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
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
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
How often we ask for genuine experience when all we really want is emotion. Over on Twitter, there was some discussion on the role of Catholicism in horror, and whether or not there is such a thing as Protestant horror. Catholicism, with it's sacrements, rites of exorcism and coherent iconography offer a compelling cinematic language. … Continue reading Towards A Theory of Protestant Horror
As Sylvia Federici points out in her landmark work. Caliban And The Witch one of the features of the emergence of capitalism was the production of a new kind of subject. The growing mercantile bourgeoisie required labour power to work for them and thus, society and the idea of the subject had to be reshaped. … Continue reading Towards A Gothic Marxism Part II: Monsters For Socialism
We live in an age of monsters. Such a statement is hardly controversial anymore – from every aspect of culture monsters peer at us, we consume them, we profess our fear, yet the market is saturated with vampires, ghouls, demons, and ghosts. We loathe the monsters, we hide from them. but we love them too. … Continue reading Towards A Gothic Marxism I: On Monsters
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