Introduction: Feminist Worldmaking and Horror Film

by: Alison Peirse with a trailer by Dayna McLeod , February 6, 2024

Doing Women’s (Global) (Horror) Film History (DWGHFH) is not just a focus issue. It is the culmination of a year-long training and mentoring programme for critics working on women horror filmmakers in non-anglophone countries, with a particular focus on filmmakers from the Global Majority. It started in December 2020, when I submitted a Feminist Horror Cinema grant application to the AHRC (a UK funding body) and proposed DWGHFH as an output. I was awarded the grant in August 2021, I started work on it in January 2022, and a month later, I published the DWGHFH Call for Proposals on the MAI website.

I wrote my call in response to the direction that work on women horror filmmakers was taking.  I had been part of an exciting new wave of writing on this topic that emerged in 2020 (Heller-Nicholas, 2020; Peirse, 2020; Pisters 2020), and I loved seeing the conference papers, essays, PhD theses and books that emerged during and in response to these publications. However, I was also increasingly aware that the research I was reading was on white women directors in contemporary, Western and / or anglophone contexts, a reflection on the primarily Western, white-majority, anglophone sector of academia in which I work. In short, I was witnessing homophily, ‘the relationship and degree of contact between similar identities, a relationship that occurs at a greater frequency than between differing  identity  groups  in  social,  cultural  and  industrial  settings’ (Nwonka 2021: 446). This mean that while we had a wonderful surge in scholarship on women horror filmmakers, much of it did not speak to or from the experiences of women filmmakers of the Global Majority, a collective term defined by Rosemary Campbell-Stephens to refer to ‘people who are Black, African, Asian, Brown, Arab and mixed heritage, are indigenous to the global south, and/or have been racialised as “ethnic minorities”, and whom ‘currently represent approximately eighty-five per cent of the world’s population’ (2021: 7).

With DWGHFH, I wanted to evidence the existence of the Global Majority women filmmakers within the academic world that I worked in. This was, and still remains, an important goal because anglophone horror criticism dominates how we understand and how we analyse horror films around the world. Yet, at the same time, as a white, anglophone woman professor, based in the UK, I recognised my lack of expert knowledge in these regions. This knowledge is central to expanding our work on women filmmakers, for, as Lingzhen Wang argues, ‘…women’s cinema is geopolitically and historically contingent’ and ‘women’s films resist uniform meaning’ (2011: 39). For Wang, ‘gender matters’ but gender itself is ‘a historically and geopolitically specific concept always in need of close examination’ (2011: 39). I realised that for this project to work, it had to emerge from a polyphony of voices, of languages, of knowledge of regional filmmaking cultures and distribution networks, and from voices that were not my own. Given this, a focus issue or edited collection was the only way forward for this research. In the CFP I then produced, I stated that I would prioritise studies of films and filmmakers from Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, South Asia and South–East Asia as they had been historically underrepresented in horror studies. Here I was attempting to gesture toward the bigger decolonial politics of the project, an attempt to ‘contribute to the struggle, undertaken for centuries by part of humanity, to assert its right to existence’ (Vergès 2021: 10, her emphasis).

While I was thinking this through, I was also discovering other gaps in film scholarship. At the time, I was absorbed in women’s film history and feminist film historiography, happily losing myself in the words of Vicki Callahan (2010) Jane Gaines (2018), and Jennifer Bean and Diane Negra (2002), not to mention Christine Gledhill and Julia Knight, whose edited collection Doing Women’s Film History: Reframing Cinemas, Past and Future (2015) is explicitly homaged in this project’s title. But in these histories, horror does not yet seem to have a home. At the same time, I was interested in video essays, and noted a distinct under-representation of substantial scholarship on horror in this arena as well. Then, in studies of horror, comparatively little of the recent writing on women filmmakers connected with women’s film histories methodologies. Finally, across all my areas of reading, I could see that when we talk about filmmakers, we still default to studying the director (for the most part). Redefining where our attention falls as academics is an act of diversifying who we study and how we study: it is not just where the filmmaker is based, it is also the job that they do.

Even if my initial impetus for this project came out of dissatisfaction with absence, I didn’t want DWGHFH to become a paranoid reading of any, or all of these areas of study (Sedgwick 2003: 123-152). What might a reparative mode look like, in this context, for this subject, at this point in time? I read Lindiwe Dovey’s work on decolonising pedagogy (2020), and through it discovered Obioma Nnaemeka’s Signs essay, ‘Nego-Feminism, Theorising, Practising and Pruning Africa’s Way’, in which she argues that ‘you cannot mobilise a movement that is only and always against; you must have a positive alternative, a vision of a better future that can motivate people to sacrifice their time and energy towards its realisation’ (2003: 364). While Nnaemeka is not writing on film, her point remains pertinent. How do we build a project that doesn’t merely point a finger at the gaps, at what is wrong, but creates space, anew, for generative, engaging and inspiring work on women filmmakers and horror, grounded in feminist thinking? Where and how do we site (and cite) scholarship that emerges from multiple points of view, a plethora of voices, from around the world?

Over the past few years of working on DWGHFH, I’ve come to realise that what I was trying to do was articulate a model of feminist, decolonial worldmaking. Although, I lacked the precise vocabulary for this desire until I read Erika Balsom and Hila Peleg’s edited collection Feminist Worldmaking and the Moving Image. In their introduction, they draw upon Trinh T. Minh-ha (1991) and Amia Srinivasan (2019, 2021) to define feminist worldmaking as naming ‘the metamorphosis that can occur when reality is redescribed from a nonhegemonic perspective and this perspective becomes shared’, where the moving image becomes a means by which ‘worldly reality may be redefined toward emancipatory ends. More than merely pointing a finger at violence and discrimination’, worldmaking practices ‘attempt to reshape the grids through which reality is apprehended, so that what is familiar appears anew, transfigured by the light of feminist analysis’ (2022: 23-24). While Balsom and Peleg focus on nonfiction film, and thus their inclusion of ‘reality’ has a (potentially) greater emphasis than in the fiction explored here, their broader point nonetheless transfers, with little trouble. Feminist worldmaking is precisely what this project has come to be. Videographic criticism is the potentially radical, transformative tool with which to do it.

While I had done a lot of thinking about DWGHFH when I put the call together, I hadn’t anticipated the sheer level of interest in the programme itself. In my grant application, I had indicated that the programme was likely to attract around 8 – 10 contributors. In March 2022, I had over 100 submissions. The following month, I offered places to 37 people. Of this number, 26 made it through the year-long programme (later in the publication cycle, I also picked up a further 3 established videographic practitioners, which, along with my submission, swelled the final contributor count to 30). I then realised I had to run a programme three times the size of my original plan, across time zones ranging from -11 GMT in Hawaii, to +11 GMT in Melbourne, and that I definitely couldn’t do it on my own.

I recruited a team of artists and scholars to deliver the programme, which ran from July 2022 – April 2023. Miriam Kent recorded the technical training videos and ran the live technical workshops. The RADA-trained actor Tanya Vital designed and delivered a voice coaching and voiceover recording session. Catherine Grant, Neepa Majumdar and Dayna McLeod delivered masterclasses on videographic thinking, writing videographic journal statements, and sound mixing. All contributors were then offered the opportunity to share their draft video essay and written statement with Catherine, in a one-to-one tutorial prior to submission. In addition, Evelyn Kreutzer ran regular live feedback sessions, in which participants could drop in to share and review each other’s work. Evelyn created a space led by the makers, without the need for top-down oversight, which became a really important part of the programme. Mentorship was positioned from the sidelines, with the goal of creating a communal space in which we all support each other.

After the contributors submitted their video essays and written statements in April 2023, their work was sent out on external peer review, and went through several rounds of feedback and redrafting between April and September. As such, all DWGHFH video essays and written statements have gone through rigorous, multiple levels of external peer review and copy editing, which means we have not been able to dispense with hierarchical procedure entirely. I would suggest though that this is a problem of academic publication, rather than of process.

When the copy-editing and submission was completed in December 2023, I realised I had worked on this project for three years. Now, as I look at my beautiful, complete focus issue, I am (happily) overwhelmed by the scale of the project which far exceeds my initial pitch for my grant application. We have created over 135 minutes of videographic criticism—a major, feature length documentary, if screened continuously – and almost 40,000 words of supporting prose – a book on women horror filmmakers, in its own right. The breadth and depth of this material feels momentous for me. I hope it does for you too.

At the same time, when reflecting on the sheer scale and range of this focus issue, I have become increasingly aware that – as the editor – I am supposed to make some conceptual decisions about how to order it for you. But I don’t think I will, not really. Given the decolonising ethos of this research, it isn’t right for me to delineate pathways based on identity or region (in short, to create order through a white gaze). As Campbell-Stephens writes, ‘it matters how people are categorised and labelled; it matters more how people choose to label themselves’ (2021: 5). At the same time, I have a strong aversion to demarcating subsections by theme, or chronology (for example). This project has come out of so many ideas and impulses, and is born of so many minds, there is no right way to explore this work. In addition, there may be many different reasons why you might have decided to read this issue. Are you here for the women filmmakers? Or are you a horror film fan? Are you interested in how to study production roles? Or are you just obsessed with video essays? (an affliction I understand only too well). These are all valid reasons to engage with this work, but they all require different pathways through the issue.

Given this, I have presented the contributions in an alphabetical list by the first name of the contributor. This arbitrary selection is inspired by Celia Lury and Nina Wakeford’s Inventive Methods: The Happening of the Social, which they organise alphabetically by chapter title. Lury and Wakeford explain that the alphabetical listing ‘is intended to encourage – perhaps even incite – you, the reader, not to read from A through to Z, but rather to make a selective entry into the collection, to use your own principles of inclusion and exclusion, of ordering and valuing’ (2012: 1 – 2). They point out that this kind of experimental ordering allows the reader to make their ‘own associations’, to ‘draw a line – across and between the chapters in ways that we may anticipate but do not want to predetermine’ (2012: 2). This approach speaks to the spirit of DWGHFH, while also enabling us to ask bigger questions of editorial practice: how do we account for the work done here? Why do we need to account for it? If we really think about it, what are the benefits of material control? This questioning of editorial practice speaks to John Laws’ After Method: Mess in Social Science Research, that perhaps we ‘need to rethink our ideas about clarity and rigour, and find ways of knowing the indistinct and the slippery without trying to grasp and hold them tight’ (2004: 3). This call to rethink how we work, to find ways of knowing without imposing control, is where we will conclude. DWGHFH is as much about ways of making knowledge as it is about the knowledge that it provides. And as such, I leave this focus issue for you to explore, without limitations or boundaries.

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Lucy Fife Donaldson and Colleen Laird who gave up significant amounts of their valuable time to help me get DWGHFH finished. Many thanks to Dayna McLeod for creating a fantastic trailer for this project. You are all very excellent friends.

DWGHFH was funded by my AHRC Research, Development and Engagement Fellowship in Feminist Horror Cinema, project reference AH/W000105/1.

_HEAVYLEG  created the original artwork logo  for this focus issue. You can view his art and music at https://heavy-leg.bandcamp.com/