Review of Heidi Honeycutt’s book I Spit On Your Celluloid: The History of Women Directing Horror Movies (2024) first published by Sight and Sound, Mar 2025
Journalist, programmer and producer Heidi Honeycutt’s I Spit On Your Celluloid: The History of Women Directing Horror Movies begins with a foreword written by Mary Lambert, whose Stephen King adaptation Pet Sematary (1989) was the first large studio-produced horror film ever to be directed by a woman – but a publisher’s oversight has omitted Lambert’s name and left the foreword unattributed. It is a peculiarly symbolic accident: for the whole history of horror cinema has been marked by the erasure of female directors.
Women’s silents are mostly lost and known to us only by their titles, while early and prolific practitioner Alice Guy-Blaché, cinema’s first female director, has been broadly overlooked or reduced by film historians, and “died unknown in New Jersey without so much as an obituary” (14). Later filmmakers have had to use male pseudonyms to be taken seriously or get admitted to festivals (378), or have seen their work vilified or attributed entirely to their (male) co-directors or to others – and recent publicity for Candyman (2021) foregrounded producer Jordan Peele while effacing director Nia DaCosta. Initially dismissed by most critics but a decade later gaining recognition and a fandom, Karyn Kusama’s Jennifer’s Body (2009) has engendered a special term – getting “Jennifer’s Bodied” (287f.) – for the way in which the subversiveness of women-directed horror takes its time to be properly appreciated. Meanwhile even Lambert herself, despite Pet Sematary’s box-office success, was not rewarded with further big budgets.
Where female filmmakers have long been sidelined by both a toxic industry and its chroniclers, Honeycutt’s book, like Alexandra Heller-Nicholas’ 1000 Women in Horror 1895-2018 (2020), serves as corrective and antidote, restoring women to front-row centre – although it is no hagiography and pulls few punches, describing outsider Doris Wishman’s œuvre, for example, as “remarkably, objectively terrible” (96). Its nine chapters represent a detailed account, in chronological order (with digressions), of the women who have found accommodation, sometimes uneasily, within genre cinema, typically through opportunities offered by individuals like Roger Corman, by television (particularly well-covered here), or by home release, streaming and crowdfunding.
In her preface, Honeycutt ascribes the book’s genesis to a list of female horror directors which she first saw in 2005 and then spent the next 17 years expanding and refining – and if these synopses, profiles, interview snippets and contextualisations for many hundreds of films and filmmakers, some familiar, some entirely obscure, feel like a list, exhaustive and sometimes exhausting, that is the point. For, impressively internationalist in its outlook, this revisionist history sets the record straight (and occasionally queer), reinscribing the overlooked, the marginalised and the forgotten women in horror.
strap: Heidi Honeycutt’s book leaves dead and buried any notion that horror helming is exclusively the province of men
Anton Bitel
