8 - By the Numbers: Roberta Findlay, Home Video, and the Horror Genre

Summary

Roberta Findlay’s association with horror cinema rarely extends beyond Snuff (1976, dir. Michael Findlay): the infamous Manson-inspired exploitation film which, in its promotional ballyhoo, falsely purported to depict the genuine murder of its lead actress. Protests that were sparked in New York City upon the film’s theatrical release, followed by its banning as a “video nasty” in Britain in the early 1980s, has helped transform an otherwise run-of-the-mill exploitation film into an exemplar of boundary-pushing horror cinema.

However, despite the film’s infamy, foregrounding Snuff in academic and popular discourse has come at the expense of sidelining Findlay’s directorial efforts in the horror genre: four films made between 1985 and 1989, The Oracle (1985), Blood Sisters (1987), Lurkers (1987) and Prime Evil (1988), which are yet to be the subject of meaningful analysis.

Findlay’s gender is grounds enough for a scholarly reappraisal of her horror output, given that, as Alison Peirse argues in the introduction to her pathbreaking collection, Women Make Horror: Filmmaking, Feminism, Genre, “there are [sic] a vast number of women filmmakers completely absent from our written horror histories and that by not including the outputs from ‘half the human race,’ our histories are faulty.” The present chapter is, in part, a contribution to Peirse’s revisionist project, but this is not, I should make clear, its sole purpose. Nor is it my intention to champion Findlay’s horror films as offering a “perspective” that challenges patriarchal hegemony, or to claim that they advocate for women or comment on “female experiences.” There remains an assumption, which Peirse challenges, that, “a woman director … will make a woman-centred film” or that woman-directed horror films de facto lend themselves to “feminist” readings. Frankly, it would be disingenuous to fold Findlay’s horror films into this discourse.