role and influenced a trend in the horror and thriller genre which is being referred to as “villain-cinema.” How do you feel about the fact that that trend is sort of taking off at a time when you have stepped away from the industry?”
Okay this guy was coming in with a little less fanboy and a little more journalist, than she had expected.
“Well, first of all,” she said, suddenly invigorated by the prospect of having a real conversation, “I don't feel like I'm away from the industry. I still love these stories, I'm just exploring them in a different way now. Through the magazine. But as far as this whole villain-cinema thing goes, I think it's great that people are calling it that. And I guess that does explain the kind of stories I was compelled to tell, but it wasn't some sort of conscious decision to create a kind of cinema. I was just writing what was inside of me. And in the end, that's all you can do, if you're an honest artist. An artist who isn't honest with what's inside isn't an artist at all.”
Ryan seemed to chew that over for second before he retorted.
“Horror has always been, well, filled with horrific, bleak, dark stories. With the introduction of villain-cinema, it seems to have... I don't want to say ‘sunken deeper’, because that sounds like a judgement somehow, but I guess I can see how some people would see it that way. I guess the difficulty with these kinds of stories is that there is no clear good guy. The good guy is bad. And even in some way there seems to be this notion that the monster is the true victim. Anybody that has seen the Blood-Witch series or Love Bytes, the movie were you play a sex-bot who grows to feel a sense of violation and anger towards the people that exploited her and then massacres them all in the most horrible ways imaginable, will know what I'm talking about. What do you think it is that compelled you to write stories in which there was no clear line between hero, villain, good-guy, bad-guy?”
“Honestly, while I was writing them, there was no agenda to write things like that, or create this notion of a monster-hero. I just sat down to write and that's what came out. But now that everyone else has had something to say about it, it’s kind of forced me to look at it and ask myself why it's my natural inclination to write these kinds of stories. And I suppose I just see goodness and evil in all of us. It also is clear to me that people who are criminals or have done, quote un-quote, evil things, many times are victims themselves in the sense that they are suffering from a kind of deficiency of something somewhere in their own existence, making them in a way, victims themselves. I don't know. I don't want to get too philosophical about it. These movies are supposed to just silly fun after all. And like I said, I'm only coming to these kinds of thoughts after the fact.”
She looked at Erin, her assistant editor whose eyebrows and lips were travelling in opposite directions across her mousy little face, an expression Mary interpreted as her being impressed.
“I would like to read something from an article written about you once.”
Mary knew of course what article he was referring to. It had proved to be the most important press she ever received.
“With an illustrious bloody rampage through the annals of cinematic gore and horror, Mary Stien has undeniably cemented her legacy as one of the great beauties of the genre right up there with the likes of iconic figures such as Elvira and the great Vampirella. She has both captivated us as the doe-eyed, heaving-bosomed, victim/survivor, and tempted us as the sinister man eating seductress. With all respect due, it’s in this author’s opinion that neither her