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Posted on April 6, 2022

NEGATIVE SPACE: A descent into the Unknown

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There is no doubt that the writings of H. P. Lovecraft have enjoyed a significant renaissance of late. In both literary academia and mainstream culture, his idiosyncratic oeuvre has now been properly recognised for codifying and popularising a unique form of horror commonly known as ‘The Weird’. In an essay written by Lovecraft himself, aptly titled ‘Notes on Writing Weird Fiction’, he deftly outlines the specifics of this distinct sub-genre, explaining how his own particular brand of horror stories evoke a disturbing and fearful sense of the unknown by violently exposing his characters to an insidious alterity that exists beyond the bounds of human reason and perception.

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Posted on March 26, 2022

Office Killer: Working from Home is Horror

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In The Shock Doctrine Naomi Klein describes the process of “disaster capitalism.” To simplify greatly, she notes that the neoliberal free market has evolved to take advantage of national crises and seemingly “natural” disasters, using these moments of collective distraction and general freak-out to stealthily implement intensifying exploitative policies and social arrangements. The COVID pandemic has set off another round of this predation, forcing us to turn our homes into offices, blend our domestic work with paid labor, pay for our own office supplies, and manage the psychological fallout that results from these changes. Meanwhile, we are advised to concentrate on the bright side of this brave new world – “More time with your loved ones!” “You can wear pajamas to work!” – while ignoring the dangers and downsides, “More time to get isolated and abused by domestic partners!” “More time to never be done with work!” For those of us who see the cup as half empty, we can find an avenging spirit in the protagonist of the only film directed by famed photographer Cindy Sherman, Office Killer, a horror film made in 1997 but still relevant today.

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Posted on March 19, 2022

Looking into the Mirror: A Review of Alma Katsu’s The Fervor

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Alma Katsu, author of historical horror novels like The Hunger (2018) and The Deep (2020), returns to the genre in her latest The Fervor (releasing on April 26, 2022). Like her other novels, The Fervor centers on a main historical event, playing with the timeline and details ever so much. This time, readers are placed in 1940s America during Japanese internment, a time when American exceptionalism, isolationism, and, of course, xenophobia ran rampant. The links to our current cultural moment are pretty plain on the page. Like us, the characters are wrestling with a strange communicable illness thought to originate from Asia, and they witness a marked increase in the attacks on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in response. Unlike Covid-19 and the increased violence against AAPI people in the States and around the world, the sickness, “The Fervor,” is one part Japanese mythos and another part experimental bioweapon.

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Posted on February 24, 2022

Review of Gothic: An Illustrated History by Roger Luckhurst

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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.

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