Stolen Screams: How Horror Has Stifled Women
Warning: This piece contains references to sexual assault.
Horror is female.
Take a moments contemplation, reflect and read those words again. Horror is female.
Now scroll through your Letterboxd or IMDB and consider how many female faces look back at you in torment, in menace, in fear – then consider it again – horror is female.
Horror is crowned by the likes of Ripley, Rosemary, Melanie, Carrie, Annie, Dani, Sadako, Eli, Angela. Our favourite stories are about mothers, wronged daughters, abused wives, gruesome girls and doomed damsels.
Yet if we once again return to our sources – so few and far between are these stories written or directed by women. So much so, that it seems curious our faces are being used as mouthpieces for other people to speak for us.
Before I begin to endeavour to explain myself, I must express that female – and male characters – written by both or either gender can be articulated to an exceptional standard. We only have to look at the list above to consider that some men can write spectacular female characters with sublime empathy and understanding that shows a willingness to engage with female creatives, and the female experience.
However, quite recently I had an experience which made me consider that some stories that are so exclusively part of the female experience were being exploited for gain – and without a single women involved.
As a woman working in the horror industry, I’m often invited to look over scripts, guide narratives and assist in development; and fairly recently I was asked by a male horror director to overlook his new piece he was pitching to the industry. The piece he had created and planned to develop with an entirely male crew was about (in his words) ‘female sexuality’ and ‘motherhood’ and he told, not asked, told me he wouldn’t be paying me for my services but required me to overlook the script and give it a ‘woman’s touch’ because he wanted to make sure female audiences found it ‘accessible’
A red flag is raised. If you want the help of a female creative – pay her. If you want to tell a woman’s story – hire a woman. Now, we could argue he was proceeding to do this – though no financial exchange was agreed and before I could contest the script was in my lap and being read.
What spiraled out before me was a script twisting in ignorance and spectacle pornography as a female protagonist was raped repeatedly until she was impregnated by her cruel keeper. As I read on I found myself resisting to tear pages from their bind and shove it into the throat of the director. Rape after rape, descriptions of the brutalism littered with titillation and sexualisation – all to be washed down with this alien-esque impregnation that results in the suicide of the protagonist.
Forgive my elaboration, forgive my descriptions – but as this young director beamed up at me as his female protagonists breasts rocked sensually through her brutal attack I found myself aghast. A man was writing of a female experience he had no comprehension of understanding, through the gaze of his own fantasy, and was now asking me to tidy it for perspective investment. I could not believe this director had decided to preside over a narrative he could not fully understand and only ask a woman to ‘help’ with the final touches, as if my voice couldn’t be less relevant to the story; as if as a woman my perspective could tweak and tidy as apposed to actually tell a story.
We could argue – as always, that perspectively it is fiction. Fiction and imagination tell stories of ghouls and gore with the gusto that make our genre what it is, and yet in this circumstance – the imagination of this young man trying to configure two such brutalist stories of the attack on the female body felt as if he was taking from me, and other women, an opportunity to speak.
Despite women being the forefront of horror, the poster damsels and the screaming queens – it seems incredulous to me that our stories are being taken from us. There is this frightening level of entitlement in the genre that allows men to talk about rape, motherhood with a faux authority that makes the ordeal palatable for them and the rest of their gender; that makes rocking breasts and wailing mothers dish of the day without any understanding of emotional circumstance.
I rejected the script, morose that once again rape – which so often consumes and ruins the lives of victims – was used as a plot device to shove a sparkler up the arse of an otherwise dulling male narrative. But even more so, that this young man was pitching an idea so embedded into the female experience, so exclusive to our own torments, bodies and histories – to sell it quick to make a name for himself amongst his peers.
Horror is female, and in recognising that the industry must allow women to reclaim the stories that are being told by men. We only have to look at the exceptional work of ‘The Nightingale’, ‘Raw’, ‘Prevenge’ to see how incredible women can articulate, and elevate the horror of the female experience with such profound empathy and intelligence. I ask all my female horror creatives, to consider this:
Your stories are being taken from you. Stories that belong to you and your experience as a woman, stories that live between within the history of our sex and your body. Women, I am begging you upon my knees – do not fear your stories anymore, do not fear your art or how it is received consider how your traumas and journeys could empower not only an entire genre but an industry. The face of horror is female, now we must give her a voice. – Rebecca Lucia