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.