Please Calm Down

~ Jessica Richmond, director, HYSTERICUS

On making a horror film where nothing is actually scary

HYSTERICUS opens on a girl performing girlhood for the digital stage.

It is 2007: Brie is filming a makeup tutorial outdoors, angling her face toward a clunky camcorder held by her mall goth friend Tay. And hey, she's good at it: the half-smile eye roll, the flourish of a makeup brush, the way she gets animated once she knows the camera is recording. Tomatoes pop into frame around her - her own fantasy of herself, on the cover of Tiger Beat…

Then she finds blood on her face, and she cannot fathom where it came from.

Neither can the audience - by design.

It could be hers; she has been sitting, leaning back, touching her own skin. It could have been on the bench before she got there - as the film unfolds, we learn the woman who lives in the house behind it is bleeding freely and unbothered, and benches are for sitting on… hell, it could be a squished tomato! The film never resolves this; nobody in it is entitled to know whose blood it is.

Brie panics and dials 911.

Please calm down, the operator says.

Nobody calms down.

Enter Officer Sam Benton from the Crisis Intervention Team, trained to look for catastrophe around her and unable to recognize anything else. She works the scene and finds her suspect: a woman bleeding freely, unwilling to explain herself. Then the air thickens, the point of view tilts, and from the shadows of the woman's skirt emerges an extreme and otherworldly vulvic creature, built entirely with practical effects.

HYSTERICUS is a horror comedy where the blood is ordinary, and the fear is the grotesque part.

The film was born of the question "Why does gore so rarely deal with naturally occurring blood: a blood most people are frightened to discuss, let alone witness?"

The resulting thesis is that when it comes to the female body, horror is in the eye of the beholder.

There are three women in HYSTERICUS, and their fear is not experienced equally. Nor is their relationship to femininity. Brie is building her relationship to it by performing it for a camera. Sam has pink nails, minimalist makeup, hair slicked back, a pink keychain - subtle hints of allowed femininity on an otherwise paternalistic uniform. The Heroine has wild hair, unshaven legs, and dries her own meat in her own kitchen - of these, Sam's is the femininity institutions can accommodate. The Heroine's is the one they read as a problem.

Officer Sam Benton is Crisis Intervention trained, taught to enter a situation looking for the threat in it. She is good at her job, in the critical sense that she always finds one. In this case: suspicious meat, an uncooperative resident, blood with no obvious source - training tells her what shape the evidence should take, and it obliges.

Here is the joke - like with most comedy, it's all in timing: Sam is bleeding too, in the middle of her own cycle, which is no reason to get hysterical - as women are famously told. Somewhere in the mysterious house, Officer Sam Benton finds herself doubled over by cramps severe enough to put her on the floor; even then, she does not first consider that her body might be motivating her state of being - instead, she reads it as part of the mystery around her. Sam is a woman institution-trained, with expertise in interpreting bodies as evidence, yet functionally illiterate about her own. (The film hypothesizes that these are connected truths.)

Why is it vital that the responding officer is a woman? The answer is: the film doesn't work otherwise. Put a man in that house, hosting that much suspicion, that little framework, and a woman who will not explain herself - and the impending violence writes itself. That version is familiar, and not funny at all.

What Sam eventually confronts is grotesque, otherworldly - a handmade vulva puppet plays the part of the "Vulva Monster" she perceives. It is not actually a threat - and it is not actual anatomy either. It's a hyperbolic vision of female genitalia. Sam cannot look away - transfixed with a desire to see, to know, running up against ingrained fear… The sight itself is awe-some, in the older sense of the word - which so many flinch away from.

What follows for our characters is a collision rather than a resolution. The tension of Sam staring at our Heroine's bleeding vulva breaks as a scream - the sound of awe-full truth being acknowledged by two women at once.

The last thing we see is the next morning.

Sam comes back off duty, out of uniform, bleeding freely herself. Nobody is arrested, and nobody is ashamed.

And Brie, who started all of this by not knowing what her own body was doing, wants to make a video about girl power - the real kind, which is what happens when menstruating individuals stop pretending they are not enduring the same realities.

The tomatoes are not only a visual gag. They grow on the Heroine's property - she makes jerky, and she almost certainly jars her fruits and vegetables. There is a particular painting of tomatoes in her kitchen, and tomatoes are the right shape and the right red to represent menstrual experience... In addition, their presence comes from my Italian lineage: tomatoes are what my family had to make meals with, to serve all. Being able to feed people when there is not much is a skill of peace, since a nourished house is less likely to get scary.

Every frightening thing in HYSTERICUS is manufactured by the one-who-is-frightened. The blood is ordinary. The women are fine. The meat is jerky. Nothing in the house was ever dangerous - it nearly became a crime scene anyway.

We called it a horror comedy because it is both at once. The comedy is the gap between the response and the cause. The horror is that the gap is not fiction.

~ Jessica Richmond, director — HYSTERICUS

A prequel to a feature in development. Nightmares Film Fest 2025 award winner · 7 official selections, 4 honorable mentions · Best Horror Comedy nominee, Horrific Women Film Fest 2026. HYSTERICUS was written by JRichmond + Peyton Blackmer; produced by Aïda B. + Geniuspills.