Episode Six: Finishing Schools of Fear

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This week we are looking at the films Paradise Hills and Level 16 that are both set at dystopian finishing schools where being the perfect girl is the goal. These young women are trapped in the trappings of femininity and sacrificed in the pursuit of an apparent notion of female perfection. We discuss this in relation to a recent TIME article that argues that women’s genre filmmaking is “about women’s deepest anxieties”. Content warning: discussion of rape culture and violence against women.

@WomenMakeSF #WomenMakeSF #WomenMakeSFPod

Intro/Outro music: Inspire Glitches (2017) by Yuriy Shishlov (CC-BY-NC-SA)

MENTIONS

• Stephanie Zacharek’s TIME piece on women’s horror movies – the article we read – is women-made genre filmmaking all about their fears?
• Paradise Hills (Waddington, 2019)
• Level 16 (Esterhazy, 2018)
• Reclaim the Frame is a British Film Institute -backed project that aims to grow audiences for films by women
• Évolution (Hadžihalilović, 2016)
• Sea Fever (Hardiman, 2020)
• Æon Flux (Kusama, 2005) 
• Tank Girl (Talalay, 1995)
• Deep Impact (Leder, 1998)
• A Handmaid’s Tale 
• Lyle’s cat/Star Trek experiment/novel project
  The Unbearable Heaviness of Cats
• Lyle’s Seven Sisters Unmet hypernovel project
• Deadly Waters by Dot Hutchinson (2020)
• Siphokazi Tau (2017). Women: The Gatekeepers Of Patriarchy. HuffPost.
• Madeline Albright: ‘special place in hell’
• A Clockwork Orange (Kubrick, 1971)
• Lina Lamont – the former silent movie starlet from Singin’ in the Rain (1952) 
• Tom Burke plays Cormoran Strike in the BBC adaptation
• We talked about Emergence, Killjoys, and Vagrant Queen on Episode Three: Women Make SF TV (aka stop cancelling my shows)
• Star Trek Discovery 
• Trans and non-binary casting on Discovery