Studying Psycho in ernest at age 8

Here's Julia Ducournau, the writer/director of new French feminist-teen-cannibalism-shocker, Raw (2017) on that:

“For [my movie buff parents] it was as important for us to watch the movies of important directors,” she says, “as to read the novels of Balzac or Zola.” She recalls watching Psycho with them aged eight, “really with the feeling that I was watching a masterpiece”, and credits them with instilling in her “the grammar of film, the tools that I could use”.

The full article on an alleged upsurge in female voices in horror is here:
http://tinyurl.com/m76qwzx

One reason to be a little cautious about the raves Ducournau's film has received: she's model/lead actress gorgeous on top of being a smart and ambitious self-promoter. There's some chance that all that's turned critics and others into fanboys prematurely.

Somewhat relatedly, I recently watched Anna Biller's The Love Witch (2016), a semi-horror that's mentioned in passing in the 'Female Voices' article. On one level LW is a hyper-/over-designed and -controlled marvel a la things like Todd Haynes's Far From Heaven and Carol or even Wes Anderson's films. And since the design and color palette and flat acting-style and sub-genre it *seems* to ape is the sort of thing we associate mainly with enjoyably self-aware '60s and early '70s semi-trash from Hammer (think The Devil Rides Out, Vampire Lovers) and Corman and Polanski (think Fearless Vampire Killers not Rosemary's Baby) and Meyer (Beyond the Valley of the Dolls) and early Giallo like Fulci's Perversion Story (1969), as well as more general saucy studio fare from the period like What's New Pussycat? and splendid euro-trash oddities like The Laughing Woman, there just *is* quite a lot to enjoy (not to mention just be turned on by if you enjoy old-fashioned, teasing burlesque) at this level.

Unfortunately perhaps, LW insists that it should be decoded as *meaning* something and as having something (important? coherent?) to say about heterosexuality in 2016/2017. There are lots of little sermons delivered about what men and women are really like and really want and about gender polarity that it's hard to take seriously (these are witches and satanists talking for the most part after all) and that I ultimately couldn't make much sense of.

In interviews, Biller is furious that people have compared her film to the sorts of films I've just compared it to (preferring to say that she's doing something much more like Sirk or Hitchcock - Biller does use Psycho-style stabbing strings at moments of great tension and revelation but that's about it I think!), and she says a lot of stuff at the meaning/content level of the film that if anything only makes it seem even more incoherent.