Horror Creative Johnna Hodge Interview [Women in Horror Month 2025]

I have loved horror movies since I was a small child in the early eighties and grew up on having a passion for horror all my life. I feel like horror is a true work of art where you have a vision for a unique story and bring it to life with unique elements to make it terrifying and have characters that come to life to the point where you feel what the characters are going through as you see each scene. You have lots of work put into your effects and make blood so that it looks so terrifying with what is created. My husband, Sam Hodge, is a 4 time award winning effects maker and makes our own blood recipe for our movies. I think everything that you have a vision for and bring to life is an amazing art. 

I have loved Horror since a small child and I had a terrible past. I love using my love for horror and using my past trauma to make my characters come to life.

I feel my inspiration is all the wonderful horror movies I grew up with and love and also my past life experiences have made me want to bring characters to life for the love of acting and making movies. It makes me happy to work and I hope to entertain people that love horror so much.

I have been in other features and short films in the past but Redhead is the creation we both made together. Redhead was the one that was so hard and challenging because I lost my pug, Puggles. She was my daughter of 14 years and passed away between filming scenes. Additionally, I almost died from an intestinal rupture but survived and 2 weeks later went back to work. At that point, I was driven to not let anyone down that was in our film. We went on a festival run after the films big premiere in October of 2023. We won 10 awards and received 25 additional nominations for Redhead including 4 nominations for Best Actress. I won Best Actress at Chicago Horror Film Festival May of 2024. We won Best Actress, Best Feature several times, and Best Effects several times. Redhead was our baby and now we have been filming Redhead 2: Deadhead and we are half finished. We take our time making our films so that we get our vision to what we imagined.

I feel Women in Horror is a month to celebrate the achievements, accomplishments , successes and hard work that women put into making and acting in horror movies and all the love and energy with every effort they put into making legendary work for horror. Additionally female villains are something to celebrate as there has been a growing impact for them along with the fantastic final girls also.

Marilyn Burns from Texas Chainsaw is a huge inspiration and wish she was still with us , Carolyne Williams from Texas Chainsaw 2 , Linnea Quigley from Return of the Living Dead , The whole cast of The Decent , Milla Jovovich from The Fifth Element and Resident Evil movies, Sigourney Weaver from Alien movies, Shelley Duvall from The Shining , Linda Hamilton from The Terminator movies, Claire Higgins from Hellraiser movies and Elvira.  For attention to our field or others I feel I would like other female directors, actresses and filmmakers to see what we have done with our Redhead movies. Female directors are becoming far more common and bring something entirely fresh to the genre.

Redhead is gradually hitting streaming platforms as we are working heavily on Redhead 2. Redhead II: Deadhead is, technically, far more involved with effects and the way shots are set up so we are taking our time.