Biography
Alexandra Heller-Nicholas is an award-winning film critic and author from Melbourne, Australia. She is the writer of the Shudder documentary 1000 Women in Horror (Donna Davies, 2025), which is based on her 2020 book of the same name. Heller-Nicholas previously appeared in Kier-La Janisse's SXSW award-winning documentary Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror (2020), and in 2024 she was interviewed in Alexandre O. Philippe's Chain Reactions, which won the Award for Best Documentary on Cinema at the Venice Film Festival. Celebrating the 50th anniversary of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), aside from Heller-Nicholas Chain Reactios also features Patton Oswalt, Takashi Miike, Stephen King and Karyn Kusama.
Heller-Nicholas is the author of ten books on cult, exploitation and horror cinema with an emphasis on gender politics, including The Cinema Coven: Witches, Witchcraft and Women's Filmmaking (2024), two editions of her book Rape-Revenge Films: A Critical Study (2011/2021), Found Footage Horror Films: Fear and the Appearance of Reality (2014), The Giallo Canvas: Art, Excess and Horror Cinema (2021), Masks in Horror Cinema: Eyes Without Faces (2019) and 1000 Women in Horror, 1895-2018 (2020), the latter two of which were finalists in the Bram Stoker Awards® Superior Achievement in Non-Fiction categories in two consecutive years.
Alexandra has also written books on Dario Argento's Suspiria, Abel Ferrara's MS. 45, and Robert Harmon's The Hitcher, as well as co-editing books on Peter Strickland, Elaine May, the collaborations of Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani, and the large format book Wonderland on Lewis Carroll's Alice in film for Thames & Hudson, which coincided with the Australian Centre for the Moving Image exhibition of the same name. Alexandra is an Adjunct Professor at Deakin University, a freelance film programmer for SXSW Sydney, a contributing editor of Film International, and a member of the Alliance of Women Film Journalists.
