Where are the female horror film directors?

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The beginning of the year saw the release of director Puja Jatinder Bedi’s film Ghost starring Shiney Ahuja and Sayali Bhagat. This horror film by a woman director was critically panned by critics. Gitanjali Sinha, whose directorial debut Yeh Khula Aasmaan was released recently, plans to make a horror film. There haven’t been many women directors who have explored this genre. So what stops them from attempting a horror film?
Says Gitanjali, “Horror as a genre has always fascinated me. As a filmmaker I want to explore and not restrict myself to any particular type. Horror has an immense possibility of visualisation. Having said that I think it is a personal choice of the women directors not to touch this topic. But to some extent I feel that women being more sensitive prefer handling emotional subjects and feel comfortable in that zone.”
Rajshree Ojha, who has experimented with different subjects in her films, may never do a horror flick. “I personally don’t like watching horror films. I guess women can’t take too much of blood and gore. That could be the reason why women filmmakers steer clear of this genre. I might try hand at thrillers but never with a supernatural theme,” she says.
Director Tanuja Chandra known for her hard-hitting cinema feels that Indian viewers have traditionally preferred love stories and comedies to the horror films and it’s a very recent development that mainstream Bollywood has begun dabbling in this.
While she hasn’t ventured into that zone so far she says, “It’s a very exciting genre and I’m sure I’ll make a horror film some day,” and adds, “I don’t think one can really put this down to gender. Women directors are themselves somewhat of a recent development. When I started out about 15 years ago, you could count women directors on one hand. Thankfully now, there are many more now. When half the directors in our industry are female, and none of them have made horror films, then we’ll analyse if this is an ‘untouchable’ genre for them.”
Women directors have barely made a mark in the movies, and horror is so specialised women directors have not got into making one, says scriptwriter Manisha Lakhe. “However personally speaking direction is a non-gender issue. There are good as well as bad directors, nothing to do with being a woman. See Hurt Locker. War is not something you’d think a woman might like to tackle, but this won all the awards. Women here can make horror films if they get their heads out of Mills and Boon,” says Manisha.