When I was 13, I spent my time lust/hate-reading lots of Kerouac (Sal’s kind of a misogynist! But he’s also kind of crushworthy!) and writing ‘poetry’ (thinly veiled autobiographical prose verse about kissing boys at Altrincham ice rink – not *totally* sure this can be classed in the same category as, y’know, Tennyson, Browning, Sexton).
However, Emily DiPrimio’s from America, not Britain, and so probably models herself more on the scarily-dynamic 13 year olds of the Land of the Free, (Tavi Gevinson, for example, or 13-on-October-31st Willow Smith) than your average ice rink-attending teen. Emily recently launched a Kickstarter campaign to direct a 1980s influenced slasher movie, Carver. Never mind that DiPrimio wasn’t even a twinkle in her mum’s eye in the 80s – from the looks of her rather-wonderful Kickstarter vid, she knows her stuff. Her dad’s an amateur-horror director, so DiPrimio has tons of experience of manufacturing fake blood and editing scripts.
You guys, check out the Kickstarter video and weep a little bit about how witty and self-assured the charismatic Emily seems in comparison to your 13 year old self.
As much as slasher movies have a questionable attitude to wimmin, with sexually active female characters usually getting gutted like fish, surely one way of combating the problem is getting more women involved in writing and directing the genre.
It’s a tricky one, because statistics about the gender divide in directing are already pretty heart-breaking across all genres. Women Make Movies, an NGO founded to address the underrepresentation of women in film reported last year that women accounted for 9% of directors working on the top 250 films of 2012. They also cited a statistic from Celluloid Ceiling’s 2012 report, that reported ‘Women were most likely to work in the documentary, drama and animated film genres. They were least likely to work in the action, horror and sci-fi genres.’
I’m literally living on the breadline – as in, all I can afford is bread (even butter’s an indulgence right now), like some sort of Dickensian chimney sweep or Jane Eyre prior to her landing that sweet governess gig – but I still gave a fiver, as surely the best way to address this imbalance is to invest in girls who are passionate about films. If any of you are making more than heavy-carbz money, I heartily encourage you all to send some filthy lucre Emily’s way. Her campaign finishes on Friday, and while she’s raised $21,000 so far, she’s got $4,000 to go – absolutely anything you could give at all would be a big help.
- SA