Horror has been attached to womanhood for as long as the arts have existed, as a phenomenon, a metaphor and even a by-product; whether it be the legendary Colchian sorcerer princess Medea, the young wife in the attic in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story or the child-bride turned “chudail” in the 2020 Hindi film Bulbbul. In traditional discourses, which are overwhelmingly phallogocentric, this attachment has been constructed and seen as a curse, an allegation. But as more and more women are becoming authors of their own stories, horror as a genre is undergoing a series of empowering redevelopments. These very redevelopments were the focus of Imbolg: Women Who Terrify.
Spearheaded by scholar Sarah Cullen and filmmaker and critic Gemma Creagh, Imbolg was a collaboration between Griffith College and Film Ireland that took place on the last weekend of January. The festival is named after the Gaelic festival of Imbolc, celebrated at the midpoint between the winter solstice and the spring equinox in honour of the divine hag Cailleach and St Brigid. As the day marked the end of frost, the festival, in the words of the organisers, “peer[ed] beneath the surface to see what horrors have become re-animated after hibernation”. The two-day programme included Q&As, a panel discussion and an AV experience, and culminated in a screening of Birth/Rebirth, Laura Moss’s feminist revisitation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. The highlights were the three strands of short films from and about women, trans women, gender-diverse, non-binary, and intersex creatives.
Moroccan actress and director Sanaa El Alaoui’s Aicha inaugurated Strand A with the non-linear story of a 17-year-old girl and her mother. An incredibly impressive start to the festival, Aicha was one of the best films on the slate. Alternating between a birth, a mystic ceremony, morticians cleaning a cadaver, a bathroom and the beach, Aicha relied on its stunning cinematography and brilliant performances to show the terrifying socio-cultural realities of being a woman in Morocco. Another memorable film from the first strand was Sophie O’Donovan’s creepily scary and funnily awkward Would You Rather, wherein the eponymous party game has dire consequences involving a hand and a blender. Strand B presented an intriguing mix of mythical and modern narratives, including films about the mercreature Selkie, social media and the “Clean Girl” aesthetic. Xinyi Cao’s Play House stood out for its mature and restrained direction. The Chinese short is about a lesbian couple hired by a man to pretend to be his wife and daughter. Sinéad O’Loughlin’s Lamb was also special as it carried horror from dark, desolate corners into domestic daylight. The film begins in the kitchen with a mother, her baby daughter and the popping of the toaster, into which the entry of a strange man creates tension that only escalates.
The final strand had an assortment of terrors, ranging from a kid’s party and a fertility clinic to bad handwriting and insect invasions. The diversity of interpretations put together by Cullen and Creagh for Imbolg was a testament to the surprising ways in which women are using and reusing the genre of horror to talk about all the things that matter to them. Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of this is the way these filmmakers are playing with form and narrative. I’ll be very excited to see what Imbolg has in store next year.
