Discovering the Women in Horror

One of the things I’ve been doing over the last few years, along with my partner-in-crime Aaron Christensen, is our little library lectures, known as Terror Tuesdays, at the Sulzer Region Library in Chicago. Each year, we have a different theme or subject that we break up into a 4-week lecture series. This year, after some suggestions from those attending, we decided to focus on women in the genre, from actresses, writers, and directors. What I didn’t expect is how much I would actually learn while doing our research.

I’ve been studying different aspect of the genre for quite some time. I know a lot, but I also know there is much more to be learned. That really hit me this time when I started to do a little research on the input from the female side in the industry. While I knew over the last two decades, women have started to make quite the impact, showing audiences some incredible stories, and some truly terrifying ones, there is still more history that needs to be common knowledge.

Some of the information I came across almost made me feel sick to my stomach. Not because of anything scary, but by the information out there on how many women were working directors, writers, producers, and other creative types in the very beginning of the cinema. Now this information wasn’t anything lost or secret that I magically dug up, but is out there on the internet, and in books (if you look in the right ones). The names of Georges Méliès and Auguste & Louis Lumière are always mentioned in the history books, as the forefathers of cinema, which they should be. But why isn’t the name Alice Guy-Blaché (pictured above) mentioned in the same discussion? I mean, she is the first person to come up with a narrative film, not to mention directing over 1000 films in her career. Add the fact that she was the first women to own and operate her own movie studio.

But it wasn’t just her. There was Lois Weber, Rosa Porten, Louise Kolm-Fleck, Elvira Notari, Eloyce Gist, and the list goes on and on. If you get a second, take a few minutes to watch this short film below called Suspense from 1913, that was written and co-directed by Lois Weber, who also stars in the film! There is a triple split screen shot, showing three different characters in three different scenes at the same time. There’s a shot looking through a keyhole, as well as shooting through a rearview mirror in a car to show what is behind the car. All of this, in a short film from 1913. Why isn’t this spoken of in the same regards as Méliès?

Apparently once the studio system came into power, with men running it, women’s participation in the industry seemed to be just in front of the camera, or a few were still doing the writing. But we never seemed to read that in our studies. I honestly felt a little angry that were women working in the horror genre but were not that familiar to most fans. Including me!

So, on a positive note, it does show that we’re never too old to learn something new, that can really change the way you think of things now. But it also shows that we all have a lot more to learn about our horror history. Thankfully, it seems more fans now are more open to their stories and how they want to tell them. It really is a case of knowing the past can really help us for the future. If you’re looking to advance your own studies on this subject, just click HERE to see a variety of books that can help you do just that.

Next Up: Highlights Part 3