Cult filmmaker Jennifer Reeder is one the most thrillingly original voices currently operating on the arty, pulpy fringes of the genre-movie mainstream. With her kick-ass gender-queer characters, hallucinatory visuals and riot-grrrl feminist attitude, the Chicago-based writer-director explodes the male-gaze conventions of horror and psychological thrillers with subversive wit, sense-swamping excess and campy satirical humour.
Reeder’s work is often likened to David Lynch and David Cronenberg, comparisons she embraces. But there is a deeper interrogation of patriarchal power going on in her films, which is both darkly funny and deadly serious. One of her key themes, she says, is “our obsession with youth and beauty among young women and our desire to literally tear them apart.”
Screening at Sarajevo Film Festival this week, Reeder’s latest visually ravishing psycho-thriller Perpetrator stars Kiah McKirnan as Jonny, an 18-year-old high-school misfit sent away to stay with her eccentric aunt Hildie, as played by iconic screen queen Alicia Silverstone. Against a creepy backdrop of masked stalkers, serial kidnappings and shape-shifting monsters, Jonny learns some sinister ancient secrets from Hildie that run deep in the family bloodline.
Film festivals seem unsure how to program Reeder’s mind-bending, genre-subverting work. Perpetrator has so far played in mainstream sections, midnight movie sidebars and more experimental niches. In Sarajevo it screens in the Kinoscope Surreal sub-section alongside other high-calibre art-house shockers including Brandon Cronenberg’s hellish holiday gore-fest Infinity Pool, Bajoli’s supernatural Afro-Belgian witch fable Omen, and Karoline Lyngbye’s reality-warping marriage breakdown melodrama Superposition.
“It’s in great company,” Reeder tells The Film Verdict. “Seeing my name and the list of those other films makes sense to me. I would rather stand out with films that maybe need a little extra explanation, a little extra context.”
Reeder conceived Perpetrator during Donald Trump’s presidency, a period when toxic masculinity was trickling down from the very apex of the U.S. government. This inevitably gave the film an extra edge of political urgency. “I was writing this in 2019 and 2020,” she nods. “I kept thinking, gosh, if that guy could just borrow some empathy, have some empathy for a day, things would just feel so much better.”
Indeed, empathy is framed in paranormal terms in Perpetrator, echoing the transformational body-horror tropes in vampire and werewolf movies. “I’ve always really liked the idea, both in real life and in my films, of being able to take that thing that someone else decides diminishes you and make that your superpower,” Reeder explains. “Because so often we internalise all of that harmful language. So you could just take that and reverse it, make that your superpower.”
Alicia Silverstone is an inspired casting choice for Perpetrator, her presence an audience-winking nod to her own breakthrough role in Amy Heckerling’s post-modern high-school classic Clueless (1995). Reeder says Silverstone relished the deliciously Gothic vamp-queen side of Hildie, even wearing some of her own clothes for the role.
“She was such a little trooper,” the director nods. “I told her I wanted to pattern Hildie after Catherine Deneuve’s character, Miriam Blaylock, in The Hunger and she immediately got it. That sent her down a Deneuve rabbit hole in general, which is never a bad thing. But I was also thinking of Vertigo and Marnie and these kind of cool Hitchcockian blondes, so we really used a lot of that. All the campiness of both Hitchcock and The Hunger, bringing that to her character was really fun.”
Reeder draws heavily on horror movie grammar in Perpetrator, and flirted with slasher conventions in her previous high-school thriller, the deliciously weird teenage murder musical Knives and Skin (2019). But she is not entirely comfortable with the H-word, always pushing at the edge of the genre, testing its parameters.
“I don’t know that I am necessarily a horror director,” she frowns. “But I think that just even being horror-adjacent, or using genre tropes in my storytelling, I get to lean way into the fantastical and the surreal. That’s a really hard thing to do any other form. And I’ve always liked to think about the psychologically dark corners.”
Unlike most 50-something observers of teen and twentysomething characters, Reeder is never sneering or condescending towards her young protagonists. Indeed, she exhibits huge empathy towards a gender-fluid, open-minded, idealistic generation who are frequently derided by media commentators. “They are just so unfuckwithable,” she says proudly.
Many of Reeder’s young female characters are queer, or women of colour, or both, but she never makes race or sexuality central to the story. In an era of anti-woke backlash and manufactured culture war, these choices feel like unavoidably political statements.
“Absolutely,” Reeder nods. “When I have an opportunity to present characters that I think have been systematically under-represented, not just in films, but in life and politics, then why not do it? I know my films are not for everybody, but they are for somebody. And, you know, if a young queer girl of colour feels seen, maybe even for the first time, that matters to that girl. And it matters to me. And there are plenty of films out there for everybody else who isn’t that girl, so I don’t want to replicate that.”
When quizzed about the growing trend of female directors working in horror, Reeder is fond of reminding us that women actually invented the genre. “The world’s most favourite monster, Frankenstein’s creature, was written by a teenage girl,” she says. “So I feel like we actually own it. Also we’re taught from a pretty young age how to not get attacked, we’re taught that we’re prey, we are taught fear from a very young age, or at least I was. Also from a young age, we have a pretty consistent and normal relationship with blood. I mean, at any time during the month, you could wake up and you’re like a one-person crime scene, you know?”
Indeed, Perpetrator is absolutely drenched in blood, from recurring nosebleeds to vast, gloopy, clumpy lakes of hemoglobin. The connection between bleeding and female bodies is heavily stressed, and soon assumes almost surreally excessive levels, like a tampon commercial directed by Dario Argento. “There’s probably lots of men who consider menstrual blood to be what they’ve seen in a commercial,” Reeder laughs. “They imagine it’s like this very thin kind of pale blue liquid, lovely little droplets of pale blue.”
An aspiring ballet dancer in her youth, Reeder first enjoyed success as a visual artist, but insists she always had film-making in her sights. Eventually, the art gallery world proved too sterile and placid and “not loud enough”, so she began making low-budget narrative shorts. “At that time, I had so many friends who are musicians, and so I was going to see bands all the time. And with my background, even as a ballet dancer, I really felt like I wanted that energy of the crowd, you know? Just to sit and the lights go down, and we’re all experiencing something together. That just felt like really, really powerful.”
Reeder’s shorts eventually blossomed into features with the indie comedy-drama Signature Move (2017), followed by her prize-winning breakthrough Knives and Skin (2019). It took decades, but she did it her way.
“I have built my own path, which actually feels pretty great,” Reeder says. “I think there’s the assumption that I got to where I am because I went to film school, and then I was a PA on on film sets, or something like that. But I’ve never been on anybody else’s film set but my own. I’m not saying that was the easiest way to do it. But, you know, I’m a Gemini. I’m stubborn.”
Reeder is currently working on two new feature projects: one is “a kind of female-led History of Violence” partly inspired by the real-life murder spree that inspired Badlands (1973) and Natural Born Killers (1994), the other an adaptation of Julianna Baggot’s short story Nest, an eerie family fable of suburban suicide and ghostly apparitions. In a corner of the film industry where you either make art or you make money, Reeder seems to have found a rare balance between both.
“Having both is really nice,” she grins. “I feel kind of at that place right now. I was happy making art for a long, long time, figuring out how to subsidise my life in a different way. But right now, it’s nice to have both of them. Having said that, I still err on the side of art.”
For all her growing success, Reeder remains a cult filmmaker at heart, with a very strong auteur style. This means critics and film fans generally either love or hate her work, with not much reaction in between. But she denies having a confrontational agenda, and seems genuinely disappointed that her negative reviews have so far been more lazy than malicious.
“Some of the takes are just like: I just don’t get it? What was she trying to do? There’s too much going on!” she sighs. “I wish I was hated by smarter people.”
The Film Verdict at Sarajevo Film Festival 2023.
