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Posted on March 26, 2022

Office Killer: Working from Home is Horror

Guest Post

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

Guest Post

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

Guest Post

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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Posted on February 13, 2022

You’re Pissing on My People: Midsommar and the Revenge of the Research Subject

Guest Post

From 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

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