At the doors of a new edition of the Sitges fantastic film festival (which starts on Thursday), EL PERIÓDICO’s critics and experts have participated in a vote to elect the 10 best horror movies directed by women. A first look at the complete list reveals a conclusion: there are many titles released in the last two decades and almost no films appear before 1980. Among the top 10, the oldest is from 1987 (and its author, Mary Lambert, will be in Sitges these days). This demonstrates the strength of the female presence in a genre in which female directors have been excluded for decades. Since 2021, the Sitges festival has been promoting Woman in Fan, a program of scholarships and specific activities aimed at giving visibility to women working in the fantasy genre. This ranking, prepared with the votes of Quim Casas, Desirée de Fez, Laura Fernández, Juan Manuel Freire, Julián García, Elena Hevia, Nando Salvà and Rafael Tapounetresponds to that same purpose.
This was the voting system
Each critic has made a list of 10 films in order of preference. And from each list, 10 points were awarded to the first classified, 9 to the second, 8 to the third and so on until the 10th, which received one point. The final list was prepared with the sum of the points received for each film.
‘Prevenge’ (Alice Lowe, 2016)
15 points
A seven-month pregnant woman becomes a serial killer following the dictates of the baby she carries inside her. Under its absurd appearance, the plot premise of the debut behind the camera by Alice Lowe (who also writes the script and plays the protagonist) serves as the basis for a macabre and bloody comedy that viciously slashes all the topics associated with pregnancy and maternity. A story of prenatal revenge loaded with social criticism and bathed in typically British black humor that could hardly have been signed by a man.
‘Jennifer’s body’ (Karyn Kusama, 2009)
16 points
A good part of the critics did not know how to see beyond its surface of a teenage horror comedy with a beautiful cheerleader who is turned into a man-eater by an evil force (literally). But the film directed by Kusama from an ingenious script by Diablo Cody is so full of visual discoveries and is so accurate in its incisive critical notes (like that indie group willing to sacrifice a virgin to achieve success) that sending it off as a Simple silly entertainment seems like a sign of myopia or laziness.
‘American Psycho’ (Mary Harron, 2000)
17 points
The fact that a woman was in charge of bringing Bret Easton Ellis’ controversial ‘best seller’ to the cinema about a Wall Street ‘broker’ as obsessed with his own image as he is with the exercise of extreme violence gave the story a new vision that It allowed the narcissism, misogyny and banality of the protagonist to be exposed without ever falling into glorification or misunderstanding. Harron skillfully mixes black comedy, portraiture of manners, social satire and horror to compose a devastating critique of a society fascinated by appearance and ostentation.
‘Living Cemetery’ (Mary Lambert, 1989)
21 points
When adapting Stephen King was a risky exercise that exposed you no matter what to the wrath of the Maine writer’s fans (not even Kubrick was spared), Mary Lambert dared with one of the author’s most terrifying novels and emerged reasonably victorious. . He was helped in his endeavor by a deep knowledge of King’s work, a remarkable talent when it came to recreating the gloomy and decadent atmosphere that surrounds the entire story, a good eye for choosing the cast (Fred Gwynne!) and the songs of the “Ramones. The success of the film encouraged Lambert to direct a much wackier second part.
‘The Invitation’ (Karyn Kusama, 2015)
26 points
A reunion of old friends who meet again after a personal tragedy distanced them long ago leads to a feast of horror and paranoia. Leading some actors in a state of grace (John Carroll Lynch’s composition is chilling), Kusama intelligently handles the ingredients of a very dark thriller that simmers before the viewer’s growing restlessness to explode in a final twist that expands the domestic madness that we have just witnessed to an entire society sick with narcissism. It won the award for best film in Sitges-2015.
‘A girl comes home alone at night’ (Ana Lily Amirpour, 2014)
32 points
Story of ‘love fou’ and feminist plea in equal parts, the “first Iranian vampire spaghetti western” – this is how the film was advertised – is shot in California and is much closer in aesthetics and intentions to the cinema of Jim Jarmusch than to that of Sergio Leone. In a spectral city that seems to exist nowhere, a chador-wearing vampire with a penchant for skateboarding and electro-pop (hypnotic Sheila Vand) crosses paths with a troubled Persian James Dean whose heroin-addicted father is dying and a misogynistic, abusive dealer. . There will be blood (in very contrasting black and white, yes).
‘Babadook’ (Jennifer Kent, 2014)
38 points
Acclaimed by William Friedkin himself, Jennifer Kent’s debut feature gives a clever twist to the trope of the monster lurking in the closet by making the unresolved traumas of a mother and son marked by the death of the father incarnate in a malevolent entity that turns their lives into a nightmare. With a skilful staging that is highly effective in generating tension in closed spaces, the Australian filmmaker dares to deactivate cinema’s ancestral idealization of motherhood to present it as a source of neurosis and terror.
‘Raw’ (Julia Ducournau, 2016)
47 points
In essence, Ducournau’s long-form debut is a textbook ‘coming of age’ in which a young woman who has just left the nest for the first time explores the limits of her new freedom by renouncing virtue and embracing her most primal instincts. . The girl’s name is Justine, in case more clues were needed about her Sadian nature. It happens that on this occasion the virtue that the protagonist discards is strict vegetarianism and the place to which her instincts lead her is anthropophagy, which turns a disturbing psychological drama in a university setting into a cannibal holocaust.
‘Trouble every day’ (Claire Denis, 2001)
49 points
Sex, cannibalism and ‘mad doctors’. Considered one of the founding pillars of what was later called ‘new French extremism’, Claire Denis’ film steals the title from a Frank Zappa song to propose a visceral exploration (in a metaphorical but also literal sense) of the horror that lurks after uncontrollable impulses. Vincent Gallo and Béatrice Dalle play two beings consumed by an illness that condemns them to devour their fellow humans and the Parisian director portrays their (self) destructive spiral with an icy, sensual, dark and brutally explicit look.
‘The Night Travelers’ (Kathryn Bigelow, 1987)
60 points
Boy meets girl and she introduces him to her family, for whom the adjective dysfunctional falls a bit short. In her second feature film as a director (the first she has signed alone), Bigelow grafts with great style a vampire plot into a contemporary Western atmosphere and the result is a romantic, violent, fun, poetic and sexy film, generous in ultra-charismatic characters ( with special mention to those played by Lance Henriksen and the overacting Bill Paxton) and blessed with magnificent special effects and memorable music by Tangerine Dream.