An in-depth review of Hollywood’s problem with women

“You could try to hold your camera like this… but your breasts would probably get in the way.”

“Women do not belong on set unless they are in hair and makeup.”

“Your main job is basically to be my work wife. You need to anticipate my needs. Especially when my wife’s on her period.”

“Women just freak out all the time. They’re crazy. Their hormones are all over the place and they can’t be calm and rational. They make the worst producers.”

These are just a few of the depressing testimonials from the new blog Shit People Say to Women Directors (& Other Women in Film). Launched in April, the site calls attention to the blatant sexism and barriers women working in the film and entertainment industry face. In less than 24 hours, it received enough material for a year’s worth of posts. The anonymous stories come from a wide range of women working in film and television, from directors and actresses to writers and crew members. And if the blog posts aren’t proof enough of the gender bias in the entertainment industry, there are no shortage of studies or women in Hollywood speaking out against the horrible way women are treated.

Sadly, women in the silent film era were better off than women today; at one point back in the day, the highest paid director was even a woman. Yet today, if you look at the top 500 films from 2007-2012, the average ratio of male actors on screen to female actors is more than two to one, according to the New York Film Academy. If you look at the ratio of men to women working on films, the numbers get even more depressing at 5:1. Of all the directors, executive producers, producers, writers, cinematographers and editors working on the top 250 domestic grossing films of 2012 only 18 percent were women, reported Celluloid Ceiling, a comprehensive study of women working in film.

Recently, actress Maggie Gyllenhaal revealed that at 37 she was told she was too old to play the love interest of a 55-year-old leading man. A review of top grossing romantic films found that the average age of a woman lead is 29, compared to 37 for leading men. In the male-dominated wish fulfillment film industry, it’s unfortunately no surprise that ageism exists and an older man seducing a woman in her 20s is the norm. Female fetuses are currently being auditioned to fill the role Gyllenhaal couldn’t.

Comedian Amy Schumer recently mocked this practice on the Season 3 premiere of her hit show Inside Amy Schumer. In “Last F**kable Day” Schumer, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Tina Fey and Patricia Arquette celebrate the day the media decides female actresses are no longer desirable, poking fun at the ridiculous double standards Hollywood has for women.

Hollywood’s gender bias extends to everything from screen time to pay scale. The top 10 highest paid actresses made a collective $181 million while the top 10 male actors made $465 million, according to a 2013 Forbes study of Hollywood’s highest paid actors and actresses. One of the biggest reveals of last year’s Sony hacking scandal concerned the movie American Hustle and the fact that Jennifer Lawrence and Amy Adams were paid less than the film’s male stars.

It’s not just woman actors Hollywood has given up on. At this year’s Cannes Film Festival, Salma Hayek accused Hollywood of giving up on women viewers as well. Despite making up 50 percent of the ticket-buying public in the U.S., Hayek noted that Hollywood thinks the only films women wants to see are dumbed-down romantic comedies (I believe these are commonly referred to as chick flicks).

Hayek also discussed the sexism and racism she’s experienced in Hollywood. One Hollywood executive told her that her Mexican accent was a drawback since it might remind moviegoers of their maids. A talented actress, Hayek has been reduced to playing a hot trophy wife co-starring alongside fart jokes and punches to the crotch in the Grown Ups movie franchise. (Never mind the fact that they keep making these movies, which just seems like one giant punch in the crotch to moviegoers everywhere.)

The examples of Hollywood sexism are endless. Melissa McCarthy recently called out a sexist critic over comments he made about her appearance. In this month’s Fast Company cover story, Amy Poehler talks about being in meetings with powerful Hollywood men who ask her where her kids are, implying she’s a neglectful mother who doesn’t see her kids enough—something they would never ask a man. Speaking at Cannes of her new film A Tale of Love and Darkness, Natalie Portman admitted to being afraid to direct herself in the film because people might see it as a vanity project, despite the fact that they would never do so if she were George Clooney.

As if Hayek and Portman’s Cannes comments weren’t enough to confirm that sexism is coming soon to a theater near you, #flatgate happened. The #flatgate controversy emerged when an unnamed festival source was quoted in the British press saying that women on the festival’s red carpet must wear high heels or risk being turned away. This after several women in flats were, in fact, turned away from a screening of the new Todd Haynes movie. Paris Hilton at your festival is classy; flats are not.

The no flats policy—which I initially thought was an Onion story— happened in a year when Cannes was trying to appear more female friendly by showcasing a number of films with strong female leads and selecting Standing Tall by Emmanuelle Bercot as the festival’s opening film, the first time a woman director has opened the festival since 1987.

Flatgate comes on the heels of this year’s #askhermore. The social media campaign to get red carpet reporters to ask actresses about their accomplishments rather than focus on who and what they’re wearing launched during this year’s Oscars. As if it’s not bad enough that women are hugely underrepresented when it comes to awards nominations—even more so for women of colour—they then have to endure full body camera pans on the red carpet and endless internet snark about their dress choices. At the 85th Academy Awards in 2013, across 19 categories, 140 men were nominated compared with 35 women. And in its entire history, only four women have been nominated for a best director Oscar. Of the four, only one woman has won: Kathryn Bigelow in 2009 for The Hurt Locker—regrettably, not for Point Break.

Response to the #askhermore campaign was mixed with some arguing that awards carpets are for talking about fashion with many celebrities, using the opportunity to promote brands and designers. Admittedly, at my Oscar party, the possibility of Ryan Seacrest going off script to discuss global warming with Sienna Miller increased wine consumption by at least 30 percent. As the man responsible for Keeping Up with The Kardashians, Seacrest has already unleashed enough awful on us and must be stopped.

I know the responsibility shouldn’t be on Reese Witherspoon’s shoulders to stop sexism on awards night, but I’d love to see actresses simply refuse to walk the red carpet or show up in a Dinosaur Jr t-shirt with a chip dip stain on it and sweatpants—a little look I like to call “Saturday night.” At least the dreaded Mani Cam was gone after many actresses refused to participate in it and Elizabeth Moss famously flipped it off in 2012. Peggy Olson would be proud.

The double standard certainly doesn’t end when actresses are off screen. In the same week that #flatgate broke, actor Bill Murray appeared lit like a road flare on MSNBC. Having just wrapped up a final Letterman appearance in which he chugged vodka, Murray drunkenly wandered onto the MSNBC set like he got lost looking for the washroom. He proceeded to spectacularly fall off his chair and then slur his way through an interview.

The next day, there were no calls for Murray to go to rehab, no concerns about whether his drinking was out of control or whether his career would ever recover from his drunken television appearance. If Murray had been a woman, the internet would still be talking about it and not in a good way. Instead, the internet found it all very charming. Full disclosure: I found it amusing, but that’s because Murray’s midlife crisis is way more entertaining to witness than my own.

But it’s not just Hollywood who is fed up with the double standards. Earlier this month, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) announced it will ask federal and state governments to examine the hiring processes studios use for directors and investigate the discrimination faced by women directors. While the discrimination certainly extends beyond directors, the ACLU investigation provides some hope, especially given the possibility that studios and networks could be charged with gender discrimination.

The hopeful moments tend to be short-lived. The 2011 success of the Kristen Wiig-penned Bridesmaids—the film grossed $288 million worldwide and was nominated for a best picture Golden Globe as well as an Oscar for best original screenplay and best supporting actress—was seen as ushering in a new wave of smart funny films by and starring women. Despite a few films like 2012’s Bachelorette, the “Bridesmaids Effect” seemed largely to be a mainstream media construct that, sadly, yielded few lasting effects. Also, cooking with summer squash is an example of a trend; women being funny is not.

When Kathryn Bigelow won best director, people were optimistic the situation would improve for women in Hollywood. Similar optimism greeted the box office success of director Catherine Hardwicke’s Twilight, which had the biggest opening ever for a female director, and also, most recently, Elizabeth Banks’ Pitch Perfect 2. Still, having a woman behind the camera is not the norm. An annual studio by San Diego State University found that women directed only 7 percent of the top 250 grossing films last year, two percentage points lower than in 1998.

Disappointingly, it seems like the responsibility to end Hollywood’s gender bias falls largely to the women. Meryl Streep recently announced she will fund a mentoring initiative for female screenwriters over 40—further proof that Meryl is awesome. Her announcement comes after reports that both the number of female screenwriters, as well as their pay levels are dismal. At last year’s SXSW keynote Girls actress and creator Lena Dunham—who also wrote, directed and acted in 2010’s wonderful Tiny Furniture—said “Something has to change and I’m trying.” Both Dunham and Girls have certainly had a positive effect, but we haven’t come a long way, baby.

Oscar-winning actress and director Helen Hunt summed it up perfectly in a recent Huffington Post interview: “What are the great movies for younger women where they’re the protagonist [being] made now? You know what I mean? The whole thing — there’s no equal rights amendment. We’re fucked.” And Hunt should know. At 34 she played 60-year-old Jack Nicholson’s love interest in As Good As It Gets. At least she got an Oscar for it.

CHELSEA VOWEL, MOLLY SWAIN, AND SOME DALEKS AT COMICCON | Photo courtesy Métis in Space

Métis in Space is a hilariously smart take down of Indigenous stereotypes in popular science-fiction

LAST SUMMER, friends Molly Swain and Chelsea Vowel were having a rough time, and looking for an excuse to spend more time together. Swain and Vowel, who are both Métis and live in Montreal, came up with a solution to fix their woes: create a podcast where they could “nerd out,” drink red wine, and talk about science fiction.

Swain and Vowel created Métis in Space, a bi-weekly podcast that reviews and critiques movies and television featuring Indigenous tropes and themes. It took the friends three days to come up with the podcast, record their first episode, and upload it to SoundCloud.

“When Molly and I hang out, we’re hilarious. I thought that the rest of the world should hear that,” says Vowel. “We expected our entire audience to be our moms, and then our moms were not interested.”

Indian and Cowboy, an independent network that creates, produces, and publishes Indigenous media projects across multiple platforms, hosts Métis in Space. Swain says the network is a “fabulous, fabulous idea” in how it allows Indigenous people to build relationships and communicate with each other in new ways.

With episodes gaining thousands of listens on Indian and Cowboy, SoundCloud, and iTunes, Métis in Space frankly, and often hilariously, analyzes shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The X-Files, and Supernatural, picking out common Indigenous representations that surface in mainstream pop culture. Vowel, who has been an avid fan of sci-fi since she was young, says she knew the tropes had always been there.

Recording Métis in Space, however, forces the friends to actively look for stereotypes. They’ve found that in science fiction, Indigenous people are often associated with mystic flutes and drum music, or the ability to turn into an animal.

Métis in Space recognizes that sci-fi creators are predominantly white men, who “explore concepts and anxieties related to colonialism in order to reassure themselves,” Swain says. Vowel adds she can’t “unsee” a pattern in science fiction that is often representative of colonial fears: the storylines often feature Indigenous people and societies who are “wiped out” or about to be erased.

“People don’t expect Indigenous people to be interested in the future,” Swain says. “That’s partially because nobody expects Indigenous people to have a future, which is what colonialism is.”

According to the hosts, Métis in Space listeners cite the “Ask a môniyâw (white man)” segment as their favourite part of the podcast, in which Swain and Vowel ask a stereotypical “white man” a question. Vowel’s husband, to his chagrin, participates in the segment by playing the môniyâw. After uploading episodes to SoundCloud, Métis in Space started receiving earnest requests from several men who wanted to be the guest môniyâw.

Métis in Space also actively confronts sci-fi creators. In Episode 5, they recorded a live-report podcast from the 2014 Montreal Comiccon. Knowing that Indigenous people are so often a part of science fiction, Swain and Vowel expected guests at the pop-culture fan convention to have some knowledge of Indigenous history, but they were surprised to find that wasn’t case. On top of that, there were vendors selling products with racist or inaccurate portrayals of Indigenous people.

“They had no consciousness. It was completely divorced from the fact that there are real Indigenous people out there,” Swain says. “It wasn’t only that we were confronting them about their lack of knowledge, but I think to a certain extent, we were almost confronting them with our existence.”

Despite the problems in science fiction, Swain and Vowel are still huge fans of the genre. For the second season, the hosts plan to uncover new ground by exploring what an Indigenous future look like 300 years from now.

“I think science fiction is almost inherently Indigenous because it is so much about world building and future building and telling stories in a way that points to where we want to go, or explores questions of, if this were to happen, how would we deal with it?” Swain says. “We’re going to reclaim ourselves from science fiction in order to create science fiction.”

There are wide arrays of hellish creatures, no shortage of ideas on how to creatively murder someone for the big screen, and more nonsensical plot twists than I can count. Yet, in this huge vastness of horror ideas, one thing remains ever constant: horror is heteronormative.

Almost every horror movie I’ve viewed­­—and I’ve seen a lot horror films—has included some really random unexplainable sex scene thrown in to attract more viewers despite its complete irrelevance to everything happening. Every single time it’s a cisgender straight (and usually white) couple. In the world of horror, there are either no LGBTQ people, or slashers and demons just like messing with straight kids more.

The first movie with a same sex couple I think of? Wrong Turn 4: Bloody Beginnings. There’s an interracial same sex couple—two women to be exact— and get this: they aren’t killed off first either. Awesome! The bad part is, their lesbian-ness is completely fetishized—portrayed as the personal and very problematic fantasy of straight cis males who fetishize lesbian sex. There’s a scene where one of the guys goes and plays peeping tom on their sex, one of the women sees them and instead of yelling at him to go away, she just smiles at him and is completely cool with the fact that he’s spying on her and her girlfriend having an intimate sexual moment. The likelihood of that happening in real life is so slim. Realistically, he’d probably at least get the door slammed in his face.

The other movies I can think of are various “lesbian vampire” B-movies on Netflix, that I’m fairly certain are just thinly veiled softcore porn tucked into the horror section. And these are typically films made by straight men for straight men—hardly progressive LGBTQ horror.

If they’re not being fetishized, LGBTQ characters in horror films are being demonized. And that’s if they’re even in the movies in the first place. Though I love the movie Silence of The Lambs, Buffalo Bill’s character is unsettlingly problematic. I distinctly remember the creepy scene where he tucks his penis between his legs, dances in front of the mirror and wears a woman’s skin. Basically, he’s fantasizing about being a woman. There’s no doubt that Buffalo Bill is a terrible person in the movie, I mean, he wore a woman’s skin. But part of me feels transphobic elements radiating from that scene, as trans women are so often subjected to the offensive stereotype that they’re actually scary and socially deviant men.

Even more, the flamboyant “gay” monster trope is one that has been in horror movies and thrillers for quite some time. A Twitter user pointed me towards the original Fright Night, analyzed by many as having a clearly gay subtext. This subtext however is used in a negative light, one where the homoeroticism has a kind of evil seduction element to it. The gay villain in a horror film is usually never presented as outwardly gay, but rather campy and flamboyant, which is meshed into their deviance and evilness. They are eventually vanquished by the straight protagonist. I’ve never seen a horror film where the villain was a macho hyper-masculine guy who is defeated by a gay teenager. But I would really like to.

When there are LGBTQ elements in a film, it automatically becomes a “gay” film—one where the plot is centered around the character’s LGBTQ identity. Horror needs to incorporate LGBTQ characters into the genre while not exploiting them for fetishization, demonization, or as the token gay friend.

Next week I look at women in horror and the damsel in distress, scream queen phenomena.

What are torture films? The biggest examples are the Saw and Hostel franchises, and the ever-controversial Human Centipede 1 and 2. However, there are lots of torture films, even among B-grade horror films; it’s a big trend. Remakes of older horror classics seem to always end up nauseatingly gory, bordering on the torture genre. I’ve frequently had the problem of putting on what appears to be a classic slasher, stuck-in-a-house-with-a-serial-killer kind of film, and had it turn out to be a torture film. I immediately switch it off.

First off,  the genre shows a complete lack of creativity. Ghosts and ghouls, hellish dimensions , the iconic images of hockey masks or striped sweaters and fedoras, parasitic otherworldly life forms terrorizing researchers in the Antarctic—now that’s creative. Even the simple black and white silent film Nosferatu changed how we saw vampires forever. That is horror creativity at its finest. Performing surgeries on live people—that’s grotesque. If I wanted to see that, I’d go to one of those bizarre hospital auditorium thingies. If I wanted to see innocent people get brutalized, I can turn on the news. Viewing horror films does have a definite element of sadism, but torture films take that sadism to the extreme.

Torture films are scary, yes. But is being scary the only way we can make good horror? Is profiting on the viewing of extreme pain and suffering healthy for audiences? There’s a difference between paying for creepy thrills and mild psychological scares, and dishing out cash to watch ultra-realistic slicing and dicing of characters wailing in agony. Sure, it’s fictional, but the total desensitization to images of extreme violence is real.

It’s one thing when you’re joking around with your friends cheering for the slasher running ridiculously down the street with an axe and another when people are excitedly taking in graphic scenes of eyeballs being removed and limbs being cut off. Half the time, the freaky part isn’t watching the movie, but knowing that some people are actually truly enjoying this macabre show. I guess some directors figured that the invention of realistic fake blood and advanced special effects meant they could sacrifice good plots, creativity, and subtle, albeit creepy, scares for total violent mayhem.

And on top of that, torture films are notorious for the sexualization of women’s deaths, hence the idea of calling it torture porn. In fact, all horror films are notorious for this, but I see it more deeply in the torture genre, because the women are often tortured whilst naked. Guys die with all their clothes on, women get cut up with their breasts exposed. Guys die in a spree of violence, women are first groped and licked before their horrific demise. Even when explicit scenes of rape are not shown, they are alluded. It bothers me that somewhere, someone out there is getting a sickening adrenaline rush from watching a naked woman undergo brutality.

It doesn’t matter that it’s fictional; it does something to our society. It’s also a direct reflection. Women are brutalized in real life and the murder of women is so frequently accompanied by rape. Patriarchy has normalized this, and film is just as much as a part of that normalization as any other medium. When horror normalizes misogynistic imagery, we internalize it. And if you’re not convinced that we internalize it, then just look at some of the comments and tweets every time there is a news story about a woman getting beaten and raped—hundreds of “she deserved it” and insensitive “jokes.” So despite the fact that this violated and dehumanized character is fictional, I take it personally. As a woman, it feels real to me.

So, excuse me while I impatiently wait for this trend to end. I guess I’m just not into repetitive frames of senseless violence and if that makes me oversensitive, then I’ll gladly be oversensitive rather than utterly desensitized, or worse, salivating over scenes of tortured women. Monsters under the bed, Satan’s spawn, and high-tension slasher chase sequences are more my thing.

Next week I’ll be looking at mental illness in horror films regarding the ever-popular trope of the “psycho” killer and horror’s obsession with psychiatric hospitals.

No matter what happens, though, one characteristic of demonic possession always stays the same: the insatiable lust of the demon, now acting through its female host—and it’s almost always a female character. Evidently, we’re more easily tainted. Or, at least, we are according to some ancient patriarchal religious idea that says women are more susceptible to being invaded by Satan. In fact, it’s such an age-old popular concept, that even if contemporary directors are not deliberately trying to propagate the masses with sexist messages, they rarely stray from this plot.

But not only does the demon possess the woman or girl in the movie, it almost always has to have some kind of utterly creepy or manipulative sexual manifestation. I’ll focus on three films in particular (analyzing all the demonic possession films with female sexuality as a key element would take a century). The most obvious example is, of course, the classic 1973 The Exorcist—basically the bread-and-butter of demonic possession films. In the movie, a demon possesses a 12-year-old girl named Regan. Aside from the green vomit, backwards crawling, and head spinning, the demon sexualizes Regan, making her say vulgar things to those around her. There’s the infamous “lick me” scene, in which Regan appears to be stabbing her vagina with what appears to be a crucifix, yelling “lick me”; she even pushes her mother’s face into her bloodied crotch.

Next we have 2010 Spanish horror film Exorcismus, in which 15-year-old Emma Evans is the victim of possession. In one scene she’s sitting with her friend Rose and begins to fall into a strange trance like state. She then starts to caress Roses’ hand, looking at her suggestively while twisting her head closer with her mouth open. Rose responds by leaning in for the kiss. Emma pulls away and starts shouting homophobic slurs at her, claiming that she knew her friend was gay and was attempting to trick her. Here, the demon uses sexuality to seduce and manipulate people, suggesting that the whole interaction was wrong or immoral in the first place. Emma comes out of the trance and has no idea what she’s said or what’s happened.

Then there’s The Last Exorcism (2010), in which Nell, a farmer’s teen daughter, is possessed by a demon. It’s found out later in the movie that she is pregnant, and her father insists that Nell is a virgin and that the demon has somehow made her body “impure.” The Evangelical minister in the film decides that Nell is not possessed, but distressed over the loss of her virginity, which is proven wrong later in the film. In one scene during an exorcism attempt, Nell—while under the possessive hold of the demon—asks the priest if he would like “a blowing job” (yes, she actually called it a “blowing” job).

In all three of these movies, the demons have at least one sexual manifestation. And, put bluntly, it seems to come down to this idea that demons make women horny. While possessed women in horror films do make some sexual statements that are obviously immoral (say those of a incestuous nature), these movies mostly seem to suggest women have repressed  sexuality that only demons can somehow conjure. We couldn’t possibly have a sex drive of our own accord; it’s the demons, duh! A good holy woman would never have sexual urges! (It should be noted that in the few movies that feature demonic or malevolent possession of men, most notably, The Amityville Horror, the male character rarely acts in a sexual manner as a result of the possession.)

I think these movies might be confusing demons with hormones. In fact, maybe I too was possessed when I was going through the embarrassing grips of puberty, blasting my angst-ridden punk music and attempting to understand the mechanics of a tampon. It should go without saying that female sexuality isn’t evil or demonic. Sexy dancing, moaning, and sexual statements do not mean that the demon king Pazuzu is now inside you, nor do these actions mean you’re now the forever accursed Angela from Night of the Demons. It’s high time that demonic possession movies start conjuring up other ways to make demons evil, and avoid the need to use women’s bodies and sexuality as a platform to convey this.

Next week I take a look at a disturbing 2000s horror movie trend, the rise of the torture film.

From its major lack of racialized characters to helpless screaming women running through the night in their underwear, horror is notoriously problematic genre. Still, at 20-years-old, I’ve gone from avoiding all horror-related things throughout my adolescence (I will always be teased by my family for bolting out of a cheap haunted house in terror) to watching several horror movies a week. I’m still an incredibly easy scare, but I just can’t resist horror: the opportunity to see society’s deepest fears and  to examine society’s deepest prejudices—acted out in hyperbolic spectacles of evil and terror. And so, for the next six weeks of my internship, I will examine my most favourite horror films, the most loathsome, and everything in between, all to combine two equally scary things: horror movies and politics.

First up, let’s look at a classic: George A. Romero’s iconic 1968 zombie flick Night of the Living Dead. Romero’s choice to cast black actor Duane Jones for the lead role was hugely significant. The main character, Ben, was initially written as a part for a white actor (they were going to cast Rudy Ricci, who was one of the writers of the film). Needless to say, it was kind of a big deal that a black actor landed the lead role, in a movie that wasn’t explicitly about race, nor part of the Blaxploitation trend of the 60s and 70s.

Now, had the character been explicitly written as black, there’s a chance the script would’ve been littered with racist stereotypes. But the script was left unaltered even after Jones was cast. His character Ben, is by far the most capable person in the film. While other characters bicker and wail, he gets the job done. However, one very problematic scene occurs when Ben lays the lightheaded and overheating Barbara, played by Judith O’Dea, down on the couch and attempts to take her coat off. It’s a scene that certainly made some viewers uncomfortable, or at least those who internalize racist suspicions of the black man that lusts for white women. Barbara then smacks Ben, and Ben proceeds to punch her in the face. The scene is also odd—it doesn’t really fit with Ben’s character. He’s tough and takes no shit, that’s for sure, but this scene is overboard, and was apparently, not an original part of the script.

The sad part is in 2014, if a black actor were cast in the lead role for a horror film that was not explicitly about race, it would still be a big deal. The presence of racialized characters in lead roles in horror is an area in which the genre is still lacking—something that can be said about many genres, such as fantasy and sci-fi.

Other then the Night of the Living Dead 1990 remake starring Tony Todd,  two more recent films with black actors in the lead are Def by Temptation (1990), and The People Under the Stairs (1991), neither of which match the commercial success and cult following of original Night of the Living Dead. Todd also stars as the Candyman in the Candyman movie franchise—not the lead per se, but the villain. There’s also British horror/comedy gem Attack the Block (2011), which follows a group of underprivileged teenagers in Brixton fighting off monsters, but the movie falls more closely into the sci-fi genre. Forty-six years later since Night of the Living Dead was released it seems little has changed.

Mention black characters in the context of horror movies, and everyone jumps to the go-to “joke” that “the black guy always dies first.” Unfortunately, it’s true: black characters, and most racialized characters for that matter, tend to play minor side roles in horror films and are quickly killed. It’s this horror movie reality that everyone pretty much laughs about, despite the fact that it has deeply problematic connotations as to the way we view black and other racialized characters: as unimportant, disposable, laughable side tokens available for the first kill.

While Night of the Living Dead was in no way a perfect pinnacle for diversity—especially concerning the portrayal of the female characters—it’s still, unfortunately, more progressive then so much of mainstream horror today.

Next week, I’ll be exploring the demonic possession genre and its obsession with female sexuality. Cue the theme from The Exorcist.

Hana is an intern at This Magazine, and a self-described angry feminist. She spends her time blogging, illustrating, and re-watching Lord of the Rings.

George F. Walker

After decades of populist programming, serialized television has blossomed into an auteur’s medium over the last decade. This new golden age is marked by subtle characterization and complex narrative: American cable networks such as HBO and AMC have pioneered the revolution with series like The Sopranos, Mad Men and The Wire.

Here in Canada, playwright George F. Walker has emerged as a leader of our own televisual renaissance. Ten years ago, Walker took leave of the theatre—“it was time for a change,” he says nonchalantly—and embraced television, where, with his writing partner Dani Romain, he has since created and written three ambitious programs. His first foray into television, the criminal justice–oriented This is Wonderland, aired on CBC for three seasons. That was followed by The Movie Network’s The Line, which explored the blurred moral boundaries on both sides of the law.

Walker and Romain’s latest effort, Living in Your Car, co-created by Joseph Kay, premiered in May on HBO Canada. A single-camera comedy reminiscent of Arrested Development, it follows Steve Unger, a powerful executive who loses his wealth and family after being caught cooking the books, and is forced to live in his 2004 Mercedes S430.

“People used to like their sitcoms 22 minutes long and very loud, and they liked their dramas very quiet and whispered and very serious,” says Walker. “But now I think the world is much too complex to separate those things. There will be elements of everything.”

Eroding divisions between TV genres make the medium an ideal outlet for Walker’s sardonic social commentary. “They’re comedies about serious things,” he explains, adding that by focusing on character, he is able to address political issues without the clunky exposition.

Walker was working as a cab driver in the early 1970s when he submitted his first play, The Prince of Naples, to Toronto’s Factory Theatre. Since then, his storied career has resulted in more than two dozen plays and numerous awards, including three Governor General’s Awards, one for Lifetime Artistic Achievement. His works—prickly satires of corporate greed and urban pretense—often focus on those living on the periphery of mainstream society. Drawing on everything from the Theatre of the Absurd to the deft, character-driven tradition of Anton Chekhov, Walker’s plays grapple with some of modernity’s most pervasive dilemmas.

Although Walker left the stage, the stage didn’t leave him. “Dani and I try to bring theatre to television,” he says. “Basically every scene is a one-act play, and the actors get really good stuff to do, which is really what you’re trying to do in theatre—not waste actors.”

In addition to the new TV show, two new Walker plays will debut in 2010. And So It Goes, the story of a middle-class family’s struggle with financial ruin and a schizophrenic daughter, opened to excellent reviews last February, while King of Thieves premiered at the Stratford Festival in July.

Walker calls King of Thieves “a play with songs” for which he wrote the lyrics and dialogue. The play is loosely based on John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, but transplants the source text to New York City right before the stock market crash of 1929. “It’s about who the real thieves are,” he explains. “Are the police the thieves, are the bankers the thieves, are the thieves the thieves—are they all thieves?”

Of his return to the theatre, Walker says, “It was just there.” He insists that it wasn’t a self-conscious decision to return to his old stomping grounds, but an outlet for reflection. “All this stuff is just sort of what’s on my mind,” he explains. “If I feel it personally, if I have an emotional response to it, I’ll let it come out.”

Still from 'Continental, un film sans fusil' (2008) directed by Stéphane Lafleur.

The title of Quebec director Stéphane Lafleur’s Continental, un film sans fusil (Continental, A Film Without Guns) is not only a playful warning to viewers seeking the adrenaline hit of an American action movie. A classic on the Quebec line-dance circuit, The Continental Walk is an American dance tune written by Hank Ballard—the man behind The Twist and The Hoochie Coochie Coo (line dancing is very popular with Quebec singles’ clubs). Their backs rigid, dancers of the Continental glide across the floor in sync, moving backward, then forward and to the left and right, occasionally jumping up and clicking their heels together. Like the characters in Lafleur’s feature, the lone dancers cross paths without touching each other. Lafleur pointedly drew from American popular culture for the title of his film, which follows the lives of four quintessentially North American characters lost in the circumstance of their suburban lives.

Lafleur is one of a generation of thirtysomething Québécois filmmakers, coming to be referred to as the “Quebec New Wave,” who explore the disquiet and confusion of life on this continent. Although these young filmmakers justifiably reject being labelled as a collective, taken together, their work reflects a new sensibility in Quebec cinema. While the characters speak French, their experience as members of North America’s largest francophone minority barely registers. Their cultural reference points are universally North American, not specific to Quebec. Questions of language and nation are conspicuously absent.

Critically acclaimed at home and increasingly recognized on the international festival circuit, Quebec New Wave directors include Yves-Christian Fournier (Tout est parfait, Everything is Fine); Henry Bernadet and Myriam Verreault (A l’ouest de Pluton, West of Pluto); Maxime Giroux (Demain, Tomorrow); Rafaël Ouellet (Derrière moi, Behind Me); Denis Côté (Carcasses, Carcass), Simon Lavoie (Le déserteur, The Deserter); and Guy Édoin (Les Affluents, a trilogy of short films).

Still from 'A l'ouest de Pluton' (2008), directed by Henry Bernadet and Myriam Verreault.

New Wave films are minimalist, reflective, and marked by the austere influence of distinctive, deliberate filmmakers like Roy Andersson, Pedro Costa, Ulrich Seidl, Darren Aronofsky, Gus Van Sant, and Bruno Dumont. They focus on the seemingly mundane, morose aspects of daily life, often with painstaking slowness. The dialogue is sparse and the takes are long. The themes they explore are dark: social isolation, the breakdown of the family, teenage suicide, and prostitution. And while they draw heavily on the work of Northern and Eastern European auteur filmmakers for their harsh, in-your-face realism, the Quebec New Wave is firmly rooted in the landscape and culture of North America. Many of their characters seem trapped in uninspired suburbs where they are cut off from nature and other people—except for their dysfunctional families.

Most of these New Wave directors came of age in the politically uncertain period after the 1995 separatist referendum defeat, when the Quebec nationalist movement was deflated and rudderless. They later practised their art with the thriving Kino experimental short film movement.

Their films respond to the blistering speed of contemporary media and to the wave of crowd-pleasing, nostalgic Quebec films released to considerable commercial success in the past decade, such as La Grande Séduction, Les Boys 4, and C.R.A.Z.Y., which portray modern Quebec culture as homogenous, insular, and cheerfully Norman Rockwellian in its ability to resolve conflict. Three of the filmmakers—Fournier, Ouellet, and Giroux—spent the early part of their careers immersed in consumer culture making video clips and advertising. Côté was a well-known film critic notoriously contemptuous of mainstream box-office hits.

Still from 'Continental, un film sans fusil' (2008) directed by Stéphane Lafleur.

It’s as if these young filmmakers are collectively saying “let’s slow down a minute and really take a look at what’s going on in this culture.” In Continental, which was awarded the prize for best first feature at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2007, lonely people try to connect, but can’t. Chantal, a single woman invited to a party on a blind date, is so ill-at-ease she drops a squirming baby to the floor with a thud. Is it a comment on Quebec’s declining birthrate that a woman in her early 30s panics when she touches a baby? In an equally uncomfortable moment, Louis, the travelling salesman, is invited by the couple next door to him at the hotel to watch them have sex. Lonely, he agrees. In what feels like an interminable shot he sits observing them, with a Styrofoam cup of wine in his hand, completely unaroused. Embarrassed, he abruptly leaves, mumbling his thanks.

Still from 'Tout est parfait' (2008), directed by Yves-Christian Fournier.

Yves-Christian Fournier’s Tout est parfait probes the taciturn world of five adolescents who feel so alienated they make a collective suicide pact (suicide is the number one cause of death among men aged 20 to 40 in Quebec). Written by Guillaume Vigneault—son of Quebec’s unofficial national poet Gilles Vigneault—and nominated for seven Genies, Tout est parfait screened at festivals in Seattle, Namur, and Belgium and was awarded the Claude Jutra Prize for best first feature from the Canadian Academy of Film and Television.

Using footage he shot in rural, urban, and suburban Quebec, Fournier created a generic North American post-industrial city. The five friends attend a massive high school and pass their time smoking dope and aimlessly driving around. Lower middle-class, they are bright but poorly educated. And while all five speak Québécois French, two of the boys are of ambiguous ethnicity: one appears to be Central American, another Scandinavian, though we never learn their origins.

Fournier and cinematographer Sara Mishara—an exceptionally talented artist who also shot Continental and Demain—jolt the audience with visuals juxtaposing both the possibility and despair of youth. In the slow-moving opening scene, a smooth-faced adolescent boy sits on a bus filled with sunlight and blue sky. Before he gets off at his stop, he hands his iPod to a radiant young woman who smiles at him. A few moments later, he shoots himself in a graveyard. In the following scenes, Josh, the central character, discovers one of his friends hanging from his bedroom ceiling in a sequence that is so tightly shot and harsh that it’s claustrophobic. Throughout the film, Fournier highlights the cultural and spiritual poverty of their domestic lives: the dark bungalow with neglected, greasy kitchen cupboards where one boy lives with an alcoholic father; or the sterile dining rooms where families sit around the dinner table staring at each other in silence.

“As human beings we are confused,” Fournier told me when I spoke to him last spring, shortly before the Jutra Awards. The 36-year-old director believes that the complexity of modern life, including technology overload, environmental problems, and lack of spiritual guidance, overwhelms young people. “Thinking about these issues we are faced with brought to my mind a character who is feeling empty, although he is full,” Fournier says, referring to the lead character, Josh. “I wanted to explore that emptiness.”

Still from 'Derriere moi' (2008), directed by Rafaël Ouellet.

Derrière moi, which opened TIFF’s 2008 Vanguard section last year and A l’ouest de Pluton, which won the Special Jury Prize in the Narrative Features category at the 12th Bermuda International Film Festival, also portray the vulnerability of North American adolescents with exceptional clarity. In A l’ouest de Pluton, directors Henry Bernadet and Myriam Verreault recruited a group of 14- and 15-year-olds, all non-actors, from a Quebec suburban high school and followed them for a 24-hour period. While the film is scripted, much of the dialogue was improvised. The shots are long and the camera hand-held. The film’s central drama is a house party where an unpopular girl invites a group of fellow students to celebrate her birthday. A group of them trash the house, stealing the family pictures off the wall and throwing them in a field. One boy is violently beaten. Another girl is seduced by a young boy then abandoned by him after they have sex. The teenagers are wild and uncontrolled—overconfident, hypersexual, ignorant, greedy. Yet they also seem utterly lost, navigating new experiences without wisdom or the guidance of adults.

Derrière moi is a slow-moving, cynical tale of Betty, a prostitute who travels to a small town and recruits lonely 17-year-old Lea into prostitution. The seduction of Lea by Betty is the centre of this psychological drama, although the film is nearly plotless until the final scenes.

Shot in dark indoor settings, the film’s shadowed, grainy texture is at times like a B-horror film: Betty is a vampire, preying on Lea’s sexual energy and youthful innocence. Ouellet wrote Derrière moi because he’s interested in how young North American women are drawn into the sex trade. “I worked at MusiquePlus for seven years,” explains Ouellet. “I was responsible for trying to sell adolescents a lifestyle based on consuming the latest iPod and being like everyone else. But young people have so much curiosity and naiveté and idealism. With my films I want to try to show them something else.” As in A l’ouest du Pluton, in Derrière moi it appears that no one is around to protect the young.

While their stories are at times opaque and frustratingly slow-moving, what is remarkable about these New Wave films is their careful attention to the detail of character. Unlike the films of celebrated Quebec filmmakers such as Denis Villeneuve (Polytechnique, Maelström) and François Girard (The Red Violin), which feature exquisite images but often suffer from weak scripts, New Wave films are obsessively character-driven: the cameras meander through their stories, revealing nuanced emotions with facial expressions, body language and long, uncut sequences. And in contrast to the practised and frequently dogmatic cynicism of celebrated Québécois director Denis Arcand, the New Wave films compassionately (and often humorously) portray a society in the midst of a spiritual and social crisis.

The culture they evoke is an uneasy mixture of American excess and Nordic austerity. It seems utterly appropriate for this wintry nation that has somehow produced two of the splashiest, most commercial acts on the Las Vegas strip: Cirque du Soleil and Céline Dion. What’s not present in New Wave films is the warmth and easy-going chattiness—the so-called joie de vivre— that anglophone filmgoers often associate with Canada’s other solitude. And the backdrops of these stories aren’t the romantic historic neighborhoods tourists flock to see, but the dreary suburbs and small towns where most Quebecers—most North Americans—live.

Post-war Quebec was rigidly Catholic and conservative until well into the 1960s. Five decades ago, the large, rural Quebec family was promoted as the ideal. Along with the church, it was viewed as one of the central pillars of the nation. Today, Quebec has one of the lowest birth and marriage rates and one of the highest male suicide rates on the continent. Quebec has transformed from a highly religious culture, where community and church were central, to a highly urbanized, secular society with a deeply ingrained media culture in half a lifetime. It appears that this new generation of filmmakers are measuring the fallout of such rapid, irrevocable change. In the process, they have reached beyond the boundaries of their own culture to develop a cinematic language that is both universal and yet—if it’s not too loaded a term—distinct.

The epic wars of the past between filmmakers and critics—Vincent Canby’s mano a mano with James Toback, James Cameron going cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs on any critic who looks at him funny, or the minor dustup that happened at last year’s Sundance Film Festival, in which a producer’s rep was punched in the face by critic John Anderson—are now few and far between. As German director Wim Wenders noted, “Filmmakers and critics wrote about each other and sometimes very harshly. This no longer exists.” Why is that?

Recently, I met a Canadian director at a film festival and a few days later watched his film, a piece of work so appallingly awful that by the end of it I was physically angry. I wanted to hit someone or something. If this had been his directorial debut, I could have forgiven it, or at least had some greater amount of sympathy.

But it was only the last in a long line of terrible films, each one perfectly, utterly bad. Somehow, in nice Canadian fashion, this man was allowed to keep on keeping on, supported and helped along. “Someone ought to stop you,” I thought. “Lock you in a basement, tie you to a chair, take away your socks and shoes, anything, so you can never make another film again.”

Extreme? Perhaps. But you will notice I have not mentioned his name. If I write something scathing about a film, I will no doubt find myself at a party a few weeks later with said filmmaker. He might pop me in the eye.

The relationship between critics and filmmakers is too close, too cautious. In literary circles, a great many critics write under a nom de plume, merely to review work with some degree of impunity. This isn’t as easy in film circles. Mostly, I do my best to avoid the entire thing, and foster some type of mild to moderate misanthropia, just enough to discourage too much contact.

It would be a nice idea—pure and clean—if critics could be kept in a separate holding pen, secluded from the artist until they have rendered their verdict on a given film. Largely, that’s not possible. In Canada, the pool is about an inch deep, and barely two feet across. Juries, panels, and film festivals also add another layer of complication. It’s a small world.

Critics do form attachments, crushes or hate-ons for certain filmmakers, and it can affect their judgment. In Gerald Peary’s documentary For the Love of Movies: The Story of American Film Criticism, the dual and dueling forces of Andrew Sarris and Pauline Kael are offered up as the apotheosis of film-critic superstars. But even they were not immune to seductions of the famous and the talented. Kael especially was susceptible to director crushes, championing certain directors (Brian de Palma?!) despite her professed anti-auteur stance.

In independent film circles, which is where I spend the majority of my time, there are subtler ways of being swayed. When a filmmaker presents me with a screener of their precious baby, accompanied by a sad story of selling a kidney or turning street tricks in order to finance their film, I’m stuck. It takes an extremely hard heart to take a mewling scrawny film, made with blood, sweat, and other bodily fluids (but almost no money) and proceed to kick the crap out of it—even if that’s really what I ought to do. Cruel to be kind may be the best thing for everyone involved, but doing it in print can feel like murder by proxy. “Well, it’s not that bad, for a Canadian film,” I find myself thinking in some strange form of affirmative action. But the end result of this process is the example of the film director and his crappy oeuvre with which I began this story. In which case, I have only myself to blame.

Film critics are no longer what they once were. They are few and far between, for one thing. Mostly these days, film has reviewers, who puff and PR them in various media forms. Call them what you will—shills, liars for hire, ink-stained wretches—stuck between pages of advertisements, cramming their ideas and thoughts into word counts that are barely in the double digits.

And filmmakers are often myopic creatures. Like most artists, they don’t see much beyond the borders of their own ego. Everything—and I realize this is something of a sweeping statement, but bear with me for a moment—outside their current film tends to blur into a fuzzy featureless landscape.

That’s why I think filmmakers really need critics, not reviewers, bootlickers, or suck-ups. They need a firm hand, like that of a stern German nanny. An outside voice that will come in and say, “You’re capable of so much more.” Or, “Here is a whole bunch of ideas you should consider.” Or, in certain extreme cases: “You really ought to think about doing something else.”

The success of the Fantasia festival in Montreal (which runs for almost three weeks in July), Toronto After Dark and the Calgary Underground Film Festival (now in its fifth year) indicates a growing level of interest, acceptance and even love for the form. But whether this is a good or bad thing usually depends on whether you were a fan before mainstream acceptance. In this post-Tarantino age, it’s getting damn hard to find very much that is truly underground any longer. Cult cinema ain’t what it used to be.

Isaac Alexander, who contributes to different science-fiction blogs and worked with the Seattle-based anime convention Sakura-Con, says, “When I grew up, I was a part of school clubs devoted toward science fiction/fantasy and anime. These clubs provided the ‘distribution’ to discover video programming from distant lands,” says Isaac. “Now, you just need to load up the internet and head to YouTube.”

Kier-La Janisse, who founded Vancouver’s infamous (and now defunct) horror film festival CineMuerte, pulls no punches in her assessment of this phenomenon: “I think the mainstream always comes knocking when anything underground proves to be viable to some degree, regardless of genre. Then they rip off the ideas of all the real pioneers, the people who took all the chances to prove that these types of films could work.”

She adds that a true aficionado is someone who works to locate low-quality versions of these titles. “When I want to watch Messiah of Evil or something, I watch a crappy VHS of it. I need the specialness—otherwise you’re just a consumer.”

A consequence of this contradiction is that films that do very well at bigger festivals like Fantasia or Toronto After Dark often err on the lighter side of the darkness. A case in point is an Austrian film called On Evil Grounds, which has screened in multiple festivals including the Calgary Underground Film Festival and Fantasia. On Evil Grounds is very much like a Tex Avery horror film (for those who don’t know the man, he was the looniest of the Looney Tunes animators). Bodily fluids erupt everywhere, and one doesn’t know whether to laugh or throw up. Maybe both. Since it is made for people to hoot and holler at, the film was a massive success at festivals.

Of course, festivals cannot live on love alone; you still need funding, and bums in seats. Certainly there is devotion from committed fans, the occasional bit of critical respect, even money. Well, sometimes. Bill C-10 is only the latest offensive that critics fear will deny tax dollars to films that are excessively violent without an educational value. You can have your bloody mayhem, but there better be a lesson buried at its centre. Despite the increased visibility and popularity of genre cinema, the festivals that program it don’t get much help from the Canadian government.

Try explaining to the Canada Council the educational benefit of films that depict maniacs hacking up boobalicious teenagers, and you get the picture. Or maybe you don’t, since many films simply don’t get shown. Brenda Lieberman, who runs the Calgary Underground Film Festival, says, “People often stereotype horror fans, which makes it less likely for sponsors to jump in.” CUFF has been growing slowly over the past five years, but the festival still struggles to break even, balancing more obscure offerings with crowd-pleasers.

If you really want to see weird stuff or, worse, show weird stuff to other people, you still have to do it yourself. I think it’s time I started a film festival.