Call him The Last Cowboy. In many ways, the 1980s and early 90s were a sort of last frontier for independent horror film-making. In the internet age, where everyone has a social media presence, Kickstarter can fund a movie overnight, and careers live and die by tweets, it’s difficult to pine for an era when esotericism and ephemera were the name of the game.

It’s 2:00 on a Thursday afternoon and I’m sitting on a wrought-iron bench next to a wine bar, waiting to talk to the Soska Sisters. Unfortunately, it’s a Thursday afternoon in Texas, and it’s August, which means that I might as well be sitting on a wrought iron bench on the outskirts of Hell. The summer has been famously unkind to the Lone Star State this year: Temperatures have regularly been breaking the triple-digits, with and without the heat-index, and but for the miraculous inventions of air conditioning, vodka, and beer, I might not still be around to write this article. 

As the 1960s were the era when racial equality finally rose to the forefront of the national consciousness and black leaders worked to ensure the passage of the Civil Rights Act, the 2010s are shaping up to be the era of gender equality. I don’t have enough background in sociology to intelligently assess why this decade in particular has become the battleground for women’s rights, though I speculate that it has something to do with collision of the 1990s’ hyper-awareness of social concern, the proliferation of shock humor in the 2000s, and the ease with which the World Wide Web has allowed casual misogyny to flourish amidst the festering canals that are revenge porn sites and particular internet subcultures. Turn on any news channel, hop over to any internet message boards, log onto any humor site, and it’s difficult not to come across an ongoing dialogue about women’s rights.

The Soska Sisters are often called “The best female directors in horror,” but this is a terribly inaccurate description. While the 2000s saw multiple genre directors rediscovering the aesthetics of 1970s exploitation film-making, few—if any—have succeeded in capturing the true ambiance or tone of the era. Rather, most attempts to recreate vintage grindhouse in the modern day have instead been the director’s own reinterpretations of how they think such a movie should look or feel.