SPOTLIGHT April 2026: Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, Film Critic & Historian, Filmmaker, Horror Nonna

If you follow AWFJ’s Movie of the Week, you may remember very recently we featured director Donna Davies’ documentary 1000 Women in Horror. The film considers how women are reflected in the horror genre, dissecting perception through life stages, starting with girlhood, and moving through our school years, adulthood, career, motherhood and aging. It also profiles the movies many of the female filmmakers who have contributed through the decades. 1000 Women in Horror was based on a book by the same name released in 2020, written by film critic, historian, and award-winning author Alexandra Heller-Nicholas. She was tapped as screenwriter for the documentary, and appears on-screen throughout the film.

A renowned expert with vast knowledge of horror as well as a great champion of women in film, we are proud to call her a member here at the AWFJ. And guess what? As there’s no rest for the wickedly talented, she has much more up her sleeve! The documentary has only just released in theaters worldwide, and yet she has multiple projects in the works. That’s why we thought it’s time to feature badass Aussie Alexandra Heller-Nicholas in our April SPOTLIGHT. AWFJ spoke to Heller-Nicholas about her life, career, how discovering she was neurodivergent later in life was an A-Ha moment, and what’s next for her. We got an exclusive on her next project, which represents a beautiful circling back to the beginnings of her career as a music journalist!

FIRST CINEMATIC COMMUNION:

Her first memories were far later than you’d imagine for someone with such a fascination for the genre, and for good reason:

“I was raised quite strictly Catholic so horror films were banned – the first horror media I remember having an impact on me, though, was the trailer for Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, which absolutely terrified me and blew my tiny mind. I think I’ve been chasing that feeling ever since! Although I did find out just before my mother died that she let my aunt who was babysitting me when I was 7 weeks old take me to see The Exorcist, so I do wonder if that didn’t make an impact on my little developing brain as well!”

FROM TEEN GOTH TO MAGAZINE FOUNDER TO CINEMA STUDIES:

“As a teenager I was a much bigger music-head than I was film-head: I loved movies and consumed them voraciously, but music was my real passion. I came to music writing from DJing in goth clubs in Melbourne, Australia in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and was the founding co-editor of FIEND, a dark alternative music and culture magazine which I also wrote a lot for: not just on music and film, but fashion, visual art, a whole range of things that really fell under a “gothic” umbrella.

This led to writing for the free local street press publication Beat Magazine, which put me on the radar of Robert Dimery, the editor of 1000 Albums You Must Hear – as such, I mostly wrote about goth albums by The Cure, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Bauhaus, to name a few, but there are a few curve balls in there that reflect my broader music tastes like Joan Baez and Neneh Cherry.”

That’s a pretty impressive start. And yet, Heller-Nicholas decided to pivot to her other love, and was supported along the way by a great collection of mentors and professors.

“I struggled a lot with the sausage fest that was the music scene, though, and a few life changes happened that saw me turn my full attention to studying what was then called Cinema Studies at Latrobe University, where I did my undergraduate studies, as well as Honors and Masters.

I feel very blessed that I had the good fortune of a series of passionate, authentic and engaged teachers in high school and university, both men and women alike: Jack Geary at Hawker College was the first person who I felt really saw me, and if there was a moment that I can pinpoint sparked my career as a writer, it was meeting him. Key figures at Latrobe University like Anna Dzenis, Rolando Caputo and Geoff Mayer were all vital in my professional development, as were later academics at other universities I was fortunate enough to work for in a research capacity: Rachel Fensham, Ramon Lobato, Anne Marsh and most of all, Angela Ndalianis.”

Aș to current mentors, she had this to say:

“I think for film critics especially, finding good mentorship is enormously important but far too rare. Jennifer Merin – the president of the Alliance of Women Film Journalists – absolutely has fulfilled that role for me for many years now, as I know she has so many other women and femme-identifying film critics.”

A PIVOT TO SUCCESSFUL AUTHOR

Although she excelled in school, it was difficult for Alexandra to pour her soul into writing a Masters thesis that was only read by a scant few, especially after working as a journalist and seeing the impact writing could have in the public space, so she shifted her focus to a more public venue. Her Masters thesis became her first book, Rape-Revenge Films: A Critical Study, first released in 2011. It was a hit, and a substantially revised 10 year anniversary edition was released in 2021.

Soon enough, motherhood became part of her life, but as she focused on raising her son, she continued contributing to publications and writing books. That including Found Footage Horror Films: Fear and the Appearance of Reality. Returning full-time to academia to complete her PhD at the University of Melbourne, led to the publication of her book Eyes Without Faces: Masks in Horror Cinema, which was nominated for the Bram Stoker Award for Best Non-Fiction. She was frequently published along the way, writing monographs on Dario Argento’s Suspiria, Abel Ferrara’s Ms. 45, and Robert Harmon’s The Hitcher. After obtaining her PhD, she released 1000 Women in Horror in 2020, The Giallo Canvas: Art, Excess and Horror Cinema in 2021, and, most recently, The Cinema Coven: Witches, Witchcraft and Women’s Filmmaking in 2024.

“After writing 1000 Women in Horror I knew instinctively that I was going to write a book specifically on women horror directors, and the focus on women directed films about witches and witchcraft evolved very organically from this. There’s a lot of great work being done on women’s filmmaking – and horror filmmaking – more generally, but I wanted to do something very precise and specific. I’d always been obsessed with witch films, so it really came together very naturally, and was a deeply satisfying and intuitive book to write.”

ADDING FILMMAKING TO AUTHORSHIP

Heller-Nicholas shares how she got involved in making a documentary based on her own book, and how that has altered her career:

“In 2018, the legendary writer/filmmaker/producer/goddess Kier-La Janisse invited me to deliver a lecture for the Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies at Fantastic Fest in Austin on the book that was at the time still in development. One of the people who saw that lecture was the British producer Giles Edwards who – despite the book not yet even being published – approached me about optioning the film as a documentary. Giles really spearheaded the project along with Nicola Goelzhaeuser and Greg Newman, who were the ones who brought the fabulous director/producer Donna Davies on board, and developed a fabulous relationship with Shudder who really turned this into a reality.

The learning curve was incredibly steep as I had never worked on a film before, let alone having written about them for decades. But I was very fortunate to have Donna Davies as both a mentor, colleague and friend, and getting to see how the sausage of cinema is made was fascinating. Donna is so kind and smart and generous, and seeing how she works up close was a real peek behind the curtain.

Now that I’ve had the good fortune of this experience, I honestly can’t see myself going back. I’m working with Donna on developing a new project. I have also been developing a few projects with filmmaker Alexandre O. Philippe. In 2023, Alex invited me to be one of the five people interviewed in his Texas Chainsaw Massacre 50th anniversary legacy documentary, Chain Reactions, alongside Stephen King, Patton Oswalt, Takashi Miike and Karyn Kusama, and it would go on to play at festivals around the world and win a major prize at the Venice Film Festival. Alex is not just one of my favorite filmmakers but one of my favorite people, and getting to play with him in the film development sandbox is one of the most exciting things I have ever had the privilege of doing!”

In another life, she might have been a director!

“The impact of women’s filmmaking has had a curious personal impact: I remember reading years ago an interview with Jennifer Kent and she said she went to film school to study acting simply because she had no idea women could direct. I don’t remember a time when I became conscious that women were making movies – I’m Australian, so maybe people like Gillian Armstrong and Jane Campion from New Zealand, but I do wish I had sort of consciously clicked earlier, because I think there is a parallel universe somewhere where I pursued that path over criticism. Because of my own experience, I therefore have enormous respect for women and femme-identifying folk who have bucked the trend. I envy them their strength and self-awareness!”

THE BENEFITS OF NEURODIVERGENCE

Discovering later in life that she was autistic made complete sense to Heller-Nicholas, and in retrospect explains her ability to hyper-focus on research and delve more deeply and completely into her subject matter.

“I received my autism diagnosis when I was 48, and it wasn’t the rainbows and unicorns moment of happy discovery that it is for so many other people: I felt a deep grief and sense of loss because I had for almost half a century had no idea why I felt so disconnected and different. But now the dust has settled, I think it’s fairly self-explanatory that horror is absolutely my obsessive interest, one that I have been able to professionalize and formalize.

Like so many neurodiverse people, when I find something I am interested in I become like a dog that refuses to let go of a bone, and all of my books – on giallo cinema, women’s filmmaking and witchcraft, sexual violence, masks, and found footage horror – had all been long-gestating obsessions just waiting for me to have time and headspace to give them shape.

I feel my best when watching horror movies and writing about them, it is my optimum tool to self-regulate. That I have made a job out of it is almost a bonus. I will always write books and have another long-term obsession I am talking to an incredible publisher about who I never dreamed I could collaborate with on a project like this, but it honestly feels like the right thing at the right time.”

THAT BRINGS US TO HER NEW PROJECT!

We are thrilled that we get to announce for the first time that Alexandra Heller-Nicholas is releasing a book about the soundtrack to The Blair Witch Project! It’s an exciting circle back to her early origins as a music journalist, and yet she’ll be using her knowledge about the horror genre, as well. A WIN/WIN for us all! We’ll let her tell you about it herself:

“My forthcoming book on the soundtrack for the original Blair Witch Project – Josh’s Blair Witch Mix – began as a proposal for Bloomsbury’s 33⅓ series. I really approached it as a writing exercise because at the time I had been really nostalgic for my origins in music writing and had really missed it, so the proposal was a nice way to dip my toe back into it while still centering a horror film. I had absolutely no illusions that the proposal wouldn’t be accepted, simply because compilation various artist soundtracks of pre-existing songs are considered such a low form, not “real” albums at all (to my knowledge 33⅓ have included soundtracks before, but only of original music, nothing like this).

That proposal became an article at Film International, which ironically in turn led to the soon-to-be announced Channel Academic imprint contracting it as a book for their Music and Cult Film/TV series. It’s only a short little monograph, but was incredibly cathartic to write. Aside from allowing me to dip my toe back into music writing, The Blair Witch Project is easily one of my favorite horror movies and while I’d written about it in my book on found footage horror and did the audio commentary with Josh Nelson for Second Sight’s recent blu-ray release, I always knew I’d end up doing something more focused on it. That the soundtrack consists primarily of goth/industrial music, including Bauhaus, Type O Negative, Skinny Puppy, Lydia Lunch, and Laibach is obviously very much in my wheelhouse, but the fact that this specific kind of music was tethered so tightly to the mood of this era has never really been discussed before. The Blair Witch Project and this soundtrack came out the same year as Columbine, in the lead up to the end of the century and fears about things like the Y2K bug: the album really opens up new ways of thinking about the film that have been until now completely ignored from a critical perspective.”

WHY WE CHOSE HER:

For film female critics, it can sometimes be a challenge, but for female filmmakers, saying their careers and getting films made is a challenge is an understatement. Alexandra Heller-Nicholas has fearlessly chose to do both. She has carved out an award-winning career as an author, historian, and film critic. She is now adding credits in the film industry to those successes, and is poised to balance all that as part of a full creative life. Her neurodiversity is part of what makes her so good in so many aspects of her career. We can’t wait to see what she does next, and will celebrate each new project, as it will no doubt offer new insight and add new context to whatever she finds fascinating enough to filter through that her own unique lens. — Leslie Combemale