Bitches Kill Bitches

Hannah Panov

The year is 2008. I am freshly seven years old and attending my neighbour’s birthday party at the local Cineplex. I’m not really sure what I’m doing there or what I’m going to see, but they shuffle us into the theatre. All at once, the lights go out and the sound of a heartbeat overtakes my own. The whistles and cheers of a distant crowd seep into the theatre. Suddenly, Zac Efron’s piercing blue eyes meet mine as slow motion sweat drips from his forehead. I’ve been chasing that high in my own work ever since.

My work comes from a place of obsession, fascination, and celebration. I’m interested in investigating specific events and collective emotional experiences that felt critical to the women and queer people of my generation, but were largely overlooked or actively dismissed by prominent tastemakers at the time. I use genre as a tool of examination and target holes in stereotypes to activate a sense of empathy within my audience, even when the characters seem ridiculous or disagreeable. Since I’m often operating within an experimental framework of story and form, I aim to create really rich imagery and sound design that stays with the viewer and unlocks different layers of the film as they think about it. Most of all, I want to capture and cradle those young people, often queer people and women, who have been outcast from the cult of “good taste” and reduced to inactive audience members for their love of the mainstream.

My creative process usually starts with the thought, “wouldn’t it be crazy if I made a film about this”? Then I decide it would be crazy, and make it. The work is informed by the fact that I was often made to feel like I had bad taste because my interests were considered “lowbrow” by other artists. Realistically, I was a young girl with young girl interests, which is just about the worst (yet most profitable) thing you can be if you want to be taken seriously. After years of trying to get my friends to watch Glee, Riverdale, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and the Twilight franchise through an intentional lens, I realized I had to shift the narrative in the work I was making to make them understand how these films and shows could be valuable for more than just entertainment. I spent a lot of my time in university studying the intersection of the teen genre and my own coming of age, specifically in the digital world and trying to figure out an access point to this surprisingly complicated quest.

I wrote my first draft of Bitches Kill Bitches when I was eighteen, but didn’t finish the film until I was twenty-one. I wanted to make a fictional horror narrative that flipped the typical female revenge story on its head and forced the audience to sympathize with protagonists who were rotten and violent just for the sake of it. Teenage girlhood is full of violence in both physical and emotional ways - just as quickly as you begin to develop your sense of personhood and individuality, you learn that it doesn’t really matter to rest of the world and that you are just a vehicle for commodification and sexuality. Who wouldn’t come to that conclusion and want to lash out? It’s brutal! I used the film as an opportunity to contrast these feelings with a lush, pink, and glossy image that hides the elements of horror until they become unavoidable. It was also necessary to emphasize the fact that the girls value their pink frilly dresses just as much as their bloodlust in order to make the coexistence of innocence and violence tangible. I wanted the characters to be in control of their own story and not doomed by a typical teen-movie or horror narrative formula. They decide that they have no choice but to commit an act of extreme violence, and it’s important that the audience stands with them in it. While the film is a campy spectacle, it is rooted in truth, and as High School Musical 3: Senior Year taught me: saturation, comedy, and catchy music can be the most valuable tools to create an empathetic audience for the true teen experience.

As I continue to make work I keep these questions of care and emotional truth at the forefront of my practice, I really want my films to feel representative of their audience and speak honestly to complex concepts of love and violence in a radically distinct way that pushes experimental structures and aesthetics into the mainstream. I always say, you can be forever young if you just make it your entire filmmaking practice!

@neutralgoose