Queer Readings: Meet bisexual horror director Axelle Carolyn
You may not know her name, but if you’re a horror fan you’ve seen her work as an actor and director, most recently calling the shots in The Manor!
Aside from directing episodes of American Horror Story, Creepshow, and The Haunting of Bly Manor, Axelle Carolyn also wrote for The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. As writer/director Carolyn has released two works that are gaining popularity in the horror community with a new work out now.
Carolyn, a bisexual forty-year-old, has worked her way up the horror ranks, beginning as a film journalist who wrote Horror Movies in the New Millennium, before diving into writing and directing horror shorts. Carolyn knows the horror medium as few do: As a commentator, critic, and creator.
On October 8 Carolyn’s latest horror surprise was released on Amazon Prime: and The Manor looks like a major move forward for her in terms of casting and distribution. It is produced and distributed by the new-horror megalith, Blumhouse, and stars Barbara Hershey — an actress who has had a horror cult status since her role in the 1982 film The Entity, and a horror fan base that has been growing since she returned to horror in 2010 with Insidious, then Black Swan, and Insidious 2.
In preparation for The Manor, I’ve gone back and watched Carolyn’s first features: Soulmate (2013) and Tales of Halloween (2015). The first time I watched these films I was unaware of Carolyn’s bisexuality. But upon returning to Soulmate I found the film an intense depiction of feminist thought suffocating under outdated patriarchal ideas. My new awareness of Carolyn’s work as a commentator and critic illuminated moments in the film I previously found confusing.
For instance, Carolyn dwells on the gaze in Soulmate. A glance in the mirror can be immense. The flash of an eye can linger long after its left. Establishing shots often put something in the foreground creating the illusion that someone is being watched and the audience is in the place of the one watching. Carolyn makes use of the gaze as a film device to situate the audience between a series of contentious views: the audience is the feminine gaze that looks upon itself in the mirror for evidence of existence, the eye that appears for a moment and disappears is the lurking sense that one is judged even while alone, and the male gazes looms large outside the house as it surveys the kingdom.
Carolyn plays the horror genre like a highly-honed instrument. She knows which images get the desired effect; she knows the history and theory that make horror work. In my favorite reversal in the film, Carolyn takes the well-documented “mad woman in the attic” trope and says that the woman in the attic isn’t “mad” but rather society, trauma, and patriarchal women are to blame for the suffering in the film.
Tales of Halloween is a vastly different film from Soulmate. Here Carolyn demonstrates the breadth of her horror knowledge with an interlocking collection of playful vignettes that include suburban ax murders, imps, and aliens. Fangoria called Tales of Halloween “the best horror anthology since Trick ‘r Treat. No wonder the Tribeca film festival declared Axelle Carolyn “holds the key to indie horror’s future.”
About Axelle Carolyn
A passionate fan of genre content and a talented director to watch, Axelle has several projects under her belt across both the television and film spaces, helming several recent beloved genre stories. In addition to THE MANOR, she recently directed episodes of several prestigious TV shows in the last year, including the standout, black-and-white chapter of “The Haunting of Bly Manor” from Paramount, Amblin, and Netflix, which Rotten Tomatoes called “the year’s most haunting hour of TV”, as well as Ryan Murphy’s lauded FX series “American Horror Story”, Shudder’s “Creepshow,” and Netflix’s upcoming “The Midnight Club.” Axelle’s previous writing credits also include the “Chilling Adventures of Sabrina,” for Warner Bros and Netflix. Her feature directorial debut, a slow-burn ghost story titled SOULMATE won several awards in festivals around the world and is currently streaming on Amazon.
