Women And Horror – Women as Heroes and Villains

Building on our successful panel on women and horror at the 2019 Festival, this panel will focus on depictions of women as both heroes and villains in horror films and beyond and what this tells us about the current zeitgeist.

Moderator
As Director of Programming at Nitehawk Cinema, Caryn Coleman programs the annual Nitehawk Shorts Festival, new independent films (focusing on horror and women filmmakers), and special rep screenings. In 2018, she founded The Future of Film is Female, a funding initiative for short films directed by women that’s also a screening series at MoMA. She received the 2012 Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation Art Writers Initiative grant for her blog on horror and art, “The Girl Who Knew Too Much.”

Panelists
Kate McEdwards is a New York based publicist. She is currently with IFC Films | IFC Midnight, and has previously worked at Oscilloscope Laboratories and Cinetic Marketing and PR. In the last decade, she has worked on 100+ films, including Neon’s I TONYA, Focus Features’ RAW, The Orchard’s THELMA, Oscilloscope’s THE LOVE WITCH, and Jennifer Kent’s THE NIGHTINGALE. She is also a co-host on the female centric podcast LADIES HORROR NIGHT.

Jourdain Searles is a writer, podcaster and comedian who hails from Augusta, GA and currently resides in New York City. Her writing has been published in Vanity Fair, The New York Times, Vulture, The Ringer, Bitch Media, and The AV Club among others. She is a lifelong horror fan and believes The Slumber Party Massacre trilogy is underrated perfection.

Sydney Clara Brafman is an award-winning writer and filmmaker living in Brooklyn, NY. Her focus drives her to study the human condition, the irony of circumstance, the tragedy of humor and the environments they inhabit with a wicked sense of humor and style. When she’s not making movies, she’s passionately hating cocoa, removing stage bloodstains from her clothing, and enjoying cats on the street.