The Body Politic: Meet the Female Filmmakers Who Are Shaping the Future of Horror
Feminist body horror is taking over indie cinema.
The female filmmakers behind this new wave of flesh and flash are finding critical and commercial success by combining the viscerally grotesque with progressive themes exploring bodily autonomy, beauty standards, and social expectations for women.
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Coralie Fargeat’s indie blockbuster The Substance — which has earned $77 million worldwide and picked up 5 Oscar nominations — is the current queen of female body horror, but gross-out feminist films are everywhere. Sundance’s Midnight screenings this year included Emilie Blichfeldt’s The Ugly Stepsister — a twisted take on the Cinderella story involving bone-crunching cosmetic surgery and bodily mutilation — and Grace Glowicki’s Dead Lover, a horror comedy about a gravedigger (Glowicki) who goes to macabre lengths in an attempt to re-animate her deceased mate.
Berlin’s lineup features Johanna Moder’s Mother’s Baby, a German-language psychological horror movie about a woman unsure if the baby she’s brought back from the hospital is actually hers, and Honey Bunch, from directors Madeleine Sims-Fewer and Dusty Mancinelli, which uses body horror tropes to examines the story of a toxic relationship.
Berlin’s European Film Market has gone all in on feminist body horror. Alongside Honey Bunch and Dead Lover, sold by XYZ Films and Yellow Veil Pictures respectively, the EFM’s gristly offerings include Magnify’s The Blood Countess, a period shocker starring Isabelle Huppert as a vampiric noblewoman, and the Beta/UTA Independent Film Group Diamond Shitter, a socially-critical body horror thriller directed by Bright Star actress Antonia Campbell-Hughes about a working-class girl who can physically absorb precious gems.
“These new female filmmakers are really making waves in their use of body horror,” says Emily Gotto, SVP of global acquisitions and co-productions for AMC Networks, who bought The Ugly Stepsister for Shudder, AMC’s horror-focused streaming service, ahead of its Sundance bow. “The feminist messaging of these films really examines how were are living today, how we act within our society and within our relationships and does so in a way that is bombastic and thought-provoking and bold and brave, but also highly entertaining.”
Gotto cites Karyn Kusama’s cult favorite Jennifer’s Body from 2009 as an early entry in the canon, but she credits French director Julia Ducournau with ushering in this new bloody wave of feminist body horror. Ducournau’s 2016 debut Raw, a coming-of-age story about a ravenous flesh-eating teenager, was a crossover success, earning more than $3 million at the box office. Her follow-up, the gonzo Titane — notorious for its scenes of girl-on-car sex, motor-oil lactation, and serial killing by hair stick — won the Cannes Palme d’Or in 2021 and was France’s entry for the Oscars.
Ducournau, Fargeat and Blichfeldt all cite Canadian director David Cronenberg as a primary inspiration. Cronenberg’s use of visceral horror and grotesque body imagery — in Rabid (1977) a woman uses a clitoral stinger to feed on people’s blood; The Brood (1979) is about a woman whose rage gives birth to mutant children — struck a chord with these young directors looking to express how it feels to be a woman in the world right now.
“I’ve never been able to watch horror movies. I’m way too soft. I can’t do jump scares. I’m afraid of the dark,” says Blichfeldt. “But there was something about Cronenberg’s body horror that was so intriguing. As an audience, we get to relate to his characters through their bodily experiences, but there’s the deeper layer, where these bodily experiences are filled with metaphors and deep philosophical ideas. This really chimed with what I was trying to do, to convey the female experience, which I think is a very bodily experience a lot of the time.”
“The way we live with our bodies in the public space, the way we are constantly judged by how our bodies look and what that means when our bodies mutate by getting older, getting pregnant,” adds Fargeat, “that is body horror. Being a woman is body horror.”
That this new wave of feminist horror is resonating, with audiences and critics alike, could have as much to do with the state of the world as the quality of the films.
In The Substance, Elisabeth (Demi Moore), a fading celebrity who gets fired from her TV job for being too old — “at 50 it stops,” says her creepy studio boss — pointedly named Harvey (Dennis Quaid). “What stops?” she asks.
In a desperate effort to pervert biology to restore the body society demands of her, Elisabeth takes a black-market drug that causes her to split down the spine, and the body of Sue, a younger sexier woman (Margaret Qualley) crawls out.
“In The Substance you have Coralie Fargeat thinking about Hollywood and satirizing a figure like Harvey Weinstein at a point when a lot of women are feeling shortchanged by the results of the #MeToo movement, [when] the pendulum feels like it’s swinging back,” says The Hollywood Reporter arts and culture critic Lovia Gyarkye.
“#MeToo was heralded as a sea change in the film industry and in the wider culture but from my perspective, at least, it doesn’t feel like very much has changed,” adds British film critic and commentator Hannah Strong. “The representation within Hollywood is still really, really bad, and globally you can’t turn on the television or read a paper without hearing about some sort of atrocity that a woman, or women generally, have been subject to. There’s a lot of frustration and anger and pain and films like Titane or The Substance are a kind of reaction to that, even subconsciously, to the patriarchy and the kind of pressures that women face.”
This new cadre of female body horror directors is co-opting the style of the filmmakers who came before but for a different purpose. Male body horror directors like Cronenberg or John Carpenter typically view the body as a source of alienation and fear — think of Carpenter’s The Thing (1982), about an alien invader who takes the shape of the humans it is preying on, or Cronenberg’s The Fly (1986), the story of a man who transforms into an insect — while in feminist body horror the body, while still grotesque, is viewed more intimately.
“In both The Substance and The Ugly Stepsister, you see how the body is both an ally and enemy of women,” adds Gyarkye. “Sue, the physical manifestation of this younger self in The Substance, turns against the mean, older character of Elisabeth. In The Ugly Stepsister, the stepsister needs her body to charm and woo the prince to find economic and financial salvation, but it’s also her greatest enemy.”
“I think female filmmakers working in the body horror space are very attuned to the fact that they are telling stories that represent the experience of many other women,” adds Strong, “and that they are carving out a space in horror that has traditionally been designated for men telling women’s stories, rather than women telling women’s stories.”
The genre of feminist body horror has proven remarkably malleable, from the slick, ’80s-style showbiz satire of Fargaet’s The Substance, to Blichfeldt’s Ugly Stepsister, which mimics the visuals and story beats of 1970s Czech fantasy films, to The Devil’s Bath (2024), co-directed by Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala, which uses body horror tropes to examine depression, suicide and religious oppression in 18th century rural Austria.
“The female experience is a reservoir, an endless reservoir, for body horror,” says Fargeat. “Now that there are more female directors getting to make movies like this, the box has really been thrown wide open.”
The horror audience, notes Gotto of AMC, has “always skewed female,” but this new wave of “bolder, more distinct or provocative” horror films with a feminist edge, “are really finding their place in the foreground, rather than in the background. I mean, we have a body horror film at the Oscars, directed by a woman! That’s an incredible and real sign that these films cannot just be siloed and considered niche or art house, they have crossed over into the mainstream.”
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