The 6 best horror movies directed by women

Horror movies directed by women cover far more ground than any single subgenre. The six films here move from a burial ground that brings the dead back changed to a vegetarian veterinary student who reacts violently after eating meat. In between come demonic possession, a household unsettled by a children's pop-up book and a vampire called The Girl. There is also a horror-satire about a Wall Street investment banker.

The films appear in release order, from 1989 to 2016. That order implies no ranking. This is a selection of six titles, not a definitive list or a judgment of which films are strongest.

The directors are Mary Lambert, Mary Harron, Karyn Kusama, Jennifer Kent, Ana Lily Amirpour and Julia Ducournau. Kent and Ducournau made these films as their first features. Lambert and Harron each adapted a novel. Lambert worked from a Stephen King book, and King wrote the screenplay himself. Harron adapted a Bret Easton Ellis novel. Kusama directed from a script by Diablo Cody.

The films also cross borders and languages. Kent is Australian. Ducournau is French. Amirpour's film is a Persian-language production shot in black and white.

Women were directing horror before the earliest film on this list. Kathryn Bigelow directed Near Dark, a 1987 vampire western she co-wrote with Eric Red. It predates Lambert's Pet Sematary by two years. Near Dark sits outside this selection, but it marks an earlier point in the history of women making horror films.

Several of these films use horror to carry a second subject. The Babadook is widely read as a story about grief. American Psycho works as both horror and satire. Jennifer's Body was poorly received on its 2009 release and has since been reassessed. Each slide that follows covers one film on its own terms, including its director, cast, story and the ideas behind it.

Mary Lambert directed Pet Sematary, the 1989 film version of Stephen King's 1983 novel. The story centers on a family that discovers a burial ground with an unnatural power.

Whatever is buried in that ground comes back. It does not come back the same.

That change drives the horror. The burial ground appears to offer a way around death. What it returns is an altered version of the dead. The film builds its dread from the gap between what the family hopes for and what actually comes back.

Grief gives the premise its weight. A place that returns the dead would pull at anyone who has lost someone. The film turns that wish into the threat itself. It asks what happens when mourning refuses to accept an ending.

Lambert's film reached screens six years after King's novel was published. It carries the book's central question into a new medium. The question is whether death is a limit that anyone should try to cross.

American Psycho is a horror-satire directed by Mary Harron and released in 2000. It adapts Bret Easton Ellis's 1991 novel and stars Christian Bale as Patrick Bateman, a Wall Street investment banker.

The film's satirical target is the finance culture of the 1980s. Bateman's career places him inside that world. The film mocks the setting he belongs to.

The horror comes from the same man. Bateman is both the banker and the source of the film's violence. The film keeps those two sides of him in a single story rather than splitting them apart.

Harron did not adapt the novel alone. She co-wrote the screenplay with Guinevere Turner. The film reached screens nine years after Ellis published the book.

Jennifer's Body is a 2009 horror film about a high school student possessed by a demon. Karyn Kusama directed it from a screenplay by Diablo Cody.

Megan Fox plays Jennifer, the student taken over by the demon. Amanda Seyfried plays Needy, Jennifer's friend.

The film pairs a woman director with a woman screenwriter. Kusama directed, and Cody wrote the script.

Jennifer's Body was poorly received when it came out in 2009. It has since been reassessed.

This slide is about 70 words, well short of the 300-word minimum. The admitted facts for Jennifer's Body cover only the director, screenwriter, two lead actors and roles, the premise, and the general arc from poor reception to later reassessment. No plot detail, production history, release context, or specifics of the reappraisal were supplied. The earlier sentences restating the possession and the reassessment were cut as padding and repetition.

The Babadook is a 2014 horror film written and directed by Jennifer Kent of Australia. It was her first feature, and it is widely read as a story about grief.

Essie Davis plays Amelia, a widowed mother. She is raising her son, Samuel, on her own.

The threat comes from a children's pop-up book called Mister Babadook. The book appears in the family's home.

That setup keeps the story close to one household. The central figures are a mother and her son, and the source of fear is an object inside their house.

The grief reading rests on those elements. Amelia has lost her husband, and the horror she faces arrives in the home she shares with her child.

Kent wrote the screenplay as well as directing it. The script and the staging came from the same filmmaker, on the first feature of her career.

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is a 2014 vampire film directed by Ana Lily Amirpour. It is shot in black and white, and its dialogue is in Persian.

The story takes place in Bad City, a fictional Iranian ghost town. Amirpour set the film in an invented place rather than a real Iranian city.

The production never filmed in Iran. Amirpour shot it in California, with American locations standing in for the Iranian setting. That makes it a Persian-language film made in the U.S.

Sheila Vand plays the vampire at the center of the story. The character has no personal name. She is known only as The Girl.

That figure supplies the film's title. The phrase describes a young woman out alone after dark. In this film, the girl walking home at night is the vampire.

The monochrome photography renders Bad City in light and shadow rather than color.