Hot on the heels of Gateway Film Center’s frosty vampire series Winter Sucks comes a springtime celebration of women who make horror movies. Femme Fatalities kicks off Wednesday, April 3 with Mary Lambert’s original Pet Sematary from 1989. But Lambert and the undeceased will not be alone that Wednesday, because the GFC program includes a short film with every feature.
“We thought it would be a cool thing to do because short films are amazing and too few people get to see them,” says Hope Madden, who co-curated the program with filmmaker Jenn Wexler. “This gave us the chance to either show a short film from the same filmmaker or expand the number of directors in the program by pairing a feature with somebody else’s short film.”
Madden’s film Obstacle Corpse and Wexler’s Shudder smash hit The Sacrifice Gamewill both be featured during the program. Both filmmakers will bring their own short films as well as features. Madden will world premiere Basement Buddy, while Wexler will revisit an older gem.
“It’s called Bits & Pieces, and I made it in 2013,” she says.
The film stars genre favorite Larry Fessenden, for whom Wexler was then working.
“He taught me all about filmmaking and was a mentor.,” she says. “This was when I first started working at his company, Glass Eye Pix. I very shyly asked, ‘Will you be in my short film?’”
For Wexler, being a filmmaker has always meant making horror.
“I wanted to be a filmmaker since I was a kid,” Wexler says. “It was always horror. It was always my dream to be making horror movies. But growing up, I didn’t see women making horror in the same way that I knew Wes Craven and John Carpenter and Tobe Hooper. And I was kind of like, why don’t we have these names, these female names, in the same way that we have all these famous male names?”
It was the chance to celebrate those women who are now and who have long been making horror that appealed to Wexler.
“There are a lot of women who are making horror and who want to be making horror,” she says. “It used to be sort of a weird thing but it’s totally normal now. And this is my first time getting to curate anything. It’s been really cool getting to work with Hope to curate this program.”
Wexler is particularly excited to be showing Amy Holden Jones’s 1982 slasher Slumber Party Massacre, a “classic slasher,” as well as Tigers Are Not Afraid from Issa López. Madden is most eager to get to see The Babadook on the big screen again.
Wexler and Madden will both be on-hand for the screenings of their films.
Gateway Film Center will also be hosting Fessenden’s BLACKOUT starting April 12
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