Exploring Women Directed Horror Films this October
Making my way through a list of female led horror films that have been collecting dust in my watchlist.
I’ve been writing about women in film since I first downloaded Letterboxd. I started studying film academically from the age of sixteen, at which my first film teacher gifted me ‘The Female Gaze: Essential Movies Made by Women’ by Alicia Malone (thank you Deirdre). Last year I wrote my dissertation on the depiction of girlhood in British mainstream media and female directed independent cinema. In fact, ever since I started my film studies learning, which has been forever growing and hopefully everlasting, my focus has always come back to women and girls.
Recently, I looked to my slightly dusty Female Gaze Bible that started me out, a book that has seen my eyes meet its pages so many times, made purposefully to educate people on the exceptional films directed by women, throughout history. I noticed something, out of the fifty-two extraordinary films Malone cites as her favourite films directed by women, which are also undeniably some of the most famous and revolutionary films directed by women, only three of them are from the horror genre. This book is stick and poked by a Lisbon girl into my core, and yet, I knew nothing about female directors’ influence in a whole genre.
I like horror, I’ve grown to love it, but I’ve realised something, over the last two years, the majority of films I have seen in the cinema are horror, yet they are all directed by men. Backrooms (Kane Parsons, 2026), Obsession (Curry Baker, 2025), Weapons (Zach Cregger, 2025), Bring Her Back (Michael Philippou, Danny Philippou, 2025), The Monkey (Osgood Perkins, 2025), the list continues. So, this October, I have decided to watch as many horror films directed by women as I can. Before this project I had seen a couple, but there are some that have been sitting patiently in my watchlist.
I thought it would be fun to document the process, reviewing the films and writing about them, some of which if I had not done the research, I would not yet have heard of. I’d love to hear your thoughts on the films as I go through the process, what you liked or didn’t like, had you heard of them before?
Also available on https://substack.com/@tallulahdenyer
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