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Posted on August 5, 2020

The Rise of the Girl-Monster Part 1: Birth and Body

Beware the girl-monster, as deadly as she is beautiful. She is that compelling horror creature who is driven to bite, mutilate, and devour her victims out of an uncontrollable compulsion or appetite. She is most often characterized by her sharp teeth and unruly body, but rarely appears in the same form twice. The girl-monster is as old as the horror genre itself but, in the last 20 years, has enjoyed a renewed popularity and is, arguably, one of the most prolific horror cycles of the twenty-first century, as well as one of the least remarked upon.

Posted on August 3, 2020

Critical Approaches to Horror in Doctor Who – CFP

Call for Papers

Although Doctor Who creator Sydney Newman wanted his show to be educational and avoid so-called “bug-eyed monsters,” the popularity of the Daleks in the second serial ensured that it would be better known for scaring kids into hiding behind the sofa. Adaptable as the science-fiction program is to fit a variety of other genres (e.g. the Western, screwball comedy, romance, period drama), horror dominates its cultural memory and ongoing practice. While there have been some critical essays over the years examining this aspect of the show, no book has been devoted to a more sustained examination of the generic work of horror in Doctor Who. This edited collection will remedy that absence.

Posted on August 1, 2020

Heroic Nihilists and Conceited Heroes in Cube

Guest Post

Given the times that we’ve found ourselves in, it’s no surprise that many of us have turned to horror as a way to cope, process, or simply escape for two hours from the current politically-charged world. What horror is so good at doing is highlighting the human aspects of survival. When the status quo is in danger, how do the characters react? This question has been asked repeatedly in horror films, being handled best in small, intimate settings that make for intriguing character studies. One such example is Cube, a low-budget Canadian SF/horror film directed in 1997 by Vincenzo Natali (who most recently directed In the Tall Grass).

Posted on July 24, 2020

On “Little Monsters” and Teaching in the Apocalypse

Guest Post

No personal protective equipment, no training for the current situation, and no Clorox wipes as far as the eye can see, though you’ve never needed one more. The threat of death lurks around every corner, and your job, nominally developing your students’ minds, now requires jeopardizing your body. It may sound like Betsy DeVos’s plan for the 2020 school year in the US. In fact, it definitely is. But it is also the plot of Abe Forsythe’s 2019 Australian film Little Monsters, a zom-com in which kindergarten teacher Miss (Audrey) Caroline (Lupita Nyong’o) must safely extricate her class from a petting zoo plagued by zombie hordes stumbling over from a nearby American military base.

As US educators watching the film in 2020 (why, God, why????), we find it difficult to overlook how often our supposed “life of the mind” demands making an ultimate sacrifice of our bodies. In that regard, COVID-19 simply replays the tired old arguments around gun violence in American schools. Whether we’re told to arm ourselves with guns or antibacterial gel, our teaching is interrupted constantly by threats we’re not trained or paid to handle. What Little Monsters suggests is that this is modern-day education.

Posted on July 20, 2020

Helen Oyeyemi’s The Icarus Girl: A Bildungsroman for the Monstrous Child

Sara McCartney

The Icarus Girl, Helen Oyeyemi’s 2005 debut novel, lives at the intersection of three contemporaneous trends. Most scholarly attention locates it among Nigerian diasporic literature, which experienced a boom in American and English publishing at the start of the twenty-first century.[i] Indeed, The Icarus Girl remains Oyeyemi’s most overtly Nigerian novel. Less recognized is The Icarus Girl’s contribution to two of horror’s big turn-of-the-millennium booms – creepy kid movies, which were having quite a moment with offerings like The Ring (2002), The Sixth Sense (1999), and The Others (2001), and children’s gothic literature, whose prominent titles include The Series of Unfortunate Events (1999-2007) and Coraline (2002). Oyeyemi’s melding of these three disparate subgenres and their expectations creates a distinctly postcolonial and humanized uncanny child.