SEE! HEAR! CUT! KILL! EXPERIENCING FRIDAY THE 13TH By Wickham Clayton. Jackson: U Mississippi P, 2020. 238 pp. $30.00 paper.

Abstract

As part of this project, essays within Women Make Horror: Filmmaking, Feminism, Genre explore a range of texts including narrative and experimental cinema, as well as short, anthology, and feature filmmaking. The essays included present case studies of North American as well as international filmmakers, films, and festivals. While the collection’s eighteen (in total) chapters include a range of topics—and veer into quite different scholarly directions—a recurring concern seen in a number of the essays has to do with the relationship between gender and genre. This focus can be clearly observed in several of the chapters that address American films. For example, in “Stephanie Rothman and Vampiric Film Histories,” Alicia Kozma addresses the intersection of gender and labor in the entertainment industries through an insightful case study of director Stephanie Rothman. Similarly, in “Self-Reflexivity and Feminist Camp in Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare,” Tosha R. Taylor examines the relationship between gender and genre while uncovering how film director Rachel Talalay hones a style and creates strong female characters that defy expectations as well as break barriers. This concern is addressed as well by Laura Mee in “Murders and Adaptations: Gender in American Psycho.” There, Mee discusses Bret Easton Ellis’s controversial 1991 novel and its (equally) controversial film adaptation by exploring the involvement by female filmmakers in bringing the work to the big screen. While it is true that many of the chapters that concern international films and filmmakers tackle a range of disparate topics, noteworthy essays in this collection effectively address the crucial relationship between gender and genre in non-US based films, as well (while also covering other important issues related to international cinema, such as those related to industry norms and reception history). For instance, in her worthwhile and nuanced essay, “The Secret Beyond the Door: Daria Nicolodi and Suspiria’s Multiple Authorship,” Martha Shearer considers the relationship between authorship, gender, and genre in the 1977 Italian supernatural horror film. Molly Kim’s thought-provoking essay, “Women-Made Horror in Korean Cinema,” also shines a light on the relationship between gender and genre, while she reexamines the history of Korean horror cinema. In both cases, the authors raise interesting questions about the assumptions traditionally associated with women filmmakers working in the field of horror cinema—and they thus both also participate in an important and ongoing discussion about these stillrelevant issues. As essays such as these demonstrate, Women Make Horror succeeds in highlighting the underexplored role women have played in creating horror films. Thus, by bringing these essays together, Peirse creates an important dialogue about horror films and their cultural relevance. In this sense, the collection fulfills its objective, which is to transform traditional views about women filmmakers and the horror film genre. By uncovering the complicated history of women’s engagement with horror films, and crossing national and scholarly boundaries to explore horror’s feminist themes, Peirse’s edited collection, Women Make Horror: Filmmaking, Feminism, Genre, pushes us to reassess the roles women have played in creating horror films. In this sense, this collection proves to be a worthwhile addition to the fields of both film studies and gender studies—and it therefore should be of interest to anyone working in those disciplines.