'Relic' director Natalie Erika James wants to change how we view women in horror movies

• Director Natalie Erika James told Insider in an interview that she wants to change how women are portrayed in horror films.
• James directed the upcoming horror movie "Relic.
• It follows a woman and her daughter as they come to terms with family matriarch Edna's debilitating — and ominous — new disease.
• According to the Australian-Japanese filmmaker, she didn't set out to make an overtly "feminist" horror film, but may have created one anyway.
• "It's nice to see three women with agency in 'Relic,'" James said.

Director Natalie Erika James said in a recent interview with Insider that she wants to change the way women are portrayed in horror films.

James directed the upcoming horror movie "Relic." The film follows a woman, Kay, and her daughter, Sam, as they try to take care of Kay's mother Edna. Upon arriving at Edna's house, Kay and Sam discover that something much more sinister than mere forgetfulness has been plaguing Edna — and are soon drawn into a terrifying world filled with decomposing corpses, mysterious stains, and ominous shadows.

Speaking with Insider, the Australian-Japanese director talked about her decision to focus primarily on female characters in her new film.

"I'm very passionate about women on screen, and definitely in the horror genre. We are often depicted as very objectified — through the male gaze, in a sort of voyeuristic way," James told Insider, adding that women in horror films are often portrayed as "a conduit for pain."

According to the director, she wanted Edna, Kay, and Sam to be different. The three women are indispensable to the film's nuanced exploration of dementia and family trauma, but James told Insider that she originally included other male characters in first drafts of the script.

"In the first iteration, I was constructing a husband character for Kay and Sam had a brother as well," James said. "But we just found over time, as we were developing it, that it felt clearer and cleaner without those characters and just centered on the three women."

"I think also because the experience was based on my mother and her mother, it just seemed to make the most sense — those are the relationships that were kind of shining on the page, and that I really cared about," the filmmaker added.

In crafting the character of Edna, the elderly matriarch of the family who's slowly losing her mind to a dementia-like disease, James said she wanted to stay away from the trope of the "crazy old lady."

"There's such a trope in horror of the 'crazy old lady,' but I feel like, in this day and age, you have to just have a bit more nuance," James explained.

At the start of the film, Edna just seems confused and a little senile. But as "Relic" goes on, it becomes clear that something else is wrong with her. With paranoia mounting among Kay and Sam, and Edna becoming increasingly violent, the film concludes with a harrowing confrontation between the three women.

"For us, it was really important that this character was also really sympathetic and empathetic, and that you could really see things from her perspective," James said of Edna. "So there could be moments of lucidity that she has, which, the audience is very much with her throughout the film. And we wanted to kind of dig into that."

James told Insider that she didn't set out to make an overtly "feminist" horror film, but that she may have created one, anyway.

"I didn't want, necessarily, to be an ideological filmmaker, but I'd probably be seen as a feminist one," she said. "Me making this film — you could probably call it a feminist film."

"It's nice to see three women with agency in 'Relic,'" James added.

"Relic" premieres July 10 in theaters and On Demand.