Women and Queerness in Horror: Instinct

Warning: This article contains images of blood and spoilers for Instinct.

In a slight move away from our norm for this series, I’d like to bring you all with me into the weird and wonderful world of queer horror short films. We’re diving into Brazilian genre director Maria Alice Arida’s Instinct. Now, when I say weird, I mean it in two ways: short films, particularly in the horror genre, aren’t always kind.

Additionally, they aren’t always accessible to your “average” viewer. Well, rest assured: I am that average viewer. I’m not a film critic in any kind of professional sense, and I found Instinct both beautifully made and easy to understand. All without stumbling into the territory of the offensive, the exploitative, or the gratuitously gross.

Instinct, clocking in at a 17-minute runtime, is longer than your average short film. However, none of that time feels wasted or hollow. The film is Arida’s thesis project, culminating in her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at the American Film Institute. It’s clear almost immediately that she had the opportunity to work with professional-quality camera and audio equipment through her program.

The film is gorgeously shot and matches its visuals with a heady soundscape. It’s evident from the first few minutes that Arida understands how to make every beat of a short film count, taking full advantage of the limited runtime to craft an unsettling, provocative, and darkly beautiful story in all its moving parts.

If you haven’t already figured this out, I loved this film. Not just for its style either. Let’s sink our teeth into the substance, shall we?

Instinct follows Isabelle (Christine Kellogg-Darrin), the owner of an art gallery, as she meets and grows attached to the delightfully vampy performance artist Camila (Jordan Monaghan). The two are undoubtedly interested in each other, but with that growing fascination comes a simmering tension. It’s something that vibrates with adjusting to a stranger coming to inhabit a space that used to be principally or even exclusively yours; with the looming presence of youthfulness.

Ultimately, at first glance, Isabelle seems to be feeling the threatening vibrations of that fragile soap bubble she’s built around herself. Particularly the experience of proving yourself in a professional space, only to face the realization that someone might outshine you, and the decision to support them or fight harder to assert yourself.

Instinct captures these sensibilities seamlessly, neither getting mired in heavy-handed exposition nor in such high-flying imagery that anyone short of a film studies major would lose the plot. You feel it because Isabelle does. The plot turns when that fascination becomes consummated in more ways than one, and is made all the more crisp, unsettling, and yet oddly beautiful in its uglier side to intimacy.

The film is clearly aware of its genre lineage, too. Camila and Isabelle by turns evoke long-familiar images of the lesbian vampire, in different ways. Yet here, it’s not a code. Even Camila’s name almost made me wonder if this would be a generously stretched Carmilla adaptation. To my relief, it isn’t. I love a good lesbian vampire but that story has been rehashed one too many times, if you ask me.

Camila’s performance art, and Kellogg-Darrin’s uncanny and seamless performance of Isabelle as someone fascinated with and repulsed by Camila’s relative youth and beauty, both evoke Countess Bathory. It winks quite overtly at the viewer, when Isabelle bites Camila’s neck during the seduction sequence. I kept waiting to see blood when Isabelle drew away, and the fact that I didn’t see it only drew me in more.

The culmination of Instinct is one best watched on its own without letting my experience of it sway you, so I’ll let you feel that one out on your own. Suffice it to say the film is self-aware enough to play with and subvert its tropes confidently. It provides an unexpectedly empathetic look at the ways that queer intimacy can be frightening and even possessive, bloody and raw but real. All while never stepping into the film’s villain indulging herself in violence because she’s queer. Full-length character study when?