I am Brody. Not the shark.

A newsletter from the shed of

Now then, 

How you doing? It has been A WEEK here. The past week or two, trying to finish this tv drama book, has been destroying me. It's been a proper battle of wills, trying to hold my nerve, and and not let myself think, I cannot write this book. I cannot finish this book. It's beyond me. 

It's been full-on final scenes of Jaws, Brody vs the shark on the boat

(I am Brody. Not the shark).

I've got mouth ulcers, I've started sleepwalking again, I'm mainlining eye drops as my eyes are so sore from extended screen time, and poor Paul been gently tolerating my unreasonable behaviour.

But, as of this Friday at 5.30pm, I completed the full 90,000 word redraft.

Four years in the making.

I nearly cried.

But instead, I put on Salt Peter by Ruby and started tidying up my office (and yes I fully recognise that my musical taste - and my fashion and film choices - have never progressed beyond 1997 and I am fine with that).

I've now got to write the book proposal (I wrote the book on spec) but in my head I am going to do this in one long day on Monday and then submit it to my editor. Usually, book proposals take me a few weeks, as most sane people write them first, so you do all your big thinking upfront. But as I did all the thinking while writing, I'm hoping I can slam it down on the page and get rid of This Beast. 

Wish me luck.
 

***

In my first, most important and favourite news of the week, the drag queen Vanessa Júpiter read out a chapter from my book Women Make Horror on her YouTube channel. She chose Tosha R. Taylor's chapter on Rachel Talalay, director of Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare (1991). Vanessa was kind enough to get in touch a while back to ask if this was OK and I have been eagerly awaiting her reading ever since. I absolutely love seeing Women Make Horror out in the world, being engaged with, being read, and being debated. I don't think you can ask for more as a writer.

Next, the Second Sight 4K UHD release of Dog Soldiers is out, hurrah! You might remember, I've written an original essay for the release, on walls falling down in horror films and how that trope works in Dog Soldiers. I'm quite proud of it actually. It's a simple essay, but I really enjoyed writing it. I've also done an original audio commentary, where I dig right into academic scholarship around Dog Soldiers, so if you ever wanted to know what weirdo academics like me write and think about Dog Soldiers, and about werewolves in general, this is your chance.

I've since discovered that this release is now number one in the official UK Blu-Ray charts, beating Downton Abbey, Fantastic Beasts and The Batman, which feels awesome.

The MAI video essay special issue on women horror filmmakers in the Global South is fully locked, loaded and underway - Miriam Kent (who is responsible for the technical training) and Evelyn Kreutzer (who is responsible for the group mentoring and discussion) are now running their workshops online and it's all actually happening hurrah. 

Plus, I've set up a couple more masterclasses to support the project. The actor Tanya Vital will do a voiceover masterclass in October, Professor Neepa Majumdar will do a session on writing artist statements in January 2023, and the video & performance artist / video essayist extraordinaire Dayna McLeod will do an audio mixing masterclass in February.

(Also - anyone who is reading this who submitted a proposal for the special issue but didn't make it into the final contributor list - I will be sending out the invite to the Catherine Grant masterclasses soon, plus you are also invited to these three new sessions as well).  

Since I last talked to you about the project, I've also secured two more late additions to the contributor lists who will be making very exciting work on Indian film, and on filmmaking in Chile - welcome to the fold, Nila and Paulette.

I am still aiming for an Autumn 2023 release for this project, which will be online, open access and free to everyone. In theory a year is long time for you all to wait for this, but now I am old a year will probably have passed by, like, next week.

The special project I've got on the go with Horror God Alexandra Heller-Nicholas is in its final stages and our final submission / hand in is September 15th (which I have just realised means I need to go straight off the book and back onto this weep) As I've said before, this will be a free, online, open access COOL THING that I look forward to telling you about very soon. 

More stuff: Three Ways to Dine Well has been selected for the HorrOrigins film festival in the States, huzzah. Dead Northern has released the schedule for their three-day in person film festival, which includes ...Dine Well screening at the York City Screen Picture House on Sunday 25th September. I am planning to be in attendance, and possibly also the Saturday too?

I've also just submitted a panel proposal on women, ageing and film to the Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference in Denver, Colorado in April 2023. If we are accepted I will be screening  Knit One Stab Two and talking about the research and my thinking behind it. 

Not that I have finished Knit One Stab Two yet. Ha. 

***

I have been seeking refuge from my TV book by watching Agatha Christie's Hjerson (More4), Canada's Drag Race (iPlayer), Only Murders in the Building series 2 (Disney +), and (of course) horror films.

The whole family watched Gremlins 2 (1987, Sky) which was ridiculous and fairly terrible but still enjoyable. Kitty and I then watched Alien (1979) and Aliens (1986, both Disney +) which she loved.

It was really weird watching them from her point of view though, given she's grown up on super-referential films and games as her primary point of reference. So, she was pointing out shots saying "that's from the last series of Stranger Things," and "oh the xenomorph is in Teen Titans Go" and, during the infamous chest-burst scene, she said "Edith's avatar on Fortnite has one of these, but a llama bursts out covered in confetti and then she strokes it and it goes back in" which I think is arguably actually more disturbing than the original film.

One afternoon when a chapter of my book was totally kicking my ass and making me very sad, I quit working about 4pm, ignored the six kids hanging around my house (thank god they are back to school tomorrow) and laid down in the dark in an adjacent room to watch The Slumber Party Massacre 2 (1987), writted and directed by Deborah Brock.

The synopsis is "Courtney Bates, the younger sister of Valerie, and her friends go to their condo for a weekend getaway, but Courtney can't get rid of the haunting feeling that a supernatural rockabilly driller killer is coming to murder them all." I mean, that pretty much gives you the whole plot, ha!

It's a bit of a strange one, this film, and not a BANGER like The House on Sorority Row, but I am still into some of its strange choices. 

The start of the film utilises lots of location shooting, and they stop off at a supermarket on the way to Desert Springs and it's all shot beautifully at golden hour, all these shimmering low-rise buildings wide and huge empty spaces. But, after that, once they get to the condo, the whole film is pretty much shot in a kitchen and living room, with occasional scenes around a swimming pool.

The idea is that one of the rich girls' parents have bought the condo but haven't moved in, so also the rooms are really bare. I always think that if you are shooting in very limited locations, you need your props and production design to do a lot of the heavy lifting to keep visual interest, but this set is EMPTY.

It reads like it barely has more budget than Killer Workout (released the same year) which is saying something. 

There's also a weird cinematography choice where instead of traditional shot reverse shot , they'll have two girls talking and one is shot from over the shoulder in a trad s-r-s format, but then, in the matching shot the other girl looks square on into the camera and the whole scene has suddenly turned into an episode of Peep Show (or, for older British readers: Lovejoy) which is very disconcerting. 

The generic coding of the film is slightly off as well (and I say all these things not necessarily as negative, I'm actually quite into this film, but I am just trying to account for its weirdness).

It is shot, relatively speaking for a 1980s film, in a realistic style. But Courtney keeps having these visions and then the man she sees in her dream appears and starts killing everybody and it's unclear whether it is a supernatural slasher or the visions of a troubled girl attempting to repress trauma. 

At the same time, this film enjoys being very, very silly: the killer is wearing head to toe leather, he wields an oversized giant red guitar with a drill coming out of the end of it, and the midpoint of the film is an extended performance sequence where he lip syncs a rockabilly number to camera (yes).

There are two things I ADORE about this film though.

First (obvious to any who has also seen this film): the BAND. The girls are all in a band together that is basically The Bangles. I am obsessed with their music, their outfits, how happy that drummer looks when she's playing, and just everything.

Then, what I also love, is the connections between the girls. Like Black Christmas (1974), the female friendship is tight.

Courtney and her friends care about each other, they listen to and comfort each other, they laugh and cry together, they totally don't need lads - they're just a momentary amusement from the more important business of being in a cool band and hanging out with your best mates. They literally live and die to protect each other. Excellent. 

Paul and I also got to the Everyman Leeds to see Nope (pictured at top of newsletter).

I am going to write about it for a bit now so

WARNING
WARNING
WARNING

if you have not seen Nope yet DON'T READ THIS NEXT BIT

JUST COME BACK IN AT THE NEXT THREE STARS FURTHER DOWN

I won't synopsise Nope because if you read this newsletter, you will know.

So let start with three random things that I was very into: the production design is insanely beautiful. Every single tiny detail of every scene is so thought out. There's even just a single scene in a diner, where they sit at this banquette, and it's bright green and it pops, saturating the screen. 

I am currently obsessed with buying a record player (this started after I watched The Conjuring 3 the other week) and this film made me double down on this desire. The record player / HiFi set-up is so good. And these are not passive props; they have purpose. There's a lot of record player action in this film and music features really prominently and beautifully and I am now all over the Richer Sounds website trying to work out if I can afford to get a system set up.

The t-shirt game is also very strong in this film. I particularly enjoyed the Rage Against the Machine and Prince tees getting an outing. I also really appreciated the way the colours of the clothes that Daniel Kaluuya's character transformed over the course of the film to become brighter and bolder and stronger.

Lets be honest, the cinematography, the score, the acting: also big ticks.

However.

Tthe question that kept coming up for me, as I watched, was, is this story thing happening because it can or because it should?

There are lots of things in filmmaking where you can put things in just because you can and it is great. Like, the stuff I've already mentioned - props, costume design, location shooting, or perhaps awesome lighting, lots of emphasis on colour design.

In these kind of scenarios, the 'can' items are a lovely added extra, bringing more depth to the world 

(I always think about the laundrette scene in My Bloody Valentine, the 1981 version, where the art direction is off-the-chart brilliant and it doesn't need to be, but it is anyway)

But, when it comes to narrative, when storylines and characters are there because they can be, rather than they should be - that they need to be there otherwise it all falls apart, then that's a different matter. 

If you've been reading this newsletter for a while, you know I like my narrative tightly honed. I want every single plant to pay off. Everything that happens is essential, is critical, or the architecture of the film falls over (I don't ask for much).

Success creates bigger budgets which creates opportunities for a more expansive storyworld. And when you have a more expansive storyworld, you create opportunities for the narrative to go off in multiple directions. This can totally work - it can create a rich, densely textured storyworld that envelops us.

But, *cough* it can also just make the storytelling baggy. 

We didn't need the chimp.
We didn't need the flashbacks.
We didn't need Steven Yeun's backstory.
We didn't need the woman from the tv series watching at the second ranch.
I mean, we didn't even really need much of a story at that second ranch.

Did we?

I understand why they are there, in theory - they all contribute to the explicit theme of the film, that is the futility in attempting to tame (and exploit) wild animals - I get it.

But really, they are all 'cans' not shoulds.

To dig in further: when I teach non-linear storytelling (with films like Magnolia and Memento and Eternal Sunshine), I talk about how the principles of classical three act structure and linear character progression no longer work. And that, if you are doing nonlinear stories then, and the forward goal is less obvious, how do you keep your audience engaged?

The simplest way is that you move the arc of drama away from the story as a whole, and move it to the level of the scene. Each scene needs its own dramatic story structure. Each scene needs conflict and excitement. Each scene needs to count.

Now I'm not suggesting that Nope is doing this fragmented, puzzle film format - it does have a simple linear goal, ultimately - but because of the way it meanders away from the central conflict all the time, moving backwards and forwards in time, spending lots of time with other characters and their histories - then some of the ideas are useful. And this is where I also think Nope lacked a bit - not all the scenes felt urgent or necessary, and after the bravura opening 5 minutes, I spent the next 20 mins thinking 'I love being in this world and I'm happy to be here, but I could actually do with some story happening now'.

I'm sure the filmmakers weren't going for this honed Alien-esque narrative race to the end (it didn't help that I recently watched Alien and Aliens of course which are masterclasses in the kind of film storytelling that I adore) but we feel how we feel, don't we?

So I loved Nope, and I plan on revisiting the Haywood horse ranch as soon as it comes out on home release, but it won't be ousting Us from my top five films of all time.

END OF NOPE STUFF YOU CAN NOW RETURN OH SO SAD IT'S REALLY THE END OF THE NEWSLETTER SORRY ABOUT THAT
 

***

I've been mostly reading French postructuralist litery theory this week for the evil book, which I won't inflict you, but I do have a few other reading recs.

First, Ashley Clark's essay "Nope and the genuine haunt", from her Keeping Up newsletter, which is lovely.

Next, Elsewhere Cinema Club is dedicated to films by & about women & queer folk in Southeast Asia. They have now published online their interview with Filipino filmmaker Pam Miras about writing and directing Pascalina (2012), a horror film about the Philippine's most famous folkloric female monster, the Aswang.

And then my current bedtime reading, Juno Dawson's novel Her Majesty's Royal Coven which is all about a gang of witches in Hebden Bridge (SOLD!).

Hope you've enjoyed this week's missive - actually, can I ask you a favour?

In December, I'll have been writing this newsletter for two years. I think in that time I've only asked once or twice for feedback - and definitely not in a long time.

So, I would love to hear from you - just reply to this email - and let me know:

where in the world are you?
what kind of horror films do you enjoy? 
why do you read the newsletter?
what do you like most about it?
is there anything you like me to talk about that I don't currently mention?
Is there stuff that I mention briefly that you'd like me to dig into more?

(notice these are positive angles because I am a glass half-full type of person hahahah)

And sorry to the multitudes of losers' club members that I still owe email replies to! I will get to you when this book is submitted, I promise.

take care, and keep in touch,
 

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.