The mysterious mother at the top of the house that you take food up to but never see

Now then,

Welcome back to the Losers' Club, thanks for dropping by. It's time to lose yourself in horror films and books and writing for a little while.

What have you been up to? My essay film Three Ways to Dine Well is now an official selection at the Austin After Dark Film Festival which is very lovely. It will be screening there in May - if you're in the vicinity of Austin, Texas, and you go along, please take a photo and send it to me - I would love to see my film happening, live, so to speak.

In other film news, I had a zoom meeting with the brilliant actor who will be doing the voiceover for my next essay film, Knit One Stab Two.

I got very excited when she sent me through test audio:

I realised, 'it is becoming a thing! It is becoming real!'

It blows my mind how you can almost just wish things into existence

(admittedly, also with a lot of hard graft).

In my head, I want to edit Knit One Stab Two and have a solid version down before I go to Vermont in June - I am pretty sure that once I do this filmmaking workshop at Middlebury I will completely rethink what I want to do with essay films, and I want to move forward with that feeling, and not decide to go back and completely redo the knitting film.

So I need to have done enough work, and be far enough on with this not to be tempted by that proposition.

I don't actually have any time planned or put aside at all to do this editing of course. Which makes this self-imposed deadline interesting.

I also wrote an essay for Arrow, on why Mike Takashi's Audition endures, over twenty years after its initial release. It was pretty straightforward and a nice return to East Asian cinema for me. I did a book on Korean Horror Cinema in 2013, and, when I used to teach film and television studies, I always tried to include East Asian cinema.

When I worked at Northumbria University, I had a whole module entitled Popular East Asian Cinema, where I screened Thai kickboxing films, South Korean monster movies, Hong Kong action films etc. Since I switched to teaching screenwriting and filmmaking in 2015, I haven't had as much chance to screen and discuss East Asian film, so I enjoyed doing this. My essay should be going live on their website soon - I'll tell you when.

I haven't got any other commissioned essays lined up for a bit now, and I'm going to try and get my head down on some bigger pieces of academic research for my fellowship on feminist horror cinema.

Talking of which, I gave a paper at the Edinburgh University Film Seminar series, entitled 'Toward a Feminist Historiography of Horror Cinema', which was all about Jackie Kong. I don't know anyone at Edinburgh Uni, and I didn't know if it would be popular, but quite a few people turned up and it seemed to go down well, so that was a relief. Plus it was fun. I always love an opportunity to screen the Blood Diner night club zombie cannibal sequence to unsuspecting audience members, ha!

Continuing on fellowship stuff, the deadline for the MAI special issue Doing Women's (Global) (Horror) Cinema has arrived and I've been absolutely inundated with proposals.

I can easily see that I will need to double the original size of the special issue, and even then, I could easily fill it five times over.

I've got some very hard choices to make over the next few weeks.

I have also watched a couple of good women-made horror films.

First, Bulbbul (2020) written and directed by Anvita Dutt (Netflix) - I have been meaning to watch it for ages, and after getting multiple proposals on it for MAI, I thought I should crack on.

I loved it.

It was visually and sonically lush, the colour and the sets were everything, and, without giving anything away, where Bulbbul ends up, in her final scenes in the film, has inspired a whole chapter in the new book and connects this film to Saint Maud AND Daughters of Darkness AND Last Night in Soho AND Rebecca.

I highly recommend this film if you want transporting away for an afternoon, to an 1880s Bengal shrouded in red mist.

I watched Eve's Bayou (1997) on Amazon Prime on International Women's Day. This was inadvertent, but fitting, given it was written and directed by Kasi Lemmons, shot by Amy Vincent, and oh, just worked on by a whole bunch of women in a ton of different production roles.

This film is a classic, for a reason. It's not outright horror, more smouldering Southern Gothic, all jealousy and envy and sex and wax coffins and adultery and hoodoo and murderous desire and puberty and visions and death. It's from Eve's point of view, a child, who doesn't always get what is going on around her, which is very Celia (1989).

This subjective point of view is then entangled in themes of memory and remembering, and how our memories are subjective and potentially flawed, and then how this partial remembering is reworked into a narrative that suits our need to avoid guilt and a reckoning with past behaviour.

i.e. it is about LIFE itself and human nature.

There's also a scene where the character Julian is preparing a canvas on an easel which totally gave me Neema Barnette's Spirit Lost (1997), released the same year and a fantastic choice for a double bill with Eve's Bayou.

Then, finally, there's Amulet (2020) written and directed by Romola Garai, streaming on Curzon Home Cinema (and pictured above, at the top of the newsletter).

I was a little reticent going into this, because I'd heard it gets super violent and body horror and BIRTHING and I was thinking oh god it might be too much and also enough with birthing (see: Titane).

But at the same time it had Imelda Staunton in it (legend) and I've been completely obsessed with Romola Garai since The Hour (the 2011-2012 TV series) which I've watched both seasons of at least three times, and it is contemporary British horror made by a woman so I need to stop being a wuss.

In case you've not heard of it yet, the one-sentence synopsis is...

An ex-soldier, living homeless in London, is offered a place to stay at a decaying house inhabited by a young woman and her dying mother.

As a one liner goes, it is absolutely accurate.

It is also absolutely not accurate.

It is absolutely and totally brilliant.

You know how I watched Censor, and thought, there's no way this can be a debut feature?

It's the same with Amulet.

Everything is so sophisticated; a film made by a woman at complete ease with set, process, story, audiovisual keys.

This ease seems to give the filmmaking team space to breathe, to explore, in ways you never usually see in debuts.

There's so much confidence here, and a love of poetic images, audio storytelling, an understanding of what dialogue is actually for (e.g. revealing character) not what a lot of horror usually uses it for (signposting plot); it is bursting with colour and light and sound in the most textured and loathsome way.

It is also so sparse on dialogue - at least in the first third, yet at the same time you always understand what the film wants and needs you to understand at that moment in time, you never feel lost, or out of sync, just cushioned in this rich, disgusting world.

You can see here that I'm not going into specifics, I want you to watch it for yourself - it's one of those films that you really don't want to give the game away on.

I refuse to even indicate themes.

It is then, of course, also one of those films that demands a rewatch as soon as possible - so, now you really get it, you can look for all the plants and pay offs en route that you missed first time around.

A few final, random points about Amulet though:

Every time Imelda Staunton speaks, I want to cut it and make a video essay of her monologues.

The mysterious mother at the top of the house that you take food up to but never see gave me Burnt Offerings (1976) until it didn't anymore and then this trope mutated into end of Relic (2020) via Pet Sematary (1989)

This film feels like it breathes in green

Magda (the young woman in the synopsis) goes to a club and does the best dancing ever

It's basically a three hander one location and I never even noticed this until I was 1hr 22 in

The ending is explicitly, violently, and satisfyingly, feminist as hell (and gave me Office Killer).

To the reading recs!

This week, it's newsletters.

Two new sign-ups first. I've recently joined the Elsewhere Cinema Club, which hosts monthly online film screenings & filmmaker's Q&As, all about women and queer folk in Southeast Asia, which looks fab.

Last week I signed up to Amber's HornBloodFire newsletter, after guesting on her podcast. In the new issue, posted out this Tuesday, I very much enjoyed her horror film viewing round ups, creator shout outs and her saying I was A GOD (well she didn't actually say that I have just extrapolated for my own ego).

Caroline Crampton, who does the Shedunnit podcast, sends out No Complaints, and this week is all about her note-taking and book writing process which I loved. She's way more interested in digital technologies to aid her process, while I will always be faithful to fountain pens and paper (preferably either a) yellow legal pads LIKE IN AMERICAN DRAMAS or b) a nice Rhodia goalbook) but I'm still into it.

Lisa Morton's Every Day is Halloween is long-time favourite of mine. She writes horror fiction and horror nonfiction books including the fabulous Calling the Spirits: A History of Seances, and in the latest issue she revealed she was the special effects make up artist on the mad 1980s horror One Dark Night (1983) which now gives me an excuse to now include that mental bit where he shoots lightning from his eyes in my next essay film, as I can now claim One Dark Night as women-made horror.

Lindsay Pugh's Woman in Revolt is also always worth reading - head over to her blog for lots more material. One of my favourite things about newsletter from people (as opposed to companies etc) is voice - a distinctive point of view and a way of writing that can only be them - and Woman in Revolt has it in spades. Her latest issue is a an extended, beautiful, thoughtful review of Mattie Do's new feature, The Long Walk, and I encourage you all to read immediately.

SIDE NOTE: I've had a large number of pitches on Mattie Do for the MAI special issue. As the first and only female film director from Laos AND the first horror film director this pleases me greatly. I'm going in on a rewatch of Dearest Sister (2016) on Shudder in preparation for guesting on an episode of Ariel Baska's Ride the Omnibus podcast.

FURTHER SIDE NOTE THAT IS KIND OF TANGENTIALLY BACK ON TOPIC I GUESS: I recently subscribed to Caryn Coleman's The Future of Film is Female newsletter, whose team have a longstanding love of the horror genre (good lasses). Caryn recently did a video interview with Mattie, which was linked on the latest newsletter, and you can watch here. I also recommend checking out their archive of video interviews with women working in horror film. It is an embarrassment of riches.

Are there any other newsletters - either about horror film, or women filmmakers, or let's be honest, whodunnits and cosy crime - that you would recommend?

Over on instagram, Madelaine Davis asked me if I'd recommend any horror film studies books for people who want to learn more about the genre, so from next week I might start a little bit of a series in this space, with kind of the key essays / books in horror film analysis decade by decade.

What do you reckon? You interested?