The story has a few variations, but goes much like this: Prince Albert Victor was Queen Victoria’s grandson, and second in line to the throne. He secretly married a Catholic shop-girl named Anne Crook, and they had a daughter, Alice. This was not the sort of thing a Royal should be doing, and when Victoria found out, the Prince was whisked away, and Anne locked up.

Unfortunately Anne’s fellow shop-girl, Mary Jane Kelly, knew the whole story. Down on her luck in Spitalfields, Kelly turned to prostitution. She and three others tried to blackmail the Prince’s friend, the artist Walter Sickert. He told the Royals, and the Royals took steps to silence the blackmailers.

This is where the Masons came in. The elderly Sir William Gull, Physician to the Queen and high-ranking Freemason, was entrusted with the task of silencing this threat to the throne. With coachman John Netley, and the collusion of fellow Masons including Sir Charles Warren, head of the Metropolitan Police, Gull tracked down and murdered the four women, and one more for good measure. These, of course, were the five canonical victims of Jack the Ripper. Perhaps unwisely, Gull chose to silence them in the most public way imaginable. He mutilated the victims in ways that had (alleged) Masonic significance, and left graffiti with (alleged) Masonic clues disguised as anti-Semitic slurs: ‘The Juwes are the men that will not be blamed for nothing.’ ‘Juwes’ apparently referred to three apprentice masons who murdered the architect of Solomon’s Temple. It’s been denied that the word ‘Juwes’ has any significance in Masonic ritual, although Masonic denials should be taken with a pinch of salt.

The source for this amazing story was one Joseph Sickert, allegedly the illegitimate son of Walter Sickert. His mother was none other than Alice Crook, the product of the secret royal marriage. Sickert told his story to (among others) a journalist named Stephen Knight, and the book that followed, Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution (1976), popularised the theory. Knight’s research is sloppy, and he apparently ignored evidence that disproved his findings (for instance, Gull and other conspirators probably weren’t Masons at all). He falls into the classic conspiracist’s trap of assuming that a lack of supporting evidence is proof of a cover-up, rather than proof of the evidence never having existed in the first place. Knight’s not-so-final solution has been comprehensively discredited.

In its heyday, though, the theory caught the public imagination. The 1970s was the era of conspiracies. Government cover-ups and complicity in crime, from Watergate to the assassination of John F. Kennedy, was taken as read. It was also a time when Britain’s Victorian pomp was being regarded with increasing suspicion. But above all, this was an exciting, fun solution to a famous unsolved murder case. The few credible Ripper suspects were obscure and rather dull. It’s not difficult to see why a conspiracy theory that has the entire Victorian establishment colluding in the murder of five lowly prostitutes is more appealing than any of the more sensible theories. We’d feel let down if he was just another East End nobody.

Two films and a TV mini-series have used the Gull theory to varying extents. Murder by Decree (Bob Clark, 1979) pits Sherlock Holmes against Jack the Ripper. The Great Detective’s investigations into the Ripper’s crimes lead him more or less to Knight’s conclusions. Oddly, Gull and Netley are renamed Spivey and Slade (other historical characters keep their real names). Spivey/Gull is shown as a near-catatonic child-man with no responsibility for his actions, with Slade/Netley as unlikely prime mover. The Masons feature heavily, with Charles Warren (a blustery Anthony Quayle) obediently covering everything up. The conspiracy loses some of its power, though, as the government is simply protecting over-enthusiastic Masonic hitmen, rather than ordering the crimes itself.

It’s an odd film, and not a terribly good one. Director Clark had previously made good low-budget horror movies in the US and Canada (Black Christmas, 1974; Deathdream, 1974), and it’s disappointing that this feels so much like a TV movie. Christopher Plummer is too bouffant and humane as Holmes (although James Mason is an excellent Watson) and the 1970s all-star cast indulges in some dreadful over-acting.

Although the Masonic angle is given a lot of screen time (with Holmes explaining the significance of the Juwes to a sceptical Watson), there’s no real sense that it drives the plot. It’s just a picturesque detail. The film’s main fault is the lack of detection – we’re never told how Holmes figures everything out, nor where his convenient knowledge of Freemasonry comes from. The film lumbers on for 20 minutes after its climax to allow Holmes to explain what happened. There’s also an odd subplot about anarchists, led by rogue cop David Hemmings, who know who the Ripper is and why he’s killing his victims. The very thing the conspiracy is designed to cover up is somehow already common knowledge among the government’s enemies, which makes it all seem a bit pointless and petty.

What Murder by Decree did successfully was add a few more tropes to Jack the Ripper cinema. Ripper films could already be relied on to include fog, gas lamps, comedy cockneys and happy hookers. After Murder by Decree, unruly mobs, police cover-ups, psychic visions and sinister black coaches were thrown into the mix.

1988 saw Jack the Ripper (David Wickes), a centenary mini-series produced by Granada. This also fingers Gull, but does away with any Royal or Masonic connection, without which his candidacy makes little sense. Its abandonment of the conspiracy angle makes it of only tangential interest (Granada was playing it very safe in the late 80s, perhaps wary of upcoming changes to ITV franchising laws). It ladles on the usual Ripper ingredients and, perhaps most importantly, it gives Ripper pop culture its hero, Inspector Fred Abberline.

A real historical figure, Abberline was well known to Ripperology (Knight makes him part of the cover-up). But in Jack the Ripper, Michael Caine played him as a boozy Victorian version of Regan from The Sweeney; this really put Abberline on the map. When Alan Moore wrote the graphic novel From Hell, he cast Abberline as his confused everyman hero. From Hell (art by Eddie Campbell, 1991-1996) is the ultimate Ripper conspiracy story. It draws in almost all the important strands of Ripper lore, concocting a huge, overarching conspiracy in which even time itself is complicit.

Perhaps wisely, the film version of From Hell (Albert and Allen Hughes, 2001) doesn’t try to cram all of Moore’s ideas into its two-hour running time. Although there are some snippets of Moore’s dialogue, and the occasional shot taken from Campbell’s art, it’s more a remake of the Granada mini-series or Murder by Decree than an adaptation of the comic. Many of its details are from those sources rather than Moore (angry mobs, black coaches, psychic visions etc). It’s more of a conventional Ripper movie than it wants to admit, in spite of the directors’ stated intention to emphasise the social injustice and hypocrisy of Victorian London. This is the most socially aware Ripper film – even before Gull starts his gory work the prostitutes are in mortal danger from a gang of local pimps.

From Hell uses the Masonic angle more than Murder by Decree, even showing a minor villain going through an induction ceremony (disappointingly, this sequence doesn’t have the same fetishised attention to detail that the film lavishes on the preparation of absinthe or opium smoking). This scene features a Masonic meeting hall under London, from where the world is ruled by evil aristocrats in funny costumes. The film could have done with more of that. As it is, the emphasis is very much on Abberline (Johnny Depp) as the classic ‘man who knows too much’, and his unconvincing romance with Mary Kelly. A scene in which Abberline learns all the Masons’ secrets from a book in a seemingly public library makes you wonder why the film uses the Masons at all. If they can’t even guard their basic rituals from public exposure, how effective a secret society are they?

That’s the problem with these Masonic Ripper movies. The fact that it’s the Masons, as opposed to any other shady organisation, is largely irrelevant. They’re prominent in Joseph Sickert’s original tall tale, and Stephen Knight was obsessed with them. Alan Moore weaves the Masons’ gloss of mysticism into From Hell reasonably well. But while filmmakers have gratefully seized on the visual trappings of Masonry for an easy way to identify the villains – a ring here, a tiepin there – there’s never any sense that it has to be the Masons as opposed to, say, the Illuminati, or even Fu Manchu. The Ripper is now inextricably tied to conspiracy theory, despite the best efforts of credible researchers; but as far as the movies go, it doesn’t seem to matter which conspiracy theory.

Richard Bancroft

This is an excerpt from the book Trashfiend: Disposable Horror Fare of the 1960s and 1970s by Scott A. Stine, published by Headpress. It’s available through to the end of April for only £7.00 from Headpress.

As a young child, before the boom of home video in the seventies, I recall being captivated by the advertisements for 8mm films offered by Captain Company in the back pages of Warren’s esteemed publications. 200” reels were offered for as “low” as $9.95 US, and 500” reels for upwards of $19.95 US. Although I had seen most of these films in their entirety on television at one time or another, the thought of being able to actually own footage from one of these films, to be watched any time at my convenience, was too good to be true. And it was, as my family didn’t even own a film projector, and $9.95 was at least three months allowance. I would have thought these films were a pipe dream, had not one of my teachers – knowing my love for monster movies – borrowed a Super 8mm copy of Hammer Studios’ The Curse of Frankenstein and shown it to me and a few friends after school as a treat. A few years later, I had also seen a few of these priceless treasure offered by a local pharmacy that specialized in camera and film equipment, but they were always just out of reach, secured behind glass and bearing price tags that were far too rich for my blood.

Many years later, I managed to acquire a handful of films at a local swap meet where I spent much of my youth – a 50’s reel of The Creature Walks Among Us among them – but traded them to another collector once the novelty of owning the otherwise “useless” films wore off. I would rue this day when, fifteen years later, I was fighting tooth and nail for the very same pieces on eBay. I had no intention of watching the films I had begun to hoard, though; video made these highly condensed versions completely obsolete as far as entertainment value was concerned.

But then, I couldn’t watch them even if I was willing to risk damaging or wearing out the fragile film stock. I owned two 8mm projectors, leftovers from my days of producing my own Super 8 shorts, but both had essentially given up the ghost a few years previous. (One needed a belt replaced and the other a new lamp, but I had discovered that it would be much cheaper to simply replace them entirely than obtain the parts needed to get them working again. The bulb I needed would alone cost around eighty bucks special order, whereas with a little bit of diligent scavenging I could probably get a working unit for about fifteen dollars from a local thrift store or swap meet.) Owning the films as an adult had a completely different meaning than it had almost thirty years prior. Nostalgia aside, they had their own distinct charm in the way of box art, produced specifically for the once widespread format but available nowhere else. The painted art that graced the packaging held just as much allure for me as the covers of vintage monster magazines from the same era, even though they were much smaller and were usually defaced by format and price stickers. And like the magazines, I had to own them all.

But I was not alone in my quest to obtain these dated treasures, nor was I as rabid as many of the collectors scouring the Internet for the same; the fact that others were willing to pay ridiculous amounts to build a collection of obsolete 8mm and Super 8 films gave me pause and made me reconsider how badly I wanted them. Talking with other collectors, though, also made me realize just how little most people actually knew about the format and the field in which they delved. Many had never dealt with paper collectibles, and most had never collected celluloid prior to this. Not an expert by any means myself when it came to films, but still more well-versed than the people with whom I had dealings, I decided to make it my job to better understand this rarely discussed field.

A Brief History of the Format

The 8mm format grew from an attempt to condense the 16mm format even further. The first incarnation of this format – the Cine Kodak Eight, introduced in 1932 – was essentially modified 16mm film with twice the number of sprocket holes on either side, enabling the filmmaker to expose only one-quarter of a frame at a time. Thanks to the dual sprockets, the filmmaker could then reload the film after one side had been exposed and use the remaining half of the stock. After the film was developed, the film stock was cut lengthwise, producing two filmstrips that could then be spliced together.

Due to its economic format, 8mm replaced 16mm as the standard for amateur filmmakers within fifteen years of its introduction. By the fifties, 8mm cameras and projectors (one was rarely sold without the other) became almost as common in households as video cameras are today. In the sixties, there was a push to improve upon the format. This resulted in Super 8mm (often referred to as Super 8), which was introduced in 1965. The improvements were numerous. It used plastic cartridges that eliminated the need for threading the unprocessed film stock or flipping it midway through. The sprocket holes were made smaller so as to allow for a wider image area, about fifty percent larger than Regular 8mm. Other modifications were made that further improved the picture quality as well as reducing the risks of poor exposure.

Since 1965, most films sold to the home consumer were available in either 8mm or Super 8 formats. In some cases, the buyer also had a choice between silent and sound, B&W and color. Of course, the desire for the more expensive sound and color versions eventually won out, making the inferior versions obsolete.

Unfortunately, the accessibility of video cameras for the home consumers in the eighties quickly replaced Regular and Super 8 film as the standard for amateur filmmakers. Although Super 8 and – to a much lesser degree – Regular 8mm film stock is still available, the dwindling demand forced prices up considerably, relegating the format to the domain of purists.

Scott A. Stine

In this fictional country there is a billionaire who lives on the fringes of society who, come nightfall, dresses as a bat. Somewhere, in a state far across that country is a pastel-coloured suburb that has a collapsing Gothic ruin towering over it. Inside, among the debris of its decaying attic, lives a young man whose fingers are scissor blades. Elsewhere the ghosts of a married couple haunt their idyllic home and a film director is unknowingly making the worst film ever. All of these lives are marked by some sense of tragedy and are lived out by individuals who, through choice as much as circumstance, live on the very edges of normal society. These people, who are aware of their difference and so conduct their lives by their own codes and morals, seek not to become part of normality but simply to interact with it. And, in most cases, they are really only one person – Tim Burton.

‘Tim Burton, like his work, is a wonderful mess. He’s falling-apart funny and completely alienated; he’s morbid and ironic; he’s the serious artist as goofball flake. A self-described “happy-go-lucky manic depressive.”‘ – David Breskin (Inner Views: Filmmakers in Conversation)

In perhaps true auteur fashion, it could be argued that if you have seen one Tim Burton film then you have effectively seen them all, so distinct and persistent is his vision. His growing body of work is populated with stripes, concentric swirls and pools of darkness that are all shot through with a manic humour; grotesque images are compounded by their Gothic trappings; there is an occasional preoccupation with falling snow and faithful dogs; there’s the distinct lack of parental figures; the repeated occurrence of resurrection collides with a total disrespect for authority; generic subversion is a mantra; the protagonist must be an outsider and the narrative fixated with how they came to be that way. The source for this ‘wonderful mess’ lies not just in a perceptive artistic vision but in one that seemingly attempts to make physical the past in order to relive it, experience it and understand it. It is a concerted attempt to embrace something that was once painful in order to accept it. This may seem like a grand elevation of the ‘visionary’ Tim Burton – an emotive reading of the pained artist to quantify the repetition – but a cursory examination of Burton’s childhood and subsequent development into adulthood demonstrates foundation experiences that have been absorbed and reworked, reiterated and relived into one of the most popular bodies of contemporary cinematic work. It may well be art but it is also entertainment, a tragedy and a comedy, a reflection of the self as much as wider society.

Timothy William Burton was born in the Los Angeles suburb of Burbank. His father, Bill, who had nearly become a professional baseball player, worked at the Burbank Parks and Recreation department while his mother, Jean, ran a shop that sold a range of items associated with cats either through purpose or motif. While seemingly having a normal life, at the age of 12 Burton left his parents and younger brother, Daniel, in order to live with his grandmother. By his own admission, Burton was an introverted, destructive child – he would try to convince the boy next door that an alien invasion had begun or would tear the heads of his toy soldiers. At 16, he had moved out once again and lived alone in a small flat above a garage his grandmother owned, earning his rent by working in a restaurant after school. Throughout his childhood, Burton found a particular attraction to both film and television – The Prisoner, Gilligan’s Island, Roger Corman’s Edgar Allan Poe adaptations, King Kong, Frankenstein, Creature from the Black Lagoon, and Godzilla all dominated his choice of viewing.

From this brief biographical sketch, the comparison between Burton and his on-screen alter egos is perhaps beginning to become apparent. This is most evident in the image of Edward Scissorhands – the tall, gangly boy with wild black hair who, without parents, lives alone above suburbia in an attic and who creates marvellous topiaries, is really no different to the tall, gangly, wild-haired Burton who lived alone and above suburbia in his grandmother’s flat. When he wasn’t at school or working Burton was drawing, creating images based upon his visual experiences and imagination. As one looks closer at Burton’s oeuvre the traces become more obvious – the attic is where the ghostly Maitlands live in Beetlejuice and, in the belfry, it is where the Joker confronts his maker, Batman; throughout most of his films the protagonist lives alone as their parents are dead (it is only recently that they have begun to appear alive – most poignantly in the reconciliation scene between Willy Wonka and his dentist father) and the narrative threat is (like King Kong and Godzilla) often monstrous and destructive.

All this may reasonably indicate a clear and sustained relationship between Burton’s life and his cinematic work, and Burton’s own reflections on his childhood both support and undermine this possibility: while Burton has indicated that he was perhaps considered strange by his peers he also notes that he did have friends and that, when alone, such a position allowed him to see the world from ‘an external point of view’: ‘That meant my perception of normality was strange. For me, reality is bizarre.’ Burton did not feel that this isolation was abnormal, stating: ‘Every time I looked around… it looked like everyone had their own private world… They were in their own special worlds.’ (Smith & Matthews, Tim Burton) For Burton, being alone, isolated and alienated was just part of growing up, an essential aspect that shapes your perspective on the world around you.

This idea of alienation shaping a persona’s interaction with the world is evident in Burton’s protagonists: the animated Vincent Malloy channels the everyday world through his imagination and transforms it into a tragic rendering of Poe’s work; Lydia Deitz would rather be dead than endure her parents Technicolor world and so sides with the ghostly Maitlands; orphaned as a child, the young Bruce Wayne evolves into an isolated figure bent on revenge that he hopes will positively transform the world he is apart from; Edward’s experience in ‘normality’ not only highlights his difference but enhances his emotions and creativity; Jack Skellington’s desire to be Sandy Claws not only leads to chaos and destruction, but also to the realisation that he is better off doing what he does best – ruling the land of which he is king. The connections and parallels sustain themselves throughout Burton’s oeuvre to the extent that, in the end, perhaps Tim Burton’s films are a unified project because they are a repeated filmic attempt at a constructed and now expected self-portrait. The narratives, the images, the look and the sounds have all become moments in which the director’s past is not only repeatedly made present but in which it is repeatedly amplified. They come together to form an unfolding fictional text that seeks not to work out why but to celebrate why not, for in that fictional country it is far better to be on the outside, to be the alien who has the choice to remain without instead of being forced within.

James Rose

As a director who recently showed a short horror film in the Birds Eye View Film Festival’s Bloody Women programme, I found the question most often asked of me was, ‘Do women prefer psychological horror?’ The most accurate answer would be that I have no idea. Personally I know women who love to be scared and so seek out the creepy atmospheric tension of films such as The Changeling (1980), The Haunting (1963) and The Orphanage (2007). I also know women who can’t stand the emotional manipulations of psychological horror and favour the more superficial nature of gore-fests like The Evil Dead (1981) or the numerous 80s slasher flicks. And then, of course, there are the women (myself included) who are simply horror fans, and who find something to appreciate in most or all of the subgenres.

But my anecdotal experiences don’t answer the question satisfactorily – far from it, in fact – and the more I was asked the question, the more I realised I couldn’t possibly answer it, though valiant attempts were made. During the fourth or fifth time I found myself rambling on about the history of horror and women’s involvement in it, I came to an epiphany, possibly born of sheer self-defence, but important nonetheless: it’s not the answer to the question that deserves further scrutiny, but rather the question itself.

Namely, why is it assumed that women would prefer psychological horror?

I do believe that this question stems from certain assumptions about women’s relation to the horror genre, though I doubt intentionally or even consciously. Historically, women have not been the target audience for horror films – that distinction has been held exclusively by men. Women are largely not even expected to enjoy horror. One need only to look to John Landis’s fantastic and ground-breaking music video for Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’ (1983) to find a summary of the popular stereotype regarding women and horror films: men take their girlfriends to horror films not because women might enjoy horror, but specifically because they don’t. Eventually, bowing under the weight of terror and revulsion caused by the monster on screen, the girlfriend will be forced to cuddle up to her boyfriend for support while shielding her innocent eyes. The boyfriend, of course, is not bothered at all by the shock horror (he is, in fact, entertained by it) and slips easily into the hero’s role, protecting his woman and possibly getting to cop a feel.

These days, the horror genre in film has a tendency to be regarded as synonymous with monsters and graphic gore, which in itself is an unjust stereotype. Psychological horror, on the other hand, by virtue of its subtlety, has an ability to hide in plain sight in the guise of a thriller, or even a drama, label. Is it possible that we assume female horror filmmakers would prefer to make psychological horror films because it’s not really horror, at least not in the current layman’s definition, which seems to require graphic sex and gore and blood and innards? Well, yes, but do the facts really bear out the assumption that women prefer psychological horror?

Women have been involved in horror since the conception of the genre, back when horror stories only appeared in writing and were given labels such as ‘Gothic fiction’ and ‘ghost stories’. Mary Shelley published her seminal Frankenstein in 1818, and it has become one of the most famous and iconic monster stories of modern times. Women such as Pulitzer Prize-winner Edith Wharton, children’s book author Edith Nesbit and many, many others were heavily involved in and lauded during the modern ghost story boom of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and the stories they wrote could be called mostly psychological. But so were the stories that men wrote. It was simply a sign of the times. Censorship and propriety meant that graphic detail was impossible, so most horror stories of that time could be lumped under the ‘psychological’ banner.

Moving forward in time and looking specifically at film, we don’t find very many horror films written and/or directed by women – but then there aren’t very many films in general by women. However, just a sample of the available horror films with major female involvement shows us Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark (1987), which is as graphic and nasty as any male-directed horror; Mary Lambert, who directed an adaptation of Stephen King’s Pet Sematary (1989); Debra Hill, co-writer of John Carpenter’s serial-killer film Halloween (1978), among others; and more recently, the Soska sisters’ Dead Hooker in a Trunk (2009), which I haven’t yet seen, but something tells me it’s not going to feature a lot of quiet introspection.

Men are capable of making and have made a range of horror films encompassing all subgenres, from psychological horror dominated by female characters to torture porn. Though the sample for women in film is much, much smaller, we know that women are capable of the same range and have been active and instrumental in the horror genre for hundreds of years. So do women prefer psychological horror? Frankly, I can’t answer that question, nor do I want to, because I feel it’s limiting to assume that female filmmakers could or would overwhelmingly make psychological horror films when they have so much more to offer the genre as a whole.

Jennifer Eiss

Jennifer Eiss is the writer and co-director of the short horror film Short Lease (2010), which screened in the Horror Shorts, part of the Bloody Women strand at the Birds Eye View Film Festival. She is also the author of The 500 Essential Cult Movies (2010) and contributing author to Jovanka Vuckovic’s Zombies!: An Illustrated History of the Undead (2011).

1. Name: Ellen Ripley
When we first meet, her name is just one more surname in the work place. We have Kane, Ash, Dallas, Ripley, Brett, Parker and Lambert. Even the cat goes by Jones. ‘Enough of this kitty bullshit,’ says Brett, on an ill-fated hunt of the cat. ‘Jones!’ There’s no way of knowing who’s going to survive. Ripley’s just a crew member: abrasive, self-serving and by no means heroic. She’s smart in wanting to quarantine Kane, but not exactly a team player, not someone your heart goes out to. And there’s nothing spacey about the names, in the same way there’s nothing space-age about the chunky steam-powered technology.

2. Sex: Female
A tough woman in a man’s world. Aside from the construct of Mother, the only other female crew member of the Nostromo is Lambert, played by Veronica Cartwright, a stereotypical weak link, whose death comes as a mercy to the audience and whose emotional incontinence contrasts with Ripley, the tough, capable, authoritative and, most importantly, unemotional character. The threat this represents is played out by Ash (the synthetic man), who attempts to kill her by literally ramming a male view of female sexuality down her throat. Ripley’s actual sexiness is a late discovery, in her standard issue knickers. As the last woman standing, she combines Little Red Riding Hood with something witchy, especially in her otherwise inexplicable devotion to Jones, the cat.

3. Family: one Special Edition daughter, one surrogate daughter, one weird alien daughter
Ridley Scott’s 1979 film, as well as being a science fiction/ horror hybrid, is also crucially a work place drama. Characters are defined by the job they do. Parker and Brett repair the engines, Ash works in his laboratory. We go through procedures: landing, taking off. Perhaps the most exciting sequence involves the self-destruct procedure in its full fiddly-ness. James Cameron’s sequel, Aliens (1986), as well as becoming a more straightforward action/war film, also segues into a family romance. On the Special Edition DVD, this is rendered more explicit with the inclusion of a scene explaining that Ripley had a daughter, who died while Ripley was in hyper-sleep. In the photograph, she is played by Weaver’s mother, Elizabeth Inglis. According to Cameron, Weaver was appalled that this scene was cut, saying that she’d based her whole performance on it. But this is precisely the kind of back story that is good for the actor, but not necessary for the audience. We understand the minute we see Rebecca (aka Newt, a nickname hinting at the ineffable weirdness of children) that there is a surrogate family in the offing, with Hicks as ineffectual father and Bishop as Synthetic Uncle (I prefer Avuncular Artificial). The feminist survivor of the 1970s becomes the working mum of the 1980s, juggling child care and grenade launchers and ultimately going mano a mano with the mother of all Aliens. Of course, motherhood is compromised as the original terror of the chest-bursters is a fear of malignant pregnancy and Newt has to be rescued from the alien maternity ward. With the shift to war movie/family romance, Cameron’s Aliens become less alien. They become resourceful soldiers and one angry mother. The femme-on-femme violence anticipates Weaver’s Women Beware Women role as the manipulative ‘bony-assed’ career woman Katherine Parker in Mike Nichols’s Working Girl (1988). Feminist struggle becomes a catfight. ‘Mommy,’ Newt cries at the end as she embraces Ripley, completing her in a way that seems incomprehensible without the Special Edition daughter subplot.

4. Marital Status: Single
In the Nostromo, sexual tensions brew but are not acted on. There are no overt romances and the various wet deaths are the only consummations, devoutly not to be wished. Cameron, in his attempt to normalise Ripley, gives her a potential partner (and Newt a potential father) in Hicks, a white- bread, charisma-free zone. And just as Lambert’s flapping panic assured us of Ripley’s heroism, so Vasquez’s butch marine (‘ever been mistaken for a man, Vasquez?’ — ‘nope, have you?’) assures us that Ripley’s het. David Fincher happily rips into Cameron’s facile sitcom values by despatching both Newt and Hicks in the credit sequence of Alien 3. Whatever flaws his film might have (Skippy the CGI kangaroo Alien chief among them), we should be thankful for Fincher’s attempt to radically cancel the homogenising impulses of his predecessor, as well as giving Ripley a post-Aids haircut. In contrast to the Pretty Woman dream of meeting the right man, Ripley is happy to get her rocks off with a similarly damaged partner who certainly offers her nothing in terms of a marital future. ‘I’ve been out here a long time,’ Ripley says in explaining her direct need for sex. Played by Charles Dance, Clemens is a doctor, an ex-drug addict, a prisoner and the most interesting character in the film. His early death at the hands of an apparently jealous Alien robs the film of much of its emotional content and leaves us with a cast of anonymous, unpleasant and brutish characters for the Alien to lunch on. Ripley will survive that attack because she is carrying an Alien. Ripley evolves from the innocent pursued by the wolfish Alien of the first film through the competing matriarchs of the second, and the third film cements her relationship to the Alien via an offstage rape. Perhaps this is what the Alien always wanted. Think back to the first film and how odd it is that once ensconced in the escape pod, the previously implacably hostile, aggressive and effective Alien seems to relax, settling in for the ride, now that all possible competitors for Ripley’s affections are dead. It would be tempting to see Ripley’s suicide/infanticide, which concludes Fincher’s film, as a meta-commentary on the state of the franchise, which she affectionately and thankfully finishes off, but for the horrors of the Jeunet sequel to come.

5. Work Experience: Warrant Officer
The original Alien brought a rare highlighting of class to a major Hollywood film. Brett and Parker are, respectively, the indifferent and angry horny-handed heroes of toil, and the rest of the crew represent a higher echelon, a middle management, while still being subordinate to the Company for which their lives are (literally) expendable. Yaphet Koto walks straight off Paul Schrader’s Blue Collar (1978), arguing about bonuses, belligerently and amusingly obstructive. Ash and Ripley bicker about priorities, everyone is touchy and no one (aside from Kane) has any enthusiasm for adventure unless it is written into their contracts. Ripley goes from being a member of the workforce to a ‘fish out of water’ hero in the following two sequels. In Aliens, she earns her spurs as a grunt, comfortable with ballsy machinery and improvised weaponry. In Fincher’s film, the Company is a cartoonishly malignant presence, and in the final film Ripley is no longer worker but product. The Company, as a character, goes from faceless menace to slimy presence (Carter Burke, the lawyer in Aliens). However, the increased villainy of the Company comes at the cost of any real critique. The credible deception and betrayal of the Company in the first film becomes a pantomimic caricature and Ripley, instead of a paid-up member of society, becomes increasingly ostracised throughout the franchise, from warrant officer to soldier to inmate, until in the end she’s more Alien than human. Likewise, Sigourney Weaver transmutes from an ensemble player in the first film, a more conventional lead but still within an ensemble context in the second film, to a co-producer and undisputed star of the final two films of the franchise. In the latter two films, she is more complicit (as the bearer of secret knowledge) with the Alien (Jeunet) and the Company (Brandywine Productions).

6. Age: 300 and something
There was always going to be some falling off in a franchise whose main initial attraction was surprise and shock. The last productions seem particularly fraught with a ‘why are we doing this’ mentality and the very naming of the final entry (Alien: Resurrection) smacks of ironic apology. One of the main problems was Ripley herself and the contrivances the films had to use to put her in harm’s way. Weaver admitted to the danger of turning Ripley into a ridiculous cartoon who keeps waking up to find aliens chasing her, but was apparently convinced by the quality of the scripts and the artistic merit of receiving ever larger cheques in her bank account. The clone that she plays in the final entry gleefully enjoys her polymorphous role as a Ripley/Alien hybrid, but the ghosts of greater films haunts Jeunet’s Gilliamesque comic book romp. A moment of genuine tragedy, the discovery by Ripley of sister clones in tortured partial forms reminiscent of Nazi medical atrocities, is undermined by Ron Perlman’s throwaway line ‘must be a chick thing’ and the rest of the film feels like a tortured cloning of the first movie’s original motifs: instead of the original film’s chest-burster we now get a chest-burster that becomes a head-burster, instead of the computer, Mother, we now get Father.

7. Hobbies and Interests: Likes Animals and World Peace
In Alien, Ripley wants to save herself and the cat. By Alien Resurrection, she’s saving the world. ‘You sound disappointed,’ Winona Ryder’s Call notices as they look at… erm… clouds. To be fair to Weaver, with her environmental charities and her inspiring performance as Dian Fossey in Gorillas in the Mist (1988), she has used the clout and dollars earned via Ripley to do good, but doing good was never what Ripley was about. She was about surviving. And survive she did, but perhaps for a little too long.

John Bleasdale

Pretty women meet un-pretty fates. It’s a uniting feature of many horror movies. The ice-cool glamour of Janet Leigh’s Marion Crane meets an ice-cold end on the bathroom floor. Shelley Duval’s Wendy narrowly escapes from Jack Nicholson’s axe and impending ‘REDRUM’. Marilyn Burns’s Sally finds herself on a never-ending flight from a Texan chainsaw. Acts of evil become heightened by an actress’s beauty; the more sublime their looks, the more sadistic the punishment. Whereas a male protagonist provides a glimmer of hope (he might physically overpower the threat or use his intellect to detect or deter the danger), the woman is often left scrambling: running through corridors; trying to slam shut or rattle open doors. She’s a passive victim caught up in the audience’s voyeuristic fantasies. Or, more immediately, those of her director. Take Hitchcock and his ice-cool blonde.

So, is this clichéd view why so few women direct horror films? It is historically a man’s genre when it comes to filmmakers; a fact that Warp Films recognised when they set up their Darklight initiative back in 2006. The leader of this development programme, Caroline Cooper-Charles, saw how women were being ‘excluded as audience members as well as filmmakers’ and came up with a very specific target for the scheme: to get more women making horror films in the UK. Chatting over the phone, Cooper-Charles recalls how picking female filmmakers proved quite a tricky task. The majority of women sending in submissions had never worked in horror; there was nothing on anyone’s showreel to make her jump. Instead, Cooper-Charles focused on reels with atmospheric, creepy shorts; films that made her ‘squirm or feel uncomfortable’. The chosen directors were then assisted in developing their ideas over a course of 12 months. As Cooper-Charles said, ‘there are so few female filmmakers working in the genre that even if two films came out of the scheme, it would have been quite a massive achievement’.

A couple of years on and there are several films in pre- and post-production: a ‘quite bloody’ exploration of motherhood entitled Little Miss Piggy; an ultra-low-budget teen horror, Freefall; and a project still in early development set in the male-dominated world of banking and business. The latter has strong thriller elements, and another director on the scheme decided to move away from horror altogether to make a thriller. Throughout our conversation, Cooper-Charles often mentions the ‘psychological’ aspect of the women’s work; perhaps an explanation as to why many of the projects boiled over into thriller territory. Even the ‘bloody’ Little Miss Piggy is described as ‘sophisticated with a gore element’. Despite the aims of the initiative, there’s a little reluctance to associate women with out-and-out horror.

After our call, Cooper-Charles writes to tell me that she is producing a film written by Lucy Moore, one of the writers who was part of Darklight, and puts me in touch with the film’s director, China Moo-Young. The following week, Moo-Young and I meet up for a coffee to discuss her film, ‘a monster movie set in Bristol’. When I ask her why she thinks there are so few women working in horror, Moo-Young suggests that it is partly a question of role models – ‘you’ve probably got two examples of women genre directors, Catherine Hardwicke and Kathryn Bigelow… you’ve got your Jane Campions but in terms of genre, they’re your big two’ – and partly a matter of timing. Most filmmakers are making their most important films in their thirties and forties, a time when women may be engaged with childrearing and so unable to undertake the heavy commitments needed to make a feature.

But these two points are asides in a conversation that aims to avoid too much talk of gender, no matter how hard I try to steer the discussion: ‘I kind of think it’s a moot point,’ Moo-Young says, ‘ I’d like to get to a point where it isn’t an issue’. She is not interested in taking part in schemes aimed exclusively at women directors and won’t be bestowed or lumbered with the female filmmaker tag: ‘Kathryn Bigelow’s strength is that you don’t know that she’s a woman… I wouldn’t be doing my job if you could tell which gender directed the film.’

Moo-Young also tells me that psychological horror is her favourite variety of the genre. She likes John Carpenter’s work because it is ‘restrained’; his films ‘use music and mood more than out-and-out violence’. Horror films she admires – The Shining, Rosemary’s Baby, Don’t Look Now, Jaws – are full of ‘well-drawn characters that don’t fall apart for the sake of the third act’. Ultimately, she loves horror because ‘it taps into human insecurities and fears; it’s about the strange and forbidden side of life’.

Cooper-Charles and Moo-Young are both extremely keen to emphasise the more thoughtful, intelligent aspects of horror; this careful explanation of their interest in the genre can be seen as a reaction against the sexist tendencies of horror and, in particular, slasher films. Although reluctant to talk about herself in terms of gender, Moo-Young concedes: ‘I wouldn’t ever want to generalise about fellow film directors – male or female – in terms of taste, but if a woman is a filmmaker working in horror, she’s probably not going to be making slasher films because she’ll have a female skew on violence towards women.’

This emphasis on psychological horror could also be a defence against genre snobbery; films that follow certain conventions or codes can easily be dismissed as less intelligent than other, less categorisable films. It is refreshing to talk to Moo-Young, not only because she steadfastly refuses to discuss being a woman in a discussion on gender, but also because she is very passionate about the horror genre and genre films in general. ‘I can’t really talk about it,’ she whispers, ‘but there’s a master document called the “brainstorm of kills”, with lots of different ways people could be killed off’. She talks about ‘mapping fear’ and ‘hitting genre beats’ and, in addition to her horror film, she is developing two thrillers and a romantic comedy. She sees horror as providing an opportunity to subvert the normal rules of life. She talks about the closing of Let the Right One In providing a hugely satisfying ending for the audience but also an uneasy one: on the one hand, we want Eli and Oskar to be together; on the other, we anticipate Oskar’s dark future as he takes the place of her previous protector. In horror, often the good have to commit ordinarily immoral acts in order to survive, which disorientates and challenges the audience’s normal moral framework in interesting ways.

The importance of subversion makes the idea of female directors influencing the horror genre both a natural and exciting progression. Women can question the portrayal of female victims on screen and also, viewing the genre from an outside perspective, they can shake up a rule and convention-led art form. Those genre films that work most successfully and stand the test of time are generally those that offer something different from the tried-and-tested formula. It sounds as if Darklight has tried to champion work that fits this description. We’ll look forward to seeing the results.

Eleanor McKeown