"Whether Doctor Frankenstein likes it or not, the zombie story has always belonged to women. Ever since teenaged political radical Mary Shelley (daughter of feminist pioneer Mary Wollstonecraft) poured her maternal anguish into the party game ghost story that eventually became Frankenstein, this cultural lodestar has come heavy with feminine, not to mention feminist, valences."
"Perhaps it's no wonder, then, that when Elsa Lanchester rose from the dead in 1935, screaming her way off the slab and quickly back into the grave again in James Whale's Bride of Frankenstein, she herself birthed countless generations of rictus rebel daughters in under five minutes of screentime. Frankenstein's monster may be a Halloween icon, but his bride and the zombie women and girls who follow her seem to capture something electric in the feminine cultural imagination."
"zombie movies by or about women had already been experiencing a small but notable bump prior to Gyllenhaal's film: This winter, for example, Grace Glowicki's wonderful will flip Shelley's script in a madcap, raunchily gothic tale in which a smelly gravedigger attempts to revive the only man she ever laid."
The zombie genre carries deep feminine and feminist roots tracing back to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, written from maternal anguish and political consciousness. Elsa Lanchester's iconic 1935 performance as the Bride of Frankenstein established a template for generations of female zombie characters that resonate powerfully in cultural imagination. Recent years have witnessed a notable resurgence of zombie films created by or centered on women, including works by Grace Glowicki, Tina Romero, and Diablo Cody. Maggie Gyllenhaal's sophomore directorial effort represents the latest entry in this self-conscious lineage, attempting to make these historical affinities explicit while drawing on the genre's rich feminist heritage.
Read at Filmmaker Magazine
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