Meet Freelance Film Critic Nadine Whitney:
To start, please introduce yourself:
My name is Nadine Whitney and I’m a freelance film critic from Melbourne, Australia – although I’ve lived on the East Coast of Australia from near Brisbane, Sydney, and Canberra. I’m a RT accredited reviewer, the co-chair of the Australian Film Critics Association, part of the governing board of OFCS, and a Golden Globes voter.
What is horror to you, what makes a work of art one in the horror genre?
Horror is a broad church and is hard to define but easy to spot. For me it is a distinct sense of unease that goes beyond the boundaries of social acceptance and reason. It is the unreason that makes something horrifying. Anxieties that become obsessions.
What made you want to work in horror?
Fairy tales. The first book I was gifted (on the day of my birth) was a huge compendium of folk and fairy tales. I’d read them obsessively taking note of how many had to do with girls and women. I’d get stuck on certain cruelties in them. The severed head of a loyal horse hung above the gate to the town square in ‘The Goose Girl’ or the shards of glass or ice piercing skin in Hans Christian Anderson. Sliced feet in ‘Cinderella’ or vipers, toads and insects pouring from the mouth of a sister in a Perrault tale. That kind of thing seared into my understanding of the world. Horror came as a natural extension of that.
Where do you get your inspiration?
Other than possibly illegal amounts of caffeine? My inspiration was originally literary works and visual art. I’m fascinated with the uncanny, the gothic, the carnivalesque, the grotesque, doppelgängers, automatons, dolls, puppets, and chimerical creatures. I’m interested in redefining the hysteric — or reclaiming her; especially the ‘proto-hysteric’ of the wild girl.
What would you like your legacy to be in the genre (or elsewhere)?
I’m working on a tome at the moment that will hopefully add to the conversation about the coming-of-age ‘horror’. If I can get that done and out into the world that will be part of my written legacy.
Otherwise, I’d like my legacy to be that I shared what I learned with enthusiasm that hopefully helped someone else become passionate about the beautiful dark.
What is Women in Horror Month to you and why is it still important this many years later?
I’m not sure it’s anything out of the ordinary for me in that I see horror as predominantly being created by, or about and for, women. That’s a centuries-old fact. But, with so much culture it’s often a matter of having to highlight that over and over. Do we need to start hexing or what?
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 feel that women are the best when it comes to horror criticism. Does anyone need to be told about Kat Ellinger, Alexandra West, Lindsay Hallam, Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, Kier-la Janisse? Alison Taylor is great especially her work on Possession.
Broader cultural criticism luminaries include Mary Ann Caws, Rosalind Krauss, Emily Apter, Elizabeth Bronfen, Whitney Chadwick, Maria Tartar, and Marina Warner.
What are you currently working on that you can tell us about?
Other than the book in progress, I have some horror related essays and disc extras coming up. I’ve just done some work on a Catherine Breillat release on Umbrella Entertainment’s first New Extremity boxset. There are many releases in the pipeline but I’m not sure any can be announced.
Where can readers keep up with you?
Insta @nadine13am
BlueSky https://bsky.app/profile/nadinewhitney.bsky.social
RT: https://www.rottentomatoes.com/critics/nadine-whitney/movies?critic=self
