May I Touch Your Meat? Jan Svankmajer, Birth Trauma, and the Gesture Toward Touch
“Life is a continuity which does not begin at birth; it is split up by birth.” — Nandor Fodor
Category: Horror
Visions of the Other: The Return of the Abject in Roman Polanski’s The Tenant
“The film’s main focus remains on the body as undesirable, non-ideal, open to external aggression and pollution. In typical Polanski fashion, the audience is trapped in an ‘uncomfortable visual space’ where the concept of a stable individual identity is never a matter of choice, but instead constituted by our surroundings and forces well beyond our grasp.”
Horror · Reviews · TV & Streaming
FridayLight NetfixStreamFest: The Corman-Price Poe Cycle
Price’s florid hamminess fills in the sparse patches of Corman’s sometimes spare mise en scene, and the sparseness conversely gives Price lots of room to floridly ham. Add Les Baxter’s crazy scores, some good freaky psychedelic California painters to make the portraits of dead and evil
uncles and incestuous sisters and flowing red paint credits, and sharp scripts by Richard Matheson and pre-CHINATOWN Robert Towne, and viola!
Mind over Mother: Ecstasy and Cruelty in Brian De Palma’s Carrie
“One reason for [Carrie’s] success in both print and film, I think, lies in this: Carrie’s revenge is something that any student who ever had his gym shorts pulled down in Phys Ed or his glasses thumb-rubbed in study hall could approve of. In Carrie’s destruction of the gym . . . we see a dream revolution of the socially downtrodden.”2
Halloween Film Guide to: Kali Chthonian Feminine Subtext
For the Halloween devouring Other in you: Here’s a small sampling of films for inciting you or your other to an orgy of castration and Kali-esque bloodletting…
Carnivorous Lunar Activities: The Origins of 1980s Metamorphosis Cinema
“I didn’t mean to call you a meatloaf, Jack!” — David (David Naughton), An American Werewolf in London
Boring Psycho? “I’m Never Satisfied with the Ordinary.”
Boredom never looked so good Psycho boring? What blasphemy! Psycho is unusual for many reasons, but in some ways the most important is the mere fact that it is in black-and-white. By[…]
Abject Objects: The Sinister Secrets of Andrew Currie’s Fido
“You weren’t very nice, but I’m sorry you’re dead”
Something That Festers: The Silence of the Lambs, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and the Visual Pleasures of Horror
“We’re drawn to and fascinated by horror because the genre reminds us that we have both outsides and insides, skin and guts, eyes and gray matter, ideas and appetites.”
The Optimum Wound Profile: Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer as Atrocity Exhibition
“How entertaining do you find this?”
Essays · Horror · Writers & Critics
The Cinematic Islands of Dr. Moreau: Beasts, Monsters, and Mad Scientists
“There are monsters that are born with a form that is half-animal and half-human . . . which are produced by sodomists and atheists who join together, and break out[…]
Draining Dracula: What’s Missing from Coppola’s Version?
Actually, a lot
Terms of Psychic Warfare: Brian De Palma’s Divided House
“What makes The Fury work in the end is the complementary sense that this conflict is part of the film’s very construction, so you can appreciate the audacity of the auto-da-fé.”
Why Do We Crave Horror? Evolutionary Psychology and Viewer Response to Horror Films
“We do not realize that ‘normal’ behavior needs to be explained at all.” —Laura Cosmides “Monsters today seem to be everywhere, and they cannot be destroyed. ” —Stephen Prince
Essays · Exploitation & Erotica · Horror
Someone to Fight Over Me: Feminism, S&M, and the Daemonic in Twilight
“The pain is my only reminder that he [Edward] was real.” — Bella (Kristen Stewart)
Reconceptualizing the Uncanny Vampire: Claire Denis’ Trouble Every Day
“We are no longer in an era of vampire stories.” — Jean-Luc Nancy
Val Lewton’s Symbolic Statuary: A Photo Essay
“It was once the figurehead of a slave ship. That’s where our people come from. From the misery and pain of slavery.” ~ I Walked with a Zombie
Towards a New Cinema of Castration: I Spit on Your Grave and Only Angels Have Wings
“Peer pressure is either a boon or a bitch with the power to destroy the world, or save it.”
The New French New Wave? Sex and Horror in the Modern Arthouse
“The explicit nature of this wave of filmmaking can be interpreted as a riposte to modern cultural sensibilities.”
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