4. Mary Harron
Best Film: American Psycho (2000) She may only be known for one film, but that one film is a doozy. American Psycho seems like a movie almost devoid of femininity, Patrick Bateman is the ultimate chauvinistic yuppie and the female characters are forced to the periphery of his psychotic mind. But Harron made a film that not only acknowledges the ritualistic murder of sexualized female characters in horror, it takes it to its slashing extreme. When Bateman - played wonderfully, as you well know, by Christian Bale - throws a chainsaw down a flight of stairs in order to kill a woman who may expose him as the murdering bastard he is, the audience laughs at the ridiculous lengths the movie goes to in order to silence the female threat. But isn't that symbolic of most of the horror genre, killing women in a bout of fanciful fun in order to limit the threat they pose to a masculine society? Harron also directed the underseen The Notorious Bettie Page in 2005, a fitting biopic of the pinup model, and I Shot Andy Warhol in 1996, but she hasn't developed a mainstream presence despite the overwhelming cult success of American Psycho. It's a shame that she hasn't been given more of a chance, but that doesn't make her work less remarkable.