and why is coral the saviour

A newsletter from the shed of

My dear Losers' Club, 

How has your week been? What have you been up to? I've been working flat out and I've got quite a few different, short, medium and long-term projects on the go, and so day-to-day stuff has been about keeping everything afloat.

(Although, I say 'afloat', and what I actually mean is not just 'running to stand still' but 'running to remain permanently slightly behind on everything and beginning every email with "sorry it's taken me a while to get back to you on this"').

When I try to think of a moment in the last two weeks, to share with you, what really stands out to me is the most random, tiniest thing.

I subscribe to Sight and Sound magazine but it does usually take me a while to attend to it, once it arrives.

(it sits in a pile with Little White Lies and last Saturday's Guardian and stares accusingly at me while I spend my time crying at the final of Glow Up: Britain's Next Make-Up Star).

So, I had finally picked up Sight and Sound, and I was reading Mark Jenkin's diary, all about taking his forthcoming folk horror film, Enys Men, to Cannes. I'm really interested in Jenkins as a filmmaker - his previous feature film, Bait, isn't a horror film in the genre terms we'd think of, but it is a kind of horror of gentrification, and money and place and power.

Jenkins' diary was really entertaining, and as I was reading I ended up riffing about class (and how that intersects with gender and ageing) and horror. 

I really, really want to write about class and gender in my next book, but I haven't yet found a film that makes my brain explode in relation to these ideas (this is a pre-requisite for a book chapter, or at least the concept of a chapter - I need to watch something and my brain ERUPTS and then we are away).

At the same time, you know the book proposal I sent to Columbia University Press? I've now realised that one of the proposed chapters would be better as a video essay

(everything is better as a video essay)

and so I have room for class.

I sat there, curled up on my sofa in Bradford, with my ancient demented cat on my knee, reading Jenkins' diary, and thinking, I hope, I really hope, that Enys Men has a class dimension, that *this* is the film that unlocks all the personal and political stuff about class that I want to explore through horror. 

I have no idea whether Enys Men has these elements - it's not out on release yet.

And I'm placing expectations on it that I don't think it can possibly speak to.

But, there is something exciting in this anticipation, in this want, in this hope that this film is the key that unlocks this door for me. 
 

***

So, in terms of things I have been getting on with, that I can actually articulate:

Three Ways to Dine Well is now Film of the Month on the Final Girls Berlin Film Festival's Patreon. For the £2 'horror hag' subscription you get the film of the month, for the £5 'evil mother' subscription, you can also access an exclusive interview with me about Dine Well, plus some teasers about my next book, Her Chainsaw Heart.

I guested on an episode of the Ride the Omnibus podcast, which I'll talk about more below, in the 'watching' section.

I'm also delighted to say I've been offered a placed on The Videography Mentorship Programme, run by Evelyn Kreutzer and her team out of Filmuniversität Babelsberg KONRAD WOLF in Germany.

I pitched a video essay project entitled 'Make-Up in the Mirror in the Moments of Madness' all about women putting on make-up (in the mirror, yes, you got it) in horror films, just before they do something insane. I've been keeping an eye on this trope for a long time, and making notes. I've got a long and diverse list of films to draw upon to make this essay.

I'm excited about this programme - I'm going to be mentored by Allison de Fren, a leading video essayist based in LA, and I'll be attending the symposium “Videography: Art and Academia. Epistemological, Political and Pedagogical Potentials of Audiovisual Practices” in Hannover in November.

I *think* this new video essay will be short and fun

(although I think this about all new projects until I drag them out into a multi-year-spanning gestation, make them overly complicated and generally just make life difficult for myself)

and I am hoping to make it open access for everyone, rather than having to lock it down while it does the festival circuit. 

I've also been going all-in on Knit One Stab Two. You know how, two weeks ago, I said I reckoned I would have it locked down in a week to pass to Paul to soundtrack? Well, as of THIS Friday afternoon, I got to the credits at the end of the piece, and realised I had about 45 minutes of work left before I could hand it over - then I saw it was 3.15pm and had to get my kids from school and take them to the park (in the rain) to celebrate my eldest finishing primary school (definitely not my idea).

That turned into a breakaway group with some other renegade mothers to the pub and I didn't end up getting home until 6pm, full of red wine and I daredn't open Premiere Pro again that day.

But!

So close!

I am going to try and finish it later today so I can start work fresh on something new tomorrow on, you know, an actual work day.

***

Now for things I've watched.

I took the kids to see Lightyear at the Cineworld White Rose Centre yesterday morning, which was excellent, but isn't exactly on-brand for a horror film newsletter, so moving swiftly on.

I'm still thinking about whether to add anymore films to the "telephone horror" video essay I made at Middlebury. So I decided to watch The Black Phone (2021), which has the following premise: after being abducted by a child killer and locked in a soundproof basement, a 13-year-old boy starts receiving calls on a disconnected phone from the killer's previous victims.

I also knew, before going in: set in the 1970s, Ethan Hawke, a mask, which all seemed like good reasons to watch.

But I was wrong (spoilers afoot, sort of, you are warned).

First, The Black Phone is adapted from a short story, and Lordy, is that apparent. This film feels stretched. I haven't read Joe Hill's story, but I imagine it is set in the room where the boy is captured - an ideal short story premise - one location, one main character, one short period of time. 

Obviously, these things don't always work particularly well at feature film length (and yes, of course, I immediately think of that Tom Hardy film, Locke, where he's filmed in his car in a single take for the whole film, but on the whole this kind of thing is VERY HARD to do well).

So, The Black Phone obviously realises this, and so pads out the first act with backstory and character set up, which includes some really unpleasant and extended scenes of physical child abuse where we have to sit and watch a girl being beaten, in real time, by her (cliched alcoholic) dad.

There is literally no need to see this. It's not dramatic, just unpleasant.

Come on, we all know the first rule of horror is what you can't see is worse. 

Then, the film wears its influences so heavily it doesn't ever transcend them, it is just this weird, floating palimpsest of horror film and fiction callbacks - Stephen King's IT is all over this film, and is referenced so overtly in the production design it's like being repeatedly hit around the head with a frying pan, there's generically moody Se7evn and True Detective vibes, and Ethan Hawke's mask is a sludgy mix of Onibaba and Donnie Darko.

The two young leads are great, actually - the brother and sister whose stories we follow - but there are lots of unconvincing supporting characters who feel like they are trying to play parts from The Lost Boys, Stranger Things or just a completely different comedy film (Ethan Hawke's character's brother).

It also wasn't remotely scary. Boo. Although it didn't help that Ethan Hawke wears a mask and is called the Grabber, and every time someone said Grabber, Paul said GRABBER like SHREDDER in the 1980s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon.

We stuck it out, but when it finished, Paul concluded "that was a bit of a mess" and you know what there is nothing more to say.

For the Ride the Omnibus podcast, I rewatched Dearest Sister (2016, Shudder), a Laotian horror film directed by Mattie Do, in which a village girl travels to the Lao capital, Vientiane, to care for her rich cousin who has lost her sight and gained the ability to communicate with the dead.

This was the choice of podcast hosts Ariel Baska and Rabia Sitabi, but it was a choice I was more than happy to run with. Nok is a fascinating protagonist who remains closed off to the viewer emotionally on some level - the only thing she explicitly seems to desire, at least to start with, is to top up her phone, then get a new handset, and the film chooses not to give us easy access to her decision making process. On the other hand, Nok's seeming antagonist, her cousin Ana (pictured above, at the top of the newsletter), is far closer to us - we are given her literal ocular point of view at times, we see the world through her eyes as her sight is degenerating.

This kind of shared point of view is a form of intimacy, an intimacy we are denied, purposefully with Nok. This isn't the only way that the film occludes our perception though. As the film progresses we realise that what we thought of as one kind of horror film - a gothic mystery where we root for the underdog villager coming to the big house in the city - is actually a very different kind of film indeed.

The film also has so much to say about power and language and the performance of identity, and we discussed this at length on the podcast - once the episode drops I'll let you know.

Finally, the other night I wanted to watch something entertaining and easy, which is when I would normally turn to:

a) The Running Man

or

b) Total Recall

but it hasn't been that long since I watched either, and I fancied some horror, so I decided to have a go with M. Night Shyamalan's Old (2021, Sky). I knew about the premise - "A vacationing family discovers that the secluded beach where they're relaxing for a few hours is somehow causing them to age rapidly, reducing their entire lives into a single day" - and I knew it got some fairly derisive reviews, but I was still in.

I remember going to the cinema to see The Happening when it first came out, and really enjoying it (BEES), and I have always had a soft spot for The Village. 

But Old really is bad.

Like, I love 'bad' films, ludicrous films, outrageous films, ridiculous films.

But Old is bad-bad, not good-bad

(and here be spoilers).

There are some really questionable scenes (WTF with the pregnancy and baby and what did all that add) and some terrible acting and the worst dialogue, and why were the women mostly in bikinis and the men covered up, and why calcium deficiency, and I couldn't comprehend any kind of coherent narrative logic at all.

I mean, were the kids physically ageing and still young mentally, or were they mentally ageing too? The film had no idea.

And why is coral the saviour (yes I meant to write that). 

I did plough on though, bravely (I hate not finishing films).

I decided to watch it as a supernatural slasher in a locked room scenario, where a group of strangers are brought together in a remote and inaccessible seaside resort (like And Then There Were None) who are picked off one by one (like Terror Train) by a supernatural / beyond the human realm force (Prom Night 2: Hello Mary Lou) and the fun is working out who is next and how they are going to die. 

But because the storyworld rules were so flawed and just... unfathomable I couldn't even have a great deal of fun with this. 

It made me quite cross, that actors were acting in this film. They must have read the script first. They chose to say those lines and act those things. I mean, Rufus Sewell. Shame on you. I can't watch Dark City anymore.

What did you lot think to Old and The Black Phone? Am I being unduly harsh?!

***

Next, I've got a few reading and viewing recs for you. 

First, a call for papers (CFP) for the conference De-Westernizing Horror: Reframing the Genre Cinemas of Asia, to be held at Kings College London in October.

There were two things about the CFP I particularly enjoyed. The first was seeing that they had Meheli Sen keynoting. Meheli has written Haunting Bollywood: Gender, Genre and the Supernatural in Hindi Commercial Cinema, all about horror and the supernatural in Bollywood films since the 1940s.

It is very good and I do recommend.

Then, I particularly liked this bit of the CFP:

[...] we aim to bring scholars working on a range of different national horror traditions in Asia into dialogue with each other. Moreover, we recognise that East Asian horror has dominated much of the discourse to date, so this conference also aims to help draw attention to previously neglected horror film traditions in Pakistan, Bangladesh, India, Taiwan, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines, Turkey, and Egypt, alongside the major East Asian industries in Japan,
Korea, and Hong Kong.

This is brilliant, and sits really well with the work I am doing on the MAI special issue, so I've emailed the organisers and proposed a roundtable with some of my MAI contributors. The organisers are up for this, so now I just need to write to my contributors to see who is up for hanging out in London in October (in person, or online)....

Next, the BAFTSS (British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies) Horror SIG (Special Interest Group) are on fire at the moment, and their latest newsletter (which you can sign up for here), lists three new horror film books coming out, with discount codes, which I am totally sharing with you guys.

So there's Johnny Walker's new book, Rewind Replay: Britain and the Video Boom, 1978-1992 (Edinburgh University Press, 2022), which is out in paperback and thus affordable (in theory), plus you can order with 30% off at edinburghuniversitypress.com with the code NEW30....

Then, Laura Mee has published Reanimated: The Contemporary American Horror Remake (Edinburgh University Press, 2022). It's currently hardback only, and even with the discount - the same 30% off at edinburghuniversitypress.com with the code NEW30 - it might be best getting your local library to order this for you as normal people can't pay academic hardback book prices.

And Stella Marie Gaynor has published Rethinking Horror in the New Economies of Television (Palgrave, 2022) which is also hardback so one to definitely read, but also definitely to get the library to order in.

And now, things to watch:

If you loved Yellowjackets, I'm happy to reveal that the team behind the event has now put online the entire day's proceeding of No Return: A Yellowjackets symposium. 

I also recommend May Santiago's talk, Queer Authorship, Spectatorship, Gaze, and Sensibility, on queer bodies and horror, for the Final Girls Berlin (again), now on YouTube.

And finally, the online publication of The Slasher Studies Summer Camp, an academic event held last summer, with Vera Dika keynoting.

I mean, VERA DIKA! If you don't know her name already, she was one of the earliest academics writing on horror. Dika did her 1986 New York University PhD thesis on the stalker film (then reprinted as the now-incredibly-rare-book Games of Terror: Halloween, Friday the 13th, and the Films of the Stalker Cycle, in 1990).

She focussed on the 'stalker', or what Carol Clover would later go on to describe as the 'slasher' in her own work. While Dika was first, it's Clover's 'slasher' that has stuck as critical terminology.

It’s worth noting though that Dika recently made clear the distinction between the terms: ‘“Stalker” indicates a spatial category, that is, the movement of characters through a space, while “Slasher” foregrounds a narrative action’ (see Dika, ‘The stalker film and repeatability’, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 2021, p.6). 

Just so you know.
 

***
 

That's it from me today. I hope you have a nice Sunday. I am planning to watch She Will (2021), on release in cinemas and available to rent on demand on Curzon Home Cinema. Directed by Charlotte Colbert, and co-written by Colbert and Kitty Percy, the film explores an aging film star who "retreats to the Scottish countryside with her nurse to recover from surgery. While there, mysterious forces of revenge emerge from the land where witches were burned". I have HIGH HOPES.

When this next newsletter is due out, I'll be in Sicily, so I promise I will write when I get back, later on in August. And, in the meantime, as ever, I will conclude by saying I love to hear from you all. If you want to say hi, please reply to this email and lets make contact. I love to know what you think to the newsletter, your reviews of the films I discuss, things you think I should be watching or reading, etc. 

Take care and speak soon, my lovely horror family.

Alison

The Losers' Club is a newsletter by Alison Peirse, associate professor of film and 
author / editor of Women Make Horror; After Dracula and Korean Horror Cinema.