By Emily Hansen

13 Women

Gothertober Original Video

This video short first aired in 2021 on the Gothtober Calendar. This page has been created to provide you with further information and resources of these fabulous women!

13 women in 3 minute video time limit is a bit of a challenge, so after watching the video, keep scrolling for more information about these women! 

Watch on Gothober Calendar Day 6!

Emily Hansen

Emily is a mother, a creator, and an educator. She made her Gothober debut in 2017 with a video called Dia de la Quinceanera. Earlier this year, she started writing a book called Mothers of Cinema, which is about important women film directors in film history who you may not know. This gave her the idea for her countdown of 13 women that the Halloween/horror/thriller fans should (and may not) know. 

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I think women are very interested in violence. They’re certainly the victims of it a lot, so they’re focused on it. Admittedly, movie-making is a male-dominated industry. And within the codes of who does what material, women are more associated with emotional material and men with the apparatus, the technology, the hardware. But I don’t think of Near Dark as a violent movie, but rather, an emotional, moral one.

– Kathryn Bigelow

In January 2020 I started a master’s program in film studies so that I could apply for more online teaching opportunities. (There were so many available, and little did I know that within months, everyone will be teaching online! Oops!) In my first class which was on documentary film, I realized how few women directors that were. I had recently watched (and backed on Kickstarter) a documentary by a director named Pamela Green called Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché, so I did my documentary class presentation on Green’s documentary. (It was all very meta! Haha!) My next class the following semester was on Classic Hollywood Cinema. Having studied Guy-Blaché, I began to look for other female directors during the early days of film and realized that many of them were not prominently displayed in our textbook, so I did my presentation on women directing in early Hollywood. This continued on during all of my classes, even when non-film specific: Painting Sculpture, Literature, Third Cinema, Cult Films, etc. Each time I made sure to educate my classmates on women from history who had created things that were just as interesting as the work of the men covered in the books and films we studied. By the time I got to my Capstone project I had decided to write a book on women directors throughout the history of film and from around the world and call it Mothers of Cinema. (I have written 5 of the 15 chapters so far.) So when it came time for Gothtober, I immediately thought of the women in Hollywood who work behind the scenes in the horror/thriller genre. … and then later thought of a way to work the truck stop theme into my vision: Easter eggs!

Squishing 13 women into 3 minutes was tough. There is so much more to say about each of them, and it was fun searching for their history. Alice Guy-Blaché herself did not make the cut for this short, but she and Kathryn Bigelow are already chapters in my Mothers of Cinema book (along with Julie Dash, Marilou Diaz-Abaya, and Lana & Lilly Wachowski). Lois Weber, Ida Lupino, and Lotte Reiniger are all on the short list for possible spots among the remaining 10 chapters. I enjoyed making 13 Women so much that I am considering doing individual videos for the 13, plus additional videos for the women in consideration for my book… after I create the 12 Women of Christmas, of course.

Apps used

  • Voilà – iPhone
  • Adobe Character Animator – M1 MacBook Pro
  • Adobe Illustrator – M1 MacBook Pro
  • Adobe Photoshop – M1 MacBook Pro
  • Adobe Premiere – M1 MacBook Pro
  • Adobe Fresco – iPad & Pencil

Sound effects and Music were royalty free from around the web.

Music by astrofreq from Pixabay