Welcome back, Scream Scholars. As a part of our continuing education in horror, it only makes sense to reach out to academics who have spent far more time than us considering the genre. It makes me incredibly excited to be able to speak with such highly knowledgeable and interesting people but perhaps none more so than Alexandra Heller-Nicholas.
Heller-Nicholas is the author of Rape-Revenge Films: A Critical Study (2011); Found Footage Horror: Fear and the Appearance of Reality (2014); Suspiria (2015), part of the Devil’s Advocates series from Auteur; Ms. 45 (2017), of Columbia University’s ‘Cultographies” series; The Hitcher (2018), from Arrow Books; Masks in Horror Cinema: Eyes Without Faces (2019), one of my all-time personal favorite horror-studies books. After our conversation, she released 1000 Women in Horror (2020) and The Giallo Canvas: Art, Excess and Horror Cinema is now on sale as of February 2021.
She’s got an impressive bibliography with some really fun topics in there that are a treat to read. But that’s not really why I’m so excited to kick off our Fear Academy interviews with Heller-Nicholas. For that, please allow me to indulge in a touch of nostalgia.
Growing up, I was always into horror. Used to scare the shit out of myself renting videos from Blockbuster or calling up my friend who was allowed to watch R-rated flicks and listening to him describe their lurid details. Sure, half of them he just made up but fuck that guy anyway, he didn’t even earn a name in this flashback. Regardless, coming from a small town I was kinda alone in my love of the genre. My friends liked it but I loved it and devoured all the knowledge about it I could get my hands on like a Lovecraftian character delving into eldritch lore.
I got a copy of Sacred Terror: Religion and Horror on the Silver Screen by Douglas E. Cowan when I was a teenager but it wasn’t until I was finished with my drug phase and going back to school in my mid-twenties that I started to take studying seriously. I don’t mean for school, I always was and always will be shite at that. But study for the love of studying. Looking into something because you can. I decided I should try looking into horror since it always interested me and so the book I picked up was Heller-Nicholas’ Found Footage Horror: Fear and the Appearance of Reality.
And it changed my life. Really diving into horror in a deep way was suddenly something that could be done in a classy way. It wasn’t just an outsider thing anymore, not really. This book stunk of academia and I loved it. Stunk is an interesting word to pick, so let me explain. The book is fantastic, it doesn’t stink. But at the time it really was like a piece of weird lore. It took work to understand. There were references to things I didn’t know so I had to follow them and find what they were from and thus I tumbled down the rabbit hole.
On top of helping me figure out a major passion in my life, Masks in Horror Cinema: Eyes Without Faces presents the concept of the shamanic imagination and I absolutely fell in love with it and have yet to be able to stop thinking about it in terms of creativity studies.
As always, you can expect a long, tangential and rambling interview but when I get out of the way and let Heller-Nicholas speak there’s some great wisdom and a lot of fun. Enjoy!
ZL: To get the ball rolling I like to start by asking interviewees to describe what they do in their own words.
AHN: Describing who I am, I tend to go for something along the lines of an Australian film critic who has written 8 books on cult, exploitation and horror film with an emphasis on gender. I have a PhD in screen studies (you’ve read my thesis!), and do some programming, consulting and paneling for film festivals around the world. I do other stuff, but that’s the gist I guess? Oh yeah, I do a lot of home entertainment work too – DVD/blu-ray commentaries, liner notes, video essays, that kinda thing, which I really love. I used to be an editor at the film journal Senses of Cinema (my background is as an editor) so my tastes are pretty broad, and home entertainment work often gives me space to work outside of pure genre and do more in-depth stuff on film history.
ZL: Right off the bat there are three different avenues for questions which I want to go down. Let’s take them one at a time. The first is that of the film studies PhD. With this particular column I am looking to provide information to the type of reader that would be considering this as a pathway into the industry or the world of studying film. How have you found the experience to be and are there any takeaways it has left you with? But, also, let me include a more basic question for those that don’t know: What does a film studies student do?
AHN: I feel in a way that it’s almost unfair for me to answer this because my own experience has been so unusual. I started writing for a zine with my boyfriend at the time and a bunch of friends, and it got picked up for newsagent distribution so for a year or two we worked on it as a glossy music/culture magazine with what I guess was a goth edge (we called it “dark alternative” to be a bit more thematically open). I wrote mostly on music then, and then moved out to do more music writing for the street press, but I found the gender politics in that scene absolutely debilitating. I walked away from it all and decided to go back to uni and finish my Arts degree and focused on film: I did Honours, then my Masters, all on horror and exploitation film. My honours thesis was on Halloween IV (best Halloween, by the way), and my Masters was on rape-revenge film. When I finished my Masters, I think my ego was a little shell shocked – I was so used from my background to writing for an audience, so having this 40,000 word research project that literally four people read (my two markers and my two supervisors), I was all “what was the point?!”. So that is when I turned to books, and that MA evolved into my first book, Rape-Revenge Films: A Critical Study which was published by McFarland in 2011.
I came to a really fundamental realization at that point that I still hold really precious today; that there is more value in critical work (especially about and around films that are very controversial, such as rape-revenge) that speaks to people who watch those films than to other academics. At a very basic level, I genuinely care more about having a dialogue and sharing ideas with a 15 year old fan than a 50 year old professor. And that’s not to diss 50 year old professors! What I am finding is that there is a way to engage with both kinds of readers, and I have worked very hard over many years in a variety of ways to try and build a bridge between fans and other kinds of non-academic audiences with the more orthodox (and let’s face it, frequently conservative) terrain of formal academic screen studies.
It took me two shots to get my PhD – the first misfire was interrupted by some life things, but I don’t feel bad about that at all because the bulk of that ended up in my second book, Found Footage Horror Films: Fear and the Appearance of Reality. I finally went back and did my PhD in 2015 with a woman who is both my mentor, friend and was also my wedding celebrant, Professor Angela Ndalianis and it was a dream – that thesis was eventually published as my last book, Masks in Horror Cinema: Eyes Without Faces. People like Angela from within the university system absolutely played such a crucial role for me personally and professionally – they really taught me to step up and to develop research and critical skills that without them I would never have developed in the direction they did.
But as for the value of a film studies degree more broadly? You can, like me, find some really irreplaceable mentors and I really deeply value what I learned in that context, but most of the critics and film historians whose work I admire are self-taught – filmmakers, too, for that matter. So I guess it depends on the person and their journey, but I don’t think that the more traditional formal study framework in a university context is the be all and end all that a lot of folks make it out to be. And the elephant in the room: I think there’s a massive dose of class politics here, for starters. Not everyone can afford to go to university. There are other ways to learn, not everyone has the same opportunities for a whole bunch of reasons, and people who learn outside of these more formal institutions shouldn’t have what they can offer be diminished or considered less of value because they don’t have a “Dr” in their title. It makes me quite angry, actually.
ZL: Finally, in regards to your opening response, I personally would love to know how you got involved with Arrow. I haven’t read your piece on The Hitcher yet but I do have the Ringu boxset and have noticed you have a commentary on Ring 0. I haven’t gotten to it yet but I’m sure I speak for more than just myself when I say the idea of getting a commentary or even just an essay on an Arrow release would be like a dream come true. Also, did you have to record the commentary though them or was it something which you recorded and was able to hand over?
AHN: This is one of those weird paths your career can take you that you don’t necessarily consciously plan for but that you sort of just arrive at. I did my first commentary with Christian McCrea in 2008 from memory on Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s The Merchant of the Four Seasons for the Directors Suite imprint in Australia, but it was many years later I was cold called from a producer at Arrow on the back of my book on Ms. 45 to do a video essay on Abel Ferrara for their gorgeous release of The Driller Killer. This was, oddly, at the same time that Arrow released their own beautiful “The Rainer Werner Fassbinder Collection” boxed set, which included a number of these earlier Australian commentaries, including mine and Christians, and one by my fabulous colleague Mark Freeman on Ali: Fear Eats the Soul. From there, it just really evolved: I worked on more releases, different materials (video essays, written essays, commentaries), and was contacted by other home entertainment companies. Again, technology makes this all so much more practical – I often do commentaries with colleagues who live in other countries, but with Skype and Dropbox it’s actually quite easy for us to record commentaries as if we’re in the same room. I really love doing this kind of work and have a really strong family of wonderful colleagues who work in the same field who make it feel like a real ‘job’, even though we often work remotely; Lee Gambin, Kat Ellinger, Samm Deighan, Emma Westwood, Heather Drain, Josh Nelson, Amanda Reyes and Bill Ackerman, just to name a few.
ZL: In one of your responses to me [absent from this article] you mentioned your role as a mother in passing. Before diving more into your work itself, may I ask if having a child ever resulted in you viewing a particular piece of horror media with new eyes? I imagine that the killer kid subgenre must play a little differently to a parent.
AHN: Very rarely, if ever. I think I made a choice a long time ago on a conscious level to step back from the way I engage with film critically as opposed to how I engage with it emotionally; it’s never that clear cut, obviously, but I don’t think I could do the work I do if I hadn’t done that conscious work towards at least an attempt to try and be objective. This probably relates most specifically to my work on rape-revenge film – these are, to state the obvious, often really really nasty movies that show some horrific stuff – I’m not a machine. No one is. So there are definitely moments where I’ve had to sort of mea culpa and say “I can’t deal with this because of my personal stuff”. Weirdly I think the most intensively I’ve ever felt the motherhood question really bleed into my experience of a film is Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook – I straight up think that film is a masterpiece, but I had a three year old at the time and that movie destroyed me. It still is very very difficult for me to watch – I find it so upsetting – and I have literally banned some of my mum friends from ever seeing it, even though I tell them it’s an incredibly made and absolutely beautiful film. So I think in one way, trying to be objective and critical and keep your relationship to a film in check on a personal level is one thing but it can only go so far – we’re not robots, and I don’t think we want critics to be robots.
ZL: I think that approaching film from an objective standpoint is a smart idea within this field. I have been working (slowly) on a book I plan to pitch McFarland about how a certain nasty topic, that is equivalent to rape-revenge films in how nasty and abject it is, is used within horror film and it definitely requires me to take an objective stance. Whenever I bring the topic up to people I get some horrified responses, which I imagine you must have experienced when talking about your rape-revenge book. Do you find that this objectivity ever causes issues in connecting emotionally to films your view outside of work?
AHN: The big thing I get with the rape-revenge book is this funny expression that comes over people’s faces which is ‘what happened to you to make you write about this stuff?” To their credit, no one has ever asked, but in 2019 I remember reading Jennifer Kent responding to some of the more vitriolic responses she got to the representation of sexual violence in The Nightingale and her saying something along the lines that it’s hugely presumptuous of people to assume things about Kent’s own background on this front – I think that’s really interesting (and in Kent’s defence, I’ll also add she has been very insistent on The Nightingale not being a rape-revenge film: I bring this up about the question of rape and women’s authorship more generally, not, for the record, that I think The Nightingale is a ‘rape-revenge film’ per se!). The latest project I’ve been working on has been revisiting my work on rape-revenge to mark the 10 year anniversary of that first book, and I have a real emphasis in this new project on women-directed rape revenge films; I also make a note of highlighting the fact that some on-the-record sexual assault survivors have made these films, so despite the entire category being so reductively treated on the whole, there’s a whole lot of stuff going on here – still going on here – that I personally feel has yet to be really seriously addressed.
Back to your question, though, I think “connection” is a really interesting one because it’s so damned slippery. It’s not that I switch the objective part of my brain on for criticism and off for ‘recreational’ viewing; I think I tend to fluctuate. Like, sometimes I’ll be watching something work related and the only way to intellectually frame it is through the emotions it provokes, either intentionally or otherwise – to be able to tap into or at least have an awareness of our own emotional dynamics I think is actually a critical act, if that makes sense, as much as mise-en-scene analysis or more mechanical things like that. But at the same time, many of my most “Eureka!” moments have come when I am watching something I think is ‘down time’ viewing and something will happen and I just sit bolt upright because it’s a little critical explosion somewhere I least expected it. There’s a real pleasure in that, and often a kind of danger and volatility that keeps not just the ‘job’ interesting, but the experience of engaging with screen culture really exciting.
ZL: Getting back to the post-secondary education discussion; in my own limited time at university, I personally encountered a system in which I felt like the biggest outsider. My experience was one in which horror was frowned upon by most of my professors and the astronomical costs made it nearly impossible for me to attend. I think that to say there is an issue of class involved in the academic system might be a bit of an understatement. Especially when you build upon your mention of the self-taught scholar in this field being quite impressive. Do you think that the academic system opens up more doors for the film scholar? Or does it just help to more quickly open up those doors?
AHN: I’m fairly ambivalent about the whole thing, as you may have gathered! Firstly, I am sorry that you had that experience – I find that genuinely outrageous. In Australia at the least, I’ll never get a job as an academic for my work in horror – it’s at the point here where ‘textual analysis’ in general (let along *gasp* genre studies) of any kind is poison, it’s all industry industry industry. Which I find hilarious, because all of my work in industry is linked to the work I did in textual analysis – people in the industry internationally and locally come to me precisely because of my books!
But I’ve chilled with it, especially since 2020 when everything got all so topsy turvy and a ‘job’ right now feels like a luxury, let alone a ‘career’. And I’ve also been fortunate enough to find some places within the university system here with real allies – I’m an adjunct at Deakin University here (which is different to being an adjunct in North America; here it’s more of an honorary role), and as a researcher on a great project at RMIT University that – while not my passion project – feels important and has a great team working on it.
But in short, in terms of my work and gender, for me my PhD in film and my books have far more value outside of academia than they do within it. No question at all about that, and I’m actually more than OK with it – like I said, I’d rather engage with people than scream into an echo chamber.
ZL: You touched briefly on this already but could you expand on what brought you to writing about rape-revenge film? Have your thoughts on the genre grown since? Actually, let’s extend those two questions to found footage horror as well since both of these genres have seemed to evolve within the last decade.
AHN: A whole bunch of things, both personal and professional, but the specific timing was the intersection of my discovering Argento’s The Stendhal Syndrome – which I still think is one of the most radical and progressive rape-revenge films ever made -and an absolutely horrendous news story from Melbourne where I live that happened in 2008 which is not referred to shorthand as the “Werribee DVD incident.” I still think about this story a lot (and have written about it elsewhere); the boys involved are all over 18 now and I’ve heard rumours one of them at least works in the film industry, but because they were under age when they were charged their names have been repressed. More than once I’ve met a young man working in film in this city and have wondered “are you one of those guys?”. It still makes me genuinely sick today, and my deep empathy and desperate anger I felt for the young woman in this story absolutely motivated me to write the book – I needed to know how did we get to a point with the representation of sexual violence on film that something like this could happen?
ZL: I’ve stated quite a few times, the most recent being in the upcoming Grim magazine where I reviewed Masks, just how much I am in love with the concept of the shamanic imagination. I think that it is a brilliant way to separate reality from assumed reality. How did you come to this concept? Do you see any applications for it in the future?
AHN: I always knew shamanism would play into it because so much of the anthropological writing on masks intersected with it. But the western framework – that nasty habit of dumping all cultural phenomena that is non-western into the same conceptual lump – sat very uncomfortably with me, and I didn’t want to do the same thing. I was familiar with the idea of the gothic imagination and Peter Brooks’s notion of the melodramatic imagination was like a lightning bolt for me when I was a younger academic – it had a huge impact on the way I thought about culture more broadly. So I really liked the idea of framing shamanism through a similar model; conceptualizing it as a part of the western critical notion of what shamanism “is” rather than falling into the same regressive trap of repeating gruesome colonial assumptions about cultures that are not my own.
And honestly, I’m probably biased, but I do see the shamanic imagination in a lot of places I don’t expect to. I think when we start dealing in any way with the actual mechanics of moving through liminal space – whether in film tests or other cultural phenomena – it’s really useful to frame it historically through those terms.
ZL: You have highlighted how much gender politics has informed your work, from the rape-revenge book through back to your decision to transition from music to film. Do you have any advice for people who are looking to explore gender in film? Obviously you should read the classics like Barbara Creed, Laura Mulvey, Linda Williams and Carol J. Clover (plus your own work, let’s be real); but are there other areas in which you would recommend researching?
AHN: Clover especially – like so many women who love and study horror – was a super exciting discovery for me as a young woman. Until then I’d love horror but always felt that as a woman I was somehow transgressing on something that I had no place in finding pleasure in.
When a Professor from the University of California maps out why and how those pleasures can be justified, it’s pretty life changing.
But with all of these works, I think what gets far too often lost today is just how old these books are – the Creed and Clover books are coming up to 30 years, and so many people talk about them in the present tense, like there’s been nothing that came after! While their influence is to be respected and is undeniable (and, in the case of Clover, as I noted is really significant to me personally as much as professionally), these works have spawned so much debate within feminist film circles in academia that I do think has been very very sadly lost in the crossover to the mainstream.
There is, for example, no question just how important the concept of the Final Girl is, but that so many people accept that concept without critically engaging with it or critiquing it really bugs me. Firstly, quite a few people have pointed out some weaknesses with the cherry picked text selection in that book, which I think is absolutely valid. There’s also been some great writing, for instance, about what the ‘victory’ of the Final Girl actually means, and I think about this a lot – is just surviving supposed to be some kind of feminist victory? Well, yes of course in the sense that they are not dead. But I don’t want my feminist icons in horror to just survive – how fucked up must Laurie and Sally have been at the end of Halloween and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre respectively, for example. I mean, that’s what I loved about the last Halloween film – as a grandmother, Laurie still is fucked up, still has PTSD, is still a mess. She’s an icon, absolutely, but I really love how deliberately and honestly that film complicates her so-called ‘victory’ as the Final Girl from the first film. Shitty things happened to her when she was a kid and it had an irreversible mark on her life and it sucked. That for me at least is a much more interesting conversation than what I far too often see as this Spice Girls level “woo GIRL POWER go team Final girl!” rhetorical bullshit (no slight to the Spice Girls there, love them).
There’s so much work out there that keeps moving the conversation about women and horror from these important foundational works from almost thirty years ago that should be tapped into much, much more. For example, two forthcoming edited collections – Women Make Horror: Filmmaking, Feminism, Genre from Rutgers UP edited by Alison Peirse (which is out now) and Bloody Women! Women Directors of Horror edited by Aislinn Clarke and Victoria McCollum – are definitely worth flagging here. As I write about in my chapter in the first book here, one of the big elephants in the room in both Clover and Creed for me is that they totally ignore the work of women horror filmmakers, despite mentioning at least one or two of them in their own books: it doesn’t fit their arguments of horror made for and by men. I love that there is work expanding that history; again, Creed and Clover and Williams and all these other great writers are really foundational, but their legacy is as much for how they sparked a conversation that is still happening than being the be-all end-all of that conversation.
ZL: Speaking of the framework through which to approach film, are there other frameworks that interest you such as queer studies, psychoanalytic studies or the like?
AHN: Outside the nuts and bolts of horror studies really laid out by Robin Wood in his foundational work via psychoanalysis, I simply have never found it a convincing analytical framework. Far too often I find that kind of work opts for critical cart-before-the-horseism, looking for films to squeeze a preconstituted theory into rather than letting the films breathe and speak for themselves. Maybe it’s also just the psychoanalytic horror studies that I’ve read, but I’ve seen an uncomfortable tendency towards dehistoricization which has also never sat particularly comfortably with me.
But I certainly don’t mean to be tribal here; the uncanny, right? The return of the repressed?
How do you talk about horror and not talk about those ideas? Amazing stuff and often very appropriate. From this perspective – especially with the mask book – I do think an almost intuitive interdisciplinarity is really healthy; I often turn back to art history almost by default at this point) and it was a strong influence on both my rape-revenge books and my latest book on giallo), and with masks especially, performance studies, anthropology, queer studies, and a whole range of other disciplines came into play. I actually find non-academic criticism is often far more agile and doesn’t get into these weird theory-bound territorial vendettas the way some academics do – it’s so often generational, too, and I’ve seen some young scholars treated very poorly for daring to branch out.
I just think you have to be way more chilled and organic about it – I often frame all of this under my idol Carlo Ginzburg’s concept of “conjectural paradigm” where he talks about a kind of critical intuition that he defines very beautifully as “the lightning recapitulation of rational processes”. Like, trust your gut. Have an open mind. Go where your instinct takes you, along the lines of Ginzburg’s definition. If it takes you to psychoanalysis, great. If it takes you to phenomenology, great. If it takes you to a combination of things, also great. But let your intuition take you, don’t try and squeeze a round peg into a square hole: I see this far too often, and aside from anything else, it’s intensely boring reading and often very pompous academics writing only for other very pompous academics. Which may be a job for some, but for me, its real-world value is questionable.
ZL: Your discussion on Clover was actually quite reassuring to me, as I had my own issues with the material for some time. However, I have had a deep-seated anxiety that I was missing something from my male perspective. Do you think that male opinion is unwelcome in this forum? If not, do you have any advice on how a man could interact and discuss these issues without being offensive or without falling into mansplaining attitudes?
AHN: There’s a lot of different perspectives on this so I can only speak for myself. Up front, mansplaining is very, very real in film criticism: I left Facebook because of it, and there is a strong behind-the-scenes network of women critics that while not solely dedicated to this subject, does at the very least in part act as a support group of sorts to cope with the seemingly inescapable arrogance of some (but certainly not all) male critics who go into almost automatic “actually” mode (or – even worse – “have you read/cited my article…”) when it comes to women speaking about film. There are simply men who cannot deal with women talking about film unless they can make it about themselves, but I frankly think this has more to do with fundamental personality flaws of certain individuals than a sweeping generalization I am willing to make about gender.
But the bottom line is, some of my favorite film critics – and indeed, of course, some of my favorite people – are men, and it feels for me personally absolutely self-defeating to not listen to their ideas based on their gender (as much as it would be agreeing with everything a women say just because of their gender). While not books about gender politics per se, I have to say that Richard Dyer’s White and Adam Lowenstein’s Shocking representation have been indescribably influential on the way I think about film, the latter especially (in fact, I struggle to think of one piece of Lowenstein’s writing that hasn’t gobsmacked me). It’s been a very long time since I’ve read it, but Klaus Rieser’s essay “Masculinity and Monstrosity: Characterization and Identification in the Slasher Film” from 2001 was a key moment for me in it made me rethink a lot about the final girl that I had taken for granted. I can’t say that I would necessarily agree with everything he says in that paper today (it’s now almost 20 years old, and probably 15 years since I last read it), but I do remember it being a really big moment for me when I realized that there was still a lot left to talk about when it came to gender and horror – Clover had hardly sealed the lid closed. So to be blunt, I think on one hand it’s important not to exclude people from conversations about gender politics and film, but at the same time I am far too old and far too tired to suffer either fools or mean-spirited mansplainers anymore!
ZL: As we move into the end of our time together, I would like to end this interview with some film recommendations of yours. Two, three, ten, twenty, whatever you feel like. But particularly, why these films? Are they films that you love? Are they films which you feel have value to study?
AHN: I love films that often feel critically impenetrable or, perhaps to be more accurate, that their intensity is so great that to reduce them to the subject of a critical autopsy almost seems besides the point. This to me is a real writerly challenge as much as a critical one, and I guess this is what underscored my interest in writing a book about Argento’s Suspiria. Zulawski’s Possession feels like that, too, but my colleague Alison Taylor is currently writing a book on that for the same series I published my book on Suspiria in – Auteur’s Devil’s Advocates – and I cannot wait to see what she has cooked up. Other films that have left me feeling similar to these films include Samuel Fuller’s Shock Corridor, Lynne Ramsay’s Morven Callar, László Nemes’s Son of Saul, and Toshio Matsumoto’s Funeral Parade of Roses; in one way a random selection of films, but they all have a kind of primal punch to them that never wears off, no matter how many times I watch them. There’s great writing on all of these films, but there’s something about them that feels like they are almost beating us as critics, trolling us; “Oh you really wanna do this? Bring it on!”, they seem to say!
ZL: If readers want to support your stuff, beyond just your books, is there any way for them to do so? Do you run a website, regularly appear on a podcast, etc?
AHN: My patreon is where the bulk of my writing on women in horror goes now, and I really appreciate the income stream: https://www.patreon.com/1000womeninhorror. I do a lot of blu-ray commentaries and other extras and they are a real passion project; I’ve worked for companies including Kino Lorber, Arrow, Second Sight, Eureka Entertainment, Vinegar Syndrome, the BFI, and Severin, and that’s work that pays and is a lot of fun: I like that in a way you are preaching to the converted with that work, you’re sharing a passion for a given film with an audience that is dedicated in a very different way than people ‘perform’ dedication or a commitment to a film or filmmaker in online or social media discourse. I do a bit of public speaking here and there, and I am a Rotten Tomatoes accredited ‘top critic’ so I do a fair bit of regular short-form, film criticism on new release titles, mostly (although not always) on women-directed film. I also am a film critic on ABC Radio’s Nightlife programme in Australia which is great fun and keeps me in touch with more mainstream releases. But it’s really my books where I feel I can do what it is that I like to do the most!
ZL: Are there any projects coming down your pipeline that people should check out in the near future?
AHN: 1000 Women in Horror, 1895-2018 drummed up far more interest than I ever expected and a lot of projects have sort of come off the tail of that which is pretty exciting. The release of The Giallo Canvas: Art, Excess and Horror Cinema is also a big one for me – far more niche than the women in horror book, perhaps, but it feels like it is a project that has been with me for a long time, so it’s nice seeing that project on its way towards the light. And as I mentioned, I’ve recently revisited my earlier work on rape-revenge film to mark the 10 year anniversary of my first book’s release and this project is a shape quite unlike anything I’ve ever done before so that is exciting – it’s a bit scary because attitudes have changed so much in the last 10 years, but I can only do what I do, and the focus on women-directed rape-revenge films especially is something I feel enormously passionate about. So I guess we just wait and see how that goes, huh?
