INTERVIEW: Heidi Honeycutt
Author of I Spit on Your Celluloid: The History of Women Directing Horror Movies
Last week I spoke with Heidi Honeycutt about her new book I Spit On Your Celluloid: The History of Women Directing Horror Movies. The book launched at this year’s Fantasia Film Festival in Montreal, where she hosted a special screening of 1973’s Hollywood 90028 (recently restored by Grindhouse Releasing) as well as a panel with other women directors. We spoke about some of the challenges she faced while writing this book, which she’s been working on for close to 20 years.
Celluloid often includes many fascinating details, not just about the films directed by women but about the lives of the women themselves. At times it reads like an oral history, bringing stories about classics like Mary Herron’s American Psycho or Mary Lamberts’s Pet Sematary into full bloom. In contrast, she outlines the multitude of films that have been lost to time and/or neglect, and that void of information makes the few facts available feel precious.
Honeycutt is an accomplished journalist and festival programmer. She was incredibly humble and generous with her time, and I’m very excited to put out this interview! The following conversation was edited for clarity.
BC — Now that you’ve finished the book, what are some of the feelings you’re experiencing?
H — I am very happy that I finished it! That might sound really naive to people who make films on a regular basis or who have authored multiple books, because this is my first book, but it feels like a very big achievement for me, and I’m very proud of that. I’m also embarrassed that that is such a big achievement for me when I know so many people who do so much more, so it’s a mixed feeling.
I know there’s gonna be some good and there’s gonna be some bad [reactions]. I want everybody to know that I’m always open. There’s plenty in the book that’s not complete! There’s no way to include every single filmmaker. I mean there’s over 3000 women who’ve made feature length horror films. I tried to mention as many as I could, but some of them don’t get in-depth coverage. I know that’s probably going to annoy some people.
BC — I really appreciate how you opened the book by talking about Alice Guy-Blaché’s illustrious career and her long life, because in my own film history books, there are so few details about her life. It’s like she just vanishes after her husband leaves.
H — I noticed that too. One thing I consistently noticed was that for a lot of these women who did have genre films, the genre films are never mentioned, or [they are but] just really in passing. The other thing is that [women] are often glossed over, like ‘we’ll just make sure to mention that she directed movies’.
Alice is one of those directors where there’s a documentary on her, her personal papers have been published and there are biographies of her that have been written in the past 20–30 years that are pretty up to date. So she’s one of the easier ones, cuz you can access all that information. I never saw anybody writing about her horror movies, or they would just mention it. And as a horror fan, THAT’S the movie I wanna know about. I’ve always been disappointed that these early pioneer women [in flim] were not discussed as horror fans, because they should be.
BC — Was it surprising to you how intrinsically linked genre film is to the history to film itself?
H — Yeah absolutely! It’s literally like anything else in film, any other genre is equally affected by the state of the film industry at any given time. Anything that affects studio films, everything that affects independent films by default affects horror films and women filmmakers.
Any time a woman is allowed to do something artistically that she wasnt allowed to do before, there’s a really high chance that men are also experiencing a new freedom to talk about things they were not allowed to talk about before. So sexual revolution and freedom also opens up men to a lot of artistic choices that probably were not acceptable before. I’m focusing on women making horror movies but it really is the story of film for all.
In early film books, I was shocked at how few women were mentioned, especially in those beginning chapters. Then women were mentioned in later chapters, mostly in the context of their Oscar winning films, but there were so many men mentioned who weren’t necessarily that prolific or interesting. There’s an argument that George Mélis was the first narrative filmmaker, that before [him, film] was just little scenes. But I find that that’s clearly not true because Alice Guy-Blaché was making narrative films, even if they were really short, as early as 1896–97. So I’m not sure why she’s left out of those conversations. George Mélis is a brilliant filmmaker and I love his films, but to call him the first narrative filmmaker as a result is really strange to me. It’s disappointing, I dont know why that is.
BC — That’s definitely something that is repeated across time and art forms, how the pop culture zeitgeist sort of forgets the contribution of women. It’s like a reflexive habit in how we look back on our stories
H — I think it’s a direct result of things that are uncomfortable to talk about. Like the fact that throughout the majority of human history, women have not had any political power or rights — that feels so weird to say cuz we live in a time where we do. It seems like such a no-brainer, but even 100 years ago when women got the right to vote in the US (and around the same time in many other countries), there were still so many things women were not allowed to do that were just considered normal.
Like, for instance, [in the US] women couldn’t have their own credit card in just their name, they had to have a man’s name on it too. Women couldn’t have their own bank account, into the 1970s, they couldn’t have their own mortgage on their own house without a man. All these things are so limiting, but people would walk around everyday feeling like this was completely normal. So when people would write a book about narrative film, it didn’t feel weird to them that they were leaving out the women, cuz they were like ‘well women don’t really do that much’.
BC — So many films that you write about have been lost for a variety of reasons. What are some of the tools and resources that you used to identify them?
H — As you can imagine when a film is lost and there’s not a lot of information on it, and everybody’s dead cuz it was made a hundred years ago, it’s really hard to find resources. Basically everything starts with a good web search. That would usually lead me to a mention of a film in a couple different resources.
In different countries, other than the US or English speaking countries, there are people who devote their entire academic career to studying specific filmmakers from their own country. And they also have resources to investigate these filmmakers, to talk to people who maybe knew them, so people have written entire dissertations on specific filmmakers. Sometimes those theses are not published and you have to ask the professor for them — I did that a lot. Or they would have access to the local cinematheque archives where maybe a copy of the film might be partially there, but the only way to see it is to go there and watch it. So other people’s academic research was very, very helpful.
The other thing was, in terms of western films, there are a lot of old Hollywood magazines. Hollywood from about 1910 until about WWII was obsessed with magazines about the stars, about studios and the magic of Hollywood. They served as an industry news outlet, but it was also for fans. These old magazines and newspapers are a treasure trove, because suddenly a film that you know of just by the title, you know who made it, maybe you know what year it came out — you comb through all the magazines from that year, you’ll suddenly strike gold. Like OMG here’s an ad for the movie! That’s the poster for the film! Now suddenly you have the poster for the film, or you’ll find the log line description of the story. So it suddenly becomes slightly less of a mystery, and you may not ever be able to watch the film, it may be lost, there may be no other photos available, but at least you’ve got that. I found a lot of information like that.
The third thing I used was foreign cinemateques themselves, like the British Film Institute. One of their main missions is to preserve films from their own countries that are largely ignored by other western forces. It’s a reallly beautiful, wonderful thing. They have these libraries — even if it’s just the log line, even if it’s just the image that they got from an old magazine, that will be there and you can see it. Or sometimes they will have copies of the film, and you have to make a special appointment to go see it.
And one more thing! There were a couple people that I did resort to private detectives in order to find them, people that I assumed were still alive because there was no obituary. That actually led to a couple people for me.
BC — I feel like you became a private detective yourself!
H — I did for some, and then others are really accessible. There are people like Stephanie Rothman, she lives in Los Angeles. I got to know her really really well. Unfortunately Roger Corman just passed, but prior to his passing he and Julie Corman were really helpful. They made so many movies that were directed by women, they were super helpful in giving me information and correcting false information too, which was really important. Like Mary Harron, Mary Lambert, these people were super accessible, Joe Dante too, who worked for Roger Corman and alongside several women directors. So some things were much easier to research. Amy Holden Jones, director of The Slumber Party Massacre, she’s around. Same with Deborah Brock, the director of TSPM II.
And then there are weird things like I’d be talking to a friend of mine, saying ‘these are some of the movies I’m looking for’ and she’s like ‘oh I know her, here’s her email.’ And suddenly this filmmaker who made a student film at UCLA in 1980 who I never would have been able to find, suddenly now I have their information. So really serendipitous luck like that really helped too.
BC — You include so much oral history, especially about some of these later movies. Why was it important to include the directors’s own conversations and words?
H — Writing this book was sort of like writing a thousand articles and putting them together in a way that made sense. I approached it from a very journalistic point of view. I didn’t want to write an academic book — not that there isn’t value to that, cuz there is. I feel like everything that’s been written about women directors is like — one article about one person, or about one film, and it might have some real life information. But in general [it’s written by] people who’ve never spoken to the filmmaker. And they don’t really know the history of why it was made or how it was made, but they want to talk about what the uterus symbolizes in the movie. Like I said, there’s value in that, but not to the average film fan.
People watch horror films cuz they like horror films. They’re fun or interesting or they make them uncomfortable. I know that when I am excited about a new release, or something that’s been restored, the thing that excites me the most is the special features. I know I’m gonna get a commentary, maybe even from the director. I’m gonna get a story about the weird thing that happened on set, or I’m gonna get some really cool behind the scenes footage that was shot at the time. And those are the things that really excite me, so those are the things I wanted to write about.
I’m not so interested in whether a film is good or bad, I’m not so interested in what it symbolizes. But I’m really interested in who made it, why they made it, what they think of it, what happened for them to be able to make or not make it. I just think it’s way more interesting. I hope I’m not wrong, but I think that most horror fans find that kind of film information more interesting too.
BC — What is it that makes Christina Hornisher’s Hollywood 90028 [the newly restored 1973 film that you introduced at Fantasia Fest this year] such a gem for you? I felt really lucky that I got to see it.
H — Before I was even able to see it, this film was of interest to me because of that time period. The film was shot in 1969–70 and then it came out a few years later. Then, women making horror movies in the US was limited to people hired by Roger Corman or people directing made-for-TV horror movies. You could maybe count on one hand the other horror movies that were made by women in the US at the time, and this was one of them. It was just an independent film that happened to have a woman director. It wasn’t a student film, she didnt make it to graduate, they made it to make it. And so that made it very interesting to me.
There’s so little information about [Christina Hornisher]. The best way to find out about her was through UCLA where she had gone as a student, cuz UCLA does a fantastic job of preserving their students’ films when they’re students. But they didn’t have 90028, and it only screened in Los Angeles once. [The restoration is] all Grindhouse, I mean it’s crazy some of the stuff that they’ve found. They happened to find this film, and there was no known print of it before they found it.
[Before the restoration] I did get a bootleg. It was a shitty copy, it was a transfer of a transfer of a transfer. Still I could tell that there was this artistic, surreal nature. This wasn’t just a regular slasher film. It’s like an arty farty exploration of Los Angeles, the porn industry, the landscape, the music. And even with a bad print I could tell that it was a special movie, and it wasn’t a bad film, it was a good film.
Hollywood 90028 is also representative of a really cool phenomenon that was happening at the time where women were actually graduating from film schools with film degrees. That did not happen before that generation. They were getting jobs and making independent movies — right when the drive-in scene was really big, right when independent studios were finally taking off after years and years of being dominated by the studios. It’s like a perfect storm of this interesting stuff that allowed this movie to be made.
I like the movie because it’s a vision of Los Angeles [where I’m from] that doesn’t exist anymore. I think Hornisher was witnessing the Victorian mansions being torn down on Bunker Hill and she brought the destruction of classic Los Angeles to the story, like [the characters] have this vision of old Hollywood that didnt even exist in the 70s. To me that’s super interesting. And I love anytime that anybody films in Century City. Anytime anybody uses that neighborhood in a movie, I love it and I get really happy.
BC — I also wanted to ask you about the so-called ‘controversy’ around whether Hornisher’s husband was the actual director.
H — So it’s not really a controversy as it didnt really leave the [research] room. [On Grindhouse’s restored Blu-ray] my commentary partner Marc Heuck is just a super researcher. He had gone to UCLA and watched all her student films and found out as much about her as he could. Then throughout the research that we were all doing that’s where that photo came from, of Hornisher’s husband (the cinematographer) listed as ‘director’ on the clapperboard.
Something about the idea of this photo really bothered people cuz it made them feel that they were being duped into thinking that this film was directed by a woman, that maybe Bob Murawski [the co-founder of Grindhouse Releasing] had invented it as a way to sell the movie. I dont think Bob did that at all — this movie has always been known as being directed by Christina Hornisher. Back then, things were a little more wishy washy on set. It’s an independent movie, you have very few people on set. Some days [her husband] may have picked up the camera and directed something while she was directing another scene somewhere else, that’s entirely possible. It’s entirely possible that he should be credited as co-director.
Also entirely possible is the story that I heard from one of the actors, that they were getting shit from the truck rental company because she was a woman director. So she was like ‘I dont want to deal with this shit, let’s just say that you’re the director’ and then they would have less of a problem dealing with people who were sexist. I think that’s entirely 100% possible as well. It’s one of those mysteries where that possibility is way more likely than ‘they just made it up’. It didn’t get her career anywhere, she never made another movie, they didn’t make a ton of money off this movie. Especially someone who took the time to go through filmschool, who made a bunch of other short films that have visuals with a very similar tone — it makes no sense to me that [Hollywood 90028] would not be directed by her.
But the fact that someone would jump to that conclusion because ‘women wouldn’t make that kind of shit’, shows me that there’s still this weird backlash against the idea of women making sleeze. And it’s certainly not everybody, it’s just very strange, I dont really understand it.
BC — I think your best proof is history. Your entire first chapter is about women disguising their names, going under pseudonyms in order to have access to the logistical side of filmmaking. It’s not unique to films either, this happens with classical music, with literature. The logical conclusion that you present makes the most sense. But “dupe” is a really interesting word.
H — The implication is that somehow the movie being directed by a woman is a marketing scheme. I can see where some men may feel that way, a kind of backlash against being woke or whatever. I think it’s part of that, it’s like ‘Why does it have to be directed by a woman, why can’t you guys just say that the guy directed it, it’s the same movie.’ Well cuz she did direct it.
BC — One last question! You worked on this book for I think 17 years?
H — Yeah, it gets a little blurry once enough time goes by. Confidently, 2005 is when my interest in this topic became very strong, and I think definitely by 2010 I was actively writing the book.
BC — I imagine that you’ve seen plenty of changes over those years. What are some of those changes, and what are some things that haven’t changed at all?
H — I constantly see things that contradict each other. It’s very confusing. So I know for a fact that the number of women making horror movies, including shorts, including features that go to theaters, features in festivals, has exponentially increased. Dramatically. I know that women are winning awards at major film festivals for their genre and horror films, which didn’t really happen so much in the past. I know that women are getting more funding [than before] for their movies. I know that when I talk to some women directors that I knew ten years ago that had just made one little short film in some film festivals — they are now directing for television, are now directing mainstream studio horror films.
At the same time, I know that these women all have stories about sexism that they’ve experienced. They also all have stories about how hard it is to get funding for their movies and that they see their male counterparts getting movies made all the time and they feel left out of that process. I know they also feel that, especially in television directing, that there’s like a roster of women that will be called on for everything, and who’s in the roster keeps changing but it’s like a fixed amount of people that doesnt seem to increase. So I know from speaking to women that both sides of this are true.
It’s very confusing to me, I’m not sure what to make of that. I do know that filmmaking is more accessible than ever. There are so many different stories, because there are so many different people, so many different women working in the horror world, and each of them is gonna have their own individual experience. Some of them are gonna have a very negative experience and some of them are gonna have a very positive experience.
I think that men also experience the same thing. Women specifically are going to sometimes experience sexism from some people that the men in this industry will not. But I think the film industry is difficult for everybody. It’s just a soul sucking, never ending clamour to gain access to money that none of us have because it’s all held by a very few rich people and a very few monumentally wealthy companies like Disney or Paramount. Without independent smaller studios, say like Roger Corman’s, or the Asylum, less stuff gets made. And the less stuff gets made, the fewer jobs there are and the less likely your project will be made.
It’s frustrating to everybody. The only time that changes is when new technology comes out or technology is changed so that there’s more distribution. The minute there’s another avenue or a new way of making a profit off a movie, more people with some money will jump in and start producing movies and giving more people jobs. It’s kinda like a pattern that I’ve seen over and over since the beginning of film.
Things have changed and things will continue to change, sometimes for the worse and sometimes for the better depending on your point of view and where you are in the industry. Right now things are great if you’re Disney. You’re in charge of everything! But if you’re an independent filmmaker who really wants to make a living directing genre films, this is a terrible time. You can be amazing, you can have brilliant ideas, but if someone decides not to pull you in, you’ll never ever be able to make your films. And that is the most frustrating aspect for everybody, and it affects men just as much as it affects women.
BC — To me, I Spit On Your Celluloid is a reference book that I can use to find more sources about filmmakers. I’m really grateful to you for that and I hope it also contributes to shifting peoples perspectives a little bit!
H — Thank you for saying that, I’m really glad you enjoyed it. And I know there’s going to be people out there that don’t enjoy it and that’s totally ok. I’m just glad that the people that it was written for will get something out of it and enjoy it!
Heidi Honeycutt’s book is available to buy right now right!
—BC —
August 2024
