Yara JUST IS

A newsletter from the shed of

Now then, 

Welcome back to the Losers' Club, thanks for dropping by. It's Jubilee Weekend here in the UK, which - amongst me and my contemporaries - is all about the distinctly British extended weekend (i.e. daytime binge drinking, watching Homes Under the Hammer, and garden centre visits) and not really anything about the royals.

Of much more, local interest to me is the news that Bradford, has been announced as the 2025 UK City of Culture. While I am Leeds born and bred, I do live 'next door' in Bradford, Leeds' neighbouring city, not least because the house prices are so much cheaper. Often referred to as Britain's Detroit, Bradford's deindustrialization, poverty, crime and unemployment needs the kind of cash injection that a council alone cannot provide - but the city of culture status can, I hope, through the ensuing millions of pounds  in funding and investment. I've written about Bradford in my essay on The Arbor and Rita, Sue and Bob Too - if any of you want to read, and can't get past the paywall, let me know.

To actual *horror* film news now. First up, public talk type stuff. I guested on the HornBloodFire podcast, talking about The Lighthouse, and it is out now! I remember talking about editor Louise Ford, costume designer Linda Muir and... the excessive amount of wanking in this film (that poor wooden dolly). Enjoy! And let me know what you think. I already heard back from Losers' Club member Kevin that he enjoyed it and is now signing up for Amber's podcast, so that is a Job Well Done as far as I am concerned.
 
Next, filmmaking stuff. Chattanooga Film Festival has booked my film Three Ways to Dine Well for its 2022 edition. It is going to be a virtual, online affair, at the end of this month, so if you are looking for an opportunity to watch a 21-minute feminist essay film with extracts from over 70 horror films made by women, from 1920s - 2020s (and who isn't?) then I suggest you sign up.

Since we last spoke, I've been plugging away on my knitting and horror essay film, Knit One Stab Two. I've realised I have been trying to make three films in one (sigh) and everything is UNWIELDY (double sigh) so I put a few days aside before I went on holiday, and really went at the edit.

I've now got a 15 minute assembly edit, and mixed feelings.

The good feeling is - hey, I've got an assembly edit! It is a film that exists in the world!

The bad feeling is - as is common with all assembly edits, I imagine - oh god, I've got so much work to do to make this good! The slow bits need speeding up, the fast bits need slowing down, it is too long overall, the AV clips are too long, etc etc. 

Now it is actually this essay film is a thing, I am putting it to one side until I come back from Vermont, and the videographic criticism workshop I am attending at Middlebury College, later this month.

I am fully expecting to come back, *on fire*, and will knock it into shape fast with my newly acquired skills (hahahaha).

Also, still on this, thank you to all the Losers' Club members who messaged me after my last newsletter with new leads on knitting and yarn in horror. I know I haven't got back to you all yet, but I promise I will, and I am planning on putting your suggestions into the final film.

This is the good thing about essay filmmaking - it is a pretty elastic medium and I can make changes right up until the final minute.

And finally in news, onto writing stuff. 

A lot of writing things have actually been not writing, and more organising.

Even I have to do project management, sadly.

I'm collaborating with Horror Genius Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, author and editor of 10 million brilliant books on horror film, not least 1000 Women in Horror, 1895 - 2018. We're cooking up something fun and feminist, to do with gender, bodies and horror, that will be free, online, and available to you all.

This is just a bit of a teaser trailer for this project, but I wanted to sow the seeds now.

I love working with Alex (who also contributed a wonderful chapter on The Mafu Cage to Women Make Horror: Filmmaking, Feminism, Genre) and it is all going really well so far. As I'm in the UK, and she's in Australia, it also means I can suggest online meetings at 7.30 / 8am which suits my early bird nature.

I've also been doing a lot of planning and sorting for the MAI journal special issue, Doing Women's (Global) (Horror) Film History. It is taking some doing, with over 30 contributors from across the world, and a crazy number of time zones, right from -11GMT to +7 GMT.

The actual training starts late next month, but before then I am setting up small groups within the contributor pool, where my contributors can meet with other writers who are a) working on video essays in the same geographical region, e.g. South-East Asia, and then, another cohort for b) who have the same level of technical background on video essay making, e.g. none at all and are terrified by Adobe Premiere Pro. 

To set this up, I've asked everyone to share a photograph and a short bio, to introduce themselves amongst their groups. Here's what I wrote for my bio:

Hi everyone, I’m Alison Peirse, with she / her pronouns. I’m an Associate Professor in Film and Media at the University of Leeds, and I live in Yorkshire, in the UK. 

My research specialism is horror film, but I have been obsessed with essay films for years (e.g. Los Angeles Plays Itself, Beyond Clueless), films / tv using archival footage to tell stories (Can’t Get You Out of My Head, Get Back), and the more experimental manipulation of image, sound and archive to tell stories (My Winnipeg, La Jetee, The Arbor). This, for me, directly connects to videographic criticism and the possibilities of what we can do with this form.

However, I’ve never ever had the confidence to attempt this kind of work myself. I am a pen and paper girl. My PhD was psychoanalytic film theory, to give you some sense of my lack of technical knowledge… But in the pandemic, I agreed to make a video essay for the BAFTSS conference in the UK. I taught myself how to script and direct it, and my brother edited it. The result was Three Ways to Dine Well. 

As of January 2022, I’ve started teaching myself editing. Slowly. In June 2022, I am attending the Middlebury Scholarship in Sound and Image: Workshop on Videographic Criticism which will improve my skills as well.

I’m really excited by this MAI special issue – both in terms of learning (skills and knowledge) and from the potentialities of bringing together scholars across the world to share work and learn from each other. It feels, in a word, potent.

Last writing news. Do you remember that back in January I wrote that journal article on Jackie Kong and Blood Diner? I wrote it really fast, going ARGH? Well the peer review reports for the Horror Studies journal are now in, and - thank goodness - they are all good.

I need do a final polish and get it back to the editors by the middle of this month, and then I'll get the final decision. As long as I don't totally mess up the final polish, it *should* be included in a special issue on horror culture in the 1980s. So, all being well, this means that a longform (8000-word) essay from me, on Kong, and on how and why we write histories of women filmmakers working in horror, will be making its way into print at the end of this year. I will keep you posted.
 

***

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

Telly-wise, it's Stranger Things. Obviously. I'm up to episode four now, and loving it. I can feel, at the moment, of them straining to pull all the narrative threads together - both for the current season and all the storylines that have gone before - but, I am not going to fault the ambition of it. I love it.

Also, I am - once again, obviously - very happy about the 1980s supernatural slasher meets demonic possession vibe of this season.

Our kid (and, given my international readership, I always feel I need to explain this Northern working-class word meaning younger brother / sibling, here, my younger brother Chris) binge-watched the entire first volume of season four on his birthday this week which is just about the best way to spend your special day. 

I'd have watched more by now, but my daughter Kitty is demanding that we eke it out, and only letting me watch a few episodes per week in order to savour it. It is killing me! I need it all now!

Me and both my girls are also watching CBBC's Silverpoint (iPlayer), which is basically Russell T. Davies' Century Falls if he'd got to binge-watch Lost before writing, and then had to decided to write the final act of Ghostbusters in for good measure. 

Paul and I started season two of Russian Doll as well. Hmmm. I was obsessed with season one, and, to be fair, we have only done one episode of the new season so far, but I'm not digging it. I can't work out why it doesn't work. But it doesn't. I'm going to give it another episode to get good. Has anyone else started season two? What do you think?

In terms of film viewing though, it has been poor.

Shameful, even. 

Since we last spoke, I have watched a total of five films. FIVE!

And three of these weren't even horror films.

I am going to blame going on holiday, if that's OK with you guys?

I *did* think about horror, while in Italy though, it never quite leaves me altogether. 

For example:

We landed in Naples and then, as we got on our bus, the coach PA system started blasting out Echo and the Bunnymen's People Are Strange, already halfway into the song. I stared out in delight at the mad, frenetic chaos of Naples, and thought this is a very strange place to think about The Lost Boys.

I got some whopping, mega bites in Pompei that blew up my whole hand and leg in large lumps and blistered, and I envisaged the scarab beetles in the 1999 version of The Mummy.

On the flight home, 40 mins after we should've taken off, the air hostess, her face brittle and strained, charges down the aisle bouncing the overhead lockers shut. One locker bounces back open, but she doesn't notice, and charges on, and a solitary, gnarled passenger hand appears in front of me, above my headrest; it stretches out slowly, grasping, like the resurrected dead, reaching for that open locker door, straining, but he just cannot reach. And like all normal people, I immediately thought: ooh, Train to Busan.

So in actual films I have seen rather than just thought about:

This week, I took my girls to Cineworld Bradford to see The Bob's Burgers Movie (good), and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (lots of fun, with plenty of Evil Dead / Drag Me to Hell moments). 

Paul and I rewatched Looper (2012, Netflix), which I've seen a few times and always begin by thinking this is brilliant! but by the end it ultimately collapses under the sheer number of film genres it is homaging.

(I will always turn up for a Rian Johnson film though).

Before I went to Sorrento, I did Horror Club with Zos, Laura and Hazel. We watched It Follows, which remains, as ever, great.

This is probably the third or fourth time I've seen it. I think it is smart, and interesting, and, to my mind, a real filmmakers' film if that makes sense - you get the sense watching it that every single frame of the film has been thought about, staged, and presented in the best possible way. 

And the sheer number of crochet blankets in this film is brilliant. 

At some point, when I make a crochet and horror essay film (OF COURSE I WILL), It Follows will be the ur-text that I work from.

Sadly, It Follows is a very MALE production team, with a male writer-director, composer, DoP, editor, production designer and art director, but at least it has some multiple women producers and Kimberly Leitz on costume design.

Horror Club particularly enjoyed the character of Yara, Jay's friend (pictured above), who has that brilliant clamshell e-reader that we all need. Yara just eats and reads and sits around throughout the film. And then she is shot and no-one is that arsed, and then when she is in the hospital afterwards, she seems fine with it and not bitter at all towards her friends and reads them out some Dostoyevsky instead.

We need more Yara's in our horror films: characters who exist, just to exist, to be part of the world, to enrich the world, without needing to serve some basic plot function or to simply cue our emotions with performances of fear.

Yara gives real verisimilitude to the film because she is just a typical late teen / early 20s actual person, like your friendship group where the majority of the people are Yara, not the leader, not the antagonist, not the love interest, a young woman simply existing, a presence, a heartbeat.

Yara just is.

Finally, the day after Horror Club, my work laptop broke and I couldn't edit and I got very cross and messaged Our Kid, for he is an IT supremo. So he agreed to come over and sort it out, in exchange for me making his tea. He stayed over and I provided beer and pizza and doughnuts (the quickest way to a Peirse's heart) and after he'd sorted the laptop we watched Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982, Netflix).
 
I'd been put onto it by Losers' Club member Johanna, who spotted some yarn action from an animatronic witch in the Silver Shamrock factory, so I knew I needed to check it out for the knitting essay film.

It soon became apparent that Halloween III was a 'brave' and 'radical' departure from the previous iterations, and beyond that, made no sense at all.

Paul walked in, sat down, endured about 1 minute (around the point that woman in the motel is hit with an energy beam in the face for no reason), proclaimed it to be 'shit' and went on his phone.

Chris and I agreed with Paul's erudite assessment, but that wasn't a problem for us.

Sometimes, when you are very tired, a ridiculous horror film is just what is needed.

And this one was everything we needed that evening.

On closer inspection, the animatronic witch seems to be crocheting rather than knitting, but it just means I now have an excellent clip lined up for a future crochet film (see: It Follows), and Chris and I got to turn out brains off completely for 98 minutes, which is always, always welcome.
 

***

To the reading recs!

My final recommendations for critical studies of horror films are going to get pushed back one more week, as I want to finish this time with a thing on newsletters.

I don't just write this newsletter, I bloody love reading newsletters, film ones especially.

I have talked in past issues about some of my favourite horror film ones, but a general film one that I love is The Cinematologists (Patreon), AKA Neil Fox and Dario Llinares.

I recently read 'There's always more to see', the May newsletter, in which Neil writes about how newsletters are a great source for discovering films (I agree - I find the Lezzie Borden horror newsletter brilliant for this). Neil then cites our Losers' Club which made me very happy.

I was already smiling by this but then I got to the end of the paragraph where he summarised the people who write the newsletters and podcasts he enjoys, and he reflects:

A traditional term for these people doing this work - Ben, John, programmers at MUBI, Alison, Marcus - is gatekeeper. But none of these experiences felt like anyone involved was trying to keep something from anyone. They are sharers, they are gateways. They want people to walk through, not stay on the outside. Come on in, the water’s lovely. Language matters.

This is everything I am trying to do with The Losers' Club, with my books, with everything I do.

I hate gatekeeping, I hate elitism, I hate that vile positioning of performing your knowledge to make others feel small or inadequate. Even in academia, whether that is research or teaching, I hate the idea of knowledge being one way - here is this great god who imparts WISDOM to you PLEBS now suck it up. For me, the work I do is about sharing knowledge - not delivering it. It's about sharing ideas, and about lifting up others - whether they are writers, curators, film festival programmers, filmmakers, podcasters, or simply those who also love film as much as I do. 

In short, in Neil and Dario's newsletter made me FEEL SEEN, people.

Take care and speak soon, my lovely horror family,
 

Alison

The Losers' Club is a newsletter by Alison Peirse, associate professor of film and 
author / editor of Women Make Horror; After Dracula and Korean Horror Cinema.