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Roberta Findlay’s association with horror cinema rarely extends beyond Snuff (Michael Findlay, 1976): 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 the way comes at the expense of side-lining Findlay’s directorial efforts in the horror genre: The Oracle (1985), Blood Sisters (1987), Lurkers (1987) and Prime Evil (1988).

Findlay’s gender is grounds enough for a scholarly reappraisal of her horror output, given that, as Alison Peirse argues ‘there are 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.’ This talk is, in part, a contribution to Peirse’s revisionist project, but 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. It would be frankly disingenuous to fold Findlay’s horror films into this discourse. While Findlay identifies as a woman and her horror films have female leads, she is not a feminist, nor have her films sought to make any political statements about feminism or otherwise. As she told Fangoria in 1985: ‘I don’t know if a movie is one thing or not’.

Alexandra Heller-Nicholas’s argument that Findlay is best understood as an ‘anti-auteur’, is a befitting label in this regard. Unlike the intentions that her horror contemporaries such as Wes Craven, David Cronenberg, and George A. Romero purported, Findlay’s chief driver when making horror movies was economic viability over artist intent. Critics were quick to recognise this too, dismissing her films as ‘horror by-the-numbers’ for the direct-to-video market.

However, pejorative though they are, comments such as these bring to light the economic context within which Findlay was operating, and the low-risk investment low-budget horror features held for filmmakers at the beginnings of the video age. This talk, rather than treating The Oracle, Blood Sisters, Lurkers, and Prime Evil as in some way innovative or as worthy of interest because they happen to be directed by a woman, shows instead how these films prove apposite case studies because of what they reveal about contemporaneous industrial practices. Analysis of the films in relation to contemporary trade publications and associated promotional materials enables a broader understanding of the economic context that birthed them and, by extension, leads to a fuller understanding of the industrial history of US horror cinema in the 1980s.

Presented by Johnny Walker

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