Who's knocking in my little house? Ursula Dabrowsky's Inner Demon (2014)

In recent years the international film industry’s attention has turned to highlighting the lack of gender equality in filmmaking. There has been much discussion on ways to increase production led by female filmmakers, and continuing pressure applied to various film festivals to exhibit their finished works. In Australia, this disunion has already been noticed and some Australian funding bodies are now compliant. So why are female led films the exception rather than the rule? Why are there only a handful of A-listed actresses that are entrusted to open films that wear the mantel of ‘women’s film or chick-flick”? In horror film circles the same problems arise: apart from the strong Final Girl archetype, female characters are often side-lined to be a girlfriend or victim that is at the mercy of the stronger male characters, or worse, an insane harridan whose film is categorised under the ‘psycho biddy’ subgenre. This article closely considers Canadian filmmaker Ursula Dabrowsky, a filmmaker based in Adelaide, Australia, in both the context of gender representation in her film Inner Demon (2014) and in terms of her status as a woman making genre cinema in the context of the contemporary Australian film industry.