six things to shout in your face and a Christmas slasher ref

My dear Losers' Club, 

Hope your week has been filled with horror goodness. Now, before we start, I need to let you know that this is much shorter and madder than usual. You have been warned!

Friday: New York City
I'm writing to you on Friday 17th June, in JFK airport, at which point I have been awake for 22 hours straight and two flights down in my epic journey to the video essay workshop in Vermont, and I've just downed a whole pint of lager like I'm 22 and living in Graduate College at Lancaster University. I've decided that I've basically got six things to shout in your face and a Christmas slasher ref then I'm off. 

1. The Museum of Modern Art in NYC is doing a mammoth horror film screening series this summer (June - August) and they've dedicated a whole section of it to my book Women Make Horror which made me cry a bit.

2. Mary Lambert has started following me on Instagram. Now don't write back to me and tell me she's started following you too, that's she's following everyone, I want to remain content in my delusion that I am special.

3. The Horrorspiria podcast has a new episode out, with May chatting to Eli and Sara from the Final Girls Berlin Film Festival. They talk about the wonder of horror scholar Valeria Villegas Lindvall, and then discuss Doing Women's Global Horror Film History, and May gets space to talk about her project on the lack of women working in Latin American Carribbean genre cinema. Do check this out - you should be subscribed to this horror podcast and supporting this wonderful horror film festival. 

4. I finished the redraft on my Jackie Kong essay and now it is epic. I don't know if it is EPIC in a good way, like epic being ace, or in the way I meant it here, that epic is really bloody long (over 9000 words) or whether it is EPIC in a bad way, like when the editor comes back to me and says 'Alison you've totally gone off on one what is this'. She said she'll get back to me in a month so I'll let you know. All being well, it'll be published by the end of this year.

5. Prano Bailey Bond (FILMMAKING GODESS) has published a smart and insightful essay on women working in horror film for Sight and Sound magazine. She cites my work, and Alexandra Heller-Nicholas' as well, which feels all validating, but more importantly I read Prano's essay, then straight after I read Tom Brown's call for papers for a journal special issue on film style, and the two coalesced to give me an idea for the final chapter of my next book, Her Chainsaw Heart, and will hopefully feature proto-slasher-with-Barbara Stanyck Sorry Wrong Number (1948) - picture above (and I've just found an AV Club essay here which argues Sorry Wrong Number created the Telephone Horror Movie).

6. I've got a meeting next week with the film editor for Columbia University Press about Her Chainsaw Heart, weeeeeeeee. Wish me luck!

Saturday: Middlebury, Vermont
I'm finishing up the newsletter from my dorm room at Middlebury College in Vermont. I'm starting the two-week videographic criticism workshop tomorrow and I am living in a big house on campus that is screaming BLACK CHRISTMAS at me.

(which is a good thing I reckon, just don't answer the phone).

I'm no longer high on lack of sleep and fizzy lager (hence the slightly more sober tone of this last bit!). But, I am consumed by the Sloth and Brain Dormancy of Jet Lag.

I had planned to talk to you about the horror aerobics feature film, Killer Workout (1987) and to then discuss 1980s haircuts, but there is no cognitive capacity people!

None left!

Instead I have got into my tiny single dorm bed with a cup of Yorkshire tea and a jaffa cake (both brought from home, for Comfort Purposes) and I am going to start reading the Valancourt Book's reissue of The Lake of the Dead (1942) (which became Norway's first horror film when it was adapted under the same title in 1958). 

But I do have a question for you. I need the Losers' Club hive mind.

For the first week of the videographic workshop, I have to make a series of video essays all on the same film. I have to pick a film that I know really well, that it will be easy for me to navigate. 

I have narrowed it down to:

1) Censor
2) Heathers
3) Pump Up the Volume (yes I am on a Christian Slater in the 80s kick right now)
4) Labyrinth

(this is why you come to me for all the serious art cinema content right)

So... which do I pick?????? What would you like to see a video essay series on? If the video essays are alright, I'll put them on my website so you might get something to watch, at least.

Finally, in two weeks time I will actually be somewhere over the Atlantic when the newsletter is due, so I'll write when I am home and I promise to be less lairy and actually talk about a horror film.

Take care and speak soon, my lovely horror family,