*The following article contains massive spoilers for Scream (2022)*
Here’s a review without spoilers if you’re interested!
Gothic: An Illustrated History, by Roger Luckhurst (Princeton University Press, 2021)
At the climax of Viy, the intensely Gothic 1967 film adaptation of Nikolai Gogol’s original short tale, the hapless seminarian Khoma is assaulted by a phantasmagoria of ghouls and goblins. Grasping hands burst from the walls, sinister, bat-faced demons creep out of the shadows, skeletons clatter their bones and chatter their teeth. Eventually, goaded by the witch who summoned them and empowered by the great demon Viy himself, the cavorting cavalcade break through the magic circle that surrounds Khoma and beat him to the floor. The last we see of the young man is as a motionless figure lain spread-eagled on the floor, dazed if not dead and his hair whitened by terror. It is a dizzying, joyful and unsettling piece of cinema that leaves the unwitting viewer in a similar state.
Posted on February 13, 2022
You’re Pissing on My People: Midsommar and the Revenge of the Research Subject
Guest PostFrom The Body Snatcher (1945) to Black Christmas (1974, 2019), from Suspiria (1977, 2018) to The Blackcoat’s Daughter (2015), the academy serves as a common setting in the horror genre. But less frequent is the use of the academy not as a site of horror, but as a source of horror, particularly for those whose knowledges and customs the Ivory Tower simultaneously excludes and exploits. In Decolonizing Methodologies, Linda Tuhuwai Smith (2012) points to the failure of Western academic traditions to attend to the material realities of colonized peoples, all in the name of those Enlightenment requirements that research be objective, apolitical, and distanced from its objects. She claims, “Taking apart the story, revealing underlying texts, and giving voice to things that are often known intuitively does not help people to improve their current conditions. It provides words, perhaps, an insight that explains certain experiences—but it does not prevent someone from dying” (Smith, 2012: 3). Read more
Posted on February 6, 2022
The Villa and the Vortex: Supernatural Stories by Elinor Mordaunt
Guest PostThe Villa and the Vortex: Supernatural Stories (1916-1924), Elinor Mordaunt, edited by Melissa Edmundson (Handheld Press, 2021).
Melissa Edmundson’s Women’s Weird anthologies were, for me, an invaluable window into the work of a number of long-neglected women writers and a trove of weird, unsettling short fiction of astonishing breadth. Stories like the cosmic horror of Francis Stevens’ ‘Unseen – Unfeared’, or the deeply oneiric tragedy of ‘The House’ by Katherine Mansfield, demonstrated that women writers are not just the equal of their male counterparts but, often, far exceed them. We should be thankful, then, that Edmundson has continued her partnership with Handheld Press to begin a series of single-author collections, starting with The Villa and the Vortex, a retrospective of Elinor Mordaunt’s strange, melancholy tales. Read more
This is a spoiler-free review. A spoiler-filled one will come later on when Scream is accessible to people who may prefer not to venture into a movie theater quite yet.
There are no bad Scream (1996) sequels. After Wes Craven took us to Woodsboro for the first time in 1996, he returned to Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) and that dreaded Ghostface mask three more times, and while none of the subsequent films reached the heights of the first, they each more than justified their inclusion in the franchise. Scream 2 (1997) positively vibrates with the joy Craven and company take in skewering sequels while nonetheless navigating powerful arcs for Sidney, Gale (Courteney Cox), and Dewey (David Arquette). Plus, Sidney’s play rehearsal remains one of the single most fascinating set pieces in any of the films. Scream 3 (2000) is a bit schlocky, yes, but injecting more camp into the franchise while moving the needle on industry satire is delicious. Scream 4 (2011) goes back to Woodsboro with flair and the best script since the original. That is, until Scream (2022) came along to crash the party.
