You’ve gone wrong around the eyes like one of those crabs at the dump

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The Question in Bodies #45: That Haunting Sense of Unexpressed Deformity

Many a man would have even blazoned such irregularities as I was guilty of; but from the high views that I had set before me I regarded and hid them with an almost morbid sense of shame.
– Stevenson, “Henry Jekyll's Full Statement of the Case”

Living with duality is something that I think most people do to some extent; we compartmentalise our selves, we communicate in different ways in different contexts. And it’s a survival technique, a thing we do naturally to maintain social discourse and our place in it.

But what if you’re autistic and you don’t know you’re autistic, and these changes of tone and etiquette don’t come naturally to you? This isn’t theoretical. In the house where I spent my childhood, sex and gender weren’t just taboo subjects, they were active subjects of revulsion and shame. I learned about bodily differences embarrassingly late. No positive depictions or discussions of sexuality were tolerated at home; and my mother particularly responded to scenes of people enjoying the act of kissing or canoodling with disgust and revulsion. 

(Footnote: I clearly remember the moment of the first same-sex kiss on British TV, between Colin and Guido on the episode of Eastenders broadcast 24th January 1989. I remember my parents’ seething outrage at it, having known in advance from the newspaper that this would be the episode where that happened, and having made absolutely sure that they tuned in and did not miss it.) 

The result of it was that very early on I developed a private imaginary space where I could escape the constant surveillance under which I was kept. And actually, my imaginary scenes weren’t really anything to be ashamed of – they certainly weren’t the twisted evil I was scared that everyone would think they were, and in later life I’ve actually become proud of the unique and odd fantasy world I made, and I have even used it in my work. But it didn’t matter. An internal Demiurge in my brain had brought into existence a fantastical world where my sexuality and imagination lived, separate from the world I presented to those about me, and the result was that I fractured.

The Question in Bodies #38: Parasite Art (ii)

 

Starry Eyes (2014)

Warning for #metoo stuff (you know what I am talking about). And many spoilers. 

If it seems sacreligious not only to segue directly from the arguable masterpiece of one of the greatest (and reportedly nicest) American directors to a low budget indie horror but also to write quite a bit more about that low-budget indie horror, well, there are loads of words about the masterpiece movie, and better ones than mine. This one? Not so many.

Mulholland Drive’s most interesting (for me) contributions to identity horror as an idea are predicated on how dreams of fame sour a person, destroy them. Betty in Lynch’s film is perfect starry-eyed ingenue, until she isn’t, and she is in fact interchangeable with the lost, bitter, missed-her-shot Diane. Betty is a dream of a dreamer; Diane is one for whom those dreams have soured into a nightmare of regret.

The Question in Bodies #36: Possessor (2020)

(Spoilers, discussion of content that may distress.)

Ren

I was on the phone not so very long before writing this with an old friend who, like me, struggles with mental health problems, and my friend said something – and I cannot remember his exact words, or how it came up – to the effect that I should seek that feeling of affirmation that comes when somebody speaks your name. I had a weird sort of epiphany then. I have never considered myself to have a name as such, and hearing the placeholder designation on my birth certificate uttered produces, normally, only a sense that something is wrong. My friend’s statement, then, inspired the realisation that not only do people exist whose names mean something to them, but that these people are somehow in the majority.

The Question in Bodies #35: Come True (2021)

(Spoilers, but not as many as usual. I feel a bit bad about writing this, really. Content warning for visceral disappointment.)

The setup for Anthony Scott Burns’ Canadian hauntological piece Come True is pretty dense, and it's a credit to its director that it doesn’t feel like it is, that the opening act feels measured and leisurely, and that the strangeness of the protagonist’s situation is anchored by a sense of normality, a sense that her experiences and behaviours are logical extensions of where she is, and because of that, her odd situation does not feel so odd.

The Question in Bodies #34: The Woman (2011)

Spoilers galore for a movie that contains literally everything that is possibly likely to ruin the day of anyone sensitive to, well, you know. You have been warned.)

The second time I watched The Woman, I had to take a break twenty minutes from the end. I knew what was coming. It was too much. To say this is a hard film to watch is one of the most basic and obvious things to say about it. But it has that genuinely unusual distinction of being harder to watch on subsequent viewings, because it is one of those films where knowing what is to come makes things that much harder to bear.

On a Thousand Walls #29: Vivarium (2019)

(Spoilers.)

Vivarium, then. I suppose I should start with the plot, which is simple enough. A young couple, primary school teacher Gemma (Imogen Poots) and landscaper  Tom (Jesse Eisenberg), are thinking of moving in together. There is pressure upon them to get on the property ladder. They go to an estate agent. The man working there, Martin (Jonathan Aris) is stilted and a bit creepy, but they nonetheless agree to see a house. He takes them to Yonder, a labyrinthine suburban estate full of identical detached houses. While they're looking around number 9, unimpressed, Martin vanishes. And they find that no matter where they drive to, they are still at the door of number 9. 

The Question in Bodies #33: Sleepless Beauty (2020); III (2015)

Sleepless Beauty (AKA Я не сплю, 2020); III (AKA III: The Ritual, 2015)

I am going to give away all the plot developments in the Russian torturefest that is Sleepless Beauty (the original title, Я не сплю, translates as “I am not sleeping”). This is because everything that's interesting in the movie – and there’s quite a lot that’s interesting – is rear-loaded, and depends upon you having seen it. Also, there isn’t a whole lot of plot to give away. But in giving away what there is of the film’s plot, I rob you of having any reason to see it. Do you want to see it? That’s a question that inspires an inhalation through gritted teeth, really. My gut says “probably not”. The same goes to a slightly lesser extent for its 2015 predecessor III. You’ve been warned.

The Question in Bodies #32: Neurodiverse part 3

May (2002)

[Many more spoilers, so do go and see May before you read this. Hell, go and see May even if you don't read this, because May is brilliant.]

The funny thing about characters coded as neurodiverse and called “weird” is that often the films in which they appear try to give us reasons why they are like this.

The Question in Bodies #31: Neurodiverse, part 2

(Wait, I hear no one say, what happened to #30? Where is Neurodiverse part 1? It's on my Patreon. It's not a film piece. It's personal and it's a bit more sensitive, and since the internet is making me aware of its nature with crappy comments in the moderation queue, you only get to read that one if you give me money, because I am nothing if not mercenary.)

(By the way. SPOILERS. ALL OF THEM)

But when all life gives you is a starchy tuber ripened beyond the point of being edible, you might as well cut it into a potato print and make something, I suppose.

I hope at least that some of this excruciating and perhaps negligibly relevant personal disclosure does put into perspective why I am writing about identity horror. And also, why writing about it has proven so elemental for me.

One of the subthemes of identity horror as a potentially mapped out genre, I think, is the attraction of monstrousness. Or perhaps, not so much the attraction of it, a sympathy with it, a feeling of mutuality with it, an experience. Of being a monster. Horror often plays upon things we are afraid of, and the best sort plays upon our sadness, too; its catharsis comes from experiencing terror, shock and grief in a controlled, finite form. The specific frustration of being unable to connect is, as I hope you might expect, one of my most profound and consistent sources of fear and grief.

Cult Cinema #30: On the Pagan Village Conspiracy

The Wicker Man (1973); Kill List (2011); Midsommar (2019)

(There will be spoilers, as ever.)

Before I even define what one is, I need to say this: outside of works of fiction, there is no such thing as a Pagan Village Conspiracy. Hold that thought.

As a fictional concept, a Pagan Village Conspiracy film has some or all of the following: an outsider protagonist goes to a rural area where they come into contact with a community who turn out to be engaged in pagan or occult practices. Every significant character in this community is part of the conspiracy, which is not usually centred around the pagan/occult practices themselves, but in how they relate to the status of the protagonist. “It was you they wanted all along” is by far the most common twist in the Pagan Village Conspiracy Movie.

The Question in Bodies #21: Lectio Infernalis

Possession (1981)

(This, written in late 2018, is still, in my opinion, the single best piece of film writing I have ever produced. Some things have changed for me since this was written, as I'm sure you can imagine, and I have no doubt things have changed for you too in the last few years. I'm in no worse a place, though, and it's still true. All of it is true. The part about “no masks” holds a weirdly different meaning now, but let's keep it there anyway.)

(OK, look. I'm just going to list the things worthy of a content warning and be done with it. This post includes talk on: suicidal behaviour; self harm; spousal abuse; misogyny; childhood trauma; infidelity; God. Probably some other things too. But that's your warning. Do what you want with it.)

Writing about films saved my life.

That’s a pretty serious statement to make, true, and of course it’s hyperbole, except that it isn’t, not entirely.

Deep breath, then. Over the space of about three years, I underwent what they used to call a nervous breakdown. I’m kind of cagey about talking on this; there’s always the sense that a thing like this is never really in the past tense. And yeah, I had a couple of false starts, and lulls, and times when I was fooled into thinking the fragile flame of a candle was the distant light of the sun at the end of that tunnel, only for it to be extinguished, which is somehow worse than never having had that light in the first place. The extent to which in my adult life I’ve been free of my mental health issues has only ever been a matter of degree, although it's only in the last two years that what I have wrong with me has really been pinpointed in any way that allows me to work with it. Writing about it, as I have increasingly in the last year, as my recovery has been something I’ve gradually become more confident about, has been a precarious, frightening thing.

There is the risk, for one, when you self disclose with any kind of honesty, that you might be revealed as a terrible human being. The risk that your honest appearance to the world might be as prejudiced, or as self regarding and pretentious, or as a navel gazer, or as inflated and pompous, or worst of all, as pathetic and creepy and small. I've been all of them at times, I think. I'll try not to be any of them here and now, but the problem with honesty is that there are no filters. There are no masks.

Room 207 Press Webinars #7: Lectio Infernalis – spiritual practice, trauma and horror as a healing text

Film writing saved my life.

That isn't an exaggeration, it's not dramatic. A three-year struggle with a precipitous and destructive mental illness whose effects on my relationships and self-identity were profound and lasting was alleviated by the meditative response to horror and writing a 150,000 word book about it.

And I know I'm not alone in that. There's been quite a lot written about the therapeutic – even spiritual – value of the horror movie, and for me, the most curious thing has been that the more blasphemous and traumatic the film is, the more capacity for healing it provides.

In Polish auteur Andrzej Zuławski's one real horror film, Possession, we have a moment where Marc (Sam Neill) is told that there is nothing to be afraid of but God. And he replies, “God is a disease.”

There's so much to unpack there; quite apart from the New Atheist idea of God as a toxic and contagious psychological construct,  a sort of communal mental plague, the idea of God in sickness, as immanent in the illness and the illness itself, challenges us, forces us to confront whether faith has any point at all. And what if anything, can bring us healing when we are forced daily to confront the void.

In Martyrs (2008), a film so extreme the BBFC used it a case study for traumatic violence, the supposed God-shaped hole in the human soul becomes all there is. But when you're living in a state of anxiety, emotional pain and overwhelming misery, while the contenplation of the void seems inevitable, approaching it through stories can help. The extremity of horror can be a release. It's not the cure, but it can be an aid to healing.

The Benedictine practice of Lectio Divina mean “divine reading”; this week, though, I'll be offering some of my own experiences as a way into talking about Lectio Infernalis, a reading in hell, which is, I think, the use of horror as a way of approaching and working through our trauma, anxiety and mental health issues – the things that can parasitise our lives in a way far too redolent of horror – in a positive way, and a lens through which we can explore cathartic and healing approaches to our past traumas.

The Zoom seminar Lectio Infernalis: Spiritual Practice, Trauma and Horror as a Healing Text is ran on Monday 20th July (8pm UK time and again at 8pm Eastern Time US/Canada). My $10+ Patreon backers got automatic access, as well as access to videos of this and all the previous talks, along with early access to my writing, an archive of audio readings and occasional exclusive goodies.

See the whole programme for the rest of the Summer here.

We Don't Go Back #93: Midsommar (2019)

I’m not sure what there is left to say about Midsommar. Increasingly, writing about it has become something of an obligation (and if there's ever a second edition of We Don't Go Back, it's a shoo-in). But here we are. Quotes from Midsommar are taken direcctly from the script of the film, which can be found on the A24 site, which is a nice thing to have – usually I just transcribe scenes as I watch them, over and over.

Let's get the usual warnings done with. We are discussing horror here, so obviously things will be nasty, but you might be more concerned about spoilers, because we're giving away the whole thing. There is some detailed discussion of rape, gaslighting and abuse in this post. If that's the sort of thing that will remind you of something terrible that happened, or which will make you relive experiences you would rather not revisit, I'll trust that you'll know what to do. With that out of the way, let's begin.

Room 207 Press Webinars #2: The Second Haunted Generation

[Before I start: even if you don't want to give me money to listen to my talks (and maybe also if you do), please consider donating to one of the bail funds currently being managed to get protesters out of COVID-19 incubating jail cells. Here's a list. You don't have to live there or know these people, or even put in that much, and you won't get any real thanks, or even really get a medal for it. Don't make a deal of it, do it anyway. It's just the right thing to do.]

Yesterday, amidst the deluge of horrors that the news cycle bestowed upon us, I saw a Facebook link for a think piece about folk horror that described The Wicker Man as something like the “1970s version of  Midsommar”. Part of me wishes I'd saved that link, if only as a demonstration of how folk horror as a thing has become enough of a cultural phenomenon to produce godawful clickbait thinkpieces and folk-horror-themed Funko Pops. It'd be glib to say that folk horror is here to stay, because obviously it isn't, pop cultural movements are ephemeral, but it's here and it's visible and it's making money.

Wouldst thou like a piece of shoddy plastic tat?

So over the last few years, I've been writing a lot about folk horror. There was that project about the folk horror and that turned into a book that got nominated for an award (which was nice), and my big thing has actually been why folk horror has become a thing, why you had movies and TV like that made so much in the 1970s, and why it has not only been retrospectively turned into an aesthetic, but why it is happening again. I wrote about this specifically a few months ago. In this week's seminar I'll be looking at how this is, what sort of cultural conditions produce this sort of media, and specifically examining what makes new folk horror a unique genre, separate from its 1970s origins, with special reference to the works of Ben Wheatley, Robert Eggers, Peter Strickland, Ari Aster and Jordan Peele.

This seminar ran on 8th June 2020. 

Films referenced: 
Witchfinder General (Michael Reeves, 1968)
Blood on Satan's Claw (Piers Haggard, 1970)
The Wicker Man (Robin Hardy, 1973)
Ghost Stories for Christmas (BBC, 1971-1978)
Rosemary's Baby (Roman Polanski, 1968)
Let's Scare Jessica to Death (John Hancock, 1971)
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Philip Kaufman, 1978)
The Stepford Wives (Bryan Forbes, 1975)
Lonely Water (Central Office of Information, 1973)
Charley Says (Central Office of Information, 1973) 
Jigsaw (BBC, 1979-84)
Bagpuss (Smallfilms, 1973)
Tottie (Smallfilms, 1984)
Jim'll Fix It (BBC, 1975-95)
Rolf's Cartoon Club (BBC, 1989-95)
Kill List (Ben Wheatley, 2011)
Sightseers (Ben Wheatley, 2012)
A Field in England (Ben Wheatley, 2013)
High Rise (Ben Wheatley, 2015)
Katalin Varga (Peter Strickland, 2009)
Berberian Sound Studio (Peter Strickland, 2013)
The Duke of Burgundy (Peter Strickland, 2014)
In Fabric (Peter Strickland, 2018)
The Love Witch (Anna Biller, 2016)
February AKA The Blackcoat's Daughter (Oz Perkins, 2015)
I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House (Oz Perkins, 2016)
The Witch (Robert Eggers, 2015)
The Lighthouse (Robert Eggers, 2019)
Get Out (Jordan Peele, 2017)
Us (Jordan Peele, 2019)
Hereditary (Ari Aster, 2018)
Midsommar (Ari Aster, 2019)

On a Thousand Walls #28: Orrore Popolare, Part 4

The Strange Vice of Mrs Wardh (Lo strano vizio della Signora Wardh) (1971)
The Perfume of the Lady in Black (Il profumo della signora in nero) (1974)

(More Italian cinema. Spoilers. Discussion of misogyny, with all you might imagine that entails. You know.)

The easiest thing to do when you're looking at the portrayal of women in classic horror from any country is generally to shrug and say, well, those were different times, and to an extent that's true, in that the way we did discourse forty or fifty years ago was different, and the terms in which we framed our expectations of gender roles were informed by societal mores, and the law, and what mum and dad were told by their mums and dads. But what that ignores is empathy.

On a Thousand Walls #27: Orrore Popolare, Part 3 and a half

The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave
(La notte che Evelyn uscì dalla tomba) (1971);
The Black Cat (Gatto nero) (1981)

(This is a continuation of my discussion of films set in England where everyone speaks Italian. Once again, spoilers abound.)

The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave, another richly saturated, spicy and mainly nutty giallo by Emilio Miraglia, begins with a man trying to escape from a psychiatric institution. He has all the genre movie signifiers of “madness”: he twitches and shakes, his vision is blurred. The orderlies restrain him and drag him back. The credits roll.

On the other side of the credits, we see him again, out of hospital. He is, we discover, Lord Alan Cunningham (Peter Wyngarde lookalike Anthony Steffen), inhabitant of a decaying ancestral pile a short drive from central London (yeah, let that sink in).

Cult Cinema #24: The Atrocity Tour, Part 4

American Horror Story: Cult (2017)

The premise of American Horror Story is simple enough. Each season, a fairly consistent ensemble of actors stars in a serialised long-form tale of terror, which is complete in about eleven episodes, and which deals with one of the big tropes of American horror: a malevolently haunted house, an asylum, a coven of witches, the backwoods, a freak show, the Apocalypse. Occasionally references are made to characters and events in other seasons, but the stories stand alone, and (with the exception of Apocalypse) you can watch any one season of AHS on its own and not miss anything. The seventh season, then, is the Cult season, and since it's explicitly called a horror story in the title, and since AHS is heavily invested in using classic tropes, we know from the beginning that we're going to be approaching the great cult atrocities.

And we do.

Spoilers, all of them, as usual.

Cult Cinema #20: Live Together or Die Alone

Doomsday (2016)

The Doomsday we're looking at here is not to be confused with Neil Marshall's bonkers 2008 “post-apocalyptic Scotland, as run by Festival Crusties” action movie, or any other film or TV show of that name. This one is a strange and probably incomplete streaming drama about a peculiar cult that has been available on Amazon Prime Video for a little while now, and which I stumbled across, almost by accident, a few weeks ago, and watched through three times, which sounds a lot, except there's only two episodes (IMDB says it's four, but that's because each of the two existing episodes was released in two parts) and there are unlikely to be more.

Anyway, as usual, this post contains spoilers.

On a Thousand Walls #26: The Man Who Killed Hitler and then the Bigfoot (2018)

There is a way to phrase a title that raises an expectation, to tell you about style, tone and content. For example, let's look at the early work of George Lucas, because it's an easy one. Star Wars (as Episode IV: A New Hope was simply called on release) is a pair of booming, declarative, internally alliterative monosyllables that almost have their own echo. It is the title of a film where a planet gets blown up, and if it does not disappoint in that department, that's less of a surprise than you might think. The title of American Graffiti, meanwhile, suggests a sentimental approach to the indiscretions of youth – you may be ambivalent towards the concept of graffiti, or for that matter the concept of America, but juxtaposition of the two makes both better. Graffiti is just writing on walls, but American graffiti is something to feel nostalgic for. On the other hand, there's something brutalist about THX-1138. Something that evokes the mechanistic, the Soviet (or, more accurately, the Western idea of the Soviet). And indeed it's a bleak, chilly sort of film. Not Soviet, though. THX-1138 is very much a capitalist dystopia. It's the future Elon Musk wants.

But. The point is, there's a lot in a title. Repo Man. Excalibur. Jupiter Ascending. Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story. Apocalypse Now. The Shining. The title is a vital part of your engagement going in, and creates an expectation, or inspires investigation into a mystery, or simply tells you what sort of film you're watching.

It's actually very rare that a title is apparently made with the intention of wrongfooting you. And it's sort of complex how The Man Who Killed Hitler and then the Bigfoot does that. To talk about those expectations, there will necessarily be, as ever, spoilers.