About Cut-Throat Women

Cut-Throat Women is an inclusive database of women* working in horror film production around the world. It aims to give visibility to the staggering amount of work that women have contributed to the genre and thereby provide a resource to fans, scholars, filmmakers, and critics. Cut-Throat Women invites ongoing submissions that provide thoughtful and rigorous writing on the creative work of individual figures. It will, in turn, bring attention to titles that are rarely seen or written about. Finally, Cut-Throat Women aims to further bridge a gap between the expansive academic community of horror scholars/critics and figures working in horror film production/exhibition through the vibrant and under-explored terrain of women’s groundbreaking roles as creative makers and thinkers of horror.

*We put forth an inclusive definition of women, including anyone for whom the identifier resonates.

A Few Comments

  • At the time of the database’s launch in June 2018, it gives initial priority to directors working from 2000-present with few exceptions, though it will continue to grow.

  • Cut-Throat Women is looking for submissions from academics and critics. If you are interested in writing for Cut-Throat Women, please use the contact form to request more information. You may be asked to submit a writing sample. Unless otherwise noted, all pieces are published under a Creative Commons Attribution License.

  • Names with completed pieces written for the site will appear in bold. For the time being, all other names will link directly to the filmmaker’s professional website or IMDb page. New pieces will be announced in the website's blog.

  • Cut-Throat Women is not exhaustive, even if it aims to be. Though it is a research-based project and will continue to expand as new filmmakers emerge, it also depends on experts, fans, and other readers to remain accurate and up-to-date. If you notice an absence or error, please use the contact form to report it.

  • Cut-Throat Women is edited and organized within an academic framework, but it has been invaluably aided by critics, filmmakers, and film festival directors outside the academy, and it is quintessentially a collaborative and interdisciplinary project.

Team

Project Manager

Dr. Sonia Lupher is a Visiting Lecturer in Film and Media Studies at the University of Pittsburgh, where she completed her PhD with a dissertation on the ties between women’s horror filmmaking, women’s genres, and the history of women’s cinema.

Advisory Board (in alphabetical order)

Ashlee Blackwell (info coming soon)

Anne-Marie Desjardins is a film archivist and teacher. She completed her B.F.A at Concordia University in Film Studies and her M.A at New York University in Moving Image Archiving and Preservation. Her research focuses on the impact of preservation practices on societal understandings of film histories, specifically through the lack of women filmmakers represented in the horror genre’s Canon. She has worked in film restoration at IndieCollect and currently works in the conservation department at La Cinémathèque québécoise and teaches in the Cinema, Video and Communications faculty at Dawson College.

Heidi Honeycutt (info coming soon)

Intern

Sydni Foshee is a Film and Media Production Major at the University of Pittsburgh and has developed multiple shows under the school's student run television station, UPTV. She is working on building a map feature for CTW.

Past interns: Claire Carpenter, Charlotte Scurlock, Delaney Greenberg

Acknowledgements

People and institutions who have contributed in no small part to the creation of this database include: Heidi Honeycutt, Ashlee Blackwell, Anne-Marie Desjardins, Javier O'Neil-Ortiz, Samantha Kolesnik, Maxime Bey-Rozet, Kelsey Cameron, and all the filmmakers who agreed to be interviewed. Acknowledgments are due as well to Dr. Adam Lowenstein and Dr. Neepa Majumdar for providing academic support and writing letters on behalf of the project, and Lauren Collister at Hillman Library for copyright consultation. The current website space (2021-present) was generously financed by the Department of English at the University of Pittsburgh, and the 2018 launch was supported by the Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies (GSWS) Program at the University of Pittsburgh.

Logo & banner design by Aimee Dan.

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