Filmmakers Nia DaCosta, Prano Bailey-Bond and Aislinn Clarke all touched down at Dublin’s second annual screenwriting festival Storyhouse to discuss the appeal that the genre space has to them as writer-directors.
All three women have worked across genre in the last few years, with DaCosta directing and co-writing Candyman with Jordan Peele and Win Rosenfeld, Bailey-Bond’s debut feature Censor premiering at Sundance and Clarke being best known for her horror titles The Devil’s Doorway and Fréwaka.
“I think there’s something about horror that’s actually really soothing, which sounds really counter-intuitive, but I think it’s an outlet for anxiety and to talk about how you can explore social issues and trauma all through horror,” said Clarke told an audience at Dublin’s Light House Cinema. “That’s the appeal for me and what it could do. It’s a really useful means for exploring a lot of tricky, dark stuff.”
DaCosta agreed, adding that “there’s something about the world falling apart that really appeals to me in the context of a movie. It’s a way to exercise those fears and anxieties.”
Bailey-Bond added: “I’m quite interested in psychology and the darkness of our minds and exploring that in characters. The physical experience of watching horror is also an appeal to me. There’s something you get from horror that you don’t often get from other genres, which is like a physical sensation and a safe space to explore fear and face things.”
Bailey Bond said that Censor was rooted in the idea of repression. “I was interested in the idea of exploring a censor who believed so much in what they were doing that they started to wonder if it was affecting them,” she said. “And that idea goes back to the idea of our oppressed feelings and what we’re willing to face in ourselves and what we push away.”
Clarke spoke about The Devil’s Doorway, her 2018 found footage horror film about two priests who are sent by the Vatican to investigate a mysterious event in an Irish home.
The director was keen to make a movie that explored the Magdalene Laundries in Ireland, Catholic institutions which operated in the 1800s, which housed “fallen women”.
“I knew I had to make this film because I didn’t want someone else to make it and mishandle it and exploit it,” she said. “I wanted it to have heart.”
She continued: “There had been a lot of conversations about the Magdalene Laundries at that point and there were a lot of necessary conversations about the church and their role in all of that, but I felt like there hadn’t been enough.”
