Luella Miller, illustration by Peter Newell (1903)

A while ago a friend lent me an excellent anthology: The Darker Sex: Tales of the Supernatural and Macabre by Victorian Women Writers. It sounded so far up my street I expected to find it waiting for me on the doorstep as I scurried home to read it.

As you might imagine, it includes a lot of creepy old mansions, brave governesses, and ghostly women wandering around in white gowns. I love that stuff. But towards the back I was delighted to discover something unusual: a Marxist Feminist vampire story.

The story was Luella Miller, published in Mary Wilkins Freeman‘s 1903 short story collection The Wind In The Rose Bush. While the events are definitely supernatural, Luella is more of a metaphorical than literal vampire, mesmerising and leeching the life force from her victims by draining their energy rather than their blood.

Her fellow townsfolk, men and women, old and young, literally work themselves to death in her service. One after another they become obsessed with caring for her, doing her washing and sewing, cooking her meals, making her coffee, working until they become ill and eventually die, when they are replaced by another willing servant.

The story is narrated several decades on by Lydia Anderson, the last person alive who knew Luella; she didn’t succumb to her mysterious power. As Lydia puts it: “There was somethin’ about Luella Miller seemed to draw the heart right out of you, but she didn’t draw it out of me.” She tells the story of all the people whom Luella drained of life, including her sister-in-law Lily:

This Lily Miller had been hardly past her first youth, and a most robust and blooming woman, rosy-cheeked, with curls of strong, black hair overshadowing round, candid temples and bright dark eyes. It was not six months after she had taken up her residence with her sister-in-law that her rosy colour faded and her pretty curves became wan hollows. White shadows began to show in the black rings of her hair, and the light died out of her eyes, her features sharpened, and there were pathetic lines at her mouth, which yet wore always an expression of utter sweetness and even happiness. She was devoted to her sister; there was no doubt that she loved her with her whole heart, and was perfectly content in her service. It was her sole anxiety lest she should die and leave her alone…

…all the time Luella wa’n’t liftin’ her finger and poor Lily didn’t get any care except what the neighbours gave her, and Luella eat up everythin’ that was carried in for Lily. I had it real straight that she did. Luella used to just sit and cry and do nothin’. She did act real fond of Lily, and she pined away considerable, too. There was those that thought she’d go into a decline herself. But after Lily died, her Aunt, Abby Mixter came, and then Luella picked up and grew as fat and rosy as ever.

Unlike many fictional vampires, Luella does not seem to intend any harm against her victims. She is indifferent, almost oblivious. Her supernatural ability to enslave her neighbours does not seem to be within her control; instead, it is more like a poisonous vapour that surrounds her, simultaneously enchanting and slowly destroying them.

Another interesting aspect of the story is the emphasis on Luella’s infantile need. It is not simply that she will not care for herself, forcing others to look after her, but that she cannot. She is entirely helpless, so that when the town finally begins to keep its distance, she herself begins to weaken.

In her article Dreadful Yet Irresistible Luella Miller: Horror in the Absence of Self (PDF), Chiho Nakagawa sees Luella Miller as a feminist parable about the suppression of agency and independence in the feminine ideal taken to it’s logical, monstrous, conclusion:

By spreading her dependency and helplessness into others, Luella makes others experience her dreadful state… Functioning as an addictive substance, Luella Miller lets us see how fearful it is to be a feminine woman without her own self.

Mary Wilkins Freeman

I think this is an interesting take, as if Luella exists only as an object of others’ self destructive love, with no subjective self, no agency or control. It is this that makes her state “dreadful”. She is parasitic, overwhelming and consuming her host, but unable to survive without them.

Without the contrasting courage, agency and practicality of “hale and hearty” 87 year old narrator Lydia Anderson, the story could seem to be a misogynist attack on wealthy women.

But  I agree with Lynda L. Hinkle and her paper Bloodsucking Structures: American Female Vampires as Class Structure Critique, when she describes the story as: “a stinging critique of a declining but still prevalent social class structure that churned out a large, useless upper class of women whose job it was to be beautiful and consume.”

I read the story as a comment on the economic and social structures which manufactured useless creatures like Luella, wealthy women who were prevented from acquiring ideas, skills, purpose or independence. The same structures, while fetishising helplessness as the supreme feminine virtue on the one hand, forced countless other women (and men) to work themselves into an early grave in the service of their betters.

One thing to be aware of when watching any of Ken Russell’s films is that you will spend at least three quarters of the running time saying to yourself, ‘What THE HELL am I watching.’

Mr Russell’s The Lair of the White Worm (1988) is so bizarre that… well, let’s just take a look at the notes I made the last time I watched it:

‘How do you spot a snake vampire cultist lady? She’ll be playing snakes and ladders. In thigh high boots.’

‘Gratuitous historically inaccurate nun torture.’

‘Where IS Peter Capaldi keeping that mongoose?’

Very loosely based on Bram Stoker’s original story, the film takes an olde worlde horror setup and adds a fantastic lady monster (Lady Sylvia Marsh, as played by Amanda Donohoe – a saucy aristocratic predator who thinks white three corner hats are casual wear) and a high pile of hallucinatory WTF.

(Unfortunately, Bram Stoker’s The Lair of the White Worm is not a great read. It’s got potential – Lovecraftian horrors stirring beneath the English countryside – but it’s clunky as hell. And contains so much sexism and racism that it reads like an unsubtle parody of a Victorian horror tale.)

Peter Capaldi plays Angus, an archaeology student who finds the skull of some kind of monster in the garden of a B&B in Derbyshire. The B&B is run by two sisters – Eve and Mary (Catherine Oxenberg and Sammi Davis. Note the unsubtle choice of names) whose mother has disappeared in mysterious circumstances.

Then Lord D’Ampton (Hugh Grant) invites them to his ancestral hall for an 80s folk/rock party, where he re-enacts the legendary tale of an ancestor of his, who killed a giant worm (guess what colour it was.) that was terrorising the village some centuries previously.

(The beast that his ancestor had the squabble with was the D’Ampton Worm. As in the Lambton Worm. Both Stoker’s and Russell’s version of ‘White Worm’ take place in Derbyshire and not Durham. There were a lot of worm monsters about in the olden days, apparently.)

This gets Angus wondering – could his new-found skull have something to do with the one in the tale? Lord D’Ampton is foppishly sceptical. And then Lady Sylvia slinks into view. And spits venom on a crucifix. I haven’t seen Downton Abbey for ages, but I’m pretty sure that her TV namesake is not in the habit of doing such things.

What follows is an unsettling campfest. Lady Sylvia does some horrible things (that poor boy scout) but she’s also horribly fascinating. I don’t know if she was meant to be a satire on the ‘sexy sex ladies who are EVIIILL’ trope or an unsubtle parody of 80s decadence (see Kate Beaton’s marvellous Dracula cartoon for a nice pisstake of how this trope came up in Stoker’s most famous tale). But either way Ms Donohue looks to be really enjoying herself.

Eve and Mary are sketchily drawn characters – it transpires that Eve is a virgin, which makes her sacrifice fodder for the great big worm beast living under Sylvia’s mansion (paging Doctor Freud). Lord D’Ampton has some rude dreams and tries to fix things with his super posh man skillz. Eventually, Angus has to face vamped up Sylvia alone. Yep, Peter Capaldi is the Final Girl.

He does a bit of snake charming with a kilt and a set of bagpipes. And a mongoose. If anyone’s concerned that Doctor Who-loving kids might come across Malcolm Tucker’s epic swears by accident online, wait until they get a load of this.

Lair of the White Worm is basically awesome trash. Or it’s trash cinema French kissing arthouse cinema down a dingy alleyway. And sometimes that’s what you want.

• Emily McQuade lives in North London. She enjoys finding weird old films on YouTube and watching other weird old films at the BFI. When not thinking about films, she enjoys books, gigs and making up elaborate conspiracy theories involving squirrels. She can also be found on Twitter: @missmcq.

The nights have drawn in, there’s a chill in the air and it’s that time of year where I like to do what I, admittedly, like to do pretty much the rest of the year: gather the family around a nice cosy horror film and scare the bejeezus out of ourselves.

I’m especially fortunate, living in Brighton, that there’s a thriving scene of horror fanatics, including the founders of the Classic Horror Campaign, whose raison d’etre is to bring back British horror to our TV screens and who run a brilliant occasional horror film festival called Frighten Brighton.

Last year they ran a day of screenings that traversed the decades from the Thirties to the Seventies. It was fascinating to watch an intricate snapshot of women in horror unfolding before me, reflective of Hollywood’s complex relationship with sexuality, equality, objectification and empowerment.

In just the five films screened – Mad Love, The Cat People, Them, Plague of the Zombies and Phantasm – a gamut of femininity was presented, from virginal innocent to sexual seductress, strident powerful woman to flailing damsel in distress, repressed lesbian to swooning romantic.

In almost all these films there is a notable slide towards objectification; the woman’s body as a object of desire for the monster or mad scientist, the virginal sacrificial lamb, or the slutty cannon fodder helpless to avert her fate. This is reflective of the wider problems within a genre that still churns out women’s bodies to be fondled, fucked, kidnapped and sliced up.

The brilliant, feminist-principled Women in Horror Recognition Month campaign¹ recognises this difficult relationship with horror. Their campaign illustrates that it can be one of the most objectifying genres, but is also an important genre for exploring a vast array of issues – power, psyche, politics, social constructs, war, violence, gender – and therefore that it’s important that women’s roles are recognised and supported.

They provide a platform for women directors, writers, actors and aficionados to get their work seen and to address issues within the industry, as well as misogyny in the genre. They’ve also used social media, blogging and film festivals to explore what horror has to contribute to the female narrative.

It’s a massive area to dig into. There’s been a swathe of material written about women as survivors in horror films – they occupy a myriad of roles: the Final Girl, the matriarch (all hail Ellen Ripley!), the victim who finds her nerve and the avenging angel survivor – frequently a victim of sexual violence.

It’s a rich seam to explore, and there’s a whole other vein to mine exploring the ones who live and the ones who die in horror movies, and what this represents metaphorically, culturally and politically. Equally, there’s a huge area to address when it comes to representations of race in horror – for example, why the last one to live is often a white woman (think Night of the Living Dead). But what about when women themselves are the stuff of nightmares?

Women aren’t always the victims in horror, and whilst there have been significant problems in the history of the genre, it has also been willing to explore areas of female experience that other genres just weren’t ready for, often at times when it would have been deeply contentious to make a film that discussed, say, sexuality or sexual violence, let alone the fact that you’d still be hard pushed to find a film about what a nightmare getting your period can be! There are numerous examples of fantastic writing and performances in horror that explore the feminine diabolique whilst also touching on real world issues underneath.

1936’s Dracula’s Daughter is a fine example of how horror can reflect both the cultural perception of women and the abiding social currents, as well as exploring key issues for women through the figure of a female monster. It was produced as part of the Universal stable of horror films, following directly on the heels of Tod Browning’s Dracula.

Gloria Holden plays the troubled and lonely Countess Zaleska, desperate to cure herself of vampirism. She tries both the occult and psychiatry before giving in to her bloodlust. The film is a Gothic delight, and Holden is dark and intense, quietly terrifying and tragic at the same time.

The film barely contains its sapphic undertones. Zaleska lingers over her female victims, covets their bodies and beauty, and prowls the streets at night in search of blood. The countess is very much a creature of her time in cinematic history, reflecting both the notion that homosexuality was considered a psychiatric malaise, and the censorship movements of the 1930s, with the Hays Code being introduced just a few years before. This was the first regulation code for cinema, reflecting religious and conservative views that any deviant behaviour had to be hidden, including sexual acts, prostitution, white slavery and homosexuality. The film is also a shining example of the demonisation of homosexuality, the portrayal of lesbians as predatory and dangerous and this is reflected in the scene where Zaleska attacks a young model, Lili.

1942’s Cat People likewise has a female monster at its heart. Irena moves to New York from Serbia, falling in love with the charming Oliver and marrying him. Underneath the surface, however, is the secret that she is descended from a wild people who can turn themselves into cats. Irena seems convinced that if she gives in to her passions she will lose control and turn into a cat herself – and her marriage becomes strained by a lack of intimacy.

Again, there is subtext around psychology, sexual repression and the power in a woman unleashing her sexuality. There is also a queer subtext as Irena stalks her husband’s mistress, Alice, and her inner cat is unleashed, suggesting that the repression she felt was her sexuality rather than her lack of ardour for her husband. All this is neatly tucked away from the heavy-handed censors, but easily readable.

Horror provided a way to express and explore female sexuality as complex and powerful – although again, it’s a sign of the times that it was also dangerous and deadly. Both films provided bold representations of female sex and sexuality at a time when it just wouldn’t have been possible to do so in a straightforward feature film. Although the subtext was ultimately tragic and fatal, it was a fair reflection of both the turmoil of coming to terms with being queer and the risk of society’s response if the fact was made public. Horror was the perfect cypher.

Moving forward, horror has continued to provide the perfect medium to explore these themes. The female monster has been a great platform for exploring puberty and all its commensurate delights: it’s all blood, mayhem and rage, after all. Think Carrie at the prom, exploding with fear, confusion and violence at her tormentors, triggered by her menstruation. Think Ginger in Ginger Snaps (2000) – first period, first full moon, morphing to discover her sense of identity, her confidence and her sexual liberation.

Both Carrie and Ginger Snaps are reflective of the fact that we are also still culturally trained to view periods and puberty with a sense of revulsion. There are several key moments in Ginger Snaps where adult characters view menstruation with disgust, implying that the girls should be ashamed of even speaking about it. Our bodies are the centre of the change in puberty, and this is interpreted into a kind of body horror, where the confusion, pain, hormones of puberty are projected outwards.

Carrie acquires powers to impact on the world around her to be able to make herself visible, powerful and a force to be reckoned with for the first time. Ginger starts to pay attention to and receive attention from her peers – she becomes a sexual being as well as a creature of rage. Bianca Nielson’s fascinating article Something’s Wrong, Like More Than You Being Female delves even further into Ginger Snaps’ representation of puberty and is well worth a read.

What is great about the film is the way that Brigitte and Ginger deconstruct their experiences together, sharing their views of their society, their bodies, and of their relationships. It’s notable how isolated Brigitte becomes when she can no longer share Ginger’s experiences. Although these conversations revolve around the fantastical, trying to deal with Ginger’s ‘wolfing out’, they’re also painfully familiar.

The female monster also allows us opportunity to address expectations of the female body. Hammer has a lot to answer for when it comes to heaving bosoms and frail victims in flimsy nighties, but in Countess Dracula (1971) it also addressed ageing. In particular, it addressed the fear of no longer meeting the expectation that women should be beautiful, and the anxiety that to age means to no longer be desirable.

The countess, fearing the loss of her young lovers, takes to bathing in the blood of virgins to retain her youth. Played by horror queen Ingrid Pitt, she was also rooted in the real life Elizabeth Bathory, who was imprisoned for murdering over 80 women and allegedly bathing in their blood. Countess Dracula is a silly, campy horror film, but it also manages to contain moments of poignancy, especially as the countess is forced to face her fate – old, hated and done for. It’s not a cheery message, but it’s a fair reflection of the cultural obsession with youth and beauty.

The girl monster also allows us to explore the idea that what’s outside doesn’t necessarily reflect what’s inside – ideas around appearances that fall outside the norms of society, the idea that ‘the other’ isn’t necessarily horrific, and the idea that monsters, conversely, can come in appealing packages. This is especially powerful when it challenges perceived notions of womanhood and beauty.

In Return of the Living Dead 3, reluctant zombie Julie bodily punishes herself because she’s no longer wholesome and good. She uses pain and piercing to control herself and to make her outside appearance reflect the badness she feels within, self-harming, cutting, modifying and piercing until she loses control. Again, on the surface it’s a silly film, but it’s a powerful scene when we begin to unpick the body as an object of aberration for young women. When Julie modifies herself she appears dangerous and sinister, but ultimately she’s still Julie underneath – she’s still a young woman mortified by herself.

This issue is also brilliantly addressed in last year’s breakthrough horror American Mary. Filmed by twins Jen and Sylvia Soska, and from their point of view explicitly feminist, it deals with the world of extreme body modification – carried out by trainee doctor Mary.

The modified women are deeply challenging representations of femininity and beauty. Their appearances are shocking and extreme, although underneath, they are caring and gentle despite seeming monstrous. This is exemplified by the character Ruby Realdoll, who desires to become sexless and doll-like. Her body has been cut and sliced to become featureless – monstrous to the accepted notion of beauty, but beautiful to her and vital to her self acceptance. The modification has dire consequences and accurately reflects how society rejects the other, often violently.

Mary herself – the ‘normal’ girl – is herself made monstrous, violent and increasingly amoral. In part, this is due to the societal pressures on her, including the fact that surgery is a boys’ club from which she is excluded as a young woman. It is also in part caused by an awful attack carried out by someone who presents themselves as the nice guy – nice job, caring profession, well respected, known to Mary. It’s a very challenging scene, mostly because the directors don’t allow you to look away, and because they refuse to fetishise it to make it more bearable. Horror reflects reality – as the directors themselves said, there are no cutaways in real life.

Importantly, though, Mary is also not a particularly nice person. She looks stunning, but she is not what we expect. She is sharp edged, cold, and self-absorbed; neither a fluffy air-headed beauty nor a bookish high achiever. Horror allows us to subvert some accepted tropes and often spits cultural expectations and stereotypes back in our faces. The fact that American Mary has generated so much discussion about what is and isn’t feminist cinema is fantastic.

Mainstream cinema is still deeply prescriptive about how women can act, talk and be – the girl monster refuses to be chained by these prescriptions. Horror is a brilliant, bloody palate for our real issues, and as a result it’s provided a forum for us to to talk about being a woman in a way that other genres could only dream of.

Of course we should enjoy the thrill of being scared. Of course we should immerse ourselves in the delight of a silly campy horror or a terrifying splatterfest – and no, I’m not suggesting that every horror fest should be an exercise in cinematic analytical criticism. But I love our sinister sisters. They’ve been reclaiming the night for decades.

• Ruth Sullivan is a children’s charity worker by day and avid gamer and consumer of pop culture by night. A former teacher and history nerd, she blogs in a personal capacity at i-conoclastic and is part of the reviews team for Close-Up Film. She tweets as @littlespy.

1. Ed’s Tiny Note: We were ambassadors for the 2013 WiHM campaign, and you can read the blogfest we curated for it here.

According to Eli Roth, it was a conscious choice for the first example of nudity in Hostel II (2007) to be that of a man. Following the credit sequence and a quick catch up with Hostel survivor Paxton (Jay Hernandez), we’re introduced to our victims.

Far from the seedy lights of Amsterdam, these beautiful college-age women are in a life drawing class in Rome. Within thirty seconds, the male nude is replaced by a female model, Axelle (Vera Jordanova), who disrobes to the sound of audible gasps. Her gaze lingers on our main character, Beth (Lauren German). Beth grits her teeth, her forehead puckered into a tense frown as she begins to sketch.

“Jeans, no heels,” is what Beth says when asked if she’s packed for their upcoming trip to Prague with friends Whitney and Lorna. Beth may as well be called Sidney or Laurie: she is masculinised, her relationship with the female model Axelle is eroticised (Whitney even jokingly refers to Axelle as Beth’s ‘girlfriend’) and it is revealed that Beth keeps her father on an allowance following the death of her wealthy mother.

Beth and Axelle’s encounters are carefully structured to be titillating, and yet Beth’s sexuality is never openly discussed. Compared to the view of male homosexuality depicted in the first Hostel film, we’re in full-on homophobic fratboy territory here: lesbians are hot (as long as they’re young, slim and not too gay), and gay men are scary and have to be repressed.

Hostel II differs to Hostel in that we get a deeper understanding of how the whole operation works, focalised through two American clients, Todd and Stuart. “This isn’t like going to a whorehouse,” Todd explains to reluctant Stuart after they successfully bid a collective $100,000 on securing Whitney and Beth as their torture victims. “You can’t just back out.”

Roth works hard to ensure the viewer feels an iota of sympathy for Stuart: he is de-masculinised by a practical and demanding wife, he lacks charisma, and he has to be cajoled into the Hostel experience by the powerhouse Todd. Todd compares their first kill to losing their virginity; Stuart pensively asks, “Do you think we’re sick?”

“We’re the normal ones,’ Todd replies, taking a deep sniff of cocaine. As they draw up to the factory, a mournful serenade plays as we see the doubt flicker across Stuart’s face. Roth asks us to feel sympathy for someone who has essentially been peer-pressured into paying vast sums of money to torture a woman – who intentionally resembles his wife, no less – to death.

Hostel twists itself into a game of privilege top trumps. The rich are powerful and the powerful are rich: the notion of power, and an individual’s lack of control over their own fate, presents a contemporary spin on the 18th century fear of the aristocracy, often portrayed through a vampiric allegory along the lines of Dracula.

Hostel II even includes a female client who pays hard cash to writhe – naked, naturally – in an Elizabeth Bathory-esque tub as the blood of virginal Lorna showers down upon her bare skin. It’s interesting to note that this is one of the few onscreen deaths of torture victims: the franchise often shies away from the so-called money shot (another grotesque connection between torture flicks and pornography).

Additionally, the fact that the only female client – aside from a stern silver-haired horsey type who unsuccessfully bids on the trio – chooses to murder her victim in this rather specifically vain method reinforces the assertion that for women, beauty is a matter of life and death. (This is also articulated in Hostel when the infamous “eyeball” woman catches sight of her mutilated face and throws herself from the arms of safety to certain death under a speeding train).

The fate of Whitney is grisly: she is made up ‘for the client’ in a corset and smudged, clownish make up. Todd gets cold feet, and so she is offered around and sold to the highest bidder. Sensitive Stuart finds his sea legs and takes her on as a warm up for Beth, who is dressed in a suit and made to even further resemble his wife.

How does Beth survive? She seduces him, naturally, then chops his dick off and pays her way out because she’s stinkin’ freakin’ rich. Let’s not forget her place, though: after negotiating with the Alan Sugar of the Hostel world, she is bent over a table and tattooed on the small of her back, rather than her bicep, ankle or, oh I don’t know, anywhere on her body that wouldn’t liken the process to being fucked from behind.

In a world in which The Human Centipede exists (and actually manages to generate enough revenue to produce a sequel), the so-called “torture porn” movement seems to have finally tipped over the edge into self-parody. The golden age for splatter flicks was 2002-2007. Since then, things seemed to have waned.

The biggest horror titles of 2012 suggest a rekindled preference for things that go bump in the night, with poltergeists, paranormal happenings and possession pictures enjoying a rise in popularity. The washed-up sequels of classic Splat Pack originals, such as Hostel III and Saw ad infinitum, are slinking off into the background – and good riddance.

• By day, Alice Slater is a writer and bookseller from London. By night, she is a horror film addict who always keeps the lights on. She writes for Mslexia and Drunken Werewolf, and she blogs about veg*n high jinx at SmokinTofu.com.

It’s unsurprising to learn that the big names in the so-called “torture porn” movement are all blokes. Known as the Splat Pack, James Wan (Saw, Dead Silence), Alexandre Aja (The Hills Have Eyes), Eli Roth (Cabin Fever, Hostel), Greg McLean (Wolf Creek), Rob Zombie (House of 1000 Corpses, Halloween) and Darren Lynn Bousman (Saw II-IV) all specialise in a brand of horror that leans heavily on sadism and graphic onscreen gore – the more creative and toe-curlingly disgusting, the better.

Eli Roth met a wave of criticism for the gender roles in Hostel (2005), a film in which all the women are either sex workers, hypersexualised and morally repugnant, strung out on enough narcotics to render them completely obsolete as anything other than onscreen ass, or all of the above (with the exception of two Japanese twentysomething tourists, who are portrayed as giggling and coquettish – the stereotypical western idealisation of Japanese women as schoolgirlish and subservient).

Roth, being a sensitive chap at heart, created Hostel Part II as a response – kind of like Neil Marshall hopping from Dog Soldiers to The Descent. Nice try, Eli. The gender politics are equally terrible in Hostel II. I know – “I can’t believe it!” said absolutely no one.

Now, horror isn’t the most feminist genre, but it’s my genre of choice. Female nudity, themes of female virginity and scenes of a sexual nature are prevalent in horror, from chaste Janet Leigh’s infamous shower scene to the chesticular fireworks of Piranha 3DD. Sex and death – the circle of life, as Sir Elton calls it – are intrinsically linked, and often sit well side by side. We all know what the phrase “torture porn” refers to, but there’s a problematic duality created by suggesting that sadistic violence and sexual gratification are titillating in the same way. It reduces the whole horror genre to something akin to Bizarre magazine: Blood! Tits! Tits covered in blooood!

Hostel opens with an unsympathetic bunch of lads on tour as they weave through the streets of Amsterdam. The group laugh at sensitive, still-getting-over-his-ex Josh (Derek Richardson) for suggesting they take a break from smoking pot and chasing skirt to check out a museum or two. Then they fistbump and hi-five their way through the Red Light District. It leaves us all feeling well primed for the next hour and a half of blood, guts and dismemberment because they are quite possibly the most unlikeable people in the history of humanity (apart from Jeremy Clarkson, who retains his crown of The Worst).

“Paying to go into a room to do whatever you want to someone isn’t exactly a turn-on,” says Sensitive Josh, and we all cock our heads and recognise that he is definitely going to die. The anti-sex work comparison drawn between prostitution and the premise of Hostel – the rich paying high prices to torture and kill others – doesn’t go unnoticed.

Loutish and drunk, the lads are denied entrance to their hostel. As a rain of glass bottles smashes around their feet, an eastern European tourist offers refuge in his hostel room. Here, Sensitive Josh awkwardly explains the definition of ‘clitoris’ (“Women have it? It’s like right near the labia? Like, it hangs?”) and talk naturally turns to sex.

“Looking for girls?” their new friend Alex asks. He then creepily shows them photos of himself having sex with women “so hot, you won’t believe it”. He explains that the women of Bratislava “go crazy for any foreigner. You just… take them.”

After hearing one of the most chilling phrases in the history of patriarchy, off the threesome go to Bratislava. A creep on the train confirms that eastern European women are smokin’ hot and DTF. He then places a hand on Sensitive Josh’s thigh and Josh reacts as though he’s just had his Achilles tendons cut (and we can be accurate here because that is exactly what happens to him approximately twenty minutes later).

This brief moment of casual homophobia is not to be overlooked: Josh, the sensitive one, the most respectful and the least sexually repugnant of the three, later places his hand on this man’s thigh in a sincere yet hesitant apology – moments after being called a “faggot” by Paxton. “I would have done the same thing at your age,” the man says, regarding Josh’s extreme and aggressive reaction to the hand-on-thigh moment from before. “It’s not easy, but from my experience, choosing to have a family was the right choice for me. Now I have my little girl, who means more to me than anything. But you should do what’s right for you.”

Hold on, what? It’s no coincidence that the next shot is of Josh ‘making his choice’ – on the brink of having sex with an incredibly attractive woman. Because of course, sexuality is a choice and the option of having a family is strictly for those that choose ‘straight’.

Anyway, the hostel is everything they imagined and more: slender young women shoot them come-hither looks, are totally chill to hang out in the spa with their tits out, and laugh at their inane jokes. Reader, our trio of lads go dancing, pop pills and eventually fuck their roommates to Willow’s Song, the alluring siren’s song performed by Britt Eckland as she seduces the copper in 1973’s hit cult flick The Wicker Man (incidentally, another movie about a community seducing and eventually murdering outsiders).

The problem? These are not sexually liberated tourists, having a laugh and shagging a bunch of goons for the fun of it. They, like Willow of The Wicker Man, are duplicitous: the sex is the primer for the betrayal, because we all know that sexually liberated women are up to no good.

• Come back tomorrow for Part 2, in which Alice looks at Hostel II – and its more prominent female characters – in more detail… EDIT: Read Part 2 here.
• By day, Alice Slater is a writer and bookseller from London. By night, she is a horror film addict who always keeps the lights on. She writes for Mslexia and Drunken Werewolf, and she blogs about veg*n high jinx at SmokinTofu.com.

Everybody has an opinion about Quentin Tarantino. Is he racist for using the ‘N’ word so often in his scripts? Is he a genius, or a copycat? Is he some sort of sicko, in love with violence for its own sake? Can he act? (No, he can’t.)

But underneath the gore, profanity, and wooden cameos, is there anything for feminists to celebrate? As unlikely as it sounds, I think there is.

Tarantino has written some pretty amazing parts for women. He puts them on screen, not just as eye candy or the girlfriends of the heroes, but as people with stories of their own to tell. They know how to defend themselves and their friends, and they do their own stunts. They fight (and dance) barefoot, and aren’t afraid to get their hands dirty.

This isn’t to say that the man himself is a feminist icon, or that his films are entirely unproblematic. Some of the violence perpetrated against the women characters has an uncomfortably voyeuristic feel to it, and every now and again his films feel more like depictions of his own sexual fantasies rather than true fiction. He professes a love for ‘strong women’ (he grew up with a single mother), but this sexualisation of women characters does call his motives into question.

It’s worth bearing in mind though, that these characters haven’t sprung new and fully formed from Tarantino’s imagination – they’re loving reimaginations of the deadly but beautiful women of the B-movies and exploitation flicks Tarantino watched as a youngster. These women were usually a bit too ‘empowered’ for their own good, and often ended up getting their comeuppance. Dodgy source material, sure, but Tarantino regularly flips this trope on its head. The rapists, murderers and crooks in his movies rarely escape without feeling the wrath of their female ‘victims’.

Try watching Zoe Bell playing ‘Ship’s Mast’ at 100mph without feeling a heart-swelling sense of sisterly pride. And I don’t know a woman who has seen Pulp Fiction and not thought Mia Wallace would be a pretty sassy best friend (if it weren’t for the cocaine abuse).

As feminists, we sometimes have to dig about in the mud of misogyny to find some empowering gold dust. In honour of that, here’s a rundown of the baddest, sassiest women in QT’s weird world.

Mia Wallace (Pulp Fiction)

Oh, Mia Wallace. The woman who spawned a million copycat hairstyles. She doesn’t kick any ass, except in a twist contest, but she’s a seriously cool customer.

Did her husband Marsellus really throw a man over a balcony for giving her a foot-rub? Maybe not, but it’s easy to see why he might. Everybody in the movie is afraid of him, and perhaps so is Mia (she asks Vincent not to tell him about the overdose), but she seems to do pretty much what she wants anyway.

She flirts with Vincent over dinner, and we never find out what might have happened between them had she not mistaken his heroin for cocaine. Something of an enigma, she’s a sassy, straight-talking woman with a preference for silence over chatter (“That’s when you know you’ve found somebody special. When you can just shut the fuck up for a minute and comfortably enjoy the silence.”) This combination of beauty and brains seems to have a profound effect on the men who meet her, and enables her to survive in her world populated by crooks and murderers.

Jackie Brown (Jackie Brown)

Jackie Brown is a black woman in her forties, and the star of the movie that bears her name as its title. In the youth-obsessed, whitewashed culture of Hollywood, this is exciting and unusual in itself (depressing, huh?).

The legendary Pam Grier plays a flight attendant, who works for a crappy airline. She makes some extra bucks on the side by smuggling in ill-gotten cash for a gun-dealer named Ordell, until she gets busted.

As she says: “Well, I’ve flown seven million miles. And I’ve been waiting on people almost 20 years. The best job I could get after my bust was Cabo Air, which is the worst job you can get in this industry. I make about sixteen thousand, with retirement benefits that ain’t worth a damn. And now with this arrest hanging over my head, I’m scared. If I lose my job I gotta start all over again, but I got nothing to start over with. I’ll be stuck with whatever I can get. And that shit is scarier than Ordell.”

But Jackie is a survivor in the truest sense of the word. When things look bad for her, she takes matters into her own hands, using her brains and courage to rip off the gangsters and escape a jail sentence in one outrageously brave scheme.

She plans everything herself, knows who she can trust, and isn’t afraid to turn a gun on a man who she knows to be a killer. She’s a smart, older, black woman who, despite being a total fox (Foxy Brown, geddit?), doesn’t use her sexuality to get ahead. With media portrayal of black women usually relying heavily on sexualized stereotypes, Jackie Brown is a breath of fresh air.

The Bride / Beatrix Kiddo (Kill Bill)

When people talk about ‘empowered’ female characters in Tarantino movies, Beatrix Kiddo is who they’re usually thinking of. The woman is dragged through hell backwards, and still manages to exact bloody revenge on everybody who hurt her, or kept her from her child.

The trope of the vengeful woman is not a particularly progressive one. But Beatrix Kiddo is no ‘bunny boiler’. She was shot in the head and left for dead, raped whilst in a coma, and led to believe that her unborn child had died. As much as we might find the gore and violence hard to stomach, it’s hard to argue with her motives. From Beatrix herself: “It’s mercy, compassion, and forgiveness I lack. Not rationality.”

She’s a woman who knows how to protect herself, and believes her life is worth fighting for. Even when she’s been buried alive, it’s still impossible to see her as a victim. And she’s not the only strong woman in the film (although she’s the only one you’re rooting for).

The women in Kill Bill are scrappy. The fights between The Bride and other female ex-members of the Deadly Viper Assasination Squad aren’t sexy ‘girl fights’. They fight with skill, knocking seven shades of shit out of each other with terrifying ferocity. They’re fighting for their lives, and it isn’t pretty.

But The Bride isn’t just violent and vengeful. She’s a mother who longs to be reunited with her child. Somehow, this duality doesn’t cause the dissonance you would expect. She’s a three-dimensional character, more than capable of being many different things at once. The shock of that highlights just how rare it is in a Hollywood film.

Zoe Bell, Kim and Abernathy (Death Proof)

Death Proof is a film of two halves, linked by one gross, murderous ex-stunt driver. In the first half, he stalks and kills a group of beautiful friends with his car. But we know that in Tarantino’s world, creeps don’t get away with things like that. When he attempts to do the same thing with another group of women, he makes a fatal error by messing with a stuntwoman, stunt driver, and their super-cool make-up artist friend.

I have some serious qualms about the first half, as the violence perpetrated against the victims is fetishised to an almost ludicrous degree. But things take a turn for the better when Zoe Bell and her pals (played by Tracie Thorns and Rosario Dawson) arrive on screen.

Zoe Bell is a real-life stuntwoman, who plays herself in this movie. When you see her perched on the bonnet of a car being driven at 100 mph, that’s really her, and she’s really doing that. Which is wicked cool.

Stuntman Mike grows tired of chasing these women who refuse to be victims, but they haven’t finished with him. Instead of letting him get away, they go after him. And their intentions are clear, with Abernathy declaring “Let’s kill this bastard.”

In the real world, women rarely receive justice for the violence they experience. Although this vigilante-style justice is probably not what we want for our own society (however satisfying it might be), watching it on screen is incredibly cathartic. When Abernathy puts the final boot into Stuntman Mike, the urge to cheer is almost overwhelming.

Shoshanna (Inglourious Basterds)

Shoshanna is the self-styled “face of Jewish vengeance” in Inglourious Basterds, Tarantino’s ‘creative’ re-imagining of World War Two. She escapes the ‘Jew Hunter’, who kills her whole family whilst they are in hiding. When we next see her, she’s running a cinema in occupied Paris, where the Nazis want to screen their latest propaganda film.

As painful as this is to her, she sees it as an opportunity to exact revenge for what was done to her family, and other Jewish families across Europe. Her single-minded resolve, and calm in the face of extraordinary pressure, is the perfect foil to the disastrous exploits of the Basterds.

Women in war films are usually relegated to the roles of tearful wife or showgirl. In Inglourious Basterds, it is a woman who changes the course of the war, and thus history. This epitomises one of the key attributes of Tarantino’s women: agency. They make decisions for themselves that change their lives, and the lives of others around them.

Of course, we know that women made a huge and valuable contribution to the war effort, in many different ways. It’s just a shame that it took a film with a fictionalised version of history to depict a woman having any sort of meaningful involvement in the conflict.

So, there you have it. Those are my own favourite Tarantino women. Broomhilda from Django Unchained didn’t quite make it in, as I’ve only seen it once. But I think she should get an honourable mention here, if only for surviving.

Obviously, Tarantino’s movies are far from perfect feminism-wise, and the man himself doesn’t have a great track record when it comes to saying sexist douchebag things. But with so few interesting or positive representations of women on-screen, we should celebrate the few characters who break the mould. Especially if they make us leave the cinema feeling a little cooler, a little braver and a little more willing to stand up for ourselves.

• Lydia Harris likes to think of herself as a grownup Wednesday Addams. Her pasty complexion is the result of watching movies and snacking during the day with the curtains closed, instead of going out to enjoy ‘fresh air’. She tweets as @lydiasquidia, and blogs (infrequently) about pop culture and feminism at myswimsuitissues.blogspot.com.

Vampires have appeared in various incarnations throughout the history of cinema. From lonely Nosferatu, to Dracula, to vampire cowboys, vampire teenagers¹ and, erm, vampire motorcycles.²

For a stylish, slinky and subversive depiction of a bloodsucker, Daughters of Darkness (directed by Harry Kümel, 1971) is well worth a look. It’s a hypnotic cocktail of horror and arthouse. The DVD has a campy Hammer-style cover and the tag line, ‘An erotic nightmare of vampire lust!’ Subtle. For some reason, there were a lot of lesbian vampire movies released in the 70s. However anyone looking for straight-up naughtiness will be disappointed with Daughters of Darkness. The vampires are beautiful women, but it’s not about titillation. It’s a lot weirder than that.

The story: a pair of newlyweds arrive at an out-of-season hotel in chilly Ostend. The bride – Valerie – is dressed all in white and appears to be the picture of naïve innocence. The groom – Stefan – has a handsome face, but there’s something not quite right about his smile. It almost looks like a sneer.

Their relationship appears to be a bit, well, peculiar. She’s concerned that he hasn’t told his mother about their marriage. He seems to be in no hurry to do so. Prior to their unscheduled stop-in at this beautiful but lonely place, they have both confessed that they don’t love one another and both seem okay with this. And then, during dinner, the sapphic vampire aristocrat arrives with her assistant/lover.

The Countess Bathory, played with otherworldly grace and just a hint of vulnerability by Delphine Seyrig, tells the couple that she is a descendant of the infamously murderous Hungarian countess. (A real historical character and template for the ‘glamorous female vampire’ archetype, Elizabeth Bathory was supposed to have been a serial killer but apparently wasn’t really into drinking virgins’ blood. That was a rumour that came about years after her death. The real Countess was never a vampire, just as Catherine the Great probably never even got to first base with any horses.)

Her loving description of the horrors her ancestor inflicted on young ladies gets Stefan a bit excited. Valerie is horrified. At first. And then the couple are drawn into the vampire’s world. In which the notions of victim and monster get turned sideways. And then the film briefly shows us Stefan’s ‘Mother’. (As the the none-more-seventies voiceover man enthuses in the film’s trailer, ‘She’s something else!’).

And there are some deaths. Including death by bowl.

Yes, bowl. And a lovely crystal bowl it is too. And someone knocks an entire lobster on the floor in the act. Such decadence! The film could be read as a mediation on power and relationships. (In their own ways, Countess Bathory and Stefan are both bullies.) Or an exercise in playing around with genre tropes. Or a daft-but-enjoyable confection of crazy featuring some splendid outfits (sequins, feathers, PVC capes!).

Actually, it’s probably a bit of all of these. It’s a strange and beautiful work. Even the bits that make you snigger might crop up in your dreams a long time after you’ve seen it.

• Emily McQuade is the co-author of Film Burble, where she likes to discuss all things cinematic. She’d like to live in a world where action figures are manufactured for all Mike Leigh characters. When not thinking about films, she likes to skulk around London in search of books, comedy and mandrills. She can also be founding loafing about on Twitter: @missmcq.

1. I once had to walk through a cinema foyer full of Twilight fans and had to restrain myself from bellowing, ‘It’s not as good as The Lost Boys.’ In a couple of decades hence, they’ll probably have to resist the urge to be similarly snarky about some future vampire boy-fest.
2. Yes really. I Bought a Vampire Motorcycle is a British horror/comedy from the late 80s. I haven’t had the pleasure of seeing it, so can’t comment on its quality.

In the dim and distant past, I edited an original anthology of horror stories called Skin of the Soul. Most of the stories were new (there were two reprints) and all of the contributors were women. What sparked my decision to do it was an all-male horror anthology published a couple of years earlier to much acclaim: Prime Evil, edited by Douglas E. Winter, was a showcase for “the masters of modern horror”, and Winter’s introduction was dedicated to the argument that horror is not a genre but an emotion, to be found throughout all literature,from high to low.

I agree; I don’t care much for generic “horror”, even if I prefer it to generic “romance”, and although I’ve written a lot of horror stories, and most of my novels have some element of horror in them (one, Lost Futures, published as horror in the US, was nominated for a science fiction award in Britain) I’m not that comfortable identifying myself as a “horror writer”.

The writers Winter invited to contribute to his anthology included nearly all the big names of the time (Stephen King, Peter Straub, Clive Barker) but also lesser-known writers (Jack Cady and Paul Hazel). Even the introduction, pointing to the many sources of horror in the mainstream, gave a name-check to just one woman writer throughout literary history.

Who was this paragon? You might guess Mary Shelley, Emily Bronte, Christina Rossetti, Edith Wharton, Patricia Highsmith, Shirley Jackson, Anne Rice, Joyce Carol Oates… but no, the solitary example the editor chose was “…the best-selling novels of V.C. Andrews.” (I did wonder if he knew her first name was Virginia rather than, say, Victor.)

So I was horrified – not in a good way – by this compilation of horrors, and daydreamed about selling my own anthology, inviting a list of excellent writers to contribute, writing my own erudite introduction about great horror fiction of the past. If anyone pointed out that all of those writers were women, I’d act surprised, pretend it was just the luck of the draw, these were the best stories submitted and naturally the examples I chose were my personal favourites.

I certainly did not set out to deliberately exclude men; there were lots of good male writers, but now that I came to think about it, not many of them wrote horror. I mean real horror, genuinely well-written and original, not that childish gross-out stuff, not those tired generic clichés, not dreary old male fantasies, but the kind of thing I wanted to read, because, after all, it only counts as horror in my book if it fits my definition… and I reserve the right to change the rules whenever I like.

Over years of going to conventions, and reading and writing and reviewing (even teaching classes) in the fields of science fiction, fantasy and horror, I’ve noticed how much time is devoted to definitions of genre. Any genre. Once you start putting labels on books, you must justify the inclusion of one and the exclusion of another. This is science fiction, of which I approve, while that is merely fantasy. (I remember Charles Platt defending his choice of interviewees for his first Who Writes Science Fiction? – Kate Wilhelm was the only woman, and she was interviewed in tandem with her husband – but, he explained, Ursula LeGuin had refused his request, and he couldn’t think of any other woman who wrote what he considered to be proper science fiction.)

“Literary” authors are given a pass time and again, not tarred with the genre brush (it’s “magic realism” or “speculative fiction”) and it pops up in discussions and reader reviews all the time: “I don’t call this horror.” “This is all about atmosphere and character and not scary at all.” “Maybe works as literature, but not as horror fiction.” “Vampires wouldn’t do that.” Etc.

Critics may praise authors who “push the boundaries” or subvert expectations, but these are the very actions that can make the dedicated genre fan feel cheated, and respond angrily, as if when they ordered chocolate ice cream, they’d been served a bowl of extra-hot chilli.

When, more than twenty years after the publication of Skin of the Soul (“which proves indisputably that horror fiction is not a male preserve”, or so said Clive Barker in 1990) , I find that women are still fighting that old battle, still having their contributions to horror ignored or forgotten, I wonder if this isn’t – at least partly – something to do with definitions and expectations of genre. And with who is defining it, and why.

Myself, I’ve never limited my reading to one type of fiction, and I don’t write novels that fall neatly into a narrowly defined slot, either. (Maybe this is my problem!) There are some readers for whom genre fiction is comfort food, and they don’t want any nasty surprises when they’ve snuggled down to read – even in a genre celebrated as the purveyor of nasty surprises. Maybe, for some readers, it doesn’t count as horror unless the author plays by certain rules, unless the story is purveyed via the male gaze, and the name on the title page does nothing to break the illusion that we’re all boys together in this clubhouse.

• Lisa Tuttle is an acclaimed author whose achievements include winning the International Horror Guild Award, a BSFA Award, and most recently the Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire.
• The novel The Silver Bough is just out in a new paperback edition from Jo Fletcher Books.
• www.lisatuttle.co.uk

May Sinclair in about 1916

Born in 1863 and a celebrated author in her lifetime, Sinclair has, like so many women writers, been largely forgotten, despite her close friendships with some of modernism’s poster boys: Ezra Pound, Ford Madox Ford, Robert Frost, and others. She was an early champion of T.S. Eliot and the first critic to use the term “stream of consciousness” to describe a literary technique.

Rather brilliantly, Sinclair also campaigned for women to get the vote, and in 1912 wrote a pamphlet called ‘Feminism’ which argued for women’s equal potential for intellectual endeavour and political engagement. Her feminism seems to have been rather essentialist, but she was still a powerful voice for equality at a time when women were routinely denied the vote, an education, economic independence or sexual agency.

Sinclair had no formal education, although she read widely and developed an interest in psychoanalysis, philosophy and mysticism in particular. She attended Cheltenham Ladies College for a year before leaving to care for her four brothers who all had a hereditary heart defect. In spite of this, she wrote a dozen novels including bleak bildungsroman The Life and Death of Harriett Frean, essays, poems and short stories before the onset of Parkinson’s disease prevented her from writing.

She died in 1946, having already drifted into obscurity. However, her literary significance as a pioneer of feminism and modernism is starting to be recognised, as this great post points out: “Her work is good, even great, and it covers all the stops. It fits quite neatly in between George Eliot and Virginia Woolf, and she can serve well as a missing link.”

I stumbled upon Sinclair entirely by accident when I picked up her 1923 collection Uncanny Stories, which is where the horror connection comes in. There’s a near-complete copy available on Google Books if you want to check it out, although it’s missing one of my favourites.

Sinclair’s letters show that her idea for the title predates the publication of Freud’s essay The Uncanny by nearly a decade, but she seems to have welcomed the coincidence and it’s certainly fitting. Her stories are intensely psychological; there is no gore or ghouls, but instead a creeping horror and eerie imagery, and a sense of claustrophobia which lingers long after you’ve finished reading.

Some of the stories are intensely sad, such as ‘If The Dead Knew’, in which a son realises his dead mother has heard him tell others how he had secretly hated her:

Something compelled him to turn round and look towards his mother’s chair.

Then he saw her.

She stood between him and the chair, straight and thin, dressed in the clothes she had died in, the yellowish flannel nightgown and bed jacket.

The apparition maintained itself with difficulty. Already its hair had grown indistinct, a cap of white mist. Its face was an insubstantial framework for its mouth and eyes, and for the tears that fell in two shining tracks between. It was less a form than a visible emotion, an anguish.

Hollyer stood and stared at it. Through the glasses of its tears it gazed back at him with an intense, a terrible reproach and sorrow.

Then, slowly and stiffly, it began to recede from him, drawn back and back, without any movement of its feet, in an unearthly stillness, keeping up, to the last minute, its look of indestructible reproach.

And now it was a formless mass that drifted to the window and hung there a second, and passed, shrinking like a breath on the pane.

But other tales are comic. In ‘The Victim’, a ghostly visitation to a murderer isn’t full of reproach, but thanks – for freeing the victim from his debts.

Sinclair’s themes and imagery chime with many of the ideas popularised by Freud. Earlier in ‘If the Dead Knew’ the central character Hollyer is alarmed to discover he wishes his mother would die:

In the dark, secret places of the mind your thoughts ran loose beyond your knowing: they burrowed under the walls that shut off one self from another; they got through. It was as if his secret self had broken loose.

You are the unconscious mind and I claim my five pounds.

Founding a literary tradition which would later include Elizabeth Bowen and Margaret Atwood, Sinclair’s uncanny stories feature divided and dislocated selves, the dance of impulse and resistance and the hidden tracks and traces of memory and unspoken desire. And as Philippa Martindale explains, these stories are particularly concerned with feminine and feminist experience:

Sinclair’s uncanny fiction is a subtle tool for feminist expression, deconstructing patriarchal paradigms of power… Her uncanny stories serve as a forum for ‘deviant’ subjects, addressing cultural issues such as female desire, sexuality, and gender roles.

When I first read the collection, it reminded me of Daphne du Maurier’s short stories, and especially ‘The Apple Tree‘ – in part because most of the stories concern relationships between men and women. Martindale highlights the “sense of struggle for mastery between Sinclair’s male and female protagonists, typically played out in the sexual arena.” One of the best examples is ‘Where Their Fire Is Not Quenched’, which deals at once with the fantastic and the horrifically mundane as a former couple are compelled to eternally repeat their loveless affair in a shabby hotel room in the afterlife.

On the subject of ghost stories, Sinclair herself said:

Ghosts have their own atmospheres and their own reality, they also have their setting in the everyday reality we know; the story-teller is handling two realities at the same time.

For me it is this touching of two worlds which makes ghost stories so thrilling. The idea of something surfacing or reaching through, reaching back is unsettling and deeply uncanny. Sinclair’s protagonists find themselves at points where the membrane between the natural and supernatural, life and afterlife, the conscious and unconscious has grown thin.

I was delighted when Bad Reputation asked me to recommend the work of five women working in horror, to coincide with Women in Horror Recognition Month. It’s the perfect time to celebrate each other’s work and shout about what women have achieved in the field. So here are five personal picks…

1. Thana Niveau, short story writer

I first came across Thana’s work in various anthologies, including several editions of The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, where her work had rightfully been selected as among the most outstanding of the year.

Most recently though, I read her first collection of short stories, From Hell to Eternity (published by Gray Friar Press, with an introduction penned by none other than Ramsey Campbell).

From Hell to Eternity is a wonderful read. I particularly loved the opening story, ‘The Curtain’, with its eerie underwater world, and ‘Stolen to Time’, with a photography session that captures more than is bargained for. This is a strong debut, and definitely marks Thana out as one to watch.

Furthermore… this is a lady who really lives the life. As her bio says, she ‘lives in a crumbling gothic tower in Wicker Man country. She shares her life with fellow horror scribe John Llewellyn Probert, in a Victorian library filled with arcane books and curiosities.’

Her online home (‘a little dusty, little dark, a little strange,’) is at thananiveau.com.

2. Marie O’Regan, anthologist

Marie is another talented short story writer as well as a top-flight anthologist. She has also worked behind the scenes of the FantasyCon gathering, putting programming together and bringing some fantastic guests of honour to the event.

One of her latest titles is The Mammoth Book of Ghost Stories by Women (published by Robinson), a project aimed at showcasing the work of women writers in the field. It includes stories dating back to the nineteenth century through to contemporary ghostly tales. I have a story in there too, and can vouch that Marie is a pleasure to work with.

With husband Paul Kane, Marie also edited Hellbound Hearts (Pocket Books), a Clive Barker tribute anthology that includes stories by Neil Gaiman, Sarah Pinborough, Conrad Williams, Tim Lebbon, Barbie Wilde, Kelley Armstrong and many more, and features a foreword by Clive Barker.

Next up on my ‘to be read’ pile is The Mammoth Book of Body Horror (Robinson), which includes more big names and potentially more visceral fare…

Find Marie at www.marieoregan.net.

3. Sarah Pinborough, novelist

Sarah Pinborough has published a number of novels, including The Hidden, Tower Hill, The Reckoning and Breeding Ground, a wonderfully chilling book that reimagines motherhood and birth in an entirely different way.

Her novella, The Language of Dying (PS Publishing) is an intimate and harrowing account of a father’s terminal illness. The fantasy elements are interwoven with the lightest touch – this is more akin to true-life horror, and brought me to tears. It won the 2010 British Fantasy Award for Best Novella.

The Dog-Faced Gods series (Gollancz) is a widely acclaimed trilogy combining crime with the supernatural. Coming up is a duology of historical novels that again combine crime with horror: Mayhem and Murder (Jo Fletcher Books). Sarah also has a movie, Cracked, in development, and is making inroads into writing for television, with an episode of New Tricks under her belt. Her short story ‘The Confessor’s Tale’ was among my favourites in the Marie O’Regan/Paul Kane anthology, Hellbound Hearts.

See more from her at sarahpinborough.com.

4. Angela Slatter, short story writer

Winner of a British Fantasy Award and two Aurealis Awards, Angela Slatter is an Australian writer of dark fantasy and horror. She has a Masters (Research) in Creative Writing and a PhD in Creative Writing.

2010 saw not one but two short story collections published – Sourdough and Other Stories (Tartarus Press) and The Girl with No Hands and Other Tales (Ticonderoga).

Sourdough is full of dark fairy tales, where babies are fashioned from bread and dolls are given souls. The Girl with No Hands has retold stories, including The Little Match Girl and Bluebeard.

I tend to think of fairy tales as the original horror stories, and Angela’s work is ideal for anyone who likes their dark fiction with a good measure of the magical and folkloric.

It’s good to hear that she is currently working on an urban fantasy novel, Brisneyland by Night.

www.angelaslatter.com

5. Muriel Gray, novelist and TV presenter

Muriel Gray was a special guest at FantasyCon last year, where she brought boundless enthusiasm to the role (and the biggest grin that I’ve ever seen!). She originally hails from East Kilbride, Scotland. She graduated from the Glasgow School of Art, played in a punk band and went on to be a successful TV presenter as well as an author. She also founded one of the UK’s leading independent television production companies.

Her writing career began in 1995 with the bestselling horror novel The Trickster, which was followed by Furnace and The Ancient (all HarperCollins), which Stephen King described as “scary and unputdownable”.

She has also contributed many short stories to anthologies and magazines, the most recent including The Mammoth Book of Ghost Stories by Women and A Carnivàle of Horror: Dark Tales from the Fairground (PS Publishing).

Apparently Muriel was a horror fan from childhood, when she hid The Pan Book of Horror Stories under her bed covers and read it with a torch.

• Alison Littlewood’s latest novel, Path of Needles, will be out in June 2013. Her first novel, A Cold Season (Jo Fletcher Books) was selected for the Richard and Judy Book Club, where it was described as “perfect reading for a dark winter’s night.” Her short stories have been picked for the Best Horror of the Year and Mammoth Book of Best New Horror anthologies, as well as The Best British Fantasy 2013 and The Mammoth Book of Best British Crime 10.
• www.alisonlittlewood.co.uk