For a lot of movie goers, even horror freaks, it's hard to name a lot more female-directed fear films than these, but there are actually quite a lot, and I'm not just talking about the explosion of them in the past fifteen years. During the early days of film, there were a number of silent films directed by women such as Lois Weber (Suspense) and Louise Kolm-Fleck (Die Ahnfrau). When the Hollywood sound era bullied to the fore in the thirties, women filmmakers were put out of business in America, but they continued to work elsewhere in the world. From the fifties through the eighties, a number of women directed exploitation films, largely because the guys producing such films, such as Roger Corman, figured that they'd just be happy to get the work and not expect the freedom or pay their male counterparts could count on. And as such injustices were finally addressed in more recent years, and digital technology democratized filmmaking in general, the number of horror movies directed by women positively exploded.
I learned a lot of this from I Spit on Your Celluloid: The History of Women Directing Horror Movies. Of course, I'd already seen Pet Sematary, Near Dark, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, and The Babadook and quite a lot of other horror movies directed by women before reading Heidi Honeycutt's sprawling new book, but I knew nothing of Weber or Kolm-Fleck or a welter of the other films she explores.
This is a truly exhaustive and eye-opening look at films made by humans who constitute half of the human population but haven't had the opportunities the other half has enjoyed. A book like this cannot help but be political, but Honeycutt refuses to turn her book into some sort of tract that would undercut the artistry of the artists she discusses. I Spit on Your Celluloid mostly reads like any study of a particular segment of film history would. She focuses on a period, introducers the filmmakers of that period, and synopsizes (beware of spoilers) and critiques their genre work. The story only takes on a political slant when politics play a specific role in it (as when women filmmakers could no longer get work for purely sexist reasons or were only allowed to make trashy movies for purely sexist reasons) or when the films, themselves, became explicitly political, which really only started happening with great regularity in the 2010s. Honeycutt refuses to suggest that there is some sort of stock shared point of view among women filmmakers or attempt to force apolitical films into a political drawer. By refusing to do so, she does the women filmmakers she discusses the ultimate service by discussing them as filmmakers, period.
