The poignant opening scene of Carlota Pereda’s provocative horror drama Piggy establishes that the Spanish director hasn’t just expanded but elaborated the troublesome themes her 2018 short film of the same name addresses in merely 14 minutes. Sociable sadism, passive power, and the confusing ability of revenge to be both cathartic and contaminating are at the hurting heart of this unusual teenie slasher.
From the Abyss: Weird Fiction, 1907-1945, by D. K. Broster, edited by Melissa Emdundson (Handheld Press, 2022).
There’s a strange irony in the fact that while the names of Weird authors may be known to fans of the genre for their strange and unsettling visions, many of them were also widely popular for more mainstream writing. E. F. Benson, for example, was not only the author of “spook stories” like the deeply chilling “Caterpillars,” a personal favourite of mine, but became well-known for the camp and sometimes caustic humour of his popular Mapp and Lucia series. Dorothy Kathleen Broster was no different. Although aficionados of the Weird may know her for the oft-anthologised tale of Jamesian transgression and punishment that is “Couching at the Door,” it was the Jacobite Trilogy of Scottish histories that made her, as editor Melissa Edmundson points out, “a household name” to the extent that many readers simply assumed she was herself a Scotsman. Should it be surprising that a writer works in different genres and modes? No, but it is surprising when those genres are so opposed to each other – in Broster’s case, deeply researched depictions of historical reality on one hand and, on the other, tales which delve into the world’s occasional bouts of un-reality.
Casual cruelty and playful perversion make up the slow-burning scares of writer-director Eskil Vogt’s sophomore feature, The Innocents (De uskyldige), whose child characters convey a creepy conception of ethical sentiment. Privileged protagonist Ida (excellent as her young co-stars: Rakel Lenora Fløttum) vents her frustration about her parents’ move to a bare concrete complex by torturing her autistic sister Anna (Alva Brynsmo Ramstad) and engaging in animal abuse. Rapidly escalating, the agony the little girl and her new friend Ben (Sam Ashraf) inflict first upon insects and invertebrates, then a trustful cat, unmasks the inhumane impulses central to the menacing morality lesson offered up by this film.
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.
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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