Hey guys, guess what month it is!
WOMEN IN HORROR
(Insert sweet wailing guitars here)
This is actually kind of a big deal for me. As a super nerd lady I love to hear about these other ladies working in genres that I love, where, for whatever reason, “people” like to pretend we are not. Or that ladies are there as corollaries to men folk, semi fetish objects (I am looking at you, mainstream comics. I am looking right at you). So while I would like to say it is a given that women are a presence in genre and fringe cultures of all colors, stripes and patterns of plaid, there seems to be this ongoing attitude that we are not.
Especially after the SFX COLLECTION: HORROR shitshow. For those who are not me and therefore didn’t have to get up from his/her desk at work to go scream in the bathroom upon reading about this, what happened was a very respected SF/Fantasy glossy hailing from the UK put out a giant, special edition spotlight on horror. It was purportedly meant to show the wide variety within the genre, all the interesting, edgy, classic, different stuff happening. The whole spectrum of horror, if you will. Except, funny story, there were no women.
None.
Really guys? Because here’s the thing with genre—actually there are a lot of ladies living there. TRUFAX. But horror, horror especially owes so, so much to the brilliant women working in it. And not just right now. I mean, pretty much from go horror has been a genre in which the ladies were keeping it real, if you can excuse the academic parlance. I don’t just mean Mary Shelley (although she was a genius, and for sure one of the architects of horror) but all of the ladies who were first exploring the suffocating horror encroaching on their lives every day—the Gothic as a literary form is based a great deal on the stifling domestic space, on being locked away in houses or estates, isolation, child birth horror, poisons and consumption, ghosts lurking just behind lovely facades. And the ladies kept working in the genre long after the days of Ann Radcliffe. It’s exciting that Shirley Jackson seems to be finally getting her day, and folks seem to have remembered Patricia Highsmith. And now we have this fabulous month for fêting all the other ladies you never get to hear about (pause to plug Grace Krilanovich, Poppy Z. Brite, Ellen Datlow, Elizabeth Hand, Kathe Koja, Joyce Carol Oates [obvi], Mary Gaitskill [I count her as a horror writer, I can get why some people wouldn’t]) because no one wants to talk about them, or even admit that they’re refusing to talk about them. Ladies be here, and not just for getting ganked by some sexually repressed psycho. S’all I’m saying.
More of this: http://womeninhorrormonth.com/
Also, this (NSFW):
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xdlz81_i-spit-on-eli-roth-dir-devi-snively_shortfilms
preach it, sister!
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