Interview with I SPIT ON YOUR CELLULOID Author Heidi Honeycutt

Author Heidi Honeycutt commemorates the contributions of women directors past and present in horror cinema in her newest book I Spit on Your Celluloid.

The multitalented Honeycutt is a co-founder of the Etheria Film Festival, which highlights the short films of women directors in genre cinema. As a respected film journalist and film historian, she specializes in horror history and women’s history in media. Her expertise can be seen on-camera in several documentaries and cinema series, including Eli Roth’s History of Horror, 101 Scariest Horror Movie Moments of All Time, and Trailers from Hell.

Over a nearly twenty-year journey, through hundreds of interviews, and countless hours of research of horror cinema from all around the world, Honeycutt with deep love and dedication brought attention to the amazing horror contributions of women, especially those lost to the pages of time. These films include everything from breathtaking gothic stories on micro-budgets, to films rebelling against patriarchal idealism and cultural expectations, to those facing censorship. She also pays homage to the current women horror directors breaking new ground.

Honeycutt shares with us what inspired her to make this book, and what she hopes readers will take away from her book.

Bonilla: What inspired you to write a book about women directors in horror cinema?

Honeycutt: I think a lot of the time actresses and writers and producers and authors and artists are all lumped together as women in horror. Whereas we don't really do that to men in horror, which is odd to me. So I thought, let's focus specifically on a distinct role in filmmaking and see what the women in those roles are making. I think that's way more interesting than just kind of lumping everyone together like, she's a writer, she makes horror bobbleheads, and she is a fashion designer. All of that to me isn't related. The only related factor is that the people who are doing it happen to be women. It's far more interesting to see what one of the major creative roles behind the camera is consistently doing or not consistently doing.

And the reason that I chose women directors is because, by far, there are fewer women directors than in any other area of film. There are fewer women doing most stuff in film, but there are the fewest women directors in film. So it's a little more precious and a little more interesting to me to see what they are doing. But also, I have been embroiled in the world of filmmakers and horror and women making projects for almost the entire time I've been in the horror industry, which is like 20 years now. So it's something that I just know.

I could write about something that I don't know, but it wouldn't be that good and it would probably be very general. This is one of the few topics that I think I'm actually qualified to write about. I'm not sure what else I would have focused on. I know so many women directors. I've researched and taken the time to find out about so many obscure horror movies directed by women that really it was the only thing I could do.

How long did it take to research and write the book?

It's been a very long process. The process began, I would say, somewhere between 15 and 20 years ago. It started with just general information gathering. And then there are interruptions throughout this time of course. Life gets in the way. It's when you're working a full-time job, or certain things happen in life. I had a lot of people close to me die and family stuff comes up. That really takes away from your ability to focus on something creatively that needs a lot of attention.

So it took longer than it should have. But throughout this time period, it has been something that I've consistently made time for. Not as much time as I wish I'd had, but a very long time. A lot of it was research I didn't even know I was doing. And by that, I mean, when you develop friendships and intense familiarity with a subject, it takes time. It takes time to really develop that knowledge. Time to even see what the big picture really is. Time to watch movies and time to understand individual directors, because there's so many of them.

So I initially felt bad about how long it took to write the book. But now, when I look back on it, I realized it was because I had to. It was because it took that long to really understand what I was writing.

The title of your book is very fitting. How did you come up with it?

I like puns, and I wanted something that was a little sensational and funny. And to me, rape revenge movies made by men are very silly. I don't seem to enjoy them very much, just personally. I always see them brought up as feminist because a woman is killing a man, and somehow that's feminism to some people. So I thought it would be funny to take the title of one of the hardest-to-watch exploitative rape films ever made, I Spit on Your Grave and just switch it around to we're spitting on the celluloid because we're women. And it's funny.

In the book you also include television and short film directors. Why was it important for you to also address them?

Because every time there's a technological change in affecting media, whether it's radio or theater or digital cameras or VHS or streaming, there's always a change that ripples throughout the industry in all directions that either causes people to get jobs or cause people to lose jobs. And one of the ways that women have been able to direct throughout the last century is slipping in through those moments when new technology has come about, and that new technology also benefits men. Men who previously were shut out of the film industry were suddenly able to get jobs, let's say in television, where it was a different beast, and things moved faster. They needed a lot more directors for a lot more content, very quickly, and they were paying less. You weren't getting paid like what Vincent Minelli was getting paid to direct. But it was a job, and you could direct.

I think that's really important. A lot of really good horror came from television all around the world. To ignore that opportunity for women directors to get into horror, and to ignore it as a place where a lot of great horror in general came from would not be fair.

The digital revolution in the late 1990s, early 2000s really opened up filmmaking to people who previously would never have been able to make films. Even films that never got distributed. Even films they made in their backyard with their friends. Suddenly you could be a filmmaker because it didn't cost a million dollars to buy film and have it developed. You could just get your digital camera out. And so many people, many of them women, picked up those cameras and started making digital horror films. And that's just one more way the number of women making their films increased.

What inspired you to dedicate a whole chapter to non-English language films?

I learned while doing my research that the films that I knew about the least, and I consider myself a pretty hardcore horror movie fan, were the foreign language films. I wanted to know why I didn't know about them, and mainly it was because they're not distributed in North America, they're out of print, they haven't been bought back for various reasons, or they just forgotten. And I'm sure this is true for a lot of films directed by men too. But since I was focusing on films directed by women, I realized that these are films that really should be better known because they fit right in with their peers.

[What] was most surprising to me was so many women directors directed television Horror in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, in Eastern European communist countries. One of my favorite finds was a television Czechoslovakian version of Dracula, which I was like, “How is this not one of the Dracula versions that everybody talks about?” Because you hear about all the other ones, certainly, all the English language ones. Why don't we know about these?

So I think one of the reasons we don't know about these is that they haven't been written about a lot, because they're hard to find. They're hard to get a hold of. The prints sometimes aren't very good. The filmmakers might be dead or completely unfindable. It's just not an easy thing to find when you're a horror movie fan, especially if you don't even know it exists.

My hope was that by covering some of these films, that now I've done some of the work for people so they don't have to do it. So now they know the film exists. They know what country it came from and who made it. And maybe it'll be easier for people to find those films and watch them.

I discovered that in Argentina in the late 1950s, early 1960s, when the horror television was taking off like in the UK and in the USA, it was also taking off in Argentina. There was a woman director who directed numerous horror episodes of this television series that is now completely lost. Sadly, because it was shot for television. It was probably shot on either film that was tossed out or some kind of video. It's just gone. I was like, “Oh my God. She directed fifteen episodes or more of horror television. And feature-length episodes of a horror series. Why do we not know this person?”

In your research, who was the earliest female horror director in America?

There are filmmakers for instance like Alice Guy-Blaché directed horror, but she directed it in France. She did end up coming to the United States and making some horror, but that was 10 years later.

But if you’re talking purely about America, I have a two-part answer to this. So number one, just straightforward. That would probably be Lois Weber and her short film Suspense from 1913 It's a short and sort of a home invasion stalker [story]. A lot of the imagery, if you watch it, it will be very familiar to people who are very big fans of slasher films from the 1970s and 1980s. You'll see a lot of peeking through windows, people coming upstairs, and knives disappearing from kitchen blocks. Things like that.

So at the time, it was marketed as a suspense film, a thriller film. The word horror was not used. So that's why I think that film in particular is not considered a horror movie among horror fans, because they've never been told that it is.

Number two, in terms of modern horror movies like what we would consider a feature-length modern horror movie, you could make a very strong argument that that was Stephanie Rothman, who was the first woman hired by Roger Corman to direct anything for him. She shot some parts of a film that was released under several different titles, and then after that, she made a film called The Velvet Vampire, which was released in 1971. But she'd been making films for him for a few years since I think 1965 when she started working for him. But I think The Velvet Vampire is the first purely modern horror film that any audience member today would recognize as a horror film directed by a woman in America.

I write a lot about Roger in the book, because he did hire many, many women directors to make horror movies from the 1960s to recently. He was hiring new women directors to make movies.

It often seems like the independent innovative studios are the ones that do that the most. Blumhouse does that a lot. They hire women directors. The Asylum has had women directors. I also write about how Charles Band has hired women directors in the 1980s and 1990s when other people really weren't doing it.

We are seeing more women directing horror documentaries. What do you think has inspired women to go the documentary route?

Yes, women, I think, in general, are seen by the film industry as dramas and documentaries is where women belong, and maybe romantic comedies. But a lot of the women that I know make horror documentaries. I think there's two kinds.

There's one, you’re a fan and they have something to say. Sometimes, I think it manifests itself as a book. Sometimes they write lots of articles for a website or for a magazine, but they're a journalist essentially. It's another form of journalism to document the specific genre of film, whether it's found footage or like my friend Kier-La Janisse, made this beautiful documentary on folk horror called Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched. Her history up until then has always been as a journalist and an author. She doesn't write fiction. She purely documents horror in that way. That was a natural extension for her.

There's another type too, which is people that make special features for releases. There are women who are like, “I can get into special features. That's a working job and I'm a horror fan”. So they focus on making a short, or even sometimes feature-length extra features for special releases. That's another place I see a lot of women working in horror documentaries.

Would you ever consider making this book a documentary?

Yes, in fact, I've been trying to make it into a documentary for the past two years. I have all the materials for it. I've got a director and producer. We're ready to go.

What surprised you most about your research?

The majority of the individual women that I contacted about their films were super enthusiastic about talking about their work and interested and helpful. Most of them only made a couple of films, so they get to talk about their films, and that's exciting.

So, as a giant horror fan, I kind of naively assumed that everybody would feel that way. But in fact, there are people who don't like the films that they've made. Don't like the way they were released, or the final cut of them, or how the filming actually went down, and they don't have positive memories. I would hunt down a lot of people, and when I would finally find them, I would be very shocked that every once in a while, I'd get, “I have no desire about talking about that movie”, “No, I don't want to talk about that movie”, and “Leave me at peace. I want to play with my grandchildren and relax. I don't want to deal with this shit”.

I was like, “Oh my gosh! There are people that don't like their horror movies”! Which was really naive, because of course there are people that made horror movies that don't see themselves as horror filmmakers. And then there were people who just flat out said, “No. I won’t talk about it. I don’t ever want to talk about that movie again”.

What else surprised me is I found filmmakers who had never talked to anybody ever about their film. They were like, “Oh my gosh, people would want to talk to me about that film”? And I'm like, “Yeah, of course they would like. Did you not know that people were interested in talking to you?” They’d say, “No, because I'm 80 and I don't use the internet, or whatever”. But people were shocked that someone actually knew what their film was and wanted to talk to them.

What are a few lesser-known female directors that you would want readers to know about?

Oh gosh. The first one is Austrian filmmaker Luise Fleck, who was making films in the late 1910s, early 1920s. In fact, she started making films when Austria was still part of the Austrian Hungarian empire. She has this huge resume of films. At least ten of them are horror movies. She has one in particular that I like called The Ancestress from 1919. It's this gothic, supernatural ghost story of this family that lives in an ancient medieval castle, and they're haunted by a ghost of their ancestor. She haunts them when someone in the family is about to die. I'm so surprised no one knows about that movie, because it's right around the same time as Vampyr and Nosferatu and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. The same general area of origin.

And I also think that people should be aware of the Argentinian director Marta Reguera. That’s the one I was speaking about earlier. The name of the TV series was Hora once (The Eleventh Hour), and it was one of those late-night horror shows where all the kids would get in their pajamas and stay up late to watch. It was mostly Edgar Allen Poe adaptations, but there were a few others. It was all based on different horror literature. She was so prolific and made all of these episodes.

I never heard of her before I started doing research for this book. I never heard her brought up anywhere except maybe she'd be mentioned. There are books about Argentinian television, so she'll get a mention, not a full article or anything. There's no newspaper articles. If you read a book about horror television in general, she's not in it. I don't know why. Well, partly why is probably because the episodes are lost and you can't watch them, and that sucks. So I'll give people that.

In 1981, there is a film called The Lady Avenger, made in Taiwan by a director named Yang Chia-yun. It's the first rape revenge movie ever directed by a woman. A lot of these countries had a later film movement than Western Europe or the United States, sometimes because of political instability and the economy. But in the early 1980s, Taiwan cinema really took off, in terms of independent cinema. They got drive-ins and VHS. There were suddenly all these ways you could watch movies that were really subversive or dark.

And Yang was one of the only women directors of this movement called Black Films. They were called that because the content was so violent and dark. It was a movement that only lasted a few years. [There was] controversy with the government trying to censor these films and them being censored in other countries.

Lady Avenger is brutal. Exactly what you think it is. It's very dark. If you are at all interested in the politics or the art behind rape revenge, I think it's an essential view for that. And for some reason we don't know that it started in 1981 with this film, probably because it's from Taiwan. But you can find the film. It's been released in an English dub in the United States under Lady Avenger. But it has a Taiwanese title Feng huang nu sha xing. I really urge everybody to look up that version, because that version has the original actors’ dialog, which I always think is way better than a dub. You lose something with a dub. The performance is compromised.

The communist Dracula is called Hrabé Dracula. Which Hrabé just means count in Czech. This was back when Czechoslovakia was communist. A lot of people don't know this, I am actually from East Germany. I'm American, but my family and I have a lot of familiarity with Eastern Europe under communism as a result. And communist countries had television. They had a lot of different kinds of television, but it was all communist. They could only show other communist shows. You could show Russian stuff, or you could show Polish stuff, but you couldn't show anything from the West or from the USA.

But one thing they liked to do on a lower budget, was remake things that were popular in the West. And so there's this tela-1971 version of Dracula. It’s Czechoslovakian. They shot it on location in a real castle, because you have those there. And they didn't have any set design or anything, because it was already there in the castle. So everything's really bare bones. It's kind of like just shooting the castle. The costumes are really bare bones.

The only time you see really elaborate costumes is during a scene with Dracula's brides. They have them decked out in super gaudy 1700s [outfits]. It's very much a condemnation of capitalist excess wealth. You can see all these little different things in it that make it a distinctly communist version of this story, even though it's very much a vampire horror film.

It's really fun to watch, and it's actually pretty good. Dracula is a gruff, tough guy wearing a bear skin. It's really different than all the other versions of Dracula. So if anybody is a Dracula buff, I think you should look that one up. I think you can even find a bootleg on YouTube.

Who would you say are your top three favorite horror films right now that are directed by women?

Favorite to me implies you can watch it over and over again and enjoy it every time. So that's what I'm going with.

I love American Psycho by Mary Harron. I think it is absolutely hilarious. I love satire. I love dark comedy. I love anything that really sticks it in the ribs of society and makes you think about everything. Honestly, I think it's her best film.

I like The Velvet Vampire by Stephanie Rothman. I think it's one of the most beautiful-looking films. It's a version of the Dracula story with a woman as the lead vampire. Beautiful colors, set in the desert, so there's a lot of bright sunlight. It's just so very sexy and sexual. And the lead actress Celeste Yarnall was great. It's just the epitome of sexy 1960s exploitation horror. It's really fun and beautiful.

Another that I really love is a film called Vera, una cuento cruel. It's a Spanish film from the early 1970s by a director named Josefina Molina. She was directing a whole bunch of different stuff in Spain. She directed episodes of this horror television series and actually made a feature-length version of one of her episodes because it was so popular.

It's a Poe-esque ghost story. It's set in a gothic castle. A man whose wife died, her name was Vera, he misses her. He's going through this horrific depression and there's a deep, dark secret in the basement. There's a butler, and people may or may not be going crazy and you don’t know until the end. It's really fun and also really beautiful to watch. So if anyone's a fan of cinema from Spain, it should be on any list of Spanish horror cinema, because it's really underappreciated.

What would you hope readers take away from the book?

I hope readers come away from the book with a general understanding of the role that women played as directors when it comes to horror movies. I hope that it fills in the gaps in some places for them. I know that one of the things that prompted me to write the book was always hearing from people who are in a position to hire women directors, “I would, but I don't know any”, or “There just aren't that many women horror directors”.

That's exactly how I felt when I started writing the book. Is this all there is? And then I found out, through research, talking to people, and meeting people who made films, that it wasn't. I hope it really fills in those same blanks for them that it did for me and maybe opens them up to some new films that they've never seen. That they want to seek out and watch them.

---

I Spit on Your Celluloid is now available in bookstores and on Amazon.

For further information on Honeycutt: https://heidihoneycutt.com/

Honeycutt’s Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/honeycuttheidi/