Award-winning writer, director, and producer Elise Salomon:
To start, please introduce yourself:
Elise Salomon is an award-winning writer, director and producer based in Los Angeles whose projects have been featured at international festivals and markets including Sundance, SXSW, IDFA, FrightFest, Stowe Story Labs, Galway Film Fleadh, Frontières and Cannes. She writes present-day, grounded folk horror with an all-encompassing aesthetic, rooted in drama and true to its supernatural underpinnings.
What is horror to you, what makes a work of art one in the horror genre?
For me, horror is a story that unsettles. That terrifies. Grieves. A story that peels away defenses and pokes at vulnerabilities. A story that traps. That pushes. Haunts. A story that brings a lingering darkness.
What makes a horror story a work of art for me is when it is able to use the terror and grief and darkness to help me connect and express complex feelings, then transcend to connection, understanding and survival.
What made you want to work in horror?
I honestly don’t remember it as a decision that I made. I had always especially loved horror, but as a producer, I told all kinds of stories that moved me. When I sat down to write my first script, I was driven by a message I wanted to deliver. That I was right to be afraid. That we were all underreacting to things. The urgency and impending doom I felt, naturally lent itself to a horror story. I am drawn to mythology and folklore. These stories encompass my passion for horror and my obsession with the visceral, unlimited artistic potential of genre films. Genre films as ART have always inspired me the most. And I have always loved stories about sensitive, damaged people in touch with a darkness and a power that the rest of us are dangerously ignorant to.
Where do you get your inspiration?
The news. (I’m being adorable. But seriously. The news.)
What would you like your legacy to be in the genre (or elsewhere)?
In the genre, my legacy will be that no animals get hurt in any of my stories.
Elsewhere, I hope my legacy will be that I brought some kindness, patience, compassion and laughs to the people close to me.
What is Women in Horror Month to you and why is it still important this many years later?
I’ll just leave this right here (wink, wink):
and
I think because the discourse regarding diversity and equity is loud, people have a misconception about the success, practical efforts, practices, and implementation of those stated goals and commitments. The industry-wide default for new talent is still: men have potential, women are a risk.
Women in Horror Month is important to me because it’s part of a movement by and for women to develop and support talent. Hire women. Fund their projects.
Who are some of the Women in Horror who you look up to and who do you want to bring attention to in your field or others?
I’m terrible at making lists. I’ll be mortified later when I realize how many names I’ve left off, but to start and in no particular order:
America Young
Ellie Foumbie
Ana Lily Amirpour
Karyn Kusama
Nia DaCosta
Jennifer Kent
Jennifer Lynch
Melody Cooper
Kathryn Bigelow
Brea Grant
Julia Ducournau
Issa Lopez
Lisa Brühlmann
Veronika Franz
Emma Tammi
Jenn Wexler
Jill Gevargizian
Lynne Ramsay
Hettie MacDonald
Susanne Bier
Alma Har’el
Andrea Arnold
Sally Potter
Susanna White
Rose Glass
Prano Bailey-Bond
Kate Dolan
What are you currently working on that you can tell us about?
Upcoming projects for Elise include her narrative directorial debut from her original screenplay, INSIDE, a present-day Irish folk horror in development with Black Mansion Films. The project has been described as one that “marries myth and magic, and explores a raw emotional landscape woven like an ancient root system through trauma and the mythic.” INSIDE has benefited from the generous support of Stowe Story Labs, Frontières International Co-Production Market, Marché du Film Cannes, and Galway Film Fleadh Market.
Her second present-day Irish folk horror, CAOINEADH, is a “supernatural Romeo & Juliet.” CAOINEADH won Best Irish Feature Screenplay from Bigfoot Script Challenge in association with Trinity College, was an official selection of the 2023 Stowe Story Labs Connemara Writers Retreat and was named one of three horror finalists of the 2023 Austin Film Festival Writers’ Conference.
She is currently writing the present-day Austrian Christmas folk horror, URD | SKULD. Elise is proud to be collaborating with the incredibly talented filmmaker, Marie Alice Wolfszahn, who will direct the dark, cinematic tale.
Elise is also in development with The Restless, an explicit supernatural romance series set in a coastal 1950s New England town.
IG: @elisesalomon
Thank you for taking the time to this, we greatly appreciate it.
Thank YOU, so so so much! xo