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248 Spring 2022

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Overland literary journal > Articles by: Alexandra Heller-Nicholas

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Alexandra Heller-Nicholas

Alexandra Heller-Nicholas is a film critic, research academic and the author of seven books on cult, horror, and exploitation cinema with an emphasis on gender politics. She has recently co-edited the book ReFocus: The Films of Elaine May for Edinburgh University Press, and her forthcoming book 1000 Women in Horror has been optioned for a documentary series. Alexandra is also a programming consultant for Fantastic Fest in Austin, Texas, the largest genre film festival in the United States.

Articles by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas:

15 November 201919 December 2019

1999: The greatest year in phalluloid

Alexandra Heller-Nicholas

Absolutely, 1999 was a significant year in Hollywood film history (so often interchangeable with ‘film history’ more generally), but let’s get a grip before we start hurling around the term ‘the greatest’. In the light of the carnival of rose-tinted glasses that covers much of positive discourse supporting this claim, it’s perhaps no small coincidence that The Blair Witch Project (one of my personal all-time favourite horror films, as an aside) is effectively the story of a woman filmmaker being punished by supernatural forces for daring to make a movie.

16 October 201922 November 2019

Dirt Music and the ‘unfilmable’ novel

Alexandra Heller-Nicholas

What marks great cinema – and great novels, and great novel-to-film adaptations, and great art in general – is a fire in the belly. Adapting a so-called unfilmable novel requires much more than just carefully cherry-picking key plot and location points but demands an unhesitating willingness to roll around in the amorphous muck of abstraction that is so often a defining feature of books of this kind.

30 July 201821 September 2018

Mary Shelley: on body horror and biopics

Alexandra Heller-Nicholas

Whether it be in terms of creators or fans, horror is not – nor has it ever been – the ‘boys club’ it is so commonly assumed to be. In Haifaa al-Mansour’s recently released biopic Mary Shelley, the author is told by her stepsister Claire Clairmont upon first reading her famous novel Frankenstein: ‘I’ve never read such a perfect encapsulation of what it feels to be abandoned.’ At its best, horror is all about outsiders, its focus emphatically upon the experience of otherness.

13 March 201830 April 2018

Hollywood’s lost women

Alexandra Heller-Nicholas

Women get lost in Hollywood for a range of reasons. There are the suicides, the murders, the accidents, the ‘mysterious deaths’. Jayne Mansfield – who died in a car crash in New Orleans in 1967 at the age of thirty-four – opens up another avenue for thinking through this idea of loss. There is something eternally fascinating in a tabloid way about Mansfield – the (supposedly) ‘dumb blonde’ who dabbled in Satanism.

31 July 201712 September 2017

Projecting prejudice: why it’s time to remember women’s film criticism

Alexandra Heller-Nicholas

But there is no Stella Count for film criticism; instead, the women film critics I know employ a less formal and statistically rigorous response involving pinot noir, vented spleens and a high volume of f-words.

1 May 201721 June 2017

‘We’re on your side’: white violence and the horror of representation

Alexandra Heller-Nicholas and Josh Nelson

Get Out is above all else a horror film about representation itself. A photographer by trade, Chris’s character is intimately connected to a field of representation and it’s through his work that Peele introduces him to the audience. Opening on a black and white photograph of a pregnant African American belly, Peele cuts to an image of a white dog, straining on a leash to attack an unseen party.

26 July 201629 August 2016

Coming home to No Home Movie

Alexandra Heller-Nicholas

No Home Movie is, at first ironically perhaps, precisely that: a home movie consisting primarily of conversations between Akerman and her mother Natalia (Nelly), recorded in the months before Nelly’s death. Yet this title also contains an important negation of the ‘domesticated’ history of amateur filmmaking traditions when brought into the family home.

22 March 201626 April 2016

Season of the witch

Alexandra Heller-Nicholas

When witches become palatable, they became controllable: I’d rather be a mad, dangerous, powerful crone than teen-screen friendly commercialised wank fodder, be it literally or – for the many feminist academics who went gaga for this mode of supposedly ‘progressive’ representation – something more symbolic.

25 February 201615 March 2016

Andrzej Żuławski and the powerlessness of language

Alexandra Heller-Nicholas

The recent death of Polish director Andrzej Żuławski might at first appear a lesser addition to 2016’s already dramatic body count of influential artists: Lemmy, Bowie, Rivette, Eco, and Harper Lee, to name but a high-profile few. But in the film world, Żuławski’s passing seemed to come from out of nowhere.

8 February 201622 March 2016

A brief history of Oscar toxicity

Alexandra Heller-Nicholas

In 2016, the Academy Awards clearly has its own ideological issues. But these stories and hashtags like #OscarsSoWhite demand we remember the long history of this institutionally sanctioned white privilege in particular.

11 January 201618 April 2016

Film bros and The Revenant litmus test

Alexandra Heller-Nicholas

Loosely based on Michael Punke’s The Revenant: A Novel of Revenge (2002), the film is a reimagining of the tale of real-life nineteenth century American frontiersman Hugh Glass. Yet I’m less concerned here with discussing the film itself than the bizarre discourse that has manifested around it. As documented with almost ritualistic fury across social media, the gendering of language by some around the film has been astonishing, even for those of us resigned to the constant drumbeat of casual misogyny issued by Film Twitter’s dominant dude-bro regime.

Published in Overland Issue 220 Spring 2015

Statement of vindication

Alexandra Heller-Nicholas

Today, stories of violence against women – particularly those who self-identify as feminists – appear in what feels like a ceaseless onslaught. Recent examples range from the harassment of Melbourne writer Clementine Ford and the Gamergate scandal, to the brutal murder of American university student Grace Mann. The velocity with which these stories spread across social media suggests that the phenomenon is relatively contemporary and gaining momentum, but one does not need to search hard for earlier examples.

19 May 201523 June 2015

Furious and Furiosa

Alexandra Heller-Nicholas

In Mad Max: Fury Road, normative masculinity is not just broken, it is literally diseased. Survival for women in this film in many ways relies on their ability to find a way forward beyond often contradictory tribal manifestation of the kind of bat-shit crazy masculinity that can only be deemed ‘unreal’ if you are privileged enough to see no problem with the current gender political status quo.

7 April 201522 April 2015

Testing Bechdel

Alexandra Heller-Nicholas

Like most online phenomena about gender, the Bechdel test has its critics. A panel at New York's women-focused Athena Film Festival last year was dedicated to discussing precisely why it was important to move beyond the Bechdel test, seeking to expand the debate around gender and film. They underscored that the Bechdel is hardly a best-case scenario.

3 February 201516 February 2015

Colleen McCullough: feminist icon?

Alexandra Heller-Nicholas

I was personally grateful for the distraction, because the very name Colleen McCullough fills me with almost paralysing anxiety. For me, McCullough personifies my early failures as a young woman attempting their first, fledgling steps into feminist consciousness.

4 November 20147 November 2014

Dear male feminist

Alexandra Heller-Nicholas

Thank you for your interest in gender inequality. We agree that these imbalances are a concern for everyone, not just women. Of course, binary distinctions like ‘male’ and ‘female’ are themselves somewhat archaic: feminism is dynamic and fluid, and its relevance washes across the spectrum of gendered identities. But if Male Feminist is how you want to brand it, by all means, don’t let me stop you.

22 October 20143 November 2014

A tiny grief

Alexandra Heller-Nicholas

What is perhaps most surprising about the passing of Prime Minister Gough Whitlam at the age of 98 isn’t the fact that he died but that the announcement has hit so many so hard.

10 October 201429 October 2014

Monstrous motherhood

Alexandra Heller-Nicholas

Before I had a child, I gleaned subconsciously from pop mythology that motherhood was distinctly pastel. Of course, I knew from the delicately-creased eyebrows of the women in the infant Panadol ads that life with a baby wasn’t always perfect.

9 September 201416 September 2014

Little (white) Aussie battlers

Alexandra Heller-Nicholas

By 1895, in Australia a ‘battler’ was someone trying to live off betting on horse races despite always losing, and from the late 1800s through to the 1950s, it referred to a female sex worker who went about her business without a pimp. For Moore, then, ‘the battler was a person at the very lowest end of society, who struggled to eke out a very basic existence’.

4 August 20148 August 2014

Drawing the line

Alexandra Heller-Nicholas

When, in late September 2005, the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published a series of cartoons about the prophet Muhammad, thousands took to the street around the world in protest. The cartoons’ publication triggered boycotts of Danish products across the Middle East, and caused diplomatic crises in a number of countries.

30 July 20145 August 2014

The unknown soldier of the war against women

Alexandra Heller-Nicholas

In late 2013, a wall collapsed on Swanston Street in the inner Melbourne suburb of Carlton, tragically killing three innocent bystanders. If any journalists from the city’s tabloids (we can call The Age a tabloid now, right?) recalled the significance of the address, they did not say so. But seventy-five years ago, the site of […]

14 July 201425 July 2014

Why have there been no great women directors?

Alexandra Heller-Nicholas

In 1971, in her foundational essay ‘Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?’, American academic Linda Nochlin argued that an assumed male perspective is entrenched in art history.

24 June 20143 July 2014

The year of uncomfortable listening

Alexandra Heller-Nicholas

With headliners including US drone metal band Sunn 0))), kids TV phenomenon Yo Gabba Gabba! and avant-garde musician Diamanda Galás, Tasmania’s Dark Mofo festival has something for all the family. Well, for some families.

13 June 201419 June 2014

In defence of Slender Man

Alexandra Heller-Nicholas

On the evening of Saturday 31 May, a cyclist discovered a young girl bleeding near Rivera Drive in Waukesha, Wisconsin. She told him that her best friend had stabbed her: nineteen times in all, in the liver, pancreas, stomach and legs, with one knife wound missing a major artery near her heart by only a millimetre.

11 June 201420 June 2014

Censorship and chainsaw massacres

Alexandra Heller-Nicholas and Dean Brandum

The supposed laughter that greeted the Texas Chainsaw Massacre announcement at the SFF program launch comes as little surprise in some ways but the film’s exhibition history in Australia raises important questions regarding broader debates about film censorship.

Published in Overland Issue 215 Winter 2014

Horrors of history: on the politics of Wolf Creek 2

Alexandra Heller-Nicholas

Wolf Creek 2 is Greg McLean’s sequel to his notorious 2005 debut. It has impacted national film culture in a number of significant (although not totally surprising) ways. Without doubt it is more violent and vicious than its predecessor, a perversely admirable feat considering Wolf Creek became a frequently cited example of ‘torture porn’.

24 April 201412 May 2014

‘Oh! England, My Lionheart’

Alexandra Heller-Nicholas

The first poster of a musician I ever had on my wall was of Kate Bush. I had just started primary school in a small country town on Melbourne’s western outskirts, an area that has since been swallowed up by the ever-expanding urban spread. I remember this poster vividly: Bush wore a white baggy jumpsuit with blotches of multi-coloured paint splashed over it, playfully wielding a paintbrush towards the camera.

21 February 201424 February 2014

Teenage Kings and ‘heroic’ rapists

Alexandra Heller-Nicholas

In October 2006, Today Tonight screened excerpts from a DVD called Cunt: The Movie, produced by a group of teenage boys from the outer western Melbourne suburb of Werribee. A short section called ‘Pimp My Wife’ had been posted on YouTube a few months earlier, and by the time the Today Tonight story went live that clip had already been viewed over 2500 times.