Final Frames

The Fourth Annual Final Frame Horror Short Film Competition – StokerCon, Grand Rapids MI, 2019

Knock Knock.

If I've been quiet this last month, it's because I've been fortunate enough to go to StokerCon 2019. As I expected, I did not win the Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in Nonfiction, that was Johnson and Mynhardt's It's Alive: Bringing Your Nightmares to Life, which I knew was going to win the moment I saw it on the preliminary ballot. This is OK. I got to meet Eugene Johnson and shake his hand, and the morning after a gentleman called Scott Edelman gave me a Bram Stoker Runner Up loyalty card, which makes me giggle like an idiot every time I see it. Getting a nomination for a self-published collection of blog posts that doesn't pretend any authority is massive anyway. I'm properly chuffed.

I could write at length about StokerCon and the basic warmth of the event, the very real family feel it had, but it would be self-congratulatory. Suffice to say that it was a good time, and I made a number of connections I hope to keep alive going forward.

In the meantime though, the one part of StokerCon I do want to talk about is the film contest. Because I would, obviously.

We Don't Go Back #90: Requiem (2018)

Crikey, how long is it since I did a We Don't Go Back post? Obviously that's because other book projects are in the way. Still, from time to time I'm still going to pick up on stuff I missed or stuff that matters. Like Requiem, BBC1's prestige folk horror serial of 2018. For those who care, I should note that this is possibly one of the most spoilery essays I've ever done. Seriously, the spoilers start in the very first sentence.

On a Thousand Walls #18: Personal Shopper (2016)

Usually when I write a response to a film, I tend to avoid looking too hard at the technical stuff, things like the specifics of direction, mise-en-scene, the edit. And that's partly because I'm sort of laser focussed on writing, acting performances, and the tastiest, sexiest bit of all, the subtext. And that's partly because this technical stuff is right outside of what I call my field of expertise. And of course the shortcoming of my approach is that a film is an entire artefact. All of these things work as part of the story told by a film or a TV show. Consider how with selective editing reality shows routinely make friends appear to be enemies or entirely innocuous social cues to be actions of calculating villainy: fictions are like that too. The truism with conversation also holds with visual media – it's not what you're saying, it's how you're saying it.

And this is where I get to the films of Olivier Assayas, and Personal Shopper in particular.

On a Thousand Walls #17: The People Under the Stairs (1991)

So. I'm a Bram Stoker Award Nominee. We Don't Go Back: A Watcher's Guide to Folk Horror got the nomination for Superior Achievement in nonfiction after all, and holy crap, is all I can say. No chance of going to Michigan for the ceremony, but still. I get a certificate and everything. In the meantime, let's get back on the horse writingwise.

I haven't managed much the last couple of months, for various reasons, not least a bad case of shingles, but let's start strong and ideological and everything with Wes Craven's chucklesome yet political horrorshow,which is a film about racism (which means that people in it do racism) and features some miserable child abuse (so you have been warned). Of course there are spoilers.

The Gospel According to Me

(another repost)

Ninja Postman

(Until very recently, this was, I honestly thought, the thing the most people would remember me for)

Rebecca and the King of All Snails

(Reposting. This was written some years ago as a birthday gift for my friend Rebecca Lowe.)