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A newsletter from the shed of
Now then, 

Welcome back to The Losers' Club. I'm so pleased you're a member. How's your week been? 

I'm at the end of week nine of teaching term and I am crawling through the week, I tell you. CRAWLING!

The 
University of Leeds closes on the 17th December and I am totally signing off then for Christmas, so I just need to be a brave little soldier and keep going til then.

First off - news stuff.

Women Make Horror has been chosen as one of the 100 Best Horror Film Books of all time. This is, obviously, delightful. 

Next, you know I wrote that essay on Censor in August? It is for the deluxe Blu-Ray release of Censor for Second Sight Films, which is now available for pre-order, HEREEEEEEEEEEEEEE.

It looks like an absolute bonanza of a release, with a trillion amazing people contributing to the special features / limited edition extras, and I'm not just saying that because I'm in it. 


And, quick reminder, that if you into this limited edition deluxe collectors kind of business, you can also pre-order the beautiful release of Schlaf / Sleep from Arrow, which is also released in January, same as Censor, and which also includes a new essay from me, but this time all about horror hotels.

And, final piece of news, your chance to watch Three Ways to Dine Well online is coming in less than two weeks!

(I'm saying TWO WEEKS here in the voice of the woman in the airport queue in Total Recall).  

This online screening is thanks to the GODDESS Hannah Forman - aka Hannah Neurotica aka founder of Women in Horror Month, the instigator of so much of the online fandom and community around women + horror, since she posted her globally influential Riot Grrrll influenced women in horror recognition manifesto in 2010, yes her, yes I am a big fan can't you tell....

Hannah has selected ...Dine Well for the
Ax Wound Film Festival in the States. And, not only that, has programmed a whole event around it - a screening plus me in conversation with Dr Kate Robertson, author of a Devil's Advocates book on Trouble Every Day (as well as many other impressive things).

Ax Wound is streaming online this year, in multiple territories, so there is a very good chance you are going to be able to watch not just Dine Well but a ton of other amazing horror films written and directed by women and non binary filmmakers.

You can buy a single ticket for the Dine Well event, at $20, or you can buy an all access "slumber party" pass for $100 that gives you access to every single film screened this year (and there are so many), plus talks, filmmakers Q&As and lots of lovely extras.

Slumber party is the word here, for me. Given that I'm based in the UK, and that I like to go to bed at 9pm, and that most events are running on EST I will definitely be in my pyjamas for most if not all of events.

I will be dressed for my own screening though, I promise. I may even sew the outfit I am going to wear - I like to make something new for these kinds of things, but this inevitably means I am still hemming it 5 minutes before I go live online. 

Please let me know if you considering attending Ax Wound generally, and / or my event. It will be live, video, online and interactive, and it would be lovely to 'meet' so many of you there and have chance to chat and answer your questions, and generally just put a face to a name.

Next up, viewing. What have you been watching?

Telly first with me. Bake-off and Drag Race UK have finished, and we're still with American Crime Story: Impeachment, Succession (when I watch I fold into a tiny ball and squish my internal organs over how cringe Kendall is and how wonderfully dreadful Roman is), as well as my adored Natasia Demetriou double-bill of What We Do in the Shadows and Stath Lets Flats. 

Film-wise, Horror Club returned! Hurrah! Zosia, Laura and Helen From Next Door all came round to watch Krampus.

I saw Krampus when it first came out and at the time was pleasantly surprised at how decent it was. But on the rewatch, I felt like, ugh, it took far too long to get going. Too much Hallmark Christmas Movies at the start! I was willing to suffer that for about 10 minutes before the monster turned up and the killing started.

However, given Krampus is actually pretty gentle, and nearer a 12 certificate, than a 15, I would say, it was probably for the best. Helen is terrified of jump scare horror and is easily freaked (I got her to watch the Joan Crawford 1947 film noir Possessed with me and that was enough to totally traumatise her) so Krampus was probably a safe choice.

And, in all honesty, it was super fun. I love communal watching, especially if I've already seen it so I can watch my friends watching the film when it gets scary. 

I take particular pleasure in watching how my friends handle horror differently.


When the tension starts to mount...

Helen starts to paw at her scarf, ready to pull it up and over her eyes.

Zos starts narrating it all like she's on an episode of Gogglebox, in what is a pretty transparent effort to downplay the suspense.

While Laura, despite professing to not really do horror at all, sits there, implacably, throughout whatever the film can throw at us, without so much as turning a hair.

Also, we've now made it a thing that when we've finished watching a horror film, we put on an episode of The Cruise, which dropped on iPlayer a while back.

(WARNING: the following paragraph will only make sense to people a) over the age of 35 and b) who grew up in Britain in the 1990s)

The Cruise is one of the first docusoaps, from 1997, when docusoaps and long form reality telly were not really a proper thing yet, so there's no structure or storytelling or character arc in the way we would understand it, and the editing is insane. Plus there's the fashion - which to say it was broadcast in 1997 definitely looks more 1991 (mushroom shimmer eyeshadow). And Laura provides all the good Jane McDonald insider goss cos she's from Wakey. 

I have now concluded that the hilarity of The Cruise is much needed levity for Horror Club. My associates are simply not as hardened to horror as me, so I need to roll with such silliness.

(just wait til I make them watch The Conjuring - we'll need three episodes of The Cruise to get over that).

I've also watched quite a lot solo too. I've been asked to pitch an essay on Audrey Rose from 1977, so I watched it for the first time and got obsessed with the number of hats in it.

I watched Lake Mungo on Shudder, spurred on by the publication of Lezzie Borden's recent essay, On Lake Mungo and Queerness in Found Footage. The essay flagged at the beginning MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD. So, because I really wanted to read the essay, I stopped, turned on Shudder and decided to get on with watching.

I'd read that Lake Mungo was absolutely terrifying so I watched it during the day with the lights on, which took it down enough to be entirely tolerable. 

Afterwards though, I wondered if I'd done myself a disservice.

I tried to imagine watching Lake Mungo in a cinema, in the pitch black, and how deliciously frightening it would have been during those later sequences with the Alice's friends, out by the lake, and the way that those bodies emerge, out of the darkness.

I also bought Second Run's recent Blu-Ray release of Celia (1988), an Australian film written and directed by Ann Turner. I've heard so much about Celia, and was intrigued that it featured rabbits a lot (I'm already mentally plotting a video essay on rabbits in horror using Us as the main case study).

I would say Celia's definitely a drama with strong horror elements, but, while using this caveat, Celia also taps into horror in exactly the same way that the best Stephen King novels do - there might be suspense, dread and fear, but the very worst of the horror, the most terrifying, brutal, cruel moments of terror, come from humans, not from monsters.

I also ended up doing an unplanned double bill of the BFI Blu-Ray release of Jane Arden's The Other Side of Underneath, with a rewatch of Ana Lily Amirpour's A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (pictured, at top, with an excellent cat).

These two very different films, with entirely different production contexts, actually really spoke to each other in the weirdest of ways.

Not just in terms of being all shots and no plot, but also in terms of movement and stillness, through scenes of dancing, and when, how and why women dance in these films.

(The Other Side... also has an excellent moment with a horse and a woman in a pink crochet hat which I duly noted in my file of moments when knitting and crochet turn up in horror films).

As well as all that, I've needed yet more comfort (it's all that having to work really hard in my actual paid job, it's very unsettling) so I've been back on my Criterion Collection subscription and going through the Fox Noir collection - Nightmare Alley, Pick Up on South Street and Hangover Square so far.

My problem is, that I totally love watching horror for soothing, but when I'm in on my own for the night, lights out, fire on, if I put a horror on right now, my brain is SO OVERCLOCKED I can't *help* but start analysing. 

Invariably by 15 minutes in I've whipped out my notebook and I'm scribbling in the dark.

I've long had a soft spot for noir - preferably 1940s, American, black and white - and I love to succumb to these worlds, to disappear into their darkness.  

Horror and noir have long been adjacent genres anyway, both concerned with death and fatalism and the darker side of life. There's absolutely tons of excellent academic research on how - in the 1940s in particular - lots of Hollywood films that we now think of 'women's film' or 'melodrama' or 'film noir' were marketed as horror or 'prestige shockers' to predominantly female audiences - films like Gaslight, The Uninvited and Phantom Lady, all from 1944.

My mate Tim's book Phantom Ladies: Hollywood Horror and the Home Front covers all this. And Paul Meehan's Horror Noir: Where Cinema's Dark Sisters Meet (2014) is another good starting point. The Only Film Noir account on instagram did a whole season on Horror Noir for October, and has ended up listing some of my favourite films of all time on there (not least, Night of the Demon!).

If I've not yet convinced you of the noir - horror symbiosis, what about this:

I reckon that film noir is the genre where we can find the origins of so many filmmaking techniques for slasher films.

Check out The Spiral Staircase, from 1946, which gives us the murderer hiding in the wardrobe just before he kills a woman.

Then there's Hangover Square, from 1947, which opens with a first-person point of view scene of the killer with a knife stabbing a man to death THIRTY THREE YEARS BEFORE MICHAEL MYERS IN HALLOWEEN.

See? 

STILL no major reading recs for you due to academic work brain drain (unless you want to read Habermas' concept of the public sphere published in the 1960s in New German Critique? Or Shohat and Stam's Unthinking Eurocentrism? thought not).

But hopefully this will change once term ends and I have space to read and think again. 

What have you got planned for the next week? Owt or nowt? I am planning to get through the next two weeks by knitting and consuming a lot of Terry's Chocolate Orange.
 
Take care and keep in touch. And, as ever, if you want to say hi, just reply to this email and let me know a bit about yourself. I'd love to know, where do you live, what do you do, what are you into? I really do love hearing from everyone, and I do always write back, albeit very belatedly. 

Also, feel free to forward this newsletter onto anyone you think might be up for joining us in The Losers' Club. And, if you've been forwarded this missive by a friend (who, let's face it, clearly has excellent taste), you can sign up y'sen and view past issues here.
 
Chin up,

Alison
The Losers' Club is a newsletter by Alison Peirse, associate professor of film and 
author / editor of Women Make HorrorAfter Dracula and Korean Horror Cinema.
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Alison Peirse · The Loser's Club · Shipley · Bradford, West Yorkshire BD18 · United Kingdom

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