By PAYTON McCARTY-SIMAS
For over a decade, award-winning film critic, author and programmer Alexandra Heller-Nicholas has been publishing books that change the game. From her incisive work on rape-revenge films in 2011 to her insightful scholarship on women-directed witch films last year, her work has delivered canny criticism, nuance and poise to the field, with an emphasis on gender and power.
Recently, Heller-Nicholas directed her first documentary, 1000 WOMEN IN HORROR, based on her 2020 book of the same name. She also lent her voice to Alexandre O. Phillippe’s latest essay-documentary on The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, CHAIN REACTIONS. To celebrate the festival run of both films, RUE MORGUE met with the writer-director for a broad-ranging discussion on everything from found footage and physical media to a woman’s right to be an asshole.
I really loved both CHAIN REACTIONS and 1000 WOMEN IN HORROR, so I’m excited to speak with you about them. Maybe we could start with CHAIN REACTIONS. You contributed a very different perspective from the other voices in it, and I was really struck by the connections you made to Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) because that’s such a disparate movie. Tell me more about how you came to that link when you were framing your ideas.
Alexandra Nicholas-Heller
Yes! So, Alex Phillippe won the best documentary film at the Venice Film Festival for CHAIN REACTIONS, and it’s like, “No shit.” The guy is at the top of his game. And peeking behind the curtain, to use that Oz reference, and seeing how he works and seeing how he thinks was such a real masterclass, not just for documentaries, but for critically thinking about film in general. We initially started discussing a very academic interview, and it was hilarious for both of us because we realized instantly that this was just not happening. We were just talking organically, and he was like, “What was the film’s release in Australia? When did you first see it?” And that’s when a lot of the material that was in the documentary actually started coming out.
The film wasn’t released in Australia until 1984, ten years after it originally came out, and primarily on VHS. It was a really, really, really crapped-out, old VHS tape that I talk about a lot in the documentary because it was very yellow. And that yellow reminded me of Picnic at Hanging Rock and Wake in Fright (1971). It felt like an Australian film, that yellow. Yellowing is such a significant marker of Australian cinema. I grew up right near Hanging Rock, so that film and that place were really important to me. I have memories of a very catastrophic bushfire there, which is very much linked to my memory of the film, and in a funny way, linked to my feelings about The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. It’s strange, memory, you know? People often say that when things like 9/11 happen, their memories are sort of merged with movies. To me, that’s not strange at all. Our memories soak things up, whether they’re fact or fiction. The images that we have in our minds of things in the past tense come from a whole bunch of different places. So, yeah, my memories of that fire, weirdly enough, are really tied to Texas Chain Saw Massacre, which is a film from the other side of the world.
Peter Weir’s “PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK” (1975)
That’s fascinating. I loved seeing the VHS version in the film, getting to look at how you watched it. The actual physical medium does shape your perception of films in such a profound way. And The Texas Chain Saw, in particular, is both infamously nasty and gorgeous. Did you find that, given your experience growing up with it on VHS, finally watching it in lovely restored quality shifted your understanding of the film? Do you prefer watching things on different media, depending on the film?
One hundred percent. I’m really big on film materiality. A couple of years ago, I wrote a book on Dario Argento’s Suspiria, and my experience with Argento films is all VHS. We think of Suspiria as this beautiful film where the colors really pop, but my memory of it is washed out. All of those colors on VHS are sort of smeared like a dirty watercolor. And the Australian VHS of Deep Red was pan-and-scan. So, the scene at the start where Martha’s pressed against the painting on the wall and David Hemmings is going down the corridor? We should see her at the start of the film, but in the Australian pan-and-scan, we don’t. The camera’s shifted, so the whole meaning of the film changes, because in the original Argento version, we’re privy to that information. I’m really, really big on materiality, and I’m pathetically Gen X, so VHS is like a default setting. When I finally saw the beautifully restored Second Sight 4K of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, I was actually laughing. I had no memory of seeing the colors blue or green in that film at all. And I’m still surprised. It’s gorgeous, but I’m genuinely thrown by seeing blues and greens in it because my memory is just red and yellow.
Alex [Phillippe] was actually down here for a screening of CHAIN REACTIONS at the Melbourne International Film Festival in August, and God bless them, the festival actually played CHAIN REACTIONS as a double bill with the Australian VHS of The Texas Chain Saw. It was just the most incredible experience. It was sold out. It was in this massive cinema with beautiful surround sound, and I thought people would laugh at the VHS aesthetics of it, but I think it really made it creepier. It’s almost ghostly, you know, the image sort of drained of detail. You could have heard a pin drop. People were really captivated! There were a lot of people there who’d never seen the film before either, so their first experience of seeing The Texas Chain Saw Massacre was on VHS, but in this Deluxe high-tech cinema. Kind of wild.
Tobe Hooper’s ‘THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE” (1974)
Is that cool for you, that you shaped that experience, replicating your own out of time? That must’ve been awesome.
It really felt like a time machine. When we did the introduction, I literally introduced it with the idea that VHS is like a time machine, like you’re traveling back to see how we used to consume film. A DVD of it wasn’t on local release until 2004, so this is how twenty years’ worth of Australians saw The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, as this completely stripped-back, yellow beast.
That’s so cool! And that’s such a fun perspective because if you start your relationship with a film thinking the pan-and-scan or whatever else is the text itself, then you can just be much more open and playful about your interpretation of the film more broadly. You can be less precious. Do you think that applies more generally to your thinking? How do you treat these different versions? As variations on one text or different texts or…?
Well, my second book was on found footage horror, so these kinds of questions, I think, are really… We should have a glass of wine and just put a couple of hours aside [laughs]. I live for this stuff. I think with horror, in particular, what’s so interesting with these questions of materiality is that there’s something that feels unstable in the very texture of the film itself, and in the actual tape, you know? There’s something dangerous and volatile and untrustworthy in the very medium. So, I think when we start talking about these questions of different formats and different qualities in horror, it has a really poignant, sensorial poetics. The idea that the whole medium itself is unstable is really spooky and really chilling. And if we go back to things like Mondo film, things like Faces of Death, where you saw it on a video re-taped off a like tenth-generation, grainy kind of under-the-counter thing. That danger, that volatility, almost feels like it’s caught up in the actual way that the tape itself is sort of unstable and shaky, and the footage is degraded. I think there’s beautiful poetics there that are really unparalleled in any other kind of genre or any other kind of filmmaking.
That brings me to 1000 WOMEN IN HORROR, which is so beautifully rigorous. I really appreciate how much work you put into talking about taxonomy at the beginning of the book and all of that structural work you do with definitions. But the first question, getting into the film: How did you take this really in-depth, encyclopedic work and translate it to film for an audience?
The book had a really strange journey. For me, it was really important because it was the first one that I did that wasn’t couched in an academic kind of concept, but it was also written as small 200-word entries, which is completely different from the kind of deep dives that I’ve done previously. The documentary really felt like a natural progression for that more conscious decision to be more public-facing with my work and to not look at it as a dumbing down but as an expansion, which is something that I feel very, very strongly about. Sometimes, I meet academics, and they think of the process of going from academic to public-facing as dumbing things down, and it just makes me so angry. It’s like, no; it’s a case of translation.
I think that academic work, for me, is just a specific kind of scientific writing. It’s jargon designed for a kind of elite few, and I don’t think that it’s smarter, and I don’t think that it’s of more value, so the women-in-horror book was really important to me to put that idea into practice, and the documentary is a natural progression from that.
The documentary had a really strange journey, too, in that I did a Miskatonic lecture at Fantastic Fest in 2018 on the book as I was developing it. The book hadn’t been published yet, right? But I had the cover, and it was sort of a “coming soon.” The documentary was actually optioned out of that talk, which was a very strange experience. It was just a collision of fate because I wouldn’t have had a clue how to have turned this into a documentary otherwise. It was this really beautiful moment of synchronicity.
The book is also structured in a very different way from the film, which is great in terms of its focus on themes, while the book is more of an encyclopedia. How did the team bring that wonderful assortment of voices together and create that sense of structure while working through such an immense topic?
I think we were blessed in a way, in that because of the book, I already knew firsthand that we weren’t going to cover everything. The joke of the book and the joke of the documentary is the same thing: that, of course, there are more than a thousand women in horror. It’s like saying a thousand men in horror. It’s ridiculous. It’s this sort of consciously self-defeating title. We knew that we weren’t going to cover everything, and that was quite liberating. We really tried to finish the documentary with that spirit, like, this is just the start of the conversation. I know that other documentaries are being made on women in horror, which there should be, and which we desperately want. I think having that pressure taken off of us was creatively and practically the only way that we could have done it. We wanted to have a playful structure that allowed us to talk about both representation and, at the same time, production and the experience.
Elsa Lanchester in “THE BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN” (1935)
Something else that struck me in the book was a moment in the introduction where you were talking about Twilight (2008) and the way that women’s filmmaking often doesn’t fit into traditional genre boxes in the same way that films made in a more standard, hegemonic heteropatriarchal way do. In terms of the documentary, how did you apply that kind of, at the risk of using a phrase that I’m not a huge personal fan of, the “female gaze,” and how do you feel those two things connect in that context?
I’m with you on the female gaze. I think it’s insanely reductive. I actually wrote on it in the second edition of my rape-revenge film book. I have a whole chapter on women-directed rape revenge films and the idea that women make certain kinds of films is so sexist to me, this idea that women are kind of predisposed to tell women’s stories. This idea of women needing to tell women’s stories. It’s like, Well, why don’t men have to tell men’s stories? Nobody talks about Brian De Palma, like, He tells men’s stories.
Maybe Michael Bay gets that, but not many others.
Some of my favorite women-directed films are actually about masculinity! I think of Lynn Ramsey’s You Were Never Really Here (2017), Svetlana Baskova’s The Green Elephant (1999), which is a very different kind of film, but it’s one of the best extreme gore films about masculinity that I’ve ever seen. Even Karyn Kusama’s The Invitation (2015) is a really interesting film about masculinity. So, it really boils my piss, actually, when there’s this assumption that women make certain kinds of films and vice versa.
“THE GREEN ELEPHANT” (1999)
Right? You know, the idea that men can’t make films like Rosemary’s Baby... Actually, that guy made Rosemary’s Baby, so maybe we should all be more expansive in our thinking.
Yeah, right like just chill the fuck out, maybe. And look. I mean, my whole thing, and I hate to be crude about it, but women have the right to be assholes! Women have the right to make offensive films. One of my favorite filmmakers, unironically, warts and all, is Roberta Findlay. I’m obsessed with Roberta Findlay’s films because I really enjoy them, but also I love that her entire filmography rejects the idea that there’s a kind of ideological thing here, the idea that all women-directed films are feminist by default. Women can be assholes! That’s totally fine! Women can make Tenement (1985), you know? Women can make Shauna: Every Man’s Fantasy (1985). Women can make some really fucking ethically dodgy shit just as much as anyone else because they’re people. We really didn’t have any kind of rules on that stuff for the film. It was very intuitive.
At the same time, it’s such an excellent primer. I feel like if I were 13, I would have had a notebook out watching this.
That’s literally what we’re hoping for. We had our world premiere at the Melbourne International Film Festival. It actually played at the same time that CHAIN REACTIONS did, which was amazing. We were really impressed that after that first screening, a Letterboxd list had already turned up. Somebody was obviously sitting in the cinema writing the films down. We wanted to have enough films there that people were familiar with that they could kind of go on the journey, but also to have some sort of curve balls in there as well.
In this moment of backlash, how do women make sense of being considered oppositional when we’re more than half the population? How do we keep moving forward?
There’s a great line at the end of the documentary from Natasha Kermani (Abraham’s Boys, Lucky), where she basically says, “Look, we need to rethink the idea of making room at the table for women because going back at least to Mary Shelley, probably back to, like, Scheherazade, women have always had a place at this table.” That’s a really radical rethinking of this idea that women are transgressors or novelties in horror or that the table is naturally male or masculine terrain by default. I really love how Natasha rejects that, based on this sort of literary precedence. You know, it’s like, No, we don’t have to earn a place at the table. We were at the table when the table was invented. I think it’s such a fun and really optimistic and practical way of rethinking it.
Mary Shelley
And I think that if you take that metaphor, and you expand, what I’m seeing now that I’m finding really exciting is what we do with this space. It’s people like Alice Maio MacKay… You know, I lose my Australian citizenship if I have an interview on horror and I don’t mention Alice. She’s a national treasure. What do we do with our space at this table? Well, we make sure that people like Alice are getting mentioned in every single interview. We expand the conversation constantly to include gender diverse people, to include transgender filmmakers, to include filmmakers with disabilities, filmmakers from different racial and ethnic backgrounds, filmmakers from different class backgrounds. That’s a whole different conversation because we’re really shit at that. Horror is one of the few places that I think you can actually make a film if you’re poor, and there’s a whole conversation about class that we haven’t really had on a major scale.
Ideally, the book and the documentary sort of open up that it’s not just about boys versus girls. We want it to be more broadly about gender and also just more broadly about these weird, random points of difference that we culturally and socially pick on and give value to. Who does that include? Who does it exclude? And what does it mean when those dynamics are in place?
