Last week was a less straightforward and conventional haunted house film, with its focus on the essential erasure or subsumption of the domestic into the service industry economy. I wanted to keep that theme going with this week's entry, Oliver Assayas’s Personal Shopper. The story follows Maureen Cartwright, played by Kristen Stewart, who works as … Continue reading The Haunted House on Film Part Four
The last piece in the series (read it here, why not?) covered something of a classic so for this installement it seems appropriate to go for a more contemporary director who is clearly indebted to the form and aesthetics of older horror film. Who better than Ti West? However, I have to start with something … Continue reading The Haunted House on Film Part Three
After starting last week with the piece on Fulci, I thought I would turn to another film that takes even heavier inspiration from Henry James’s novella, “The Turn of the Screw.” The Innocents, directed by arguably the most literary of British film directors, Jack Clayton, is utterly peerless. It is formally and thematically bold in … Continue reading The Haunted House on Film Part Two
Over the next few months I’ve decided to spend some time exploring the haunted house in horror film. Given the simplicity of the plots, and the general structure which has become so well established as to be cliche, these films are a useful way of exploring both the historical and ideological constructions of housing, and … Continue reading The Haunted House On Film Part One
The multiplicity of interpretations to which the Commune has been subjected, and the multiplicity of interests which construed it in their favor, show that it was a thoroughly expansive political form, while all the previous forms of government had been emphatically repressive. Its true secret was this: It was essentially a working class government, the … Continue reading The Democratic Modernism of Peter Watkins
The Haunt emerges from an almost yeat-long slumber. I don’t know if you’ve seen this or not, but Horror Vanguard put out our yearly Halloween special episode. A few years ago we decided to do something special for the first time and put out an episode that cracked the three hour mark. The following year … Continue reading Amityville Postscript
‘Your Karl Marx still believes in letting natural forces take their course. No politics, no conspiracies, am I right? Everything out in the open, and nothing to fight for but wage rises ... To hell with you and your gradual evolution! Set fire to every town and city, cut the populace to shreds, raze everything … Continue reading Zola As Horror Writer
The apparent delight with which we dwell upon objects of pure terror, where our moral feelings are not in the least concerned and no passion seems to be excited but the depressing one of fear, is a paradox of the heart… difficult of solution. John and Anna Laetitia Aikin, “On the Pleasure Derived from Objects … Continue reading Hungry For Something
For FRJ. Fredric Jameson is dead and it feels like the world has moved on its axis, a center of gravity has shifted. It is almost impossible to give a full and fair summation of Jameson’s achievements - as an intellectual, writer and philosopher he can only be thought of in plural, as many Jamesons. … Continue reading Thought To The Second Power
A couple of years back, I went to a conference on Utopian Studies. For the most part, it was, to be blunt, rather disappointing. Papers were presented wherein the limit of utopian thought was a liberal beneficence -- less the great shock of the revolutionary New, but a more capitalist sense of “new and improved!” … Continue reading Raise Them Up From The Poison Swamp: Rupture and Heresy in The Books of Jacob
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