Get ready – there’s an upcoming biopic of Patricia Highsmith called The Murderous Miss Highsmith! The biopic will star notorious sapphic Cara Delevingne, acclaimed actor Shailene Woodley and Portrait of a Lady on Fire’s Noémie Merlant. What a cast! Up-and-coming (and female!) filmmaker Alexandra Pechman will direct, according to Deadline.
While Patricia Highsmith wrote one of the earliest lesbian novels to feature a happy ending, The Price of Salt (1952), later popularized in Carol (2015), she mostly wrote–and was very well known for–psychological thrillers. It’s only fitting that The Murderous Miss Highsmith is horror-themed!
The biopic will reimagine Highsmith’s life as a horror movie, which makes great sense considering the gloomy author’s personal life. She’s a hard person to create a portrait of; every angle we look at her story reveals something different about her. When we think we know her, we discover we don’t. She’s a mystery.
The 2022 documentary Loving Highsmith, directed by Swiss screenwriter Eva Vitija, captures the life of Patricia Highsmith through the eyes of those who loved her. It reveals that her life was a case of disturbing poetry that I’m sure many lesbians can relate to. Namely, Patricia Highsmith lived a life plagued by women who betrayed her for men, which was the source of irreparable unhappiness.
First, it was her mother, who left Highsmith with her grandmother when she was still a baby and moved away to be with her stepfather. The mother heckled Pat with homophobic taunts as she got older, calling her “lez,” ridiculing her gender-nonconformity, and revealing that The Price of Salt was written by Pat when she wrote it under the pen name Claire Morgan to keep safe from homophobia.
Then it was a married woman named Caroline, who she fell in love with. Caroline promised to leave her husband, which she did not do, instead keeping the sapphic romance quiet until Pat left due to the “sadism” of it all. Pat was different after Caroline. She couldn’t sleep, eat, or write for periods at a time.
But Highsmith wasn’t perfect–no interesting person is–and the way she was treated by the women in her life didn’t excuse her own wrongdoings.
Patricia Highsmith is investigated both in text and on-screen so often because she’s a successful historical lesbian who is extremely difficult to understand. Perhaps a horror-themed biopic is an untapped tool to finally do so.
