Female filmmakers are marginalized in every genre, but horror is a particularly male domain. Tod Browning, James Whale, Val Lewton, George Romero, John Carpenter—from the silent era onward, men have shaped the horror movie, often around the sound of a woman screaming. According to Mubi.com, women have directed only about three dozen horror features, the most notable being Kathryn Bigelow’s gloomy 1987 vampire thriller Near Dark (Bigelow went on to win an Oscar for The Hurt Locker). Rarer still are horror movies with a genuinely female perspective, which is what makes American Mary, opening Friday for a week-long run at Facets Cinematheque, so unusual. Canadian twin sisters Jen and Sylvia Soska (who made their feature debut in 2008 with something called Dead Hooker in a Trunk) share with Browning (Freaks) a fearful fascination with human deformity. But American Mary, about an impoverished young medical student who gets sucked into the body modification underground, filters this through a distinctly feminist ideal of controlling one’s own body.
Mary takes genuine pride in helping people realize their ideal selves, splitting people’s tongues and implanting horns in their foreheads, and this generosity of spirit makes her an anomaly of sorts among horror-movie surgeons. In the male tradition, they’re usually mad doctors imposing their wild dreams upon others—who can forget the title character of Frankenstein (1931), stitching together a man from random body parts, or the deranged Dr. Moreau of The Island of Lost Souls (1932), creating weird man-beast hybrids, or the haunted Dr. Genessier of Eyes Without a Face (1960), hoping to graft another woman’s face onto that of his disfigured daughter? People are usually trying to escape from these guys, not track them down. By making the surgeon an instrument of self-determination, the Soskas slyly assert that people’s bodies are their own, a key argument in prochoice activism.
Directed by Jen and Sylvia Soska
