Now then,
Welcome back to the Losers' Club, thanks for dropping by. If, like me, you are finding the world a more terrifying place than usual, then you are welcome to lose yourself in our chat about horror films and books and writing for a little while.
What have you been up to? A much quieter fortnight for me so a lot less news klaxons this time.
I've been getting a ton of interesting pitches for the MAI special issue Doing Women's (Global) (Horror) Cinema.
I am really starting to believe that - should the pitches turn into proposals, and the proposals turn into video essays - that we might have something very special on our hands.
I've got some fantastic pitches on the Middle East and South Asia, and I am finally starting to get ideas on South East Asia.
(although, I've had nothing yet on Thailand - if you know anyone who is interested in writing in this region, please pass this on! I would particularly love to get pitches on Arpat (2015), directed by Kanittha Kwanyu, and cinematographer Niramon Ross, who shot Shutter (2004), among many other films - but really am open to seeing pitches on any Thai filmmakers).
Latin America is already very well represented, which is pleasing.
I reckon the special issue is going to function as an awesome playlist for those people interested in seeking out the work of women working in horror film, who want to go beyond the work of white anglophone directors. The best thing about this project though, unlike most academic projects, is that the issue is going to be free and open access for everyone who wants to watch these video essays and read about the intention and process behind the pieces.
And if you are contemplating submitting, on anything to do with women filmmakers, not just Thailand, you have until the 17th March. You are welcome to pitch to me informally on my work email (in the link above) if you want, beforehand, and we can take it from there.
I am not looking for pitches on white anglophone directors, or their films, but other than that, just get in touch.
And I don't want to hear anything about you are not clever enough or academic enough etc etc. I don't agree at all. If you have a go and you don't get in, the worst that is going to happen is you get a friendly email from me saying 'I'm sorry I couldn't fit it in', and that's really not so bad is it?
After my book Women Make Horror: Filmmaking, Feminism, Genre came out I heard from quite a lot of brilliant women saying, 'I saw your call for papers, and I was going to submit X (something predictably amazing) but I didn't think I'd be good enough so I didn't put in'
and I'm like NOOOOOOO!
We have to support each other and have a go with these things.
I promise I will be gentle.
I do have one piece of BIG NEWS though (for me).
In one of the very most exciting things to ever happen me in my whole academic career, I have been accepted to study at the Scholarship in Sound and Image Workshop at Middlebury College, USA.
In June I will be travelling to Vermont to take place in an intensive workshop on videographic criticism (i.e. video essays) with basically the world's best tutors and thinkers on this topic.
This is a massive deal and when I got the email offering me a place my eyes totally filled up even though I am a right hard bastard.
If it all goes well, you can expect more video essays on horror films from me this year.
***
What have you been watching and listening to? Owt or nowt?
Tellywise, I'm on Team Jujubee for Drag Race UK versus the World, and I've just binge-watched the whole of Magpie Murders on Britbox and absolutely loved it.
It was the cosy crime salve I needed last week. I've already read the books, so I knew whodunnit, but I still enjoyed it tremendously. It wasn't quite as fabulous as Only Murders in the Building, but it did come close.
I'm also really enjoying the Shedunnit podcast. I listened to The Whodunnit in India episode and then read R.V. Raman's A Will to Kill which I found extremely soothing.
Film-wise, I've also got some women-made horror films to report back on for you all.
Yesterday, I went on the HornBloodFire podcast to discuss The Lighthouse (2019, streaming on Netflix UK). Amber, the host, asked me for three of my favourite things, with the idea that she would then come up with a few films to choose from, that contained all these things.
I think this is an excellent way to organise a podcast.
Being me, I picked 'cats, knitting, the sea' (no surprise to anyone who knows me at all) and while Amber couldn't deliver a horror that contained all three (tbh I don't think I could), she did suggest The Lighthouse, which I was a due a rewatch of.
The Lighthouse is a great film, and the podcast was an excellent opportunity to discuss the excellent work of editor Louise Ford and costume designer Linda Muir.
I'll let you know when the episode is released.
I've been to the cinema as well. Last Saturday, Paul and I went to see The Duke (slight diversion here not horror, our kid worked on it), along with all the other old people at the National Media Museum in Bradford (further diversion: all the old couples were sat on ends of rows, with the men in the seats next to the aisles so they could get up for regular wees. This is what we have to come, people).
and, after having our hearts duly warmed, we went home and watched an actual woman-made horror - Lamb (2021, streaming on MUBI UK), edited by Agnieszka Glinska.
I really enjoyed Lamb, even if it continues with my gripe about A24-produced films - far too long.
Lamb is crying out to be 80 minutes.
BUT - the jumpers!
the weather!
the sheep man! (I immediately thought of the horse man in Sorry to Bother You).
Paul rolled his eyes and pronounced it to be Bleak. Slow. Weird.
But I was into all that.
I also watched Black Lake (2020, streaming on Amazon Prime UK) the other day. I was keen to watch after reading writer-director K/XI's director statement, and seeing that it was shot in Pakistan and Scotland.
Black Lake is not unduly concerned with plot development or dialogue, but it is a mood. The first half is contemplative, dreamy, sense and sensation. Also, unusually for a low budget indie, it's very big on nature, on being in remote, rural landscapes, insects, water, space and light. It is expansive.
I'm very excited to watch her second feature, Maya, which has just had its world premiere at the Renegade Film Festival.
I also steeled myself to watch Titane (2021, streaming on MUBI Latin America), pictured at the top of the newsletter. Now, I am assuming most of The Losers' Club already know about Titane - written and directed by Julia Ducournau, winner of Cannes Palme d'Or, a film that promises sex with cars and automative pregnancy, and a girl with a steel plate in her head, and gender dissolution and extreme violence....
I was a little reluctant to view this, in case I was completely traumatised by it. At the top of my viewing notes, I wrote 'I don't know what I am letting myself in for here!'
It looks, sounds and feels amazing, proper cinema, super confident, the performances are across the board outstanding, - it is indeed, as the subject of this newsletter suggests, a case of flash bang wallop what a picture.
The visceral nature of the film genuinely provoked intense physical bodily reactions in me - I curled into a ball when Alexia ripped Justine's nipple ring out, and Alexia goes in to repeatedly break her own nose on the corner of the sink in the public toilet I realised I had raised my hand to my mouth in horror -
but, but, but....
it felt like two films to me.
There's a long-short film here about a female serial killer - the first act of the film - which I was fascinated by - and this is where all the car stuff is that you see in the publicity shots.
Then there is an abrupt tonal and story world shift when Alexia has to flee in the bloody wake of her murders (the girl can't help herself) and she decides to pass herself off a twenty-something man, Adrien Lagend, despite the fact she is now pregnant by a car
(I am just imagining our Lynn, my lovely cousin & godmother, reading this aside and shaking her head).
The gender-flip section of the film is also beautiful, compassionate, wide-ranging in its explorations of gender and performance and chosen families, plus rising plot tension, euphoric dance sequences, a mosh pit, and a reference to KNITTING, but it ended in a birthing scene that I felt I had seen before (if not the kind of baby, definitely the kind of scene).
It made me think of Leigh Janiak's Honeymoon (2014), and I thought, for all Titane's subversion, we're still riding on women giving birth as a climactic horror sequence.
Given the originality and wild beauty of the film, it would've been great for it not to end in this way;
it upended our expectations in every other respect, so why not this?
Titane is, inevitably, every bit as wild a ride as one would anticipate, but, if I am honest, I need to swim against the tide and admit that I preferred Raw, Ducournau's debut feature - I do prefer one coherent world and one story.
Or, if I admit my petulance, I was far more interested in the first act and what the story there might have become.
Finally, I have for you a film that is made, almost entirely by men, and for that, I am grateful, for it is indeed a terrible film.
Welcome to Darkness Falls (2003).
So, Zos read something in a past newsletter where I referenced a demonic tooth fairy horror that got 9% on rotten tomatoes and pronounced that this needed to be our next horror club screening.
(to be fair, I think she normally just opens my newsletter and goes apple + f, 'zos' to see what I have said about her so I guess I should be grateful my best mate is actually reading this)
I will watch all sorts of shite so I was OK with it, Helen was worried she would be too scared but I pointed out that if it was truly shit she wouldn't be scared, and Laura (VERY WISELY) cried off.
So Helen, Zos and I settled down to Darkness Falls which truly is the worst film I have seen in so very long, even with Emma Caulfield (Anya in Buffy) in the lead female role, doing her best to keep things moving.
There are numerous reasons why this film is bad and why Helen proclaimed the 9% rating was 'generous', but some of the main ones are:
the lead guy in it performs like he is in Doctors (British soap opera ref for my international readers)
the premise - demonic tooth fairy murdering kids who have lost a tooth - is only in the prologue, then it's all about adults, and she's totally just murdering any old person REGARDLESS OF THEIR TEETH
there's a whole climactic scene in a police station where an officer shoots a dog but we never see nor hear a dog nor is a dog ever discussed before or after and the whole thing is baffling
Helen pronounced that the demonic tooth fairy just looked like a dementor and once she'd said that I couldn't unsee it
after about 25 minutes, the film doesn't make sense - I am inclined to sympathise with editors, so I can't imagine what actual material he was given, if this was the best that could be stitched together.
There was a lot of us three going 'where are they?' 'what's going on?' (and also, I didn't have my hearing aid in and I was saying 'are they mumbling or is it me'? and they confirmed it was mumbling so I felt marginally less infirm)
But I think, perhaps the biggest issue was that the prologue is actually pretty good. It has about four jump scares in a row which are super effective - enough for scaredy cats Helen and Zos to scream multiple times and Helen have to put down her wine for fear of throwing it and then raise either side of her cardigan around her face as a protective barrier, and Zos to suddenly have to do some very urgent actor research on her phone (even though I was bellowing gerrof your phone Zos) to see if the girl was the Baudelaire girl from Netflix's A Series of Unfortunate Events (she was) which actually means Zos is too scared to look at the film anymore but we're not allowed to admit that.
We had expectations, but, they were dashed when the prologue ended and the man who should have been in Doctors walked on screen.
Perhaps the scariest thing of all is that I remember going to see this film at the cinema when it was first released - by which point I already had a first class degree in critical and cultural theory and I was doing a masters degree in visual culture - and I remember thinking IT WAS QUITE GOOD.
Afterwards, to get over it, we had to watch Jane MacDonald in The Cruise again, forgetting that the editing and storytelling in that is also completely disjointed to contemporary eyes, so it was quite a discomforting evening all round.
We are now debating whether to:
a) continue watching terrible films and rebrand as Crap Horror Club
b) for them lot to give in and actually let me pick something genuinely scary. I am desperate to at least try them out with Us.
We shall see.
***
To the reading recs!
Work-wise, I've got my head in books on British horror cinema right now - I've been charting a history of trade press and academic books devoted to British horror cinema as a way of working through changes in approaches and thinking about the topic.
Here are some of the key books that I am referencing:
Peter Hutchings, Hammer and Beyond: The British Horror Film (Manchester UP, 1993)
Steve Chibnall and Julian Petley, British Horror Cinema (Routledge, 2002)
I finally ordered my own paperback copy of Johnny Walker's Contemporary British Horror Cinema: Industry, Genre, Society (2015) after relying on the library copy far too many times.
and, the first academic book written by a woman on this subject, Lindsey Decker's, Transnationalism and Genre Hybridity in New British Horror Cinema (University of Wales, 2021)
Finally, not about British cinema but all about horror - two new books (to me) that I am looking forward to getting my teeth into:
Rosalind Galt's brand-new book, Alluring Monsters: The Pontianak and Cinemas of Decolonization has just turned up in the post and I am super-keen to read. The blurb is thus:
The pontianak, a terrifying female vampire ghost, is a powerful figure in Malay cultures, as loved and feared in Southeast Asia as Dracula is in the West. In animist tradition, she is a woman who has died in childbirth, and her vengeful return upsets gender norms and social hierarchies. The pontianak first appeared on screen in late colonial Singapore in a series of popular films that combine indigenous animism and transnational production with the cultural and political force of the horror genre.
Obviously so up my street.
And I've had David Church's Post–Horror: Art, Genre and Cultural Elevation on my kindle for ages but I now finally have the headspace to read it:
....Variously dubbed 'elevated horror' and 'post-horror,' films such as The Babadook, It Follows, The Witch, It Comes at Night, Get Out, The Invitation, Hereditary, Midsommar, A Ghost Story, and mother! represent an emerging nexus of taste, politics, and style that has often earned outsized acclaim from critics and populist rejection by wider audiences. Post-Horror is the first full-length study of one of the most important and divisive movements in twenty-first-century horror cinema.
I found the 'post-horror' label deeply annoying when it first emerged, so I am fascinated to read Church's take on all this - his hints at it being 'one of the most divine movements' have totally drawn me in.
If you are interested in this one, it is currently very expensive, so do order it through your local library.
And in the meantime, I have my fingers crossed for a paperback release.
***
Right, that's all from me for today. Hope you have nice things planned for your Sunday and the week ahead. I'm planning to drag my family out for a walk into Bingley, to get a very nice Sunday pub lunch. I've also just seen that Romola Garai's British horror Amulet (2020) has dropped on Curzon's streaming service so I know what I'll be watching tonight.
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? Or, are there any excellent films, books, podcasts that you've devoured recently that you think I might enjoy?
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.
Take care and speak soon, my lovely horror family.
Chin up,
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