After suburbia, in the last part of the series I was interested in a more traditional haunted house film for this week’s installment. I was looking through lists for some underrated haunted house films and stumbled across The Changeling, a George C Scott vehicle from the 1980s. It follows John Russell, played by Scott, a … Continue reading The Haunted House on Film Part Six
Putting Vivarium into this series is maybe a slightly left field choice but I think it makes for a fascinating haunted house movie precisely because it cuts against so many of the generic expectations of what a haunted house story should be. Traditionally, the haunted house was about the intrusion of a long-thought-buried history, reintroducing … Continue reading The Haunted House on Film Part Five
On The Representational Horror of Film The Director by Daniel Kehlmann translated by Ross Benjamin Black Flame, by Gretchen Felker-Martin Is not the reproduction of the illusion, in a certain sense also its correction? - Gilles Deleuze, CINEMA I Movement-Image I’ve started a new reading thread over on bluesky. It’s something I’ve done many times … Continue reading The Horror of Film: “The Director” and “Black Flame”
Happy Christmas friends and comrades. Taking some inspiration from xenogothic, whose blog and wider intellectual work I’ve deeply admired for years now, I thought it would be interesting to try and wrap up the year and collate all of the writing I’ve managed to publish this year. Much of the year I spent wracked with … Continue reading 2025 Retrospective
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
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
‘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
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
I was, for better or worse, raised in the Methodist Church. To try and explain precisely just what that means is difficult, as in many ways that iteration of the Methodist Church is no longer existent, or is found mostly in memories, kept alive by dwindling, gray haired congregations. The Methodism of the North of … Continue reading Re-enchanting Zion: On Sarah Perry’s Enlightenment
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