Jennifer 39;s Body Watch Australia

[Claudio Davey]

Atthis year's FGBFF, which took place earlier this month, Robertson gave a talk entitled, "Girls Gone Wild: Autonomy, Sexuality and Resistance in Representations of Young Women in Horror Films." In it, she "explores women-led horror films featuring young women who take active roles in their stories, maintaining control of their bodies, choices and lives." Anyone interested in the relationship between feminism and horror will find it fascinating. Although it isn't readily available online, you can request a recording from the festival team.

In this condensed and edited conversation (which took place before the festival), I talk to Robertson about how much it sucks to be a teen girl, why women enjoy horror, and Claire Denis' criminally underrated "Trouble Every Day" (2001). She is a gem, her writing is wonderful, and everyone should keep an eye out for her future projects and lectures. I could seriously listen to her talk about horror audience demographics all damn day.

KR: I did my Ph.D. in art history in Sydney [Australia] and taught for quite a few years on art and film, mainly introductory level classes, so I got to do a big spread of topics. I started doing some separate work at the time for local publications and branching out into more accessible writing because I wanted audiences to actually read what I was writing. Academic writing doesn't exactly have a particularly wide audience.

I'm glad you branched out because I don't think I would have found you if not for your article in The Atlantic on female cannibals. Was there a film or work of art that initially got you interested in that topic?

Yes, absolutely. It's quite unusual, but it sort of pulls together my doctoral work with film work. I guess it's the linchpin, now that I look back at what happened to my life. I was writing my doctoral thesis and working on this huge nineteenth century oil painting by John Longstaff, which was inspired by the myth of the Sirens. I was reading some of the actual source material, the classics, which I had done a little bit of in school but wasn't that familiar with. I started thinking about why they were understood to be mermaids in popular culture and not as their original description, which was part bird. It's very different from what shows up in TV shows and movies. I wanted to figure out what these creatures meant and how they fit into this schema of representations of women. They're these beautiful creatures but lure men to their deaths and then eat them and they're all over the place ... in movies, comics, other art works, advertisements.

My friend, Georgina, and I were getting to the end of our projects and honestly, a little bit bored. You work on these ideas for so many years, and we decided that we needed a little break. We came upon this idea of proposing a panel to this very prestigious Australian art conference that we went to every year so that we could talk about something else that was more current and a little bit weird. She came up with this brilliant paper and I gave one called "Ladies who lunch." I later turned it into an academic article and when it was accepted to a journal I realized ... okay, so I'm not the only one who finds this idea appealing.

Final Girls is pretty separate. There will be a little crossover with some of the characters, like from "Jennifer's Body" (2009), "Raw" (2016), "The Lure" (2015), and probably a few others. This talk focuses solely on women-led horror films since that's what Final Girls is looking at. It does limit the filmography, which is good in some ways, but there is a lot less to talk about. There are films that would fit into this theme, like "The Witch" (2015), but it's not written or directed by a woman, so it didn't make the cut.

It's kind of an amazing feeling to know that I just can't look at every film I want to, though. Originally, I was going to include a couple of final girls and some rape-revenge, but I felt like it didn't really fit.

That's also part of the reason why I decided to look at young women, mainly teens, or very early adulthood. It's a pretty ideal topic for horror, if you think about it. Watching all of these movies has really thrown me back into my teen years and made me feel fifteen again ... where everything is awful, you hate and love everybody simultaneously, and you're just so angry. There's such desperation to be an adult, but you also want to be a kid. It's sort of horrible and wonderful at the same time. It's been weird experiencing that again through some of these films.

A lot of the girls in these movies are around fifteen to eighteen, and people expect them to be adults, to be independent and have control over things in their lives, but then they don't actually give any control. It's all of the responsibility and none of the payoff. As a teenager, it felt so unfair sometimes.

You're also experiencing a lot of things for the first time, so you don't know how to even identify certain feelings, let alone handle them well. There should be more films about how horrifying it is to be a teenage girl.

You're really not equipped for some of these things. You might have great friends who offer their support, but from what basis? Where is their knowledge coming from? Everyone is working it out as they go and trying to look after each other. It's all about trying to find some power or autonomy in a world that really doesn't want to give you any.

When we were emailing earlier, I mentioned Gita Jackson's essay about how horror is one of the few places where women see their fears being taken seriously. Do you have any theories about why women are so drawn to horror?

There are some scholars, including Brigid Cherry, who in the late '90s started doing some great research into women who enjoy horror. Cherry is one of the first people I found who actually started interviewing them and trying to fill the gap. Women have always watched horror, though. In the '30s, when there was the big golden age cinema horror boom, women were a really important demographic. On a practical level, women attended matinees, when men were at work. When horror came out, one of the things they would do is highlight the romance aspects of the films. So, "Dracula" (1931), I kid you not, was pitched as the strangest love story of all and opened on Valentine's Day.

Marketers understood that they needed to appeal to women, although they didn't necessarily go about it how people would today. I've read a little bit on some of the promotional materials that used to come out for films like "Mystery of the Wax Museum" (1933), which I've just written about in a book chapter that's coming out next year. One of the things they proposed was a tie-in with a local department store, so definitely a women's domain, where a live model would pose frozen among the figures in the store before coming alive and surprising the audience by smiling and bowing. It sounds very kitsch today, but at the time ... like this is years before something like "The Tingler" (1959).

This sort of gimmick was really big in the '30s. There were films that they used to have an ambulance parked outside for or things like the ability to take out a life insurance policy before going to see a certain film. When a bell rang, audiences were encouraged to close their eyes. It's not unusual, but I found some of the strategies directed towards women particularly interesting. That's a roundabout way of agreeing that women have always watched horror but that I don't know why. I don't think that "Dracula" appealed to women because of the romance, honestly. It might have been what got some of them into the cinema, but I don't think that was it. The article you sent was interesting because it's good to have someone affirm that the fears women experience on a daily basis are real.

I think some people like the catharsis of it. There are certain genres that women tend to find particularly horrifying, like films set in haunted houses. The home is a place where women spend a lot of time and have been historically relegated to in the cultural imagination. For many women viewers, the danger is inside the house whereas for many men, it's outside ... it's in the countryside, like in "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" (1974). It's about looking out instead of looking in.

It's so interesting to me that in the '30s, marketers were recognizing women as an important demographic but that in the case of more recent films, like "Jennifer's Body," they were completely ignored. Do you have any explanation for that discrepancy?

They really messed up the marketing for "Jennifer's Body." I've read a few takes on what happened from people involved in the making of the film. It seems like everyone knows that it was mishandled and unfortunately, the film didn't get the love that it should have during its release. At this point, it has been pretty well-established as a great film. It was totally not what I expected when I first watched it. I have been convincing people to watch this film for a really long time. People are never really quite sure of what it is and what it means, but it definitely didn't match up with the marketing, which is super unfair because it was made by a team of women!

I think some of it comes down to who makes these choices about how films are marketed, edited, when reshoots are done without the original directors, when and how rewrites happen. If it's an independent film, the makers have more control, but if it's a studio film, the studio has a lot of sway. And of course, most studios are run by men.

There are these amazing reports that come out every year [from the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative] on women in the film industry. It's interesting to look at the numbers on how many women are working in different positions or sitting on boards. Very few fit into the media landscape. That definitely has to play a part.

I know you have a book coming out soon on "Trouble Every Day," so I feel like we have to at least touch on it. I just saw the film a few years ago and was blown away. Like "Jennifer's Body," it was totally panned by critics upon its release. Even now, it only has a 50% critics score on Rotten Tomatoes. What's the deal with that?

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