...from whence it came.

I saw Rob Zombie's The Lords of Salem last night and, despite being in the midst of frantically trying finish my thesis, felt compelled to assemble a quick collage of some films TLOS seems to reference. Some are no-brainers (Zombie said he was influenced by Polanski, Russell, and Kubrick in interviews), others are educated guesses.

From upper left to bottom right: Rosemary's Baby (Polansk 1968), Don't Look Now (Roeg 1973), The Mummy (Fisher 1959), The Shining (Kubrick 1980), Suspiria (Argento 1977), The Devils (Russell 1971), The Witches (Frankel 1966), Inferno (Argento 1980), Witchhammer (Vavra 1970)

And maybe a dash of Jodorowsky's The Holy Mountain...

The LA Zombie paper...

Nearly two years ago, I attended a midnight showing of Bruce LaBruce's LA Zombie and I have been talking and thinking and writing about it ever since--from the ride home (with the lovely, willing, and fearless Nikoba), to using it as an excuse to strike up a friendship with the gentleman/scholar Adam O., to writing a research paper and, thus, ensuring a home for LA Zombie in the university's film library. Whether anyone will ever watch it is another question, but knowing that I leave UWM covered in terms of gay zombie porn makes my heart pitter patter. As usual, the original paper emerged from the haze of sleep deprivation, carefully balanced alcohol and caffeine consumption, and made-up voodoo rituals involving keyboard pounding and ill-advised harem pants. I have since revised it for a PhD program application, but feel that it still lacks the character I want it to have, especially for a LaBruce film, which deserves a spirited response.

However, for the time being, this paper is the demon-child of my years at UWM and my best effort at forging an interdisciplinary pathway. To what end? I have no f**king clue. I am in need of a patron willing to indulge my interests in film studies, queer theory, cultural geography, and the urban milieu. I will wear a push-up bra if needed. Also, I own a blazer that can easily be fitted with scholarly suede elbow patches.

Without further fanfare, here is the LA Zombie paper. Many thanks to Gilberto for tolerating me and for the few people who will appreciate the effort. For the uninitiated, here is a trailer and link to the website:

 LA Zombie website: http://www.lazombie.com/ 

There is No Title Because I Have Erased the Title
(This is Not a Title)  

In this paper, I...

1.       Propose a theoretical model for the study of queerness and geography in film, including a discussion of the spatiality of film itself, the relevancy of cultural geography in the study of film, the role of built environments in the regulation of sexuality, and the zombie’s ability to “queer” space.

2.       Read Bruce LaBruce’s LA Zombie (2010) as a radical critique of the spatial marginalization of sexual minorities and as a utopian text that champions border-crossing and the queering of normative spaces.

Join the Horde

Entry #2 is a paper I'm really fond of and will be revising when I have the time. Those of you familiar with academic writing will probably be able to tell that this should be a much larger paper. In too few pages, I tried to provide a history of the zombie genre, detail the ways in which I think it systematically deconstructs binaries, and analyze two films, a comic, and a novel. The paper needs to be considerably longer in order to properly dig into the "meat" of these texts, but this is a good start and it was an incredibly fun paper to write. I am especially excited about it because I have always been interested in the intersection of cultural geography and film and this paper provided me with some of the material for another research paper this semester. Also, I was glad to be able to finally articulate some of the vague ideas I had about the tonal seachange in recent zombie films. Finally, it allowed me to not just make peace with Land of the Dead, but to really, really enjoy it from a critical perspective.

I had to monkey with the formatting when I switched it to single space, which I believe is way easier to read. If I could, I'd write every paper single-spaced, Chicago style, with links and graphics...but I won't get started on that rant. Anyhow, as a result of changing things around, the graphics are not the best. I also need to figure out why all my docs look like crap on Scribd. Okay, enjoy:
Horde

Bad Conscience

...from Peeping Tom (Powell, 1960)

Because I have no time to spend working on anything other than research papers, I thought I'd post a few for any of you that might be interested in What It Is Exactly I spend most of my time doing. Entry #1 was written for a film theory course last semester and (surprise, surprise) defends the unlikely virtues of the horror genre. It could benefit from revision, obviously.

An Examination (Part II: Wolves and Sharks)

This is where I should have started, but (and this is also why I get hiccups) I am often too excited for my own good. If I breathe in and breathe out and imagine starting this whole conversation over again, I find myself twisting and turning in my childhood bed.

I grew up on a homesteader-type spread in the middle of Indiana. We lived in a tiny blue cottage on the edge of 20-ish acres of  forest and marsh. The cottage was as tired and achey as a septuagenarian and correspondingly vocal. The largest of the outbuildings was a large, red barn that we only partially used, and its darkest rooms were full of rusted tools and small, skittering shadows. Night was not orange but black, black, black. But I digress. When I was extra-tiny, before it occurred to me that my surroundings could be frightening, my mom read me fairy tales. Old World fairy tales. The Brothers Grimm's "Little Red Cap" was the first work of fiction that gave me The Fear.

Arthur Rackman: "Little Red Riding Hood"

Little Red Cap

I had the most ferocious nightmares about wolves for months afterward, and one of my first memories is my mother apologizing for reading me this story.

As I grew and began moving independently outward from the cottage, exploring the barn or climbing in the woodshed or playing in the forest, I operated on fairy tale logic ("wolves live here, here, and here and I won't go there unless I have a big stick"). Without a television (or friends), there wasn't any outside "static" interfering with my bloated imagination, so I spent a lot of time being horrified: mostly by choice. When I first heard Vincent Price's monologue on Michael Jackson's "Thriller," it only confirmed what I already knew (that, at night, things were crawling up to the house from the marsh).

It's easy to romanticize the Girl Explorer/Wolf Meat phase of my childhood, because children have been poking around in the woods and scaring the hell out of themselves for eons. But the Event that turned the pokin' stick into a remote control happened when I was ten and my dad finally allowed a television and VCR player into the house. I was ecstatic because that meant I finally got to see...

Wait, let me back up...

I remember being incomparably excited about three things in my childhood:

1) The Jem pink punk rock wig I asked for one Christmas
2) Being tall enough to ride the Vortex at King's Island
3) JAWS

From the moment Jaws went into the VCR, I was so engrossed that I lost all concept of self. My parents were as entertained by me as they were by the film because, although I started out sitting about 3 feet in front of the screen, by the film's end I had scooted and scrambled all the way across the living room and was wedged and cowering against the couch. For the next five years, I had wolf-grade nightmares about sharks. The dreams went something like this: I would be walking through my school's gymnasium and the floor would open underneath me and I would plunge into the ocean with one or many sharks circling me. I would wake up with my sheets twisted off the bed, as if I had been trying to swim. The nightmare didn't always end right away because, in that heightened state of arousal, I would sometimes see Frankenstein's Monster silhouetted in my bedroom door or hear wet footsteps coming up the hill from the marsh. No matter how much teenaged hormones dampened my lively imagination, sharks would sometimes transport me back to that wonderful, porous childhood mindset.

Reading over this, it sounds like a set of reasons to hate horror films. What makes one person love being scared and another hate it? I'm trying to imagine what went on when I was being assembled in my mother's womb. There's a big production line and a switchboard for turning on and off certain genes. The workers are all tiny forest animals, and there's a drunken rabbit at the switchboard.

God gene off!
Horror gene on!
Allergic to...everything!
Cries during previews!
Man...this kid's gonna be a WEIRDO!
Gary- send more tequila!

And out I pop, poking things with sticks and trying to sneak onto grown-up roller coasters and peeking from between my fingers at the movie theater.

So, that explains that or, rather, explains nothing. Because, as tempting as it is to "p-shaw" at the thought that liking horror means anything about me, it quite obviously does. But that's for next time, and now's for sleeping.

An Examination (Part I: Invisible China Teacups)

A still from Cronenberg's Rabid

Thus far, the blog experiment isn't much of a success. I have some half-finished writing on Event Horizon (in response to some comments I received from friends about my last set of screenshots) and the excellent Cold Prey (Uthaug, 2006), which has been called "the perfect slasher." However, all that writing is languishing (festering?), because summer classes and various parks, beaches, and patios have prevented me from finishing...anything. A recent email exchange serves as good motivation though, so I think I'll break my silence by writing about why I love horror.

I imagine that people who are primarily interested in "legitimate" film genres spend less time mentally circling their interests and trying to figure out what being interested in That means about Them. More than (most) other genres, horror seems to encode its viewer with a set of (mostly) undeserved characteristics. I've recently read some theory that helps me being to understand it all. In "Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess," Linda Williams examines the form, structure, and functions of pornography, horror, and melodrama, which are awarded a low cultural status for their excessive display of sex, violence, and emotion. I find it particularly interesting when Williams cites Mary Ann Doane’s writing on the “textual rape” of the viewer, who is “feminized through pathos." Each genre can be seen to victimize (feminize) the viewer through the objectification of women in porn, the “fight or flight” response elicited in horror, or the simulation of intense loss in melodrama. The key is the greater degree of bodily violation, even though we are always, always, always seeking a sensory experience whenever we buy a ticket or press "play." Although comedy seems to be a counterexample (because it can also elicit a powerful physical response from viewers), only the three aforementioned genres present a special challenge to their audience, who sit in the dark: jerking in fear, arousal, or sadness. I really can't recommend this essay enough to anyone who wants to explore these cultural "dark alleys." It has become an important piece of writing in my quest to more reasonably respond to the following proclamation:

 

On more than one occasion, I've found myself responding to what I perceived (correctly or not) as a value judgment in one of three ways:

1) Explain that I also enjoy foreign films, baby animals, and lying in fields in the sunlight

2) Push up my glasses and blather about horror's function as "cultural problem solving" 

3) Ask the naysayer why they don't like it

If I asked you which of the three yielded the more interesting conversation, I'm guessing you'd choose 3 (so choose 3). Interestingly, 3 is rarely a revelation. Turns out, horror is scary. Imagine. Or, if you have the pleasure of insulting the good taste of an academic, horror objectifies women and rubs our faces in the consequences of challenging patriarchal capitalismblahblahyawn. Lately, 2 is getting the better response, because (I think) it gives people a safe distance from which to engage the topic of What Frightens Us All. Because, after all, it's not that I'm not scared of sharks and men with mommy issues and the shambling dead...it's that I can engage with these images rather than reject them. In the BBC documentary Why Do We Dream, it is asserted that nightmares have served an important function in human evolution. Perhaps without dreaming of fanged things, humans would have gone the way of the dodo bird. It is only natural that, given the power, we would project these dreams (which serve such an important function in our lives) onto the screen. Yet, it certainly means something different to have nightmares and to willingly subject ourselves to horror films.

Coming up in Part II: Wolves and Sharks (Or How I Learned to Stop Shivering and Love the Horror Film)

Screenshots + Celebration

An unusually intense semester has ended, so here are some celebratory screenshots. I had intended to write something of substance, but right now I just need the catharsis. And what could be more cathartic than a wall of blood?

Anyhow, Event Horizon has always unsettled me. I guess that's probably because it completely annihilates all my Utopian notions of sub-light travel. In EH, humanity's greatest ambition leads straight to hell...and Sam Neill. Anyhow, despite the film's tendency to push some of my buttons, the wall of blood has always stood out as beautiful to me...so, here you have it.