Horror’s female gaze: 6 features directed by women at FrightFest 2024

The elegiac neo-noir A Desert begins as a portrait of Alex (Kai Lennox) trying to lose himself in the desert as he retreads his own receding career as analogue photographer. But by the end it completely pulls focus to his wife Sam (Sarah Lind), who is now retracing Alex’s last known steps while she projects something of herself on to the blank canvas that he has left behind. I mention this not only because Joshua Erkman’s metacinematic feature debut is my favourite film at FrightFest 2024, and indeed of the year so far, but also because its careful drift from male to female gaze reflects a broader evolution in the festival itself.

The inaugural FrightFest, back in 2000, showcased just 17 features on its single screen, whereas now, for its 25th birthday, the genre festival shows more than 70 films across multiple screens – and it has also, over the years, grown in other ways. For while no film in its first year was directed by a woman, a quarter century on there are 16 female-helmed features in the line-up, reflecting not only changing demographics and tastes in both indie horror film production and audience (currently 45% female at FrightFest, and increasing every year), but also programming sensitive to such changes.

While Jenn Wexler’s debut The Ranger opened FrightFest 2018, and her follow-up The Sacrifice Game closed FrightFest 2023, and Axelle Carolyn was one of the contributing directors to 2015’s closing anthology Tales of Halloween, this year the coveted opening and closing slots are for the first time both occupied by female directors (Joanne Mitchell with Broken Bird, Coralie Fargeat with The Substance), setting the festival’s tone and leaving its aftertaste. This is a significant development, and perhaps even more significant for coming so unheralded.

There is always scope for further progress, but female directors have never been better acknowledged, represented and platformed by FrightFest. Here are six picks that look beyond the boys’ club of horror.

Given that it opens with the image of a dead bird being prepped for stuffing and mounting, the title is literal – but there are also two metaphorical ‘broken birds’ here. Divorced police detective Emma (Sacharissa Claxton) has not recovered from her young son’s death, and the subsequent unsolved disappearance of his body. The problems of mortician, taxidermist and amateur poet Sybil (Rebecca Calder, chillingly odd) go back much further, to a harrowing childhood trauma. As these two women’s paths intersect, either one, in her way, desperately seeks to reintegrate lost family.

Joanne Mitchell is a FrightFest regular for her writing and acting, but this expansion of her 2018 short Sybil is her first feature as director, and opens the festival on a note of shrill psychosis, stitching together threads from Lucky McKee’s May (2022) and Lynne Stopkewich’s Kissed (1996) to create a mosaic of loss, guilt and (nec)romantic delusion.

The witch is perhaps the figure from horror most associated with both women’s oppression and empowerment. In this film from Kelly Bigelow and Roland Becerra, a wheezing, middle-aged professor (Ryan Whiting) discovers his neighbour Agatha (Emily Joyce-Dial) engaging in a blood ritual of resurrection, and seeks an occult cure for his terminal illness.

Without question the prettiest film at this year’s FrightFest, and also one of the most hermetic and haunting, this abstract, near wordless suburban fairytale places an eerily rotoscoped cast into beautiful painted sets, and forges links between the bleak, run-down present and ever-returning past of Bridgeport, Connecticut. In this place, where in the 17th century a woman was hanged from a tree for witchcraft, female solidarity and sisterhood remain as counterforces to the prevailing, literally sick patriarchy.

In Joy Wilkinson’s assured and unpredictable feature debut, two people, both stood up by their dates in the same London restaurant, end up spending the next few days getting to know one another. Both damaged goods, single mother Lena (Emma McDonald) and loner Daniel (Billy Postlethwaite) whimsically retrace Daniel’s history by sneaking into each of his previous residences, traversing the psychogeography of an indifferent, often alienating urban landscape in its various divisions of postcode, sex and class.

Yet this city symphony also takes its couple through as many genres (romance, thriller, melodrama, horror) as locations, each stylised with mannered colour coding, as lost Lena finds her way towards a realisation of who Daniel really is and a decision about what she truly wants. This is both calling card and travel pass, residing in a complementary relationship with FrightFest’s other excellent female-centric dating nightmare, Elric Kane’s The Dead Thing.

“Women weren’t just the femme fatale, or the ingénue or the doughty wife, or the victim. No, women were whole people, emancipated from the harness of how a woman was supposed to behave.” Erstwhile actor Gigi (Rebecca De Mornay) is referring to the heroines of pre-Code Hollywood, but she might equally be describing her granddaughter Clare Bleecker (Bella Thorne). For, while navigating all the usual problems of high school, smart, strange, Catholic Clare is also secretly investigating a slew of missing locals (“how do so many women go unnoticed?”), and – even more secretly – serially killing predatory men. All this, while she regularly converses with the ghost of a postman (Frank Whaley) who is “the last itsy bitsy piece of [her] conscience”.

Adapted from Don Roff’s novel Clare at Sixteen (2021), Mitzi Peirone’s feature is a small-town murder mystery whose messily complex protagonist is all at once sinner and saint.

The main character (played by Amélie Daure, but sometimes by Anne-Sophie Charron) comes with the forename Alter (as in ‘alter ego’), marking writer-director Aurélia Mengin’s follow-up to Fornacis (2018) as occupying the illusory terrains of allegory and psychodrama. Structured around a series of surreal cave-set sessions with the shrink Léandro (Stefano Cassetti), the film goes deep into the conflicted psyche of bisexual, dissociative Alter on her journey to recover a forgotten primal scene from her past, and to become reconciled with her mother (Patricia Barzyk) and her own divided self.

All this is a fantasia and a fugue, with little purchase on the reality that Alter simultaneously seeks and evades, and so it is presented in attractively lysergic visuals, keyed to the clashing colours of the title, and inducing in the viewer something of the disorientation and disconnection experienced by Alter in her guilty quest for her other.  

“I need help,” says the obviously upset schoolgirl Charlotte who has just turned up at dusk on the doorstep of stranger Roy (Dean Kilbey) – and as this loner lets the young girl in, a trap is being set. For in this English countryside location, where even adult women are harassed by their male colleagues in the workplace or addressed with demeaningly gendered slurs, young girls are easy prey and regularly go missing – and Roy is not quite the nice guy he at first seems to be. As little Charlotte, fleeing a troubled home life, keeps coming back to Roy’s, we can see this damaged girl being manipulated and groomed for something unspeakable.

Georgia Conlan’s feature debut tackles a taboo subject in a strictly social realist mode (complete with literal kitchen sink) – but equivocal writing and extraordinary performances bring everything to a conclusion that, though truly satisfying, will leave viewers not quite believing what they have just seen with their own eyes.

FrightFest 2024 takes place 22 to 26 August across both Odeon Cinemas, Leicester Square, London.