Toby Poser

Personal context

Summary

Toby Poser is an actor, writer, producer, musician, and director whose independent career became centered on creating substantial roles for women, particularly older women. After industry opportunities declined around age 40, she helped form the family filmmaking collective Wonder Wheel Productions and built a body of work including Rumblestrips, The Hatred, The Deeper You Dig, Where the Devil Roams, Hell Hole, and Mother of Flies. Poser has repeatedly said that making her own films lets her portray women who look like her, embrace aging rather than conceal it, and avoid reducing women to background or decorative roles. Her films consistently foreground female agency, mother-daughter relationships, matrilineal power, women’s anger, unconventional motherhood, and women who are treated as threatening because they are knowledgeable or socially nonconforming. She has also described wanting to challenge horror conventions that cast women as victims and to give her daughters meaningful creative authority. Her public record is primarily artistic rather than partisan, but representation-first and feminist framing are recurring, explicit features of her career.