such movies have been traditionally understood as offering only sadistic pleasures to their mostly male audiences, Clover demonstrates that they align spectators not with the male tormentor, but with the females tormented — notably the slasher movie’s “final girls”—as they endure fear and degradation before rising to save themselves. The lesson was not lost on the mainstream industry, which was soon turning out the formula in well-made thrillers.
©TAKE ONE 2016 EDITOR IN CHIEF: ROSY HUNT WITH THANKS TO COVER ARTIST JENIFER RANDELL