Twisted Sisters: An Interview with the Soska Siblings

I was a teensy bit nervous, I must admit, on my way to interview the Soska sisters, aka the Twisted Twins. They are the Canadian directors of American Mary, a horror revenge fantasy in which Mary Mason (Kathrine Isabelle), a student surgeon, turns to illegal body modification for violent retribution after being sexually abused by her instructors. I steeled myself with a stiff drink before being led upstairs in Edinburgh’s Filmhouse, ready to take on these identical, raven haired horror vamps. But it seems that the twisted twins have been replaced by delightful doppelgängers. It’s all smiles and hugs, genuine warmth and courtesy. They are altogether charming and I’m utterly charmed by them. There’s still an element of anxiety, however – men often find strong women intimidating. That’s why in horror films they are stalked and murdered, imprisoned and tortured. Categorised into saints and whores, both ultimately victims.

The fact that Jen and Sylvia Soska were required to subvert the genre is testament to its often questionable positioning. “It was really important to bring a female perspective to it,” Jen tells me. “A big catalyst for us was the Twilight director [Catherine Hardwicke] saing Twilight is a female horror film. That made me fucking nauseous. Martyrs [Pascal Laugier, 2008] is a real chick horror film. [Horror filmmakers] always try to make girls so one dimensional and so cookie cutter clean, like they don’t have the capacity for evil. I’m a woman and what happens in [American Mary], I want to do that to people all of the time but I’m not medically trained and I have a little bit of morality that keeps me from doing it.”

The standard horror movie revenge arc seems to focus on the (mainly female) protagonist’s torment with only a small element of cathartic revenge. The percentage of screen time devoted to lingering, voyeuristic shots of sexual violence in films such as I Spit on Your Grave exposes filmmakers aiming to gratify a certain dubious audience; the type who might give Human Centipede multiple viewings. The Soskas avoid exploitation in their treatment of such scenes, suggesting much while showing little. They’re more interested in the aftermath, the rebuilding of a broken person through an extreme form of therapy.

Sylvia giggles unnervingly as she explains Mary’s bloody retribution: “I feel like what she does to him is like, girls always have this little black dress in their closet and when they’ve had a shitty day they put it on and they’re like ‘I’m awesome.' Well she doesn’t have a little black dress, she goes over to the storage locker and when she has a weird day she’s like, 'I’m just going to remove this and sew it on somewhere else to make me feel better about myself.' ” And better she becomes, in a fashion. While traumatic acts in Straw Dogs or Deliverance forced those poor victims to tap into primal wells of barbarity, the Soskas show Mary’s revenge as an attempt to heal herself; yet the arteries of her soul harden, killing emotion while strengthening resolve. Her revenge is measured, showing cool composure in place of unthinking, animalistic regression.

An argument might be that the twins skewer genre norms while at the same time catering to a traditional, hetro male horror audience. Alien, with its feminist warrior Ripley, blows its good work in one single scene as Sigourney Weaver strips down to her skivvies at her most heightened moment of peril. She is instantly sexualised, to be ogled while at her most vulnerable. And this is only a fleeting moment, while Katherine Isabelle spends much of American Mary’s running time clad in lingerie or fetishistic nurse’s uniforms. This seems to contradict the feminist subtext injected into the film, but one of the sisters recently defended this approach in the Guardian, stating that "We're very into third-wave feminism, where a woman can own her sexuality and not shy away from it... She's [Katherine] more like, 'I'm gonna take my sexuality and I'm gonna cram it down your throat, and I'm gonna own it!'" I suppose much of this depends upon who’s watching, and for what reasons.

But the feminist subtext is only one that they explore, with Sylvia suggesting that they “like to have a film that on the surface level will draw people in and then we want to trick them into seeing a good movie and maybe learning something.” The old Roger Corman grift of serving the audience the gore they desire while surreptitiously spiking them with social commentary, forcing them to eat their greens. And while Sylvia notes that most modern American horrors are potboiler slashers with little to say, Jen looks back to past masters. “The genre’s always been a great place for people to have some sort of fantastical way to grapple with really important subjects. Like with Larry Cohen’s The Stuff: he was talking about consumerism and how everybody is saying ‘go do this’ even though you have no idea what the hell this product is that you’re putting in your body. If you sat down there and had a bunch of scientists talking about it in a drama you’d be like ‘piss off!’ But if you have this white slime and its coming everywhere then you’re like, ‘I watched this white slime movie, but it made me think about what I eat!' "

The twins embrace their subject, showing ‘normal’ polite society as dangerous and false, reflected unfavourably against the outwardly freakish, misunderstood subculture of extreme body modification. Todd Browning’s 1932 feature Freaks, in which real life carnival performers starred, provided much influence. “It was a huge inspiration, not only for the plot but for the way it was pulled off, because we had people from the real mod community come on and play themselves... so the theme was you never really knew if you were looking at a real person and their life choice or an amazing effect.” Most notable is supporting actor Tristan Risk, a burlesque performer with the fifth smallest corseted waist in the world. She plays the unsettling Beatrice, a character straight out of a Lynch script; a puzzling mix of delicate Betty Boop vulnerability with a razor sharp edge. And Jen tells me that the wider mod community also responded to them. “The first time that we screened anywhere for an audience we had a couple of rows just of mods. To have a horror audience or any audience like the film and get something out of it means the world to us, but to have the mod community get behind it and say a thank you for representing us in a fair and honest light is more than we could ask for.”

Just as Romero continues to tackle the social issue de jour through the medium of the undead, the Soskas take a scalpel to America’s skin deep obsession with body beautiful, told through their own symbolic on-screen imagery. “A tip of the hat to Dario Argento with Suspiria, so there’s red, white and blue through the entire time.” They and their fellow female horror filmmakers might just herald an opportunity for the genre to show gender neutrality. But with so much primal fear and anxiety tied into sexuality this is a big ask. Perhaps bare flesh will always equal death for the scream queens.