Bloody Breasts: An Exploration of Women, Feminism, and Horror Films
Bloody Breasts: An Exploration of Women, Feminism, and Horror Films
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Project Genesis, Overview, and Contextualization
Project Genesis, Overview, and Contextualization
In 2008, Maude Michaud began her Graduate studies in the Media Studies program at Concordia University with a desire to study fandom and online communities. Having always been very vocal about her love of the horror genre, she found herself challenging a lot of academic texts negatively skewed toward the genre and relying on stereotypes to qualify all horror films as 'misogynist'. While this attracted negative comments from some classmates questioning her feminism due to her love of the genre, it also helped give her the perfect angle she needed for her thesis. From that point on, she became determined to provide the counterpoint to those academic texts by proving that women not only love the horror genre, they also creatively use the genre to create feminist horror films. Since there was no academic text on the topic at the time, she set off to create her own set of data by interviewing women horror filmmakers, and what better way to present her findings than a documentary that would give a voice to these media makers, but also present snippets of their work After raising a few eyebrows in the department, she got her project approved and began filming in the fall of 2009 with an initial set of participants referred to her by Shannon Lark (founder of the now defunct Viscera Film Festival, a festival focused on feminist horror films), Heidi Honeycutt (founder and writer of the now defunct Pretty-Scary.net, a website dedicated to news and articles about women and horror), and Hannah Neurotica (founder of the Ax Wound zine about feminism and horror films). Filming took place in 2009 and early 2010, along with the writing of the accompanying thesis.
However, 2010 marked a turning point for the topic of women and horror when Hannah Neurotica created the first "Women in Horror Recognition Month (WiHM)" which shone lights on countless more women filmmakers working within the genre. While this was a great, notable event for the cause that gave even more weight to her research, it also rendered her initial set of findings obsolete if she were to release her (now almost completed) documentary "as is" without including coverage of WiHM. Faced with this dilemma, she decided to turn her documentary into a web-based series that would allow her to add future episodes while reframing her thesis and project as a snapshot of what the women and horror scene looked like before WiHM made it an ever-growing movement that inspired women around the globe to pick up a camera and make their own horror films.
In 2011, she premiered the five episodes of her documentary webseries online and was invited to host a panel on the topic at the Fantasia International Film Festival. The panel, moderated by Kier-La Janisse (one of the initial interviewees included the voices of even more women filmmakers - including her own - was filmed and added as an addendum to her thesis which was defended in November 2011.
As of July 17th, 2024, the project includes:
The five initial webisodes of the Bloody Breasts webseries - available to watch on this site
The accompanying thesis paper Horror Grrrls: Resistance and Agency within the Interpretive Community of Women Horror Filmmakers - available soon
The Bloody Breasts presents: Women in Horror Panel - available to watch on this site
The OffScreen article Horror Grrrls: Feminist Horror Filmmakers and Agency which offers a comprehensive overview of her thesis' main arguments - available on the OffScreen website
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