Australia, and the world, is lucky to have her majesty of horror Dr. Alexandra Heller-Nicholas. A scholar, a fan, an award-winning author, a community builder, and a generous champion of filmmakers, writers, critics, and general friendly fiends.
Alexandra’s delightful and informative (but not exhaustive) tome 1000 Women in Horror was published to acclaim in 2020. Acclaim included a congratulations from Vincent D’Onofrio, which would have at least made my year. Now the book has morphed into a documentary directed by Donna Davies and includes a journey through film history, the femme body, and interviews with directors and actors.
1000 Women in Horror is a skilful and at times irreverent dive into the vast talents and thinkers who shaped how horror can be framed and reframed. Alexandra says the title is almost a joke because there are so many more creatives, executives, writers out there. Whet your appetite and begin searching.
Alexandra discusses 1000 Women in Horror, Donna Davies, and more in the below interview.
“Horror is for everyone because death is for everyone.” That’s one of your statements in 1000 Women in Horror. But as the documentary discusses the stages of being gendered female from childhood to old age, would you accept that horror is more precisely for women because life is for women (not only to live but to carry)?
Alexandra Heller-Nicholas: My own personal take is that horror is for everyone who's ever felt like you are not the default setting for whatever a given culture at a certain time and place deems normative. So in this sense I find binary distinctions between biologically defined categories like "male" and "female" less useful than much looser concepts like "masculine" and "feminine".
If you go back to those beautiful old classic Universal horror films of the 1930s you can see just how emphatically feminised Bela Lugosi is in Dracula or Boris Karloff in Frankenstein - their otherness (where their "foreignness" is a marker of their assumed "monstrosity") really pushes them into a feminine space, even though these iconic horror characters might be more obviously classifiable as "male".
Absolutely many people with the whole uterus kit-and-caboodle live the life of a body horror film for much of our lives. For so many of us, every 28 days downstairs turns into a straight-up re-enactment of the final scene of Dario Argento's Tenebre in terms of the sheer spectacular force of blood splatter! Whether we like it or not, our bodies give us the potential for our own little horror film festival once a month.
Where do you think the horror urge starts for women as consumers and creators? Jenn Wexler grew up with the renaissance of teen horror in the 1990s and its mainstream acceptance, whereas Mary Harron’s points of cinematic reference are found in Hitchcock. So it’s not just one kind of film but a conglomerate of experience living with the female body and its societal restrictions which also extends to a psychological rebellion against ‘feminine mores’. Did you, like some of the voices in the documentary, feel Carrie White was right? And did you crave her discovered power?
AH-N: I don't think I am alone in having grown up with the assumption that horror was very much a "boy thing", and that for those of us who have found our home in the genre - like Mary and Jenn - we all have our own unique paths that lead us to discovering that the genre is for us as much as it is for anyone. One of the things I hope the doc conveys is that there is not one singular, unified gendered experience of horror from femme makers and audiences - we all have our own paths, we all have our own stories, we all have our own weird quirks of personality that make it a good fit for us individually.
And your mention of Carrie White here is absolutely perfect - like our girl here, we all are trying to find our own way to autonomy and empowerment, be it personal, professional or both. It's just for some of us, like Carrie, that path can be a little more batshit than others.
The documentary points out that at every stage of her life a woman is both a potential victim or a threat. The despoiling of innocence in girlhood. The confusing melee of adolescence which teaches shame about becoming a woman and a potential threat to be destroyed or who will destroy. Professional lives and motherhood within the realm of adulthood. And finally the body that is frightening because of its proximity to death (and lack of fecundity) the old woman. Are we always potentially monsters? And should we claim the monstrosity?
AH-N: There's a wonderful moment in the doc where Laotian filmmaker, pet-mother and all-round goddess Mattie Do speaks with her signature robust passion about embracing our monstrosity. To paraphrase, claiming monstrosity as our own and using it to empower ourselves becomes a kind of radical act in the face of being constantly pulled back and forth between historically-enforced stereotypes as docile baby-making servants on one hand, and hysterical, psychologically frail dimwits on the other.
Leaning right the fuck in to femme-coded monstrosity has a kind of primal, radical sense of release to it. Fuck the mother/whore binary: horror gives us a space to embrace the banshee within!
When working with Donna Davies how did you make decisions about who you would like to feature? Mattie Do, Kate Siegel (whose c-section description will haunt me), Brea Grant, Chelsea Stardust, Akela Cooper, Lin Shaye, Nikyatu Jusu, and Natasha Kermani to name a handful of the talent involved. What drew you to these women in particular?
AH-N: Donna and I and our wonderful team including our producers Nicola Goelzhaeuser and Giles Edwards (a proper feminist ally if ever there was one) were all really on the same page from the very outset of this project. There was a real unspoken sense that we all had the same idea of what kind of 'shape' we wanted the conversation to take, and who the right people to sculpt that conversation would be.
Every single person in the documentary was someone we were all very excited to have on board, and Donna is such an experienced documentary filmmaker and an enormous horror nerd that for her the kinds of conversations we were hoping for were made a tangible reality. This documentary wouldn't be what it is without Donna and her almost supernatural knack for getting people to talk about things they might not have expected to!
When I think of horror in the film criticism community my mind goes instantly to women. Yourself (of course), Alex West, Kat Ellinger, Kier-La Janisse, Carol J. Clover, Linda Williams, Heidi Honeycutt, Izzy Lee and so many others. The sheer volume of scholarship coming from non-male critics is spectacular. Do you think the shift in scholarship (even just reviewing) to more women experts influenced the horror market?
AH-N: Like both the book and the documentary 1000 Women in Horror, I think it's a case of women being hidden in plain sight for a long, long time when it comes to this question. One of the best books I have ever read about slasher films was published in 1990 - two years before Carol J. Clover's Men Women and Chain Saws - called Games of Terror: Halloween, Friday the 13th and the Films of the Stalker Cycle by a woman called Vera Dika. Until last year, this book was virtually impossible to find, but it has recently been republished by the University of Wales Press, thanks to the Herculean efforts of Wickham Clayton and hot bitch Daniel Sheppard.
But even after that, there were enormously important books on horror such as Linda Badley's Film, Horror and the Body Fantastic (1995), Isabel Cristina Pinedo's Recreational Terror: Women and the Pleasures of Horror Film Viewing (1997), Joan Hawkins' Cutting Edge: Art-Horror and the Horrific Avant-garde (2000), and Tanya Kryzwinska's A Skin for Dancing In: Possession, Witchcraft and Voodoo in Film (2000), which were all influential at the time but I don't think have really received the credit they deserve today when it comes to the bigger picture of horror scholarship.
And that is clearly just scratching the surface - you could do I think a really compelling documentary specifically about the history of women's horror film criticism, including these writers and those you mentioned, just for starters.
Have you spent a significant part of your adult life trying to find a blue/indigo dress similar to the one worn by Isabelle Adjani in Possession? Or is that just me?
AH-N: My holy grail was a replica of the dress from Peter Strickland's In Fabric which I actually wore in an In Conversation event with Peter at the Melbourne International Film Festival back in 2019 (you can see it here!)
If you could extend the documentary into a series what are some of the topics and creators you’d like to do a deeper examination of. Are there any topics you felt you couldn’t discuss for time reasons.
AH-N: A big one for Donna, Nicola and I (and filmmakers such as the multi-talented Australian artist and filmmaker Isabel Peppard) is the total invisibility of menopause (and perimenopause) not just in horror, but in cinema in general.
We seem to age magically from 45 to 65 in horror, and the genre to my eye at least has yet to really find a way to tackle the absolute biological shitshow that is peri/menopause in any kind of sustained, meaningful way. I know Izzy is taking that challenge seriously as an artist, and there may be other filmmakers out there who have tackled it that I don't know of. But I absolutely don't blame horror filmmakers of any gender for this oversight - it obviously is something that culturally is a major blindspot, not just in screen culture but in general.
There is also a moment at the end of the doc where we note that the current women in horror movement is very much a global phenomenon, and if there are any documentary filmmakers reading this I strongly believe this would be an incredible subject for its own film.
There's Heidi Honeycutt and Staci Pippi at Etheria in the US; Sapna Bhavani and Wench Film Festival in India; Elinor Lewy and Sara Neidorf at Final Girls Berlin; Mónica García Massagué from Sitges Film Festival in Spain and her incredible work on the Women in Fan program; Anna Bogutskaya and Olivia Howe at the Final Girls/We Are the Weirdos in the UK; Melody Cooper, Kelly Krause, Lisa Kröger and Mo Moshaty at the Nyx Film Collective; Ash Blackwell at Graveyard Shift Sisters; Dr Sonia Lupher at Cut Throat Women; as well as historically really important fests like Hannah Neurotica's Ax Wound (and her entire Women in Horror Month project) and in Australia, Briony Kidd and Rebecca Thomson's Stranger With My Face festival in Hobart.
And honestly, this is just scratching the surface - there's so many other people and events that should have their work, passion and projects showcased.
“A horror movie can follow you home.” That line was said in relation to The Exorcist. Do you believe once one begins to invite in and reckon with horror (as much as that name contains multitudes) that it begins to create a feeling that we are seen and recognised?
AH-N: I am pretty chilled out about the fact that horror might not be for everyone - it really is so tapped into sensory experience, and some folks are seekers while others are staunchly avoidant. And that is totally fine - I would never force someone who was resistant to horror to watch it.
That being said, though, for me horror is enormously comforting. It is really the only cultural forum I can think of that really says "you know, everything is not OK all the time. And that's OK". I think this enormously reassuring for those of us who feel threatened or at risk or vulnerable because of our gender identity or any of a whole range of different markers of social difference, be it race, ethnicity, sexuality or class.
There's a beautiful paradox that by virtue of its acknowledgement of a volatile world that we can't always control, there is something oddly reassuring about horror.
“Sit down little boys. The grown-ups are talking.” That’s your line. Anonymously what are some of the worst “boy takes” on horror that you’ve encountered?
AH-N: Offered without comment:
1000 Women in Horror screens at MIFF on 21 & 23 August 2025. Tickets are available here.