The Women Directing Horror, From Ida Lupino to Julia Ducournau

The most durable myth about women and horror is that they mainly turn up in it screaming. It is a myth with a long tail, because for decades the genre’s female roles really were written by men and photographed for men, and the criticism that grew up around the films inherited the same blind spot. Look at who was actually directing, though, and a different line appears — a thin but unbroken thread of women who used horror precisely because it was the least guarded room in the house. The genre’s low prestige was its own kind of open door. Nobody polices the servants’ entrance.

The pioneer who would not call it horror

Start with Ida Lupino, because she got there first and by the hardest road. A major Hollywood star of the 1940s, she moved behind the camera at the end of the decade through her own independent company, The Filmakers, at a time when the Directors Guild counted her as effectively its only working woman. Her subjects were the ones the studios flinched from — unwed pregnancy, bigamy, sexual assault — handled with a cool, unsentimental economy. Her masterpiece, The Hitch-Hiker (1953), is a lean noir-thriller about two men held hostage on a desert road by a killer whose eye never fully closes, and it is a horror film in everything but marketing: a study of predation, helplessness and the collapse of ordinary safety, shot with a documentary flatness that makes the menace feel procedural.

Lupino matters here because she establishes the pattern the rest of the century repeats. She entered through genre because genre was where a woman could actually get financed, and she smuggled her real subject — vulnerability, and who gets to inflict it on whom — inside a form nobody was watching too closely. That combination of a disreputable frame and a serious interior is the recurring shape of women’s horror, and it holds all the way to the present.

The exploitation apprenticeship

The next generation came up through the exploitation machine, because that was where the cameras were cheap and the gatekeepers absent. Stephanie Rothman, trained in the Roger Corman academy that also produced Scorsese and Bogdanovich, directed The Velvet Vampire (1971), a sun-bleached desert vampire film that quietly inverts the era’s leering conventions by handing its predatory gaze to a woman and letting her look back. Doris Wishman, working even further outside the system, built a long, strange, self-financed career in the nudie and roughie fields, an outsider auteur whose disorienting cutting and refusal of polish read now as something close to avant-garde. She would cut away from a conversation to a lamp, a pair of feet, a patch of carpet, and the result is a woozy dislocation that no film school taught and no producer would have permitted. These are not respectable filmographies, and that unrespectability is exactly what let them exist.

The lesson of the exploitation apprenticeship is that constraint sharpens craft. Working with no money and no oversight forces a director to find effect in framing, rhythm and suggestion, the disciplines that separate a real filmmaker from a well-funded one. It is the same schooling that produced the drive-in satirists like Russ Meyer, whose cutting and attitude came out of the identical economy of nothing-to-lose. The women who trained in that economy learned to make the frame do the work, and it shows the moment budgets arrived.

The eighties and the vampire as author’s tool

Kathryn Bigelow is the hinge. Her Near Dark (1987) took the vampire film — a form so encrusted with erotic cliché that it seemed used up — and rebuilt it as a dusty American western about a surrogate family of drifting predators, all sunburn and diner neon and the horror of belonging to the wrong tribe. Bigelow’s control of action and space was already total, and the film uses the vampire’s oldest theme, the seduction into a new and monstrous kind of intimacy, as a structure for something about hunger and loyalty. She would go on to become the first woman to win the directing Oscar, for a war film, which tends to erase how completely she began in genre. The vampire has always been the horror figure most openly about desire, a metaphor I have traced across a full century of the cinema, and Bigelow grabbed it precisely because its elasticity let her say her own thing.

Through the 1990s and 2000s the thread thickens. Mary Harron’s American Psycho (2000) did something no male director of that material could quite have managed: it found the satire in Bret Easton Ellis’s abattoir by playing it as a comedy of male vanity, the violence curdling into farce because a woman was framing the narcissism from the outside. Claire Denis’s Trouble Every Day (2001) turned cannibalism into a study of desire as pure appetite, filmed with an art-house patience that scandalised audiences expecting either a horror film or a French drama and refusing to be simply either. Antonia Bird’s Ravenous (1999), a cannibal-western black comedy, is one of the great neglected genre films of its decade. In each case the director used horror’s licence to be extreme in the service of a very controlled idea.

The body-horror turn

The current era belongs, more than to anyone, to the directors who turned the genre inward onto the female body itself. Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook (2014) built a monster out of grief and exhausted single motherhood, and made the pop-up storybook at its centre a genuine feat of design — the creature works because the film keeps it in the register of a children’s book gone wrong, all cut paper and impossible angles, so that it never has to become a man in a suit. Karyn Kusama’s Jennifer’s Body (2009), dismissed on release and reclaimed since, used a succubus plot to talk about the way teenage girls consume and betray one another. Ana Lily Amirpour’s A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014) made a monochrome Iranian-diaspora vampire western out of a lonely woman in a chador who stalks the men who deserve it.

Julia Ducournau is where the strand arrives at full pressure. Raw (2016) films a vegetarian veterinary student’s slide into cannibalism as an allegory of appetite waking up in a young woman’s body, and its craft is in the escalation — the way Ducournau shoots hunger as something physical and shameful and irresistible, holding on flesh long enough to make the audience complicit in the looking. Titane (2021) went further into pure body horror and won the Palme d’Or at Cannes, making Ducournau only the second woman to take the festival’s top prize. The achievement is that these films are unmistakably about female embodiment — about bodies that transform, leak, hunger and refuse to behave — told through a genre that spent decades photographing women’s bodies from the outside. The gaze has been turned around and handed to the person it used to fall on.

Why the servants’ entrance mattered

The through-line from Lupino to Ducournau is not a story of steady progress; it is a story of a genre whose very disreputability kept a door propped open. Prestige cinema guarded its directing chairs jealously and handed them, overwhelmingly, to men. Horror could not afford to be so choosy — it needed product, it worked cheap, and it was beneath the notice of the people who decided who was allowed to make Important Films. So it became the place a woman could pick up a camera and say something serious inside a form that let her be extreme. Prano Bailey-Bond’s Censor (2021), a film about a woman examining the very video nasties whose panic I have written about, is almost too perfect a summary: a female director, working in horror, dramatising a woman’s authority over exactly the images the culture once tried to ban.

The next time someone tells you horror is a genre that does women dirty, the honest answer is that it did their images dirty for a long time and, at the very same time, gave more of them the keys to the camera than any respectable genre ever dared. The screaming was on screen. Behind it, from Lupino’s desert road to Ducournau’s transforming flesh, women were quietly running the machine. If you want to see where the genre’s most patient, controlled fear-craft went in parallel, the Korean horror of a film like A Tale of Two Sisters shows the same lesson from another tradition: the genre rewards whoever takes its craft seriously, and it never much cared who that was.