Gillian Wallace Horvat speaks to STARBURST’s Rich Cross about her new independent feminist horror film I BLAME SOCIETY…
“The original title for the film was actually I, Murderer because that was the title of the short documentary that this film grew out of,” explains writer-director Gillian Wallace Horvat of her new indie-horror. “When I was asked to come up with another title, I Blame Society came to mind. It’s a good title for our film in the sense that it expresses… the energy that the film has of just rage and vitriol.”
I Blame Society is a combination of horror, satire, and scathing social critique which follows the increasingly questionable choices of a frustrated female film director – played by Wallace Horvat. “She is struggling to get her first feature made,” Wallace Horvat explains. “She’s had some successful shorts, but she’s just having trouble with people believing that… they should give her a million dollars to make a first feature.”
The gatekeepers of the industry seem reluctant to give female filmmakers equal opportunities. “All the while she’s watching that same level of scrutiny not be levelled at her male peers,” she says. When her manager drops her and her boyfriend acts “like he doesn’t believe in her”, this would-be auteur reaches a pivotal decision and takes a fateful step.
She revives a long-abandoned documentary project that was “based on a compliment that she would ‘make a good murderer’,” and decides to finish the film by “actually killing people.” It’s not that her character is motivated by blood-lust, Wallace Horvat insists. It’s a determination to prove to others that “she is competent and talented and worthy of validation.”
Some of the frustration that her character experiences is autobiographical. “There’s a lot of the film that is drawn from my life,” she says, “But I also am not unique. There are lots of female filmmakers out there who face barriers to entry that male filmmakers don’t.”
One of the elements of I Blame Society that makes the film stand out amongst its horror contemporaries is its focus on female agency and the attention it affords to the perspectives of women. There’s obviously “the conceit that it’s a female character who is filming herself”, but this is also a movie with a female Director and female Director of Photography. “It’s very front-to-back a female gaze,” she affirms.
Wallace Horvat embraces the idea that hers is a feminist horror film. “I’m totally okay with it,” she says. “I think that we’ve moved past the point as a society where ‘feminist’ as a slur. So it’s totally fine with me.”
Not that there’s anything earnest or dry about the themes of I Blame Society. “We’re actually showing that films that have subversive ideology are effective entertainment,” Wallace Horvat says. “They are just as funny or gross or hot, or whatever.” Done well, movies with a social and political message “can be effective as films too.”
Key to the success of I Blame Society is the challenge that the lead character’s behaviour poses for the audience watching. “She is not there for you to unthinkingly live through her choices. But I do encourage people to feel a catharsis and feel a release from some of her actions.”
Wallace Horvat concedes that there’s no simple fix that would make the film industry more receptive to the work of women artists. “I can only express my frustration and try and get people to empathise and feel where I’m coming from,” she says. But if audiences respond to this film and it’s successful “then it guides by example – providing an antithesis to the kind of films that… the current male gatekeepers are asking for from women.” New and different types of female film that “feel personal and problematic.”
“We don’t talk enough about the cleansing power of anger and the cleansing power of rage to, to precipitate changes,” she continues. “To de-normalise things that we’ve taken for granted and have just become conditioned to… we need to get angry again. ‘Make America angry again.’ That’s what I’m running on.”
I Blame Society is released on April 19th. You can read our review here, and watch the full interview below:
