'am I being paranoid or are there MURDERS EVERYWHERE?'

Now then, 

Welcome back to the Losers' Club, thanks for dropping by. How are you doing?

It's just been solid head-down working round our way, ploughing through piles of STUFF, until Thursday, when Paul and I escaped down to London to have a break for his birthday. I've only been down to London once since 2019 so this was a proper treat.  

The sun shone - twenty degrees! - which felt insane given it was literally snowing up here last week. Never has it felt more obvious, Game of Thrones style, that I live north of the wall, and London is Kings Landing

(note: Paul has explained that I would not even live in Winterfell, for my temperament suggests I am a true Wildling).
 
In terms of work, I finally started my book proposal this week for Her Chainsaw Heart! I was genuinely, nerdily giddy about sitting down and starting it.

At first, I thought I didn't want to start it - a book proposal is not necessarily the most exciting thing in the world to write - but once I started putting the headings in and thinking about what went where, I totally got into it. 

I went for a coffee with Zos on the morning I started it, and as we were walking to the high street, I told her how excited I was. So she politely asked what the book was about (as all friends have to do even when they don't care), and I explained "I don't know yet".

This puzzled Zos: how do you write a proposal for a book when you don't know what it is about?

But I explained that my way of working is to start with the chapter outlines - a couple of paragraphs on what each chapter is about, what the point of it is, etc. I create ideas for chapters and literally work the book through on the page, deleting and moving around ideas for chapters, methodologies, film texts, until I am satisfied and I think there is a coherent flow.

And only then do I start trying to write the hardest bits - your book in one sentence, your book in one paragraph, your book in one page (and then, I'll write those in reverse order - longest version first, then distilling down and down).

"Oh" said Zos, "so you literally will this book into existence as you are doing it".

YES. Exactly so.

This is also what every new project feels like - having an idea and then, from sheer will and stubbornness, making it become a thing that exists.

Talking of a thing that now exists, I've also now written to everyone who submitted to the MAI special issue and accepted or rejected them (how that hurt even my tiny cold heart), I've created and circulated a technical questionnaire for all the contributors, and now I'm just waiting for the responses to come in, so Miriam Kent and I can get our heads together to plan the video essay technical training.

In the meantime, I made another video essay of my own! You can view it for free, on my site. It's called 'make allowances (for Rachel)' and for it, I combined Katt Shea's awesome The Rage: Carrie 2 (1999) with Richard Price's poem 'in your generous hours' (as you do). I had a lot of fun doing it, and it was primarily an exercise to remind myself I can edit (a tiny bit) in adobe premiere pro and I haven't to be terrified when I start editing Knit One Stab Two, which is a far bigger and more demanding proposition and I am secretly a bit going fuccckkk but determined to have a crack nonetheless.

As my head is thoroughly been in video essays, I have a couple to recommend for you - a trio of delightful videos all about giallo (hurrah!):

Birdy Weiting Hung, All the Colors of Lady Avengers: Giallo, Pink Eiga and Taiwanese Pulp Films

David Mai, Anime Affect: Neo-Giallo Aesthetic of Masaaki Yuasa,

Ashkan Forouhi, In What Tongue do Gialli Speak? Dubbing, Language and Affective Experience in Giallo

These essays were all screened at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference this year - thank you to Birdy, David and Ashkan for sharing these with me, and to everyone else, enjoy. 
 

What have you been watching and listening to? Owt or nowt?

Telly-wise, I am up to season three and the introduction of Robin in Stranger Things, as part of my preparatory pre-watch for season four. Me and my eldest daughter adore it, as soon as the music starts I can just feel myself relaxing, ready to be transported to Scoops Ahoy in the Starcourt Mall.

Also, I've just watched the latest Stranger Things season four trailer and there is a scene in a roller disco!!!

Other than that, I am lost in a world of Yellowjackets.

It has taken me forever to start the series, despite all the signs pointing to it being perfect for me - dual timelines of 1996 plaid-wearing teens and 40-something women dealing with shit now (i.e. ME), plus the very excellent horror academics Kate Egan, Lindsay Hallam, Shellie McMurdo, Laura Mee and Miranda Corcoran are hosting No Return: a Yellowjackets Symposium in June which also indicates it is a series worthy of investigation. 

However. 

Do you know what the problem was?

Why it has taken me this long to fall head over heels for it?

To watch it I need to get off the sofa, walk to the telly, grab the long lead from the back, plonk my arse back down on the sofa, and plug in my Mac to the Sky app. 

That's it.

Bloody shameful isn't it? 

At least I am sufficiently invested that I am now willing to stand up and sit down in order to watch this brilliant series.

We finished the last episode last night and I have noticed that, when I have to wear glasses to do screen work (like, write to you guys), I now nudge my glasses up just like Misty. I find this very pleasing.

In terms of films, I started with Gigi Saul Guerrero's Bingo Hell (2021, Amazon Prime) as I knew it was a horror comedy and I've always got time for that. But it took 37 minutes to get going and I wasn't entirely convinced (you know my need for a totally tight script).

Then I watched Mariama Diallo's Master (2022, Amazon Prime) which looked and sounded beautiful, the acting was fantastic, but it so thoroughly skewered how race is handled in higher education I was watching through my fingers. Master totally nailed it - right down to the 'I am Ancaster' promotional video which features every faculty and student member of colour as a tokenistic attempt to 'prove' diversity while not actually dealing with any of the underlying structural issues. It lost its way for me though, near the end. I won't do spoilers as it's a pretty new film, but there is a dual narrative running throughout the film - the very real horrors of racism interwoven with a potentially supernatural haunting - but then a narrative decision with one of the main characters at the end of act two, that kind of throws out the structure and creates a weird final act that feels smaller than the sum of it parts.

This week then got to the point where I needed to watch something comforting from under a blanket. And to me, this means turning to 2000s-era supernatural major studio horror. It's slick, not actually scary, and I've definitely already seen it before. Probably twice. 

You know what I am talking about: The Ninth Gate, The Skeleton Key, Bless the Child, The Village...

This time I went with What Lies Beneath (2000, Disney +). I went to see this at the cinema when it came out and thought it was great (retrospectively: very low standards teen me), then I watched it again about ten years ago and was quite scary at the end, so I figured, this time it would be just the ticket - glossy, paranormal but Hitchcock vibe (was how I remembered it dear lord), major Hollywood stars, some good bath almost-drowning scenes.

But this time: dear lord, did it drag.

It dragged SO HARD. 

You can tell it is early 2000s from the fact it is 2 hours 10. Yes, 2 hours 10 for a mainstream horror film. Think, even House of Wax (2005) is 1hr 53. Now, it would be 87 minutes (the best length of time for a horror film, and incidentally, also the exact length of Bingo Hell).

Inside, I was mentally rewriting the screenplay and cutting the first 45 minutes: POINTLESS UNIVERSITY SCENE! UNNECESSARY BACK STORY! TIME FOR MICHELLE PFEIFFER'S CHARACTER CLAIRE TO STOP MOONING ABOUT AND ACTUALLY DO SUMMAT!

I really lost faith at this point of exchange though:

Claire is at the 'am I paranoid or are there MURDERS EVERYWHERE?' and her friend comes to see her. They stand in the giant garden of her giant house overlooking a giant lake, and her friend sees she's wrecked. She is totally sympathetic: '...cos your only daughter just went away to college... well you had a hell of a year too. The move. The house. The garden... big stress stuff'.

As in: she moved into an inherited, beautiful big house and did it up and has also been doing some gardening. Claire admits she is struggling: 'and so far this week my big task is to take pictures of my roses for the garden club'.

My eye twitched. For some reason, I was finding it hard to empathise.

My final film this week was The Northman at Picturehouse Central, London. I hadn't planned to mention it to you, what with it not being horror, but it really is my film of the week.

I am not doing any spoilers here by the way, do not worry - I'm aware that the majority of my lovely losers' club members are in North America and Australia (and a lot in Brazil, Italy, Germany, Romania and Sweden too, hello!) and it seems to have been released first - or earlier - in the UK.

So, I'll just say a few, minor things. This is Robert Eggers' first big commercial picture which means reducing the SUPER WEIRDNESS that he enjoys to cameos from Bjork (pictured at the top) in a brilliant role as a witch and Willem Dafoe, who roams around on all fours not wearing much. 

Despite the reduction in insanity, it still captivated me. Louise Ford's editing is exceptional and Linda Muir's costume design is spot-on. It is also more brutal than any horror I've seen for ages, with triple the number of beheadings of your usual 1980s slasher film.

However, Paul claims my love for this film is just down to Alexander Skarsgård's abs, and admittedly, there is a scene where he headbutts a man to death that is on par with the Ryan Gosling stomping in the lift scene in Drive (my mate Emma knows what I mean here, right Bradders?) but the whole film is really well executed (no pun OK a few puns).

There's this recurrent tree of life inner-eye sequence that recurs throughout the film, where we see all the family tree as actual people, connecting to each other, and as a film about feeling the need to avenge one's family (and what happens when it all goes wrong), it didn't half make me think of the Philip Larkin poem 'this be the verse', which begins:

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.   
    They may not mean to, but they do.   
They fill you with the faults they had
    And add some extra, just for you.

and ends...

Man hands on misery to man.
    It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
    And don’t have any kids yourself.

I feel like Amleth should have read a bit of Larkin before setting out on his quest.
 

To the reading (and listening) recs!

As previously requested, here are some reading suggestions for members of The Losers' Club who would like to read some academic books on horror film (I'm glad at least someone does) and they don't know where to start. 

Analyses of horror film started being published in the academy in the 1970s and 1980s (with a few earlier outliers) from critics including Robin Wood, Linda Williams, Tania Modleski and Carol Clover, but it was the 1990s when the first major tranche of whole books on horror film appeared.

A few of my favourites are:

Carol J. Clover, Men, Women and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (1992, updated edition 2015)

Barbara Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (1993)

Peter Hutchings, Hammer and Beyond: The British Horror Film (1993, now published in a 2nd edition in 2021 and edited by Johnny Walker, well worth picking up as out in paperback too and thus affordable)

Linda Badley, Film, Horror and the Body Fantastic (1995)

Jack Halberstam, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (1995)

Rhona J. Berenstein, Attack of the Leading Ladies: Gender, Sexuality and Horror Cinema (1996)

Barry Keith Grant, The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film (1996, 2nd edition 2015)

Harry M. Benshoff, Monsters in the Closet: Homosexuality and the Horror Film (1997)

Isabel Cristina Pinedo, Recreational Terror: Women and the Pleasures of Horror Film Viewing (1997)

i.e. this is pretty much a roll call of the books I consulted while doing my PhD. Ah! A trip down memory lane.

Happy reading everyone.
 

Right, that's all from me for today. I've got Horror Club booked for next Tuesday and I've put my foot down and demanded we actually watch something good. So I've picked The Descent which everyone is very unsure about given that none of them are major horror fans (and Helen and Zosia totally can't handle jump scares hahah). 

I'll let you know how that goes....

As ever, if you want to say hi, just reply to this email and let me know a bit about yourself. I really do love hearing from everyone, and I do always write back, albeit very belatedly. 

Take care and speak soon, my lovely horror family.