A horror filmmaker’s take with Jennifer Reeder: Is fear taught?

Grace Khachaturian  00:00 

Welcome to This is UIC, the official podcast of the University of Illinois Chicago. I’m Grace Khachaturian, and with each episode, we delve into the stories that drive us to unpack our most compelling questions. As Chicago’s only public research university, UIC is leading the way to create and inspire a better world. This is UIC. 

Today we’re speaking with Jennifer Reeder, filmmaker, screenwriter and professor at the University of Illinois Chicago. Jennifer is known for her bold films that dive deep into provoking themes, and today’s episode will impact the layers of how her films and story intertwine and get a glimpse into the mind of a truly gifted storyteller.  

Grace Khachaturian  00:43 

Welcome, Jennifer. I am so excited to have you here on the podcast today.  

 

Jennifer Reeder 00:50 

Thanks for having me.  

Grace Khachaturian 00:53 

So today, we’re going to dive into a question that I think you have a very unique background to be able to answer. We’re answering the curiosity of “A horror filmmaker’s take: Is fear taught?” So before we answer that, and before we dive in and really unpack that, I’d love for us to understand your why. What personal experiences or stories in your life have inspired the work that you’re currently doing? 

  

Jennifer Reeder  01:18 

So I come to the sort of house of, I guess, genre filmmaking, and even maybe specifically horror, or at least horror adjacent filmmaking, I say, by kicking in the basement door and sort of making my way up to the living room. It was a very precarious path to where I am now. And in yesteryear, I mean, I came to filmmaking through the dance world. I was a pretty serious ballet dancer as a young person. And you don’t have to be that familiar with the ballet world to at least have a peripheral idea of Swan Lake or Giselle or some of the classics. And they’re all very dark. You know, they kind of lean into mythology and fairy tales. You know, people turning into creatures, demons, you know, haunting haunted shoes. I mean, we go on and on. So even as a very, very young person, I was aware of the magic of sort of darker corners, let’s say, and was not afraid of them. And actually really liked the theatrics of sort of Gothic stories. And again, I liked the theatrics of fairy tales and mythology. I mean, they’re fantastical and wonderful. And that first introduction of the of the world of the surreal, which is such a fun place for your mind to go. You know when you’re parked in the real, which, even as a young person, certainly right this minute, is not always a fun place to sort of stay parked.  

So you know, when I knew that I wasn’t going to be a professional ballet dancer, I landed in a sculpture class in my freshman year of college, and I did very, very poorly in that class. And my teacher, very sympathetically, said, I don’t think that you’re going to be a sculptor, but there’s a kind of a performance art class that’s being taught next semester. And I know you’re a dancer, you know, that might be a place for you to sort of, like, reintroduce, kind of like, your body and how it moves through the world, you know, in the art department. And I took the class. It wasn’t so much a performance art class. It was sort of an intro to video art, which is a term that doesn’t really exist anymore. But the first time that I picked up a video camera in that class, I felt like I had recovered a phantom limb. And of course, you know, that was at a time when, well, we didn’t have cell phones, but even if we did, your cell phone wasn’t also your camera. So it just felt like I wasn’t quite sure how to get from there to even, sort of where I am right now, which is why, you know, going back to the beginning of this story, you know the path, the path was precarious and certainly not a straight line, and sort of exhausting when you have to kind of bypass the system or duck the system or trick the system to kind of get where you are.  

There’s a lot of paths for even my young students who just can’t quite, don’t see the path from where they are to where they want to be, you know. And I just have to remind them that sometimes you’re not going to see the path, and you have to build your own path, and that’s going to be tiring, but you either do that or you sort of abandon your dreams. And it just feels like abandoning, you know, your dreams should never be, you know, an option in this lifetime. And so I really slowly started to teach myself how to direct actors, teach myself how to write screenplays. I landed in Chicago to pursue my MFA at the School of the Art Institute, and so that was the sort of root. And so I carry with me what is still in my body, even as a dancer, I think of the way that I block actors, or think of the frame through the lens as a choreographer and the way that, you know dancers move through the proscenium and on the stage. So that still stays with me and I, you know, my films have gotten sort of much more sort of fantastical and dark in scope. That’s the sort of, you know, longer than expected story about sort of where I am right now, and where I really feel quite comfortable. I mean, there’s still many, many, many more dark stories for me to tell. 

  

Grace Khachaturian  05:27 

Thinking about, you know, the world of dance and your background and even childhood and upbringing. How do life experiences shape how we perceive fear? 

  

Jennifer Reeder  05:38 

That exactly is, that is the root of even the kind of like prompt for this conversation is, is, you know, is fear learned? And I offer an emphatic yes to that and evidence to sort of like my, my own lived experience. We not only, I mean, we learn, sort of like where fear lives in our body and well, what we believe is our instinct to fear, you know. I mean, we could sort of go on and on, these kind of tropes of the fears of our life, sort of a thing, a fear of heights, or a fear of, you know, enclosed spaces. You know, some of those might be a bit of kind of nature. But I think it’s also sort of nurture, or it’s the fear of falling off of a building, or fear of being suffocated, you know, by a crowd, or stuck in an elevator for the rest of your life. Those are also, you know, ingrained, learned, sort of indoctrinated, you know, by society.  

For me as someone who has kind of leaned into the sort of trope of the missing girl, the stalked girl, oftentimes even the murdered girl, which is a constant theme in so many horror films, a very problematic scene in a lot of you know so many horror films. It just feels like for me, I don’t want to ignore it and say, well, I’m a feminist filmmaker. That’s triggering. It’s problematic. But I like that challenge. I like the challenge of saying, okay, this is a problematic trope. How can I flip it? I don’t know. I don’t know that I always get it right, but I always, but I keep trying, my last feature length film that came out in 2023, “Perpetrator,” there’s a whole sort of cohort of missing girls at the core and part of what that storyline in that film in particular is questioning is, why, when girls go missing, some of them are looked for and some of them are ignored? And that’s a real-life crisis, you know. If we think about sex workers of color who go missing, even you know, minors or just the too many indigenous women, you know, who are missing, I just want equity when it comes to that. And so, in the “Perpetrator,” there is kind of that question of who gets to be found, and who must remain missing. It’s an entertaining horror film, but that sort of plot line, there’s a bit of, you know, questions around social justice in there. But as a mother, there’s no greater fear than not knowing where your child is. But the storyline in knives and skin, you know, she sort of even talks about that that, you know, her greatest fear is that she, you know, she doesn’t know where her where her child is. And so that’s kind of coming out, directly out of, sort of my sort of greatest fear. And, you know, one sort of, one, one other subplot that that remains in both knives and skin and perpetrator, that comes directly out of my own experience. That’s not about being taught fear, but my own experience as a young woman, you know, sort of being kind of pursued by older men, or at least being like having to experience an adult males feeling entitled to indulge his own desire. That’s a storyline that I’ve incorporated into actually, a lot of a lot of my films, and that’s felt really productive in terms and when I’ve had Q and A’s after films, or done other podcasts and being asked about that, it’s, it’s a moment that always resonates with you know, so many people in the in the audience, I like being able to make entertaining films. Also have an opportunity to open up a conversation that is really important, still a conversation that doesn’t happen enough. 

  

Grace Khachaturian  09:58 

It’s so interesting. That you’re actually processing the fears that you have through the work that you were putting out there. But is that a healing space? Is it a way to truly, like fully process or navigate or just unravel those parts of your life? 

  

Jennifer Reeder  10:15 

There’s a moment in particular, in in knives and skin, where the high school, the high school girl who has been kind of pursued by the substitute teacher, I mean, in a predatory way, but not in a sort of like a physically harmful way, yet he’s just a predator towards her, which happened to me, that happened to me, we had a student teacher when I was a senior in high school who, you know, knew that I was 16 or 17 years old, and was very predatory to me and but then it just went into this place where I didn’t know how to tell him to back off. I was really intimidated, and I felt I felt shame, even though it was nothing that I had done. And I, I feared, I sort of feared him. I mean, he was in a he was not just older. He had this authority in the classroom and in the world. And I also was afraid if I, if I outed him, you know, in that kind of whistleblower way, you know, who would believe him or me or anyway. So I wrote that storyline into knives and skin, and then I wrote also a moment that I never had, where the class assignment has been to write a sonnet. And so the girl, he’s saying, you know, like, Who wants to go first? And she’s like, I’ll go. So she, instead of reading her sonnet, she reads a very explicit text message that he has sent her, sent to her so writing that scene, having that kind of moment where at least that character, who was mildly based on me and my experience in high school, having that moment of then watching the teacher just be outed in front of the whole classroom, but in a way that was still on her terms, was super satisfying to write and to watch, you know, and then to have people ask me about it, and to be able to say, Well, that happened to me because it was something that I hadn’t, you know, talked about in my adult life at all. And so being able to say, Yeah, that wasn’t just a, you know, a storyline that was, that was my that was my story. 

  

Grace Khachaturian  12:30 

How do you go from the point of, okay, this is part of my story, but then crafting the storyline around that? 

  

Jennifer Reeder  12:37 

It took me a long time to do it, and I had just had the time to, like, kind of unpack it as an adult, and to really think about, Okay, how are we going to, how am I going to develop this, and how am I going to, like, suture up that, that that narrative in a really satisfying way. And I talk my students through this all the time, because they oftentimes want to add something that is autobiographical and that maybe they don’t want to talk about. So sometimes I say, Well, if you’re not really ready to talk about it, then maybe you’re not really ready to write it, even in a fictional sense. But yeah, you have to be in a place where you’re very you know, you’re really beyond it, so that you can craft it as a fiction, like you’re building another kind of Avatar next to yourself. You’re not kind of building it back in your own body. You know so often in other films that hopefully are not mine, we run the risk of making images that are that are re triggering and instead of being part of the storyline. And so I want to make provocative images, I want to make challenging images, but I don’t want to make images that, you know, send an audience member kind of back to a really traumatic, dark place. I do want to, I do want to inspire hard conversations that maybe include a moment from someone from an audience member’s own biography? 

  

Grace Khachaturian  14:02 

Yeah, I’d imagine it’s such a fine line to walk, considering so many sides of the conversation of those who might be watching it. Do you think people truly enjoy the thrill of like a horror film experience? Or do you think they’re going into this hoping to grasp something more, like there’s more to it that they’re looking to take away. 

  

Jennifer Reeder  14:24 

I mean, as someone who has a particular taste in horror, like, I am not someone who, as a consumer, I don’t seek the jump scare, yeah, you know, I don’t seek out the super, you know, graphic. As a consumer, I love watching, you know, horror and thriller that is that sort of leans more into the surreal, or leans more into the psychological, a kind of a long sort of conundrum. But I do think that that audiences seek out. About that whole spectrum of films as a way to think about religion. What happens when you die? Is there a parallel universe? Is there a heaven and hell? Or, you know, all of the different worlds, words for all of those because, because so many horror films, really, you know, lean in like the paranormal and the and the fantastical. It’s a, it’s a way to sit for an hour and a half into what is, what, in my opinion, is pretty unknowable. So I think that that, you know, that genre films, again, spanning into the kind of, you know, even the sort of speculative fiction, science fiction like our way to to sort of, yeah, sit with, sit with these questions of, you know, real life can be very tough. It’s getting, you know, tougher every day. And so, uh, you know, a trip into a fantastical world, even if it’s, you know, drenched in blood. I think for audience members, can, can feel, maybe not like, like, joyful, but can, can feel, you know, some other kind of, you know, energizing emotion, energizing feeling.  

  

Grace Khachaturian  16:19 

I know we’ve touched on this, we’ve answered it a little bit. But just as a bottom line, a horror filmmaker’s take is fear taught? 

  

Jennifer Reeder  16:26 

Yes, yes, absolutely, and from a very young age. But I think the bottom line is that, yeah, that that fear, fear is a learned emotion experience, you know, psychological state, etc. And it can be, but it could, but that, but in that way, it can also be unlearned, which is, which I feel like is, you know, part of my sort of job as a storyteller and certainly as a as an educator. 

  

Grace Khachaturian  16:53 

Jennifer, this conversation has been so interesting, learning about your story and its influence on your work, and unpacking the question is fear taught, as well as considering how the perception of fear is shaped by the world around us. So to round out our time together, we like to end things on a lighthearted note. If you were to pick a song that you think best represents your story, what song would you pick? 

  

Jennifer Reeder  17:17 

It’s a no brainer. I would pick Donovan’s “Season of the Witch.” 

 

[Music plays: Season of the Witch] 

   

Jennifer Reeder  17:37 

Which is a very groovy song. It’s been covered, I think, by Lana Del Rey more recently, but maybe it came out in the late 60s, early 70s. It’s a really, it’s a really groovy song with, like, the most kind of poetic, sort of eerie, dark lyrics. It’s one that I listen to a lot like that song’s message frequency is like, matches my own sort of frequency. And I just like the idea of, you know, a Season of the Witch again. What does that mean? And I’ll just, I’ll claim all of that, all of that witchy energy that I can 

  

Grace Khachaturian  18:21 

so good. Well, Jennifer, it has been an honor to speak with you. I think this has been such an interesting conversation. So thank you so much for your time today.  

 

Jennifer Reeder 18:29 

Yeah, this was great. Thank you! 

 

Grace Khachaturian 18:32 

 Find out more about Jennifer in the show notes  

 

[Music plays: Season of the Witch] 

 

Grace Khachaturian  18:48 

Thanks for listening to this is UIC, the official podcast of the University of Illinois, Chicago, Chicago’s only public research university until next time. Visit today.uic.edu to uncover how UIC is inspiring a better world.