The horror of realisation: Female directors perfectly understand what scares us most
What’s scarier? The act or the anticipation? There’s a moment in between, before a trauma response or maybe a survival instinct kicks in, where it’s too late to hide from the horror that’s about to happen. It’s worse than dread, more serious than that. It’s not the fear of a lingering potential threat. It’s the moment when you realise, without a doubt, that you are in danger, imminent, real danger. And for a cast of female directors writing horror movies distinctly for the female experience – that’s the scariest thing.
I say this distinctly for the female experience because this is something we’re raised with. I don’t remember any one moment where someone taught me to worry about the sound of footsteps behind me on a dark street or a man walking towards me at night. I don’t remember ever learning things like lying to Uber drivers so they don’t know their address on the screen is my home or telling men who approach me that I have a boyfriend or a husband even if I don’t, just to get them to take no as no. These things feel almost born into me, into my friends, into women as a collective, as fear is part of our make-up.
We’re accustomed to dread as it sits in our stomachs on those walk homes where you’re listening, analysing the speed of the footsteps behind us and fearing the moment they speed up. But the scariest thing of all would be the moment of realisation if they did. The anticipation of something happening is one thing, but the sheer full-body terror that would hit the second a woman realised that the person behind was, in fact, running after her, was about to attack her, and that the life-long worry was, in fact, right now happening – that is horror movie fuel.
Female directors know that cause they’ve felt it, too. In recent years, a cast of contemporary filmmakers has been exploring the use of the moment of realisation as the act of horror in their horror movies rather than the dead itself.
Emerald Fennell shocked people and split opinions when she did it in Promising Young Woman. Set out as a kind of revenge flick, the film focuses on Cassie, played by Carey Mulligan, on a mission to seek revenge against the people who caused or played a role in the death of her best friend after she committed suicide following being sexually assaulted. But in the finale, as she faces the men who attacked her friend, she’s murdered by them.
But that still somehow doesn’t feel like the most horrific part of the film. For Fennell, there is some catharsis in Cassie’s death. She fights back against these men, and even though she loses her life, she wins in the end. But where she doesn’t win is in the horrific moment when she realises that her new boyfriend, Ryan, was there during her friend’s rape as the audience hear her watch a video of the act and hear his voice. Fennell purposefully doesn’t show the video. Instead, we watch Cassie have this gutting, horrifying moment of realisation that someone she loved and trusted. It’s arguably this moment that feels worse of all.
Throughout the film, no real violence is shown. Anna Kendrick took the same approach when making Woman Of The Hour, a thriller powered by these terrifying moments of realisation. Based on a real-life case of a serial killer appearing on a dating show, the perspective bounces between several different victims, showing this moment of realisation through several different pairs of eyes as they realise they are in danger or they are going to die. Similarly to Promising Young Woman, the moments of more active violence in the film are not the most harrowing moments. The worst of it comes in a car park. After Anna Kendrick’s character, Sheryl, gets paired with the killer live on TV and they go on a date, that sinking feeling of dread kicks in. It steps into that realisation of imminent danger as he corners her in a parking lot, threatens her, but then simply follows her, walking behind her for a scene so tense that it seems to go on forever, putting that terror of realising you’re in danger onto the audience.
That moment is essentially the whole premise of Zoë Kravitz’s Blink Twice. While the trailer does a great job of making it seem like just another horror flick about a crazy rich man, the actual plot is way more insidious. As the women on this remote luxury island begin to realise that they’re all suffering from memory loss, that’s the fuel for the film. The lingering sense that something bad has been happening and then the breakthrough moment of remembrance and realisation. While Kravitz does show some pretty horrific glimpses of what the women endure, it’s only mere flashes because she knows that that’s not really the most important thing and that there’s really no need to lay out exactly what happened to them. The horror is already there in the moment they realise that they are living in a horror movie and that the danger they’re in is real.
Across all three of these contemporary films, the women in the director’s chairs seem to get it. When the danger hits, things are simple. You fight, freeze, fawn, or you’re dead – in any case, being in active anger is emotionally paralysing. But it’s the moment right before when dread turns to pure fear with a realisation that is the most deeply impactful and emotional moment of horror. These female directors seem to understand that it’s the second when the worries and anxieties women seem born with become real that is the scariest thing of all, with the sudden knowledge of violence being imminent being endlessly more scary than violence itself.
