no more limping

Now then,

Welcome back to the Losers' Club, thanks for dropping by.

It is the 1st May!

I don't actually attach any serious significance to this except for the feeling - in the North of England at least - that it should at least warm up soon and it shouldn't be bone-cold freezing for much longer.

In light of the huge rise in energy bills here in the UK, Paul has fully turned the central heating off, even First Thing on a Morning, so I write to you while wrapped in multiple crochet blankets, slipper socks and an oversized wool cardie.

The sun has, on occasion, started to appear, to be fair. We spent last weekend at Thornwick Bay Caravan Site at Flamborough Head, and I managed to burn my forehead while sat on a pebble beach in a coat reading Graham Greene's The Confidential Agent (and my phone assured me it was 11 degrees).

Then yesterday we went to the Mek Summat art fair in Saltaire and looked at anti-Tory art and ate vegan tamales and the sun shone so a change is a coming (she says writing on the greyest dampest Sunday morning ever).

It has to!

In actual news that isn't about how cold I am, my book Women Make Horror: Filmmaking, Feminism, Genre was recently cited in a Queer Horror article which made me very happy indeed.

I also discovered that Women Make Horror has been reviewed in the Journal of Popular Film and Television and I would be very keen to read the review (while secretly terrified in case it is awful). The review is paywalled though and Leeds Uni don't have access.

Do any members of the Losers' Club have access to this journal? If you do, I would love to read a PDF just saying.....

Last week, I was invited by the wonderful academic and filmmaker Ashlee Blackwell, to give a talk on horror and video essays, to her class at Saint Joseph University in Philadelphia. Due to time differences, the class didn't start until 10pm, which as we all know is one hour after my bedtime, but when Ashlee Blackwell asks you to do something, you are always going to say yes, right?

The class had watched my film Three Ways to Dine Well beforehand, and asked smart questions, both about the film and how I went about thinking about making the film, and I got to rhapsodise at length about my love of Beyond Clueless, Christian Marclay's The Clock, and Los Angeles Plays Itself and thus it was all very enjoyable.

I am also pleased to tell you that the pre-orders for Second Sight's Limited Edition Blu-Ray of Dog Soldiers is now available for pre-order. I've done an audio commentary (which you may remember, I recorded in January, in one shot, didn't dare listen back to in case I hated it, sent it off, and have not heard the final version so god knows if I am actually any good or not) and an essay all about what happens the walls collapse in horror film (which I am more confident is decent).

I mean, I am sure if they were both terrible I would have heard, or they would have just quietly been left out of the release, but there is that weird nervous thing of sending stuff out into the world, forgetting about it, then pre-launches happen and you go oh! shit!

What have you been watching and listening to? Owt or nowt?

Telly-wise, Kitty and I finished Stranger Things season three, so we are now fully prepped and primed for season four next month. I continue to be ridiculously excited by every new trailer.

Other than that, there's not a lot of horror-adjacent TV happening here. I've required a great deal of comfort viewing that my annoying brain cannot possibly translate into Work Thoughts, so it's Glow Up Ireland, The Great British Sewing Bee, Stitch Please!, Interior Design Masters and Top of the Pops 1992.

In terms of films, I was unexpectedly delighted by The Manor (2021, Amazon Prime), written and directed by Axelle Carolyn. The surprise was not from Carolyn, who is a sterling contributor to horror film (with clearly a love of supporting fellow women horror filmmakers, if you follow her insta), but that The Manor was released through horror powerhouse Blumhouse. As a major producer of horror content, I'd rather expected that they would mess with it, prodding around, making the implicit explicit etc. While I suspect there may have been some Night of the Demon-esque shenanigans around showing the monster, on the whole, it was great - a very classy film.

I could go in on the fantastic locked-in premise of the old people's home (creative limitations invariably generate imaginative storytelling), the pleasure in watching a team of older actors completely smash it, the subtle play with a protagonist whose point of view could be flawed, who could be unstable, or the world could be a much more dangerous place than we realise, or even the warm, funny relationship between protagonist Judith and her grandson Josh....

but three of the other reasons I loved it are....

1. It contains a WOMAN KNITTING (only for a few moments, but it is so going into Knit One Stab Two)

2. there is a certain point where a Robert Johnson-esque deal with the devil is offered, and one of the major plus points is 'no more limping' which as even I, only in my forties but definitely getting stiffer, can totally appreciate.

3. It has a DEATH CAT. I can't remember where else I have read or watched this trope, but it is the idea that the cat in nursing home or hospital goes to stay with the person who is going to die.

I think I might have seen it recently in Doctor Sleep? I'm not sure. I want to think 12 Hour Shift but I don't think that is right either. My brain is refusing to help me out here.

I love a death cat. I love the knowledge that cats are absolute shits who would totally sense death and enjoy sitting on the knee of the person so they would in turn know that they are going to die

(I say this as the loving owner of three cats).

This particular Death Cat is also awesome because it is the spit of my old, dearly departed cat Harry Palmer (yes, named by my parents after the Michael Caine film), who we got when I was four, and he kept going til I was 21, and whenever I had pre-clubbing get togethers in my bedroom at home, all rowdy girls covered in glitter, shrieking and necking Paul Masson wine from Netto directly from the unnecessarily wide bottleneck, he would be right in the middle of it all.

This week, I was also thoroughly entertained by Shadow in the Cloud (2020, Amazon Prime), a World War II set action horror monster movie (yes!), co-written and directed by Roseanne Liang, and starring Chloe Grace Moretz.

It is, for the most part, a one-person horror film, with Moretz alone in the gun turret of a bomber, and I was surprised how successful this conceit was. All her dialogue is delivered to the crew on the main part of the ship over the radio, so as I was watching it, my writer brain was ticking over (this is why I have to watch Interior Design Masters to relax) and I was thinking what a brilliant radio play it would make.

Given that it would work on the radio, you'd not expect it to necessarily be successful on screen, given she's in one tiny space and can't really do much at all, but credit to the team involved, and not least Moretz, who sustained a compelling, visual story.

I did enjoy the monsters - this bomber is attacked by gremlins! (this is a very minor spoiler, everywhere talks about this, I promise) - and what a fun, easy watch it was, but what I think I enjoyed the most was how explicitly feminist it was.

Like, pointedly feminist, especially the final act.

As someone interested in feminism and horror (did you know that? I don't know if I have ever mentioned it?) I am fully used to doing feminist readings of horror film, of not necessarily finding feminist stories in the text, but instead doing feminist work uncovering the little-discussed contributions of women to the horror film. However, there isn't usually that much of what I watch that makes overt political points about gender, representation and culture.

So the ending of Shadow in the Cloud, while a little 'on the nose' for me, was a pleasure to watch - someone shouting FEMINIST! all over the film and not giving a shit.

It made me think of Amulet, which in a very different way, actually does exactly the same thing.

With the unabashed, gleeful, shouting, anyway.

Last but not least, we had a welcome return to Horror Club. It was a full house this time, with Zos, Laura, Helen and our newest recruit, Hazel. As I promised you last newsletter, I've got a bit tired of watching totally rubbish horror with my ladies (that Tooth Fairy film was a low) and I wanted something that might genuinely make them jump.

It's a fine line with my horror women though. I wanted something scary, but none of them are majorly into being terrified, and if I completely traumatise them there's no way they'll come back.

So I picked The Descent (pictured at the top of the newsletter).

The last time I watched The Descent was 2008, when I was teaching on the MA in British Cinema at the University of Hull and I set it for a week on genre and completely traumatised my gentle, retired students who had taken the MA in order to watch lovely old Ealing films and 1950s melodramas about quietly despairing housewives.

I was pretty sure The Descent would hold up for horror club, even if I couldn't remember much about it.

So we put it on, and Helen outdid herself by yelling HOLY SHIT at the very first jump scare which, if we are being honest, hadn't even been underpinned with any tension or dread.

However, she settled in after a while, and by the middle, it was definitely Hazel that did most of the screaming. This tickled me immensely, and I left her sat on the edge of the sofa, absorbed, while I went in the kitchen to get a beer. I was so tempted to pick up Rigby (my twenty year old tabby) who was asleep in the kitchen, and then go drape her over Hazel's neck in the dark, but I thought this might not end well for either of them.

My favourite bit of the film though, is that point in The Descent, about an hour in, when you see all the crawler things for the first time - I knew exactly when this was coming up because I had originally edited it into Three Ways to Dine Well (I don't think it is in the final version), so I got to sit there quietly and wait for all four of them to bellow.

(Zosia has now got very cross about this, and my habit of sitting back and watching them all during the scary bits, and is now insisting we watch something that I haven't seen either, but we've already agreed It Follows for the next one, which none of them have seen, and obviously I have, and if you have - YES I cannot wait for The Tall Man).

My favourite bit of the night itself though was (***and here BE SPOILERS****) when Sarah escapes the cave and runs to the Land Rover and gets in, and starts the car, and the windscreen wipers start up, but it's dry, and they make that grim dragging sound across the windscreen, and Laura said firmly, 'well I cannot be doing with that at all', and it was literally the only moment in the whole film that affected her in any way.