Jennifer’s Body (dir. Karyn Kusama, 2009)
Dismissed upon release by its mostly white, cis and (horny) male critics, Karyn Kusama’s Jennifer’s Body has since risen from the grave as a feminist cult classic. The teenage horror archetype of the ‘hot girl’ takes on the literal sense of being a man-eater, in what is certainly Megan Fox’s career defining performance. Following Needy’s exclamation of ‘’You’re killing people!’’ Jennifer rolls her eyes and accurately sums up the film’s sentiment with one simple response, ‘’I’m killing boys.’’ The most frightening hunger in Kusama’s aesthetically gory film isn’t Jennifer’s monstrous hunger. It’s male hunger, the one that devours and oversexualises all the women it encounters, the one that takes girlhood and twists it into something dirty and profane. Jennifer’s Body stands the test of time because it touches on a horror that is still true: what it means to be young, female and desirable in a culture that feeds on you.
Bodies Bodies Bodies (dir. Halina Reijn, 2022)
Halina Reijn’s slasher-comedy satire is a refreshingly sharp take on the whodunit genre, fueled not by jump scares but by Gen Z’s painful brain and social rot behaviours. A murder mystery unfolds at a mansion party gone wrong, yet the true carnage lies in group dynamics. Jokes often hinge on the subversion of social-media buzzwords, real issues mutated into online culture wars and all the characters are terrible in their own delicious ways. Really, what Bodies Bodies Bodies does exceedingly well is understand its characters and its audiences. For us, Gen Zers, the true horror is being rightfully and accurately perceived and exposed.
A Girl Walks Alone at Night (dir. Ana Lily Amirpour, 2014)
Ana Lily Amirpour’s black-and-white debut feature A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night, with a vampire in a chador stalking the predatory men of an Iranian ghost town called “Bad City,” is part feminist fable and part reimagining of an age old genre story. A vampiress driven by (rightful) revenge is a well-worn horror trope, one that is usually accompanied by an oversexualisation of its character and the hunger that defines her existence. Amirpour’s film rejects that and instead makes Girl -the title eponym- more of a political statement, one that skateboards her way into the night (literally). The image of a female vampire skateboarding down a street, her voluminous veil flying out behind her, speaks for itself.
Woman of the Hour (dir. Anna Kendrick, 2024)
While not explicitly labelled as a horror, Anna Kendrick’s directorial debut manages to capture what thousands of male directors never will: a kind of fear that women everywhere have experienced at least once and have learned to trust, honed under the heavy, unwanted gazes of men. Based on the real-life story of serial killer Rodney Alcala’s appearance on The Dating Game, the film plays with the discomfort of watching a predator hide in plain sight. Interwoven with the dating show sequence are the last moments of Alcala’s victims but Woman of the Hour refuses to fall into the romanticisation that plagues the true crime genre, instead rendering Alcala as merely another evil man, while his victims are women in their own rights. ‘’Did you feel seen?’’, Kendrick’s Sheryl is asked after the show and her response is uncomfortably familiar. ‘’I felt looked at,’’ she says, and it is no revelation. It’s merely a woman’s reality.
American Psycho (dir. Mary Harron, 2000)
Mary Harron’s adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho is an effortless study into how the female gaze strips away the mystique the psychopathic, alpha male types desperately try to cling to. A male director might have portrayed Patrick Bateman, the protagonist of American Psycho, as a serial killer driven by psychological torment. Harron, however, finds him a tad boring, a man consumed by the banal, everyday compulsions of masculinity. The director herself has called the film ‘’feminist’’ and it is, unapologetically so; this dog-eats-dog world is both the product and fantasy of late capitalism toxic masculinity and the film openly despises it.
+ A series: The Haunting of Bly Manor (dir. multiple, 2020)
While not a film and not solely directed by a woman (the brilliant Mike Flanagan heads the production and the directorial team and assembles a team of horror masters such as Axelle Carolyn), The Haunting of Bly Manor is a masterpiece of psychological horror. Loosely adapting Henry James, this is a story about hauntings as much as it is about the haunted. Flanagan is interested in the humanity of horror and the horror of humanity in equal measure, which is why above everything else, The Haunting of Bly Manor is a tale of love told through time. “It’s not a ghost story,” utters a character during the show. “It’s a love story.”
