12 of the Best Female-Directed Horror Films of the 2010s, From ‘Knives and Skin’ to ‘The Babadook’

“Knives and Skin” (2019)

For fans of “Twin Peaks” and “Riverdale,” “Knives and Skin” is a dark treat, offering a campy, creepy send-up of the Young Girl Goes Missing in a Small Town genre. Writer/director Jennifer Reeder’s neo-noir traces the eerie spell that the disappearance of Carolyn Harper (Raven Whitley) casts on the townspeople, and specifically her very attractive high-school classmates.

“It starts out with the kind of disruption of everyone’s kind of boring small town life, [where] a girl goes missing. It kind of gives everybody an urgency and it gives everybody a goal for their daily life,” Reeder told IndieWire. “That curiosity that disrupts the daily small-town life becomes a genuine worry, a reminder of death, of the fragility of the human body. Everyone in their brains starts to replace that missing girl with their own missing loved ones.”

Cinematographer Christopher Rejano’s Technicolor images impressively conjure up a dreamlike world, where events often proceed at the narcotic pace of a David Lynch film, but with bracing moments of hallucinatory terror. Think John Hughes caught in a bad dream.

“Certainly David Lynch is an influence. Even though I understand specifically the ‘Twin Peaks’ reference, I have actually been much more influenced by ‘Blue Velvet’ or ‘Lost Highway.’ I love the way his storytelling weaves in a kind of surrealism, and the way he suggests that small towns are the portal to the fourth dimension,” she said.

“In terms of a story about a dead or missing teenager in a small town, my go-to has always been ‘River’s Edge.’ That film stuck under my skin for a long time,” Reeder said, and that’s fair to say, given that “Knives and Skin” revolves around a teenage tragedy. However, Reeder injects the narrative with horror tropes that manage to find even more pathos below the surface.

“Revenge” (2017)

Writer/director Coralie Fargeat’s sun-soaked “Revenge,” which burst out of the Midnight Madness section of the 2017 Toronto Film Festival, puts a feminist spin on the revenge thriller. A steely Matilda Lutz plays Jen, a seemingly naive young American who, while on a tryst in the desert with her married boyfriend, is sexually assaulted and left for dead. But she sets out on the warpath, plagued by peyote and hallucinations and the beating sun, in a confidently directed gore-fest that announces Fargeat as a horror talent to watch.

“The Love Witch” (2016)

Anna Biller’s “The Love Witch” is more camp than creep classic, but the director paints with the whole, crimson-colored palette of 1960s cult horror movies to conjure an eerie, out-of-this-world experience of a spell-casting woman’s desperate search for love. Biller proves herself a formidable multi-tasker with this film — directing, producing, writing, scoring, and editing a garish ode to midcentury Technicolor horror. And while the film’s intentionally stilted dialogue feels very much of the period, its depiction of the loneliness at the heart of seeking a romantic connection rings true in the age of Tinder, Bumble, and Hinge.

“Raw” (2016)

“Raw” is Julia Ducournau’s incredibly disturbing, viscera-spewing body horror film that parallels a young woman’s sexual awakening with her evolving desire for the taste of human flesh. Ironically, the protagonist Justine (Garance Marillier) is a strict vegetarian, and a misfit at her boarding veterinary school. Following a hazing ritual that involves eating raw rabbit kidneys, Justine develops a disgusting head-to-toe rash that leads to her cannibalistic craving.

“Raw” is a gross freakout that’s hard to watch most of the time and even more impossible to stomach, and yet beneath all the blood and guts lies a surprisingly tender coming-of-age story, with Ducournau using the horror platform to open a window into a uniquely female experience.

“Always Shine” (2016)

Alongside “Persona,” “The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant,” “Black Swan,” and the thematically similar “Queen of Earth,” “Always Shine” is the ultimate girlfriends-on-edge film. It’s directed with icy precision by Sophia Takal, who helms the December remake “Black Christmas.”

Mackenzie Davis and Caitlin FitzGerald play a pair of blond, lithe, almost-lookalike actress friends who, in an effort to rekindle their cracking bond amid the pressures of Hollywood aspirations, take a healing trip to Big Sur. But in Takal’s world, there will be no R&R on this mini-vacation to hell. Beth (FitzGerald) and Anna (Davis) proceed to tear each other apart with eviscerating words and psychosexual mind games. Alone, and together, in the woods is no place to be for two women on the verge — and especially two competitive actors — who are locked in a suffocating folie a deux.

“Prevenge” (2016)

British comedy actress Alice Lowe is known to straddle the razor’s edge between the funny and fucked-up, as in Ben Wheatley’s “Sightseers” and Edgar Wright’s “Hot Fuzz.” With “Prevenge,” she makes her directorial debut about a pregnant woman with a homicidal, unborn fetus.

It’s a cleverly funny premise, but also creepy as Ruth’s (Lowe) baby sends her killing orders to exact revenge on those who were involved in her partner’s death. Lowe flips the concept of the mother-to-be as a perfect saint on its ugly head (and the actress/writer/director was actually pregnant during production). “Prevenge” does for wombs what “Psycho” did for showers.

“The Invitation” (2015)

Maybe it’s best not to stay in touch with your exes? Karyn Kusama’s creepy “The Invitation,” centered around one of those let’s-all-drink-poison-and-experience-rebirth cults that the impressionable should always avoid, certainly makes that case convincingly.

Will (Logan Marshall-Green) takes his new girlfriend Kira (Emayatzy Corinealdi) to a dinner party hosted by his spooky ex-wife Eden (Tammy Blanchard) in the Hollywood Hills. Once New Age garble gets introduced, it becomes an inescapable dinner party from hell where the front doors are locked, and everyone is on their own brainwashed wavelength. Kusama’s film is supremely mounted — even the posh mid-century furniture becomes threatening in this tense thriller that, in its final moments, reaches for the cosmic and pretty damn well succeeds.

“Evolution” (2015)

Lucile Hadžihalilović’s second feature, “Evolution,” presents a seaside slow-burn that teeters stomach-churningly into David Cronenberg territory — while never full-blown becoming the kind of garish, in-your-face freakout made by the likes of, say, her husband Gaspar Noé. Instead, Hadžihalilović’s film, centered around dubious medical experiments taking place on an island populated by only women and boys, moves at a somnambulent pace — but with enough icky body-horror close-ups to jolt you out of hypnosis.

“The Babadook” (2014)

You could argue that Jennifer Kent’s most recent film “The Nightingale” — a dank tale of rape and revenge in 1820s colonial Tasmania — is a horror film, but that feels too glib a characterization for Kent’s grander ambitions. Instead, her smashing feature debut “The Babadook” is a near-perfect exercise in horror and an examination of the sanctity of the mother-child bond.

Essie Davis gives a scream-queen performance for the ages, recalling Catherine Deneuve in “Repulsion” or Mia Farrow in “Rosemary’s Baby,” as a single mother questioning her own sanity after she and her mentally disturbed six-year-old son face off with a top-hatted ghoul who manifests from a children’s pop-up book. Kent crafts one of cinema’s most iconic movie monsters — a sinister boogeyman who went on to become a queer icon.

“A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night” (2014)

Ana Lily Amirpour is one of today’s most badass genre benders, and her 2014 debut “A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night” kicked off a wave of projects that followed, across screens big and small, from her 2016 western-hybrid “The Bad Batch” with Keanu Reeves, to episodes of “Legion,” “Castle Rock,” and “The Twilight Zone.” But her 2014, black-and-white, Persian vampire western remains her most ambitious, iconic piece of horror.

Performance artist Sheila Vand makes her big-screen leading-lady debut as a young woman simply known as The Girl. In a desolate ghost town torn from the pages of dusty American westerns by way of Italian realism, The Girl, cloaked in a chador, furtively roves the streets in search of male prey. And sometimes on a skateboard. To prepare for her introverted, bloodsucking character, Vand watched videos of cats and cobras, and the physical dexterity she picked up from that study shows in her sinister turn.

“We Need To Talk About Kevin” (2011)

Few social horror films are as viscerally unnerving as Lynne Ramsay’s “We Need to Talk About Kevin,” which free-falls into the shattering mind of a mother (Tilda Swinton) whose life disintegrates after her son (Ezra Miller) commits a horrific act of violence. Ramsay and her team conjure all the atmospherics of a horror film with hardly a jump scare: cinematographer Seamus McGarvey, editor Joe Bini, and composer Jonny Greenwood all plunge us into Eva’s (Swinton) splintering psyche as she sifts through the guilt over her own possible contributions to her son’s psychopathic education.

“Silent House” (2011)

Co-directed by Laura Lau and Chris Kentis, “Silent House” is a creepily effective one-take illusion that remakes the 2010 Uruguayan film “La Casa Muda.” Elizabeth Olsen plays a frantic young woman left alone in her family’s crumbling Victorian mansion who believes she’s being chased by an unknown perpetrator — or is it her own demons manifesting? Working with cinematographer Igor Martinovic, Lau and Kentis present the movie as a single unbroken shot, a la “Rope,” as Olsen navigates her way to safety. Surprisingly, the movie turns into a potent exploration of the psychic trauma of sexual abuse.