ENG 102: Fall 2023 Resources #9

 Bakan, Joel and Raj Patel. "The WEF is Actually Bad, but Not Like That." Darts and Letters (July 24, 2023) ["The WEF is yet another example of the scrambled ideologues of our moment. Conservatives condemn the WEF, and news organizations like Rebel cover it doggedly; at the same time, left-leaning NGOs speak there, and progressive news organizations say little. What’s going on? On this episode, we examine the shifting political discourse surrounding our global financial elites. How can the left operate in this ideologically confusing moment? First, we take it back to the heyday of the 90s global justice movement. Activist, author, and academic Raj Patel revisits the Battle in Seattle. Then too, there were some reactionary forces pushing an anti-globalization line against the WTO. However, the real politics there were different: it was built on global justice and global solidarity. Could we bring back the spirit of the 90s? Then, we go to Davos and look for left-leaning protesters organizing against the WEF. Each year, there is a planned “protest hike,” quite far from the actual WEF site, because Swiss authorities push demonstrates away. Yet, the WEF also invites individual activists in. Producer Marc Apollonio speaks with three Swiss organizers — from Strike WEF, the Young Socialists of Switzerland, and from Greenpeace — to learn about how they are pushed and pulled by the WEF. Finally, academic and documentarian Joel Bakan is well-known for his hit documentary The Corporation, which was released in 2003–not long after the Battle in Seattle. Today, he tells us the politics are completely different: corporate leaders, including those at WEF, tell us they’re actually the good guys. His new follow-up film The New Corporation: The Unfortunately Necessary Sequel says that this new warm-and-fuzzy branding makes the corporation even more dangerous."]

Bates, Douglas C. "The Ancient Greek Version of Buddhism." The Imperfect Buddha (April 17, 2023) ["“It is not events that disturb us, but what we believe about them.” Is this true? Well, apparently Pyrrho, a rather obscure Greek philosopher claimed it to be the case and he may have been influenced by Buddhism in his creation of what today is called “Pyrrhonism”. Pyrrho agreed with the Buddha that delusion was the cause of suffering, but instead of using meditation to end delusion, Pyrrho applied Greek philosophical rationalism. Pyrrho’s Way: The Ancient Greek Version of Buddhism (Sumeru Press, 2020) lays out the Pyrrhonist path for modern readers on how to apply Pyrrhonist practice to everyday life. Its author is Douglas C. Bates, founder of the Modern Pyrrhonism Movement. He has been a Zen practitioner for over 25 years, was a founding member of Boundless Way Zen, and is a student of Zeno Myoun, Roshi."]

Bordwell, David. "Asteroid City: Adrift in the Cosmos." Observations on Film Art (May 23, 2023) ["Anderson’s geometric framing and staging demand a stream of small details. Moment by moment we have to take in gorgeous Populuxe furnishings, rapid dialogue, enigmatic signage, non sequiturs, abbreviated gestures and glances, and flickers of facial expression. For a few seconds a cigarette lighter is casually refilled with a squirt of gasoline (a good example of Brecht’s gestus, the piece of performance that crystallizes a social attitude: we’ll have oil forever). Soon enough a gizmo pulled from Augie’s decrepit engine thrashes on its own: Is this the alien? Just the range of cultural references dazzles. Anderson’s love of theatre emerges in recollections of plays from Lost in the Stars to Bus Stop, by way of Wilder and Williams. And are all the variants on a nonexistent play text his contribution to multiverse storytelling?"]

Brown, Shane and Marc Jancovich. "'The Finest Examples of Motion Picture Art': Prestige, Stardom and Gender in the Critical Reception of Silent and Early Sound Horror." Monstrum 6.1 (June 2023) ["Although research on horror often presents the genre as a disreputable one, the following essay demonstrates that a very different picture is suggested if one examines the critical reception of horror films released during silent and early sound eras. Certainly, during the 1910s, the US film industry made a bid for respectability, so that it could appeal to affluent, middle class audiences; and those aspects of horror that were understood as lower class, melodramatic entertainment were a problem for this bid. However, by no means were all horror materials seen as a problem and, by the 1920s, the genre was primarily understood as “artistic” and one that demonstrated the potential of the new medium of cinema. Consequently, as we will demonstrate, the horror film not only attracted top directors and stars but was also associated with female audiences, audiences that were crucial to Hollywood’s bid for cultural respectability."]

Crimes of the Future (Canada/France/Greece: David Cronenberg, 2022) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Archive of Online Resources) ["As the human species adapts to a synthetic environment, the body undergoes new transformations and mutations. Accompanied by his partner, celebrity performance artist Saul Tenser showcases the metamorphosis of his organs. Meanwhile, a mysterious group tries to use Saul's notoriety to shed light on the next phase of human evolution."]

DePillis, Lydia. "Understanding Greedflation." On the Media (July 14, 2023) ["In late 2021, Isabella Weber, an economist at University of Massachusetts, Amherst published a paper with a new idea. The theory, what she called "seller's inflation," sought to address the confounding fact that the economy was seeing rising high prices and skyrocketing corporate profits. The idea quickly moved from the halls of academia to the political arena. And quicker still, it was dismissed—at one point called a "conspiracy theory." But now, in 2023, "greedflation" is popping up across headlines. This week, OTM correspondent Micah Loewinger sits down with Lydia DePillis, a reporter on the business desk at The New York Times, to talk about her 2022 article dissecting the arguments for and against the impact of"greedflation" on the economy, and everything that's happened since."]

Dorian, MJ. "Carl Jung & Alchemy • Part I: Dreams, Art, & Synchronicity." Creative Codex #39 (June 9, 2023) ["What is alchemy? Where does it come from? When did it begin? What does Jung find in alchemy? What does it represent to him that is so important, so profound, that it causes him to abandon his inspired work of the Red Book? It’s time to find out."]

Fairie, Paul and Micah Loewinger. "Why Do We Argue About the Same Things Over and Over Again?" On the Media (June 9, 2023) ["OTM correspondent Micah Loewinger takes a look at some of the big media narratives that continue to animate online debates and panicked press coverage. He speaks with political scientist Paul Fairie, who has devoted his Twitter account to investigating refrains like "nobody wants to work anymore" and "people are losing their sense of humor" to show that seemingly modern moral panics have been repeated in the American press every decade for over a century. With the help of voice actors (see below), listen as Paul and Micah dive deep into the newspaper archives to demonstrate how little has changed in our political discourse."]

Gray, Martin. "Sacred Places." Sounds of Sand #44 (July 20, 2023) ["Martin Gray is a seasoned explorer, photographer and travel writer renowned for his profound insights into pilgrimage to sacred sites around the world. He created the World Pilgrimage Guide website in 1996, which has received more than 100 million visitors and shares lists of places, writings and photos of sacred sites in over 160 countries around the planet. In 2004 National Geographic published “The Geography of Religion” of his photos. In 2007 Sterling published Sacred Earth, a collection of 200 of photographs."]

Leland, Andrew. "The Country of the Blind." Open Source (July 27, 2023) ["In The Country of the Blind, where the writer Andrew Leland is guiding our tour, they do things differently. They have their own identity riddles, their network of heroes and not-so-heroes. They have their own senses of beauty and of sexual interest. They have their own sore spots when sighted people speak of their disability. They have their own Facebook pages and their own panic attacks—their own wacky humor, as well. They have their own Hall of Fame, back to Homer, among the ancients. They have a sense of their modern selves as strivers, even adventurers, more than victims. They argue fine points among themselves, like whether Lady Justice in front of the courthouse is, or ought to be, blind, and whether a male gaze persists among men who cannot see."]

ENG 281: Week 3 - Contemporary Ghost Films (16 Week)

The Devils Backbone (Spain/Mexico: Guillermo del Toro, 2001)
Guillermo del Toro is considered one of the great contemporary filmmakers making dark fantasy/horror films (his film Pan's Labyrinth, which will be an option later, is one of my favorite films of the 21st Century) "One of the most personal films by Guillermo del Toro, The Devil’s Backbone is also among his most frightening and emotionally layered. Set during the final week of the Spanish Civil War, it tells the tale of a twelve-year-old boy who, after his freedom-fighting father is killed, is sent to a haunted rural orphanage full of terrible secrets. Del Toro expertly combines gothic ghost story, murder mystery, and historical melodrama in a stylish mélange that, like his later Pan’s Labyrinth, reminds us the scariest monsters are often the human ones." - Criterion Collection

The Others (Spain/USA/France: Alejandro Amenábar, 2001)
If I remember correctly, this film was championed by Guillermo del Toro, and has since been considered to be one of great ghost films of the 21st Century. If you choose this film, do not read anything about it, it will be a better viewing if you let the mystery unfold naturally.
"Grace is a religious woman who lives in an old house kept dark because her two children, Anne and Nicholas, have a rare sensitivity to light. When the family begins to suspect the house is haunted, Grace fights to protect her children at any cost in the face of strange events and disturbing visions."

The Ring (USA/Japan: Gore Verbinski, 2002) 
[This is a rare example of a good American remake of a foreign horror film. The original is Ringu (Japan: Hideo Nakata, 1998) and it set off a flood of Japanese ghost films that took the world by storm for a time. The Ring is a very timely film that explores our relationship with technology and provides some truly creepy feelings and jump scares.]
"It sounded like just another urban legend: A videotape filled with nightmarish images, leading to a phone call foretelling the viewer’s death in exactly seven days. As a newspaper reporter, Rachel Keller was naturally skeptical of the story, until four teenagers all met with mysterious deaths exactly one week after watching just such a tape. Allowing her investigative curiosity to get the better of her, Rachel tracks down the video… and watches it. Now she has just seven days to unravel the mystery of the Ring. "


Tigers are Not Afraid (Mexico: Issa López, 2017)
[Issa López's film explores some of the contemporary socio-political issues/problems in Mexico and expands/examines it through a magical/mystical lense. How do traumatic events haunt a society?  You might want to check out this video essay on Magical Realism for thinking about this film AFTER you have watched it.]
"A haunting horror fairytale set against the backdrop of Mexico’s devastating drug wars, Tigers are Not Afraid follows a group of orphaned children armed with three magical wishes, running from the ghosts that haunt them and the cartel that murdered their parents. Filmmaker Issa López creates a world that recalls the early films of Guillermo del Toro, imbued with her own gritty urban spin on magical realism to conjure a wholly unique experience that audiences will not soon forget."

Candyman (USA: Nia DaCosta, 2021)
[A remake of Bernard Rose's classic and influential 1992 Candyman, Nia DaCosta integrates contemporary concerns of gentrification and the Black Lives Matter movement to bring this powerful tale to a new audience] "Anthony and his partner move into a loft in the now gentrified Cabrini. After a chance encounter with an old-timer exposes Anthony to the true story behind Candyman, he unknowingly opens a door to a complex past that unravels his own sanity and unleashes a terrifying wave of violence."
If you watch this film, you should check out this article (which serves as an introduction to many of the films we will be watching throughout the semester) How Black Horror Storytellers are Using Horror to Battle Hate 

Talk to Me (Australia: Michael Philippou and Danny Philippou, 2022)
[This film may still be in the theaters near you. It is not only my favorite horror film of the year, but currently it is my favorite movie of the year. This is the debut film from these brothers, but they brought a lot of experience producing short videos for their very popular Youtube channel. I believe they artfully capture the energy and perspectives of the current generation, the concerns about viral technologies and their effect upon our psyches, and some good old horror genre tropes. I walked out the theater very excited by what I had seen.]
"When a group of friends discover how to conjure spirits using an embalmed hand, they become hooked on the new thrill, until one of them goes too far and unleashes terrifying supernatural forces."  Here is an interview with the directors, for after you watch the film "Terrifying Twos: Danny and Michael Philippou on Racka energy and Talk To Me."

The Ring (USA/Japan: Gore Verbinski, 2002)

 The Ring (USA/Japan: Gore Verbinski, 2002: 115 mins)

Jarvis, Brian. "Anamorphic allegory in The Ring, or, seven ways of looking at a horror video." Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies #3 (November 2007)

Ozawa, Eimi. "Remaking Corporeality and Spatiality: U.S. Adaptations of Japanese Horror Films." 49th Parallel (Autumn 2006)

Prewitt, Zach. "The Best Horror Cinema of the 21st Cinema." (Posted on Vimeo: October 2016)

Wada-Marciano, Mitsuyo. "J-horror: New Media’s Impact on Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema." Horror to the Extreme: Changing Boundaries in Asian Cinema. ed. Jinhee Choi & Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano. Hong Kong University, 2009: 15-37.

Xu, Gang Gary. "Remaking East Asia, Outsourcing Hollywood." Senses of Cinema (November 2004)

ENG 102: Fall 2023 Resources #8

Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. "Freedom of Speech." The Reith Lectures (November 13, 2022) ["Best-selling Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie gives the first of four 2022 Reith Lectures, discussing freedom of speech. She argues that it feels like freedom of speech is under attack. Cancel culture, arguments about “wokeness" and the assault on Salman Rushdie have produced a febrile atmosphere. Meanwhile autocrats and populists have undermined the very notion of an accepted fact-based truth which lives above politics. So how do we calibrate freedom in this context? If we have the freedom to offend, where do we draw the line?"]

Anderson, Ellie and David Pena-Guzman. "Boredom." Overthink (May 23, 2023) ["One must imagine Sisyphus…bored. Take a break from boredom and listen to episode 78 of Overthink as David and Ellie guide you through the fabulously idle realm of this “bestial, indefinable affliction.” They discuss the peaceful highs and painful lows of their middle school summer slumps, the endless days of pandemic panic, and the sluggish mornings of monks during the Medieval period. What can boredom teach us about existence? Is Kierkegaard right that the masses are boring while the nobles bore themselves? Can 9-year-olds be existentially bored? Maybe all we need to overcome boredom is a little bit of fun, perhaps a holiday. Or is it?"]

Booker, M. Keith. "The Imagination of Deterioration: Human Exceptionalism, Climate Change, and the Weird Eco-Horror of David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future." Monstrum 6.1 (June 2023) ["To an extent, David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future (2022) represents a rousing return to the body horror with which its director exploded onto the independent-film scene in the 1970s and 1980s. In this case, though, the film updates Cronenberg’s earlier concerns via an especially strong focus on the impact of environmental deterioration on human beings and human society, placing the film in the realm of eco-horror as well. The action of the film occurs in a decaying near-future world in which climate change and other worsening conditions have led not only to a general decline in the quality of life (both material and emotional) but also to strange (and sometimes macabre) mutations in the human body itself. The strangeness of these climate-related mutations places Crimes of the Future in the realm of ecological horror, and especially of the recent turn toward the “weird” in eco-horror. Nature seems to have been almost obliterated in this future world, but these weird mutations, beyond the control of any of the human forces in the film, challenge the notion that humans stand apart from a nature that they can easily understand, dominate, and control. These mutations also contribute to a growing sense in the future world of the film that things are getting out of hand and that there is no identifiable fix for the general deterioration of conditions, a sense that resonates with widespread attitudes in the world of the early 2020s."]

Rohr, Richard. "Christianity and Unknowing." Sounds of Sand #28 (March 30, 2023) ["Richard Rohr, as a Catholic priest and Franciscan Friar, offers a concise history of how Western Christianity once had, soon lost, tried to retrieve, and now is roundly rediscovering its own traditional understanding of unitive consciousness (which was our word for non-dual thinking). The Christian contemplative mind was usually a subtext, and yet it was always clearly there too, and much closer to the surface, but only for those exposed to the mystical base that was revealed in the Gospel of John, the Desert Fathers and Mothers, the Celtic and monastic traditions, and what was generally referred to as the apophatic or wisdom stream of Christianity. These were our many saints and mystics. This possibility was brought to the fore by Thomas Merton in the middle of the last century, and is now flowing in many positive directions. It is now our task to rediscover the pre-Enlightenment Christianity that reveled in "the cloud of unknowing", what some called "learned ignorance", and the very notion of Mystery itself. Only when we got into competition with rationalism and secularism, did we adopt this rather recent mania for certitude and a very limited kind of scientific knowing. Almost the entire history of Protestantism emerged in this period, and thus the contemplative mind is an utterly new revelation for them, and frankly for all of us, as we again learn to be comfortable living on the edge of both the knowable and the unknown. Fr. Richard Rohr is a globally recognized ecumenical teacher bearing witness to the universal awakening within Christian mysticism and the Perennial Tradition. He is a Franciscan priest of the New Mexico Province and founder of the Center for Action and Contemplation (CAC) in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Fr. Richard’s teaching is grounded in the Franciscan alternative orthodoxy—practices of contemplation and self-emptying, expressing itself in radical compassion, particularly for the socially marginalized. Fr. Richard is the author of numerous books, including Everything Belongs, Adam’s Return, The Naked Now, Breathing Under Water, Falling Upward, Immortal Diamond, and Eager to Love: The Alternative Way of Francis of Assisi."]

 Sulzberger, A.G. "At an Embattled Moment, the New York Times’ Publisher Makes a Stand." The New Yorker Radio Hour (June 9, 2023) ["Over the past several years, as more democratic institutions and norms have come under attack, many journalists have raised the question of whether it is ethical to adhere to journalism’s traditional principles of non-bias, objectivity, and political neutrality. In May, A. G. Sulzberger, the publisher of the New York Times, staked out his position in the traditionalist camp in an essay for the Columbia Journalism Review. “The traditionalists in the ranks have long believed that their long-standing view speaks for itself. I became increasingly convinced that the argument doesn’t make itself,” he tells David Remnick. Sulzberger shies away from the term objectivity, instead describing the “posture of independence” as one that prizes “an open mind, a skeptical mind,” and a clear-eyed pursuit of truth––even if it leads to uncomfortable conclusions. Sulzberger, whose family has owned the paper since 1896, says he wants to push back on a culture of “certitude” in journalism. “In this hyper-politicized, hyper-polarized moment, is society benefiting from every single player getting deeper and deeper, and louder and louder, about declaring their personal allegiances and loyalties and preferences?” he asks."]

West, Stephen. "Belief." Philosophize This! #41 (November 3, 2014) ["On this episode of the podcast, we discuss the many facets of belief. We start out by discussing two major complications that belief brings to the table. First, absolute certainty is impossible--even certainty about the fact that "certainty is impossible”. Second, we can convince ourselves to believe in literally anything we want (such as the belief that demonic possession is achieved through rustling curtains and slamming doors). Next, we talk about justified, true belief and the multitude of ways our beliefs can be proven wrong. Finally, we learn how to put our beliefs under a microscope and why it’s absolutely necessary to do so in order to achieve true knowledge."]

---. "Optimism." Philosophize This! #42 (November 11, 2014) ["On this episode, we explore the benefits and drawbacks of optimism. First, we examine the various motivations for pessimism, and hear what Winston Churchill, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Marcus Aurelius have to say about optimism. Next, we think about the vastly different implications of optimism in our personal lives and optimism on a societal level. Finally, we find out why Voltaire thought it was preposterous to think that we’re living in the best of all possible worlds and why he said, "Optimism is the madness of insisting all is well when we are miserable." ]

---. "Superstition." Philosophize This! #40 (October 16, 2014) ["On this episode of the podcast, we explore superstition in its various forms and examine the ways Berkeley and Voltaire tried to eliminate it in their work. First, we think about the superstitions we subscribe to in our everyday lives, whether it’s “an apple a day keeps the doctor away” or “the key to happiness is buying lots and lots of stuff.” Next, we learn why Berkeley wanted to throw out the notion that true reality lies behind the veil of perception and find out his answer to that cliché question about a tree falling in the forest. Finally, we begin our discussion of Voltaire and find out why he called Christianity "the most ridiculous, the most absurd and the most bloody religion which has ever infected this world."]

Wray, Ben. "The Battle to Control Microchip Supplies Will Define the Twenty-First Century." Jacobin (February 26, 2023) ["Semiconductors are as important for global capitalism today as access to energy resources. Only a handful of countries can produce the most advanced microchips, and control over their supply is becoming a key battleground in the US-China trade war. Review of Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology by Chris Miller (Scribner: New York, 2022)."]

Zadeh, Joe. "Rise of the Plant Destroyer." NOEMA (July 6, 2022) ["Pandemics aren’t just for humans — they can sweep through the plant world too. As the planet warms, devastating diseases are being carried to new lands by the infrastructure of global capitalism, wreaking havoc on undefended crops and ecosystems."]

---. "The Secret History and Strange Future of Charisma."  NOEMA (May 24, 2023) ["At times of crisis, confusion and complexity, [Max] Weber thought, our faith in traditional and rational institutions collapses and we look for salvation and redemption in the irrational allure of certain individuals. These individuals break from the ordinary and challenge existing norms and values. Followers of charismatic figures come to view them as “extraordinary,” “superhuman” or even “supernatural” and thrust them to positions of power on a passionate wave of emotion. In Weber’s mind, this kind of charismatic power wasn’t just evidenced by accounts of history — of religions and societies formed around prophets, saints, shamans, war heroes, revolutionaries and radicals. It was also echoed in the very stories we tell ourselves — in the tales of mythical heroes like Achilles and Cú Chulainn. "]

The Devil's Backbone (Spain/Mexico: Guillermo del Toro, 2001)

 

One of the most personal films by Guillermo del Toro, The Devil’s Backbone is also among his most frightening and emotionally layered. Set during the final week of the Spanish Civil War, it tells the tale of a twelve-year-old boy who, after his freedom-fighting father is killed, is sent to a haunted rural orphanage full of terrible secrets. Del Toro expertly combines gothic ghost story, murder mystery, and historical melodrama in a stylish mélange that, like his later Pan’s Labyrinth, reminds us the scariest monsters are often the human ones. - Criterion Collection

The Devil's Backbone (Spain/Mexico: Guillermo del Toro, 2001: 106 mins)

"Adventures in Moviegoing with Guillermo del Toro." The Current (May 25, 2017)

Barry, Angie. "Vivisect the Director: Guillermo del Toro and The Devil’s Backbone (2001)." The Criminal Element (April 7, 2014)

Cathcart, Abigail M. "An Outsider Amongst Outsiders: Psychosocial Impact of The Devil’s Backbone, The Orphanage, and Mama." (A Thesis Submitted to the Honors College of The University of Southern Mississippi in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirement for the Degree of Bachelor of Fine Arts in the Department of Theatre: 2015)

"Cleansing of the Soul for a Clean Slate: Guillermo del Toro’s The Devil's Backbone." Cinephilia & Beyond (ND)

del Toro, Guillermo and Cornelia Funke. "Guillermo del Toro's Influences." The Current (October 19, 2016)

Ebert, Roger. "The Devil's Backbone." Chicago Sun-Times (December 21, 2001)

Goldberg, Matt. "The Films of Guillermo del Toro: The Devil’s Backbone." The Collider (October 9, 2015)

"Guillermo del Toro's Ghostly Encounter." The Current (July 29, 2013)

Heumann, Joseph K. and Robin L. Murray. "Through an Eco-Lens of Childhood: Roberto Rossellini's Germany Year Zero and Guillermo Del Toro's The Devil's Backbone." Monstrous Nature : Environment and Horror on the Big Screen. University of Nebraska, 2016: 57-80.

Ibarra, Enrique Ajuria. "Permanent hauntings: spectral fantasies and national trauma in Guillermo del Toro's El espinazo del diablo [The Devil's Backbone]." Journal of Romance Studies 12.1 (Spring 2012)

Kermode, Mark. "The Devil's Backbone: The Past is Never Dead." The Current (July 30, 2013)

Lázaro-Reboll, Antonio. "The Transnational Reception of The Devil's Backbone (Guillermo del Toro 2001)." Hispanic Research Journal 8.1 (February 2007): 39–51.

Markham, John. "Guillermo del Toro and the representation of the Spanish Civil War in ‘Pan’s Labyrinth’ and ‘The Devil’s Backbone.'" (Personal Website: January 6, 2015)

Savage, Julian. "The Object(s) of Interpretation: Guillermo Del Toro’s El Espinazo Del Diablo (The Devil’s Backbone)." Senses of Cinema #21 (July 2002)

Smith, Michael Glover. "Giving The Devil’s Backbone Its Due." White City Cinema (October 15, 2010)

ENG 102: Fall 2023 Resources #7

Adjetey, Wendell Nii Laryea. "Cross-Border Cosmopolitans: The Making of a Pan-African North America (University of North Carolina Press, 2023)." New Books in Intellectual History (August 4, 2023) ["Twentieth-century African American history cannot be told without accounting for the significant influence of Pan-African thought, just as the story of U.S. policy from 1900 to 2000 cannot be told without accounting for fears of an African World. In the early 1900s, Marcus Garvey and his followers perceived the North American mainland, particularly Canada following U.S. authorities' deportation of Garvey to Jamaica, as a forward-operating base from which to liberate the Black masses. After World War II, Vietnam War resisters, Black Panthers, and Caribbean students joined the throngs of cross-border migrants. In time, as urban uprisings proliferated in northern U.S. cities, the prospect of coalitions among the Black Power, Red Power, and Quebecois Power movements inspired U.S. and Canadian intelligence services to collaborate, infiltrate, and sabotage Black organizations across North America. Assassinations of "Black messiahs" further radicalized revolutionaries, rekindling the dream for an African World from Washington, D.C., to Toronto to San Francisco to Antigua to Grenada and back to Africa. Alarmed, Washington's national security elites invoked the Cold War as the reason to counter the triangulation of Black Power in the Atlantic World, funneling arms clandestinely from the United States and Canada to the Caribbean and then to its proxies in southern Africa. By contending that twentieth-century global Black liberation movements began within the U.S.-Canadian borderlands as cross-border, continental struggles, Cross-Border Cosmopolitans: The Making of a Pan-African North America (University of North Carolina Press, 2023) reveals the revolutionary legacies of the Underground Railroad and America's Great Migration and the hemispheric and transatlantic dimensions of this history."]

George Carlin's American Dream: What George Meant To Me (Trailer for HBO Featurette posted May 20, 2022) ["He created the scientific method for comics." Comedians Stephen Colbert, Jon Stewart, Hasan Minhaj, Sam Jay, and many more share how the legendary comic influenced their own work."]

Hoeksema, Jason. "Unraveling the Mysteries of Mycorrhizal Networks." In Defense of Plants #427 (June 25, 2023) ["In this episode, we continue our journey in the world of mycorrhizal interactions with Dr. Jason Hoeksema. Join us as we investigate the ecological and evolutionary consequences of interactions between trees and mycorrhizal fungi and learn how complex and complicated these relationships truly are."]

Maass, Peter. "The Day Saddam Hussein's Statue Came Down." On the Media (May 3, 2023) ["On April 9, 2003, a US marine battalion rolled triumphantly into Firdos Square, in the center of Baghdad, two and a half weeks after the US invasion of Iraq began. Hours later, the marines toppled a statue of Saddam Hussein, amongst what seemed like a roaring, jubilant crowd of Iraqis. It became, perhaps, the most televised image of the Iraq War — and it seared itself into the minds of its viewers. Twenty years later, that image is still circulated, and sometimes celebrated. Peter Maass, then a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine, stood at the edge of Firdos Square that day. What he witnessed, was vastly different from what viewers were seeing on their television screens across the world. Years later, Maass reconstructed the chain of events that led to the toppling to see what went wrong. For this week's podcast extra, he speaks with Brooke about how the media subconsciously creates events for itself to cover — and how the rampant misconceptions that followed in the wake of the toppling led to a pernicious view of the Iraq War that we're still trying to divorce from today."]

Maté, Gabor.  "The Myth of Normal," Healing in a Toxic Culture & How Capitalism Fuels Addiction." Democracy Now (Posted on Youtube: November 24, 2022) ["In an extended interview, acclaimed physician and author Dr. Gabor Maté discusses his new book, "The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture." "The very values of a society are traumatizing for a lot of people," says Maté, who argues in his book that "psychological trauma, woundedness, underlies much of what we call disease." He says healing requires a reconnection between the mind and the body, which can be achieved through cultivating a sense of community, meaning, belonging and purpose. Maté also discusses how the healthcare system has harmfully promoted the "mechanization of birth," how the lack of social services for parents has led to "a massive abandonment of infants," and how capitalism has fueled addiction and the rise of youth suicide rates."]

Miéville, China. "The Communist Manifesto Through the Ages." On the Media (July 14, 2023) ["The Communist Manifesto was first penned by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in 1848, a year simmering with revolutionary possibility in Europe. In the years since, the text has served as a refuge, and an inspiration, for those betrayed by the free market. It has ebbed in and out of popularity, its sales rising by 700 percent in the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis, and may be, according to some accounts, the second best-selling book in the world after the Bible. It’s a phantom, always lingering, not quite out of sight. China Miéville writes speculative fiction, but his latest book, “A Spectre, Haunting: On the Communist Manifesto," traces the subversive text's place in the world throughout history. This week, he chats with Brooke about why the text refuses to fade from our consciousness, and how best to read it at this moment in time."]

Oreskes, Naomi. "How American Business Taught Us To Love the Free Market."  On the Media (July 14, 2023)  ["For decades the so-called "free market" has been seen as a fundamental part of American society, often lauded in debates about the success of capitalism. But with wealth inequality in the U.S. at an all-time high, debates about capitalism have ramped up. This week, Brooke sits down with Naomi Oreskes, professor of the history of science at Harvard University and the co-author with Erik M. Conway of The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market, to trace the evolution of what Oreskes calls "free-market fundamentalism" back to a century-old public relations campaign that still impacts American politics."]

Pierrot, Grégory. "Black Panther: Wakanda Forever— Eternal Return of the Afro-Horn." Evergreen Review (Spring/Summer 2023) ["Having completed an initial cycle of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Disney has begun to unleash the first installments in its new ten-year plan. Brace for the onslaught and a new opportunity to wonder how many variations on the same generic plot structure are needed to screw in the neon sign of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, a galaxy as full of variety and promise as it is frustrating in its commitment to the generic. It is arguably one of the great frustrations of the Age of Marvel that after it finally figured out the special effects to do justice to the expansiveness of the original comic books, Disney also worked overtime to distill and dilute all that was weird, silly, garish, elating about them into a surefire, hit-making formula. The hero may have a thousand faces and Disney a hefty roster of them at hand, but inside they’re also all made of the same flesh, and a lot of it is twice lab-grown, having gone through comic book assembly lines before reprocessing in Hollywood. In those circumstances, departures from formula become all the more significant. When Ryan Coogler directed Black Panther, he did not just bring fifty years of Black superhero comics to the screen; he was expressly inspired by all the Black writers and artists, from Billy Graham, Christopher Priest, Brian Stelfreeze, and Alitha Martinez to the Hudlin brothers, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Roxane Gay, all of whom contributed along the years to turn an often corny cat into a cultural icon. Coogler brought as Black Panther’s main foe Killmonger, a cousin and polar inversion who could have been as cringeworthy as Bizarro, but turned out as existential a nemesis as Poe’s William Wilson, and sharing the same sharp fate. The film managed to simultaneously propose and absorb a notion that Killmonger made something painfully clear: however cool and well-meaning, a monarch—and both these guys were monarchs—can’t be a revolutionary. Still, working within these limits, Coogler made a way out of no way with humor and by sprinkling historical and political Easter eggs for those who would explore."]

Roane, J.T. "The Divine City: On J. T. Roane’s Dark Agoras." The Los Angeles Review of Books (June 15, 2023) ["Dark Agoras (the title is a riff on the Greek agora, meaning public space) provides us with a view of the lives lived and worlds built by Black migrants who made their way from the rural South to Philadelphia across the 20th century. Roane’s entryway into Black working-class life was inspired in part by the groundbreaking work of W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Philadelphia Negro. In that 1899 text, Du Bois identified two social categories associated with Black migrant cultures."]

Rosen, David. "The Great Panic: Trans-Sexuality and the Erosion of Patriarchy." Counterpunch (May 25, 2023) ["We’ve witnessed tragedy play out in the long, long battle to overcome patriarchy’s subordination of women. We saw a less tragic version of it play out in the battle over gay rights. We are now witnessing patriarchy play out as farse in today’s culture wars campaigns to repress transgender identity, suppress challenging reading materials and enforce electoral gerrymandering."]

Seth, Anil. "What Is the Nature of Consciousness?" The Joy of Why (May 31, 2023) ["Consciousness, our experience of being in the world, is one of the mind’s greatest mysteries, but as the neuroscientist Anil Seth explains to Steven Strogatz, research is making progress in understanding this elusive phenomenon."]

ENG 102: Fall 2023 Resources #5

Adam, Barbara. Time. Wiley, 2004. ["What is time? How has our relationship to time changed through history and how does time structure our social lives? In this lively introduction, Barbara Adam explores the changing ways in which time has been understood and how this knowledge is embedded in cultural practices. She takes the reader on a journey of discovery that extends from ancient mythology and classical philosophy to the contemporary social world of high-speed computer networks and globalized social relations. The book poses key questions about the nature of time, how it is conceptualized, what it means in practice and how the parameters set by nature have been transcended across the ages by the human quest for time know-how and control. It provides the reader with a good basis for understanding the role of time in contemporary social life. This book assumes no previous knowledge. Through its broad perspective and transdisciplinary approach it provides an accessible and wide-ranging introduction for students and teachers across the social sciences."]

Abdelfetah, Rund, et al. "Before Roe: The Physicians Crusade." Throughline (June 8, 2023) ["Abortion wasn't always controversial. In fact, in colonial America it would have been considered a fairly common practice: a private decision made by women, and aided mostly by midwives. But in the mid-1800s, a small group of physicians set out to change that. Obstetrics was a new field, and they wanted it to be their domain—meaning, the domain of men and medicine. Led by a zealous young doctor named Horatio Storer, they launched a campaign to make abortion illegal in every state, spreading a potent cloud of moral righteousness and racial panic that one historian later called "the physicians' crusade." And so began the century of criminalization. In the first episode of a two-part series, we're telling the story of that century: how doctors put themselves at the center of legal battles over abortion, first to criminalize — and then to legalize."]

Allen-Hermanson, Sean, Philip Goff, and William Seager. "Panpsychism." The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (February 13, 2022) ["Panpsychism is the view that mentality is fundamental and ubiquitous in the natural world. The view has a long and venerable history in philosophical traditions of both East and West, and has recently enjoyed a revival in analytic philosophy. For its proponents panpsychism offers an attractive middle way between physicalism on the one hand and dualism on the other. The worry with dualism—the view that mind and matter are fundamentally different kinds of thing—is that it leaves us with a radically disunified picture of nature, and the deep difficulty of understanding how mind and brain interact. And whilst physicalism offers a simple and unified vision of the world, this is arguably at the cost of being unable to give a satisfactory account of the emergence of human and animal consciousness. Panpsychism, strange as it may sound on first hearing, promises a satisfying account of the human mind within a unified conception of nature."]

Austin, Thomas. "Horse-People and White Voices: Neoliberalism and Race in Sorry to Bother You." Senses of Cinema #105 (May 2023) ["The comedy drama Sorry to Bother You (2018), written and directed by Boots Riley, follows the trials and tribulations of Cassius, aka “Cash”, Green (played by Lakeith Stanfield), a new employee at RegalView, a fictional telemarketing firm based in “an alternate reality” version of Oakland, California.1 Here I consider two of the many sonic and visual devices through which the film develops its social commentary and political critique of contemporary America."]

Barndt, Deborah, et al. "Learning for Liberation: The Life & Legacy of Paulo Freire." Darts and Letters #79 (May 25, 2023) ["Paulo Freire offers activists and academics everywhere a lesson in what it means to be a radical intellectual. He is known as the founder of critical pedagogy, which asks teachers and learners to understand and resist their own oppression. His subversive books have been banned and burned in many countries, including his native Brazil, where the military dictatorship of the 1960s imprisoned and then exiled him. On this episode, we learn about Freire’s life and the basics of his foundational text, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, with help from professor emeritus John Portelli. Then, we explore how Freire’s legacy is still shaping our ideas of teaching and learning today. Academic/activist/artist Deborah Barndt takes us to York University’s faculty of Environmental and Urban Change, which is rooted in the work of Freirean scholars. Next, we learn about how Freire’s pedagogy is put into practice to advocate for disabled learners, with Marc Castrodale, a teacher, disability officer, and scholar of critical disability and Mad studies. Finally, social worker Sharon Steinhauer tells us the story of the University at Blue Quills, and how an act of Indigenous resurgence led to the beginning of a network of decolonial universities in Canada."]

Baynham, Jacob. "The Myriad Lives of People and Water." NOEMA (May 4, 2023) ["Our lives are grand voyages, far more entangled with everything around us than we know. This is as true for a person as it is for a creek."]

Blackston, Dylan McCarthy and Susan Stryker. "The Transgender Studies Reader Remix (Routledge 2022)." New Books in LGBTQ Studies (April 24, 2023) ["This is a book that’s as big as it is rich. It brings together 50 previously published articles that track both the history and the current directions in the interdisciplinary field of transgender studies. The reader shows the conversations taking place not only within transgender studies but also between transgender studies and such fields as feminist theory, queer theory, Black studies, history, biopolitics, and the posthumanities. In our conversation, editors Stryker and Blackston gives us a sense of this range and also the crucial issues that inform the creation of the reader itself and the importance of transgender studies as a field. Blackston is an Assistant Professor of Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies in the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies at Appalachian State University. Stryker is Professor Emerita of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Arizona, founding co-editor of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, founding co-editor of Duke University Press’s ASTERISK book series, and co-editor of Routledge’s two previous transgender studies readers. And here’s our conversation."]

Brown, Krista and Moe Tkacik. "Taylor Swift Tickets." On the Media (June 7, 2023) ["On January 24, the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on Ticketmaster. The hearing followed in the aftermath Taylor Swift's "Eras Tour" tickets going on sale last November, a debacle during which Ticketmaster broke down during the presale, leaving millions of fans without tickets. Senators convened to hear testimony from a top Live Nation executive (Ticketmaster’s parent company), competitors in ticketing and concert promotion, antitrust experts, and a musician. The hearing represented a step toward a potential antitrust case against Live Nation and Ticketmaster, which merged in 2010. Moe Tkacik and Krista Brown are researchers at the American Economic Liberties Project, a left-leaning think tank which is part of a consortium that is pushing for the DOJ to break up the Live Nation monopoly. In February Micah Loewinger spoke to them about an article they co-wrote for The American Prospect about Ticketmaster’s forty-plus-year-history, and how the company came to dominate, and in some ways reshape, the live music landscape."]

Chungking Express (Hong Kong: Wong Kar-Wai, 1994) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive) ["The whiplash, double-pronged Chungking Express is one of the defining works of 1990s cinema and the film that made Wong Kar Wai an instant icon. Two heartsick Hong Kong cops (Takeshi Kaneshiro and Tony Leung Chiu Wai), both jilted by ex-lovers, cross paths at the Midnight Express take-out food stand, where the ethereal pixie waitress Faye (Faye Wong) works. Anything goes in Wong’s gloriously shot and utterly unexpected charmer, which cemented the sex appeal of its gorgeous stars and forever turned canned pineapple and the Mamas & the Papas’ “California Dreamin’” into tokens of romantic longing."]

Craze, Joshua. "After Solidarity." New Left Review (May 18, 2023) ["Tori et Lokita (2022), the latest film by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, opens with a shot that has become a signal part of their visual repertoire: a face in the centre of the screen, crumbling under the voice of an unseen speaker. We see Lokita as she is interrogated by an immigration officer. At first, she seems impassive, but eventually she hesitates, and then breaks down in tears, unable to answer the officer’s questions. We witness the consequences of power, inscribed on a face."]

Denbeaux, Mark and John Kiriakau. "From Waterboarding to Rape, Abu Zubaydah Depicts Torture at Black Sites & Gitmo in Graphic Sketches." Democracy Now (May 18, 2023) ["The Center for Policy and Research has just published a new report titled “American Torturers: FBI and CIA Abuses at Dark Sites and Guantánamo,” which compiles a series of 40 drawings by Guantánamo Bay prisoner Abu Zubaydah that chronicle the horrific torture he endured since 2002 in CIA dark sites and at Guantánamo Bay, where he has been detained without charge since 2006. The United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention has issued a new call for the United States to release him immediately. We speak with one of his attorneys, Mark Denbeaux, and CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou, who exposed the Bush-era torture program and was the only official jailed in connection to it."]

ENG 281: Week 2 - Classic Ghost Films (16 Week)

 Lyons, Kevin, Mike Muncer, and Adam Nyman. "Ghosts Pt. 1: An Introduction." The Evolution of Horror [This is a conversation on the history of ghost films and was the initial episode in a season on the subgenre - the rest of the episodes are located here ]

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Ghosts: Classic Films

Our film options this week:

Kuroneko (Japan: Kaneto Shindo, 1968) [Shindo's film is a beautiful and eerie tale.]
"In this poetic and atmospheric horror fable, set in a village in war-torn medieval Japan, a malevolent spirit has been ripping out the throats of itinerant samurai. When a military hero is sent to dispatch the unseen force, he finds that he must struggle with his own personal demons as well. From Kaneto Shindo, director of the terror classic Onibaba, Kuroneko (Black Cat) is a spectacularly eerie twilight tale with a shocking feminist angle, evoked through ghostly special effects and exquisite cinematography."

The Fog (USA: John Carpenter, 1980) [Make sure to watch the 1980 version, not the 2005 remake. John Carpenter is considered a master horror filmmaker, based upon Peter Straub's popular horror novel.]

"Strange things begin to occurs as a tiny California coastal town prepares to commemorate its centenary. Inanimate objects spring eerily to life; Rev. Malone stumbles upon a dark secret about the town’s founding; radio announcer Stevie witnesses a mystical fire; and hitchhiker Elizabeth discovers the mutilated corpse of a fisherman. Then a mysterious iridescent fog descends upon the village, and more people start to die."

The Shining (USA/UK: Stanley Kubrick, 1980) [Considered by many to be a masterpiece of horror and made by one of the best 20th Century filmmakers, based on Stephen King's popular horror novel - King hated the film, and one of the most analyzed/theorized films.]
"Jack Torrance accepts a caretaker job at the Overlook Hotel, where he, along with his wife Wendy and their son Danny, must live isolated from the rest of the world for the winter. But they aren’t prepared for the madness that lurks within."

The Poltergeist (USA: Tobe Hooper, 1982) [Directed by the maker of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, this a very influential ghost story that brought them into the modern American suburbs and exposed the evil underneath middle-America] 
"Steve Freeling lives with his wife, Diane, and their three children, Dana, Robbie, and Carol Anne, in Southern California where he sells houses for the company that built the neighborhood. It starts with just a few odd occurrences, such as broken dishes and furniture moving around by itself. However, when he realizes that something truly evil haunts his home, Steve calls in a team of parapsychologists led by Dr. Lesh to help before it’s too late."

The Sixth Sense (USA: M. Night Shyamalan, 1999) [This was Shyamalan's debut film and literally made his career. It was a pivotal film in the horror/thriller subgenre that was extremely popular at the turn of the century, known as "mind-fuck films" as detailed in this article Eig, Jonathan. "A beautiful mind(fuck): Hollywood structures of identity." Jump Cut #46 (2003) - do not read the article before seeing the film, it will ruin it]
"Following an unexpected tragedy, child psychologist Malcolm Crowe meets a nine year old boy named Cole Sear, who is hiding a dark secret."

The Shining (USA/UK: Stanley Kubrick, 1980)

 

The Shining (USA/UK: Stanley Kubrick, 1980: 146 mins)

Abrams, Nathan. "Kubrick and the Paranoid Style: Antisemitism, Conspiracy Theories, and The Shining." Senses of Cinema #95 (July 2020)

Abrams, Nathan, et al. "The Shining and Us – Participants to the Dossier Reflect on Their First Encounter with Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining." Senses of Cinema #95 (July 2020)

Beyl, Cameron. "The Directors Series: Stanley Kubrick, Pts. 1-5." The Film Stage (February 11, 2015)

Chodorov, Pip.  "Reflections on The Shining." Senses of Cinema #95 (July 2020)  ["Kubrick, though, always claimed to be doing something more than entertainment. He is waking up the spectators, warning them that their relationship to images should not be passive, that the shadows in the mirror can affect us in profound and often troubling ways."]

Dutta, Debopriyaa. "The Viewer in Kubrickland: Solving Stanley Kubrick's Hermeneutic Labyrinth." High on Films (June 22, 2017)

Englert, Angela. "Taking the Shine Off with Doctor Sleep." Cultural Gutter (December 10, 2020)

Fairfax, Daniel. "A Stranger in the Hotel: Jean-Pierre Oudart and The Shining." Senses of Cinema #95 (July 2020)

Fenwick, James, I.Q. Hunter and Elisa Pezzota. "Stanley Kubrick: A Retrospective. Introduction." Cinergie (December 4, 2017) 

Figlerowicz, Marta. "Jack's Smart Home." Senses of Cinema #95 (July 2020)

Figueras, Mark Anthony. "Kubrick in Color." (Posted on Vimeo: January 2016)

Ford, Phil and J.F. Martel. "The Dark Eye: On the Films of Rodney Ascher." Weird Studies #12 (May 2, 2018) ["American filmmaker Rodney Ascher is a master of the weird documentary. Whether he be exploring wild interpretations of a classic horror film in Room 237, bracketing the phenomenon of sleep paralysis in The Nightmare, studying the uncanny power of the moving image in "Primal Screen," or considering the sinister power of a kitschy logo in "The S from Hell," Ascher confronts his viewers with realities that resist final explanations and facile reduction. In this episode, Phil and JF follow Ascher's films into the living labyrinth of a strange universe that isn't just unknown, but radically unknowable."]

Hancock, James and Martin Kessler. "The King of Horror." The Wrong Reel #135 (May 16, 2016)

Kaneria, Rishi. "Red: A Kubrick Supercut." (Posted on Vimeo: 2015)

Nemrov, Alexander. "The Manly Veil." Senses of Cinema #95 (July 2020)

Pulver, Andrew. "Stanley Kubrick: film's obsessive genius rendered more human." The Guardian (April 26, 2019)

Rinzler, J.W. and Lee Unkrich. "Stanley Kubrick's The Shining (Taschen 2023)." New Books in Film (February 6, 2023) ["In 1966 Stanley Kubrick told a friend that he wanted to make “the world’s scariest movie.” A decade later Stephen King’s The Shining landed on the director’s desk, and a visual masterpiece was born. J. W. Rinzler and Lee Unkrich's book Stanley Kubrick's The Shining (Taschen, 2023) is the definitive compendium of the film that transformed the horror genre features hundreds of never-before-seen photographs, rare production ephemera from the Kubrick Archive, and extensive new interviews with the cast and crew."]

Szaniawski, Jeremi. "'Come Out, Come Out, Wherever You Are': The Legacy of The Shining in Contemporary Cinema." Senses of Cinema #95 (July 2020)

---. "“How Do You Like It?” (Forty Years On) – The Shining in the Age of Global Quarantine." Senses of Cinema #95 (July 2020)

Uhlich, Keith. "Great Directors: Stanley Kubrick." Senses of Cinema (May 2002)

Ulivieri, Filippo."King vs Kubrick: The Origins of Evil." Senses of Cinema #95 (July 2020)

Undine (Germany/France: Christian Petzold, 2020)

 Undine (Germany/France: Christian Petzold, 2020: 91 mins)

Abel, Marco, Aylin Bademsoy, and Jaimey Fisher. "'Playing Innocent Would Have Meant Lying': From the Introduction to Christian Petzold: Interviews." Film International (June 29, 2023)

Cleaver, Sarah Kathryn. "Swept Away: A Thematic Dive Into the Depths of Undine."  Curzon (April 1, 2021)

Eggert, Brian. "Undine." Deep Focus Review (June 4, 2021)

Hudson, David. "Petzold and Undine." Current (June 2, 2021)

Nguyen, Mai and Pauline Greenhill. "Uncanny sounds and the politics of wonder in Christian Petzold’s Undine." NECSUS (Spring 2022) ["In the story of Undine, a water sprite leaves her aquatic origins to marry a human and acquires a soul in the process. The narrative ends tragically when her lover betrays her and she is obliged to kill him according to the laws of the elemental spirits. Related to figures such as the sirens of Greek mythology, the Lorelei of Clemens Brentano and Heinrich Heine, Melusine in French folklore, and selkie narratives of Celtic and Norse oral traditions, the first writings on this nymph can be traced back to Swiss physician and natural philosopher Paracelsus. Popularised as a literary fairy tale in 19th century Germany by the Prussian writer Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué, Undine’s story has inspired numerous incarnations. For instance, it served as the source material for operas by E.T.A. Hoffmann (1812-1814) and others, a play by Jean Giraudoux (1938), and most famously Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale Den lille havfrue (‘The Little Mermaid,’ 1837). Films referencing ‘Undine’ date from the silent era and come from Austria, Canada, France, Ireland, and the US, as well as three from Germany: Rolf Thiele’s Undine 74 (1974), Eckhart Schmidt’s Undine (1992), and Christian Petzold’s Undine (2020) – our subject here. Movies based on or inspired by Andersen’s tale are of course much more common."]

Petkova, Savina. "Christian Petzold’s Material Symbolism." Photogenie (November 4, 2020)

Ryder, Alastair. "Paula Beer on Christian Petzold’s Methodical Approach and Telling a Berlin Fairytale with Undine." The Film Stage (June 2, 2021)

Sheehan, Sophia. "Undine: When a Curse Becomes a Choice." High on Films (July 28, 2023) 

Tallerico, Brian. "Undine." Roger Ebert (June 4, 2021)

ENG 102: Fall 2023 Resources #4

Abdelfetah, Rund, et al. "Affirmative Action." Throughline (June 15, 2023) ["The Supreme Court is expected to rule on affirmative action sometime this month. Most of us understand that some colleges use race as a factor in college admissions. But journalist Jay Caspian Kang argues that this focus is too narrow, and that it avoids harder conversations we need to have as a culture. In his view, focusing on the admissions practices of a select few universities creates "a fight for spots in the elite ranks of society" — and blinds us to the bigger problems plaguing American democracy. On today's episode, we talk with Kang about affirmative action's origins in the civil rights era, what it does and doesn't achieve, and what a more equitable education system could look like."]

Murtha, Tara. "Ode to Billie Joe." AllMusic (March 13, 2023) ["The backstory of one of the all-time great songs and Bobbi Gentry, the woman behind this masterpiece."]

Nayman, Adam. "The Words Don’t Really Matter." The Ringer (April 14, 2023) ["Thirty-five years later, there’s still nothing quite like Hayao Miyazaki’s My Neighbor Totoro."]

Rodriguez, Randall. “Otto the Barbarian: Patriarchy, Feminism, and Romanian New Wave Cinema.” Film Matters (March 15, 2023) ["This article aims at bringing to light some of the underlying themes in Ruxandra Ghițescu’s 2020 film Otto the Barbarian. One way to interpret the film is as an examination of adolescence, anger, and the old ways of life clashing with new ones. I believe that there is another (less obvious) way of interpreting the film: as a criticism of phallocentric cultural norms. Ghițescu does this by turning phallocentric storytelling tropes in on themselves and executes this in a way that keeps the first interpretation of her work intact."] 

Scovell, Adam. Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange. Liverpool University Press, 2017. ["Interest in the ancient, the occult, and the "wyrd" is on the rise. The furrows of Robin Hardy (The Wicker Man), Piers Haggard (Blood on Satan's Claw), and Michael Reeves (Witchfinder General) have arisen again, most notably in the films of Ben Wheatley (Kill List), as has the Spirit of Dark of Lonely Water, Juganets, cursed Saxon crowns, spaceships hidden under ancient barrows, owls and flowers, time-warping stone circles, wicker men, the goat of Mendes, and malicious stone tapes. Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful And Things Strange charts the summoning of these esoteric arts within the latter half of the twentieth century and beyond, using theories of psychogeography, hauntology, and topography to delve into the genre's output in film, television, and multimedia as its "sacred demon of ungovernableness" rises yet again in the twenty-first century."]

Singer, Peter and Tse Yip Fai."What AI Means for Animals." NOEMA (April 18, 2023) ["There is an urgent need to expand AI ethics so that it considers nonhuman life."]

Triangle of Sadness (Sweden: Ruben Östlund, 2022: 147 mins) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive) ["Models Carl and Yaya are invited for a luxury cruise with a rogues’ gallery of super-rich passengers. At first, all appears Instagrammable, but the cruise ends catastrophically and the group find themselves marooned on a desert island."]

Upholt, Boyce. "Saguaro, Free of the Earth." Emergence (May 23, 2023) ["Imagine a world where the mountains and glaciers, trees and waterways and animals—everything comprising our living, breathing planet—had as much a right to exist, legally, as humans. In this narrated essay, author Boyce Upholt travels to meet with the O’odham peoples of the Sonoran Desert, who have long revered the Saguaro cactus as a being with personhood. As Saguaro are bulldozed to make way for a segment of the US-Mexico border wall through Organ Pipe Cactus National Park, existing legal protections for the cactus come up against human-centric and extractive attitudes towards the Earth. Talking with elders from the Tohono O’odham Nation who are acting on behalf of the rooted beings of the desert, Boyce wonders how our Earth might transform if we recognized the dignity of all life."]

Walker, Sara. "AI is Life." NOEMA (April 27, 2023) ["Technology is not artificially replacing life — it is life." "Sara Walker is an astrobiologist and theoretical physicist."]

Warren, Robert. "Ant Dispersal Revisited." In Defense of Plants #419 (April 30, 2023) ["What started as a question about some strange "seeds" in an ant nest turned into an explosion of scientific investigations into the links between oaks, gall wasps, and ants. We revisit a conversation with Dr. Robert Warren in which we discuss the mind-blowing evolutionary insights that can come from natural history observations and what they could mean for seed dispersal in spring ephemerals."]

Zadeh, Joe. "The Tyranny of Time." NOEMA (June 3, 2021) ["The clock is a useful social tool, but it is also deeply political. It benefits some, marginalizes others and blinds us from a true understanding of our own bodies and the world around us."]

ENG 102: Fall 2023 Resources #3

Arnold, Carrie. "The Surprisingly Sophisticated Mind of an Insect." NOEMA (May 5, 2022) ["Insects appear to be more intelligent and emotionally complex than we give them credit for. Perhaps, new research suggests, they are even conscious."]

Bolelli, Danielle. "Sitting Bull (Part 1)" History on Fire #54 (January 30, 2023) ["In historical terms, it was just a blink of an eye ago. In the mid-1800s, the Great Plains in the United States were still firmly in the hands of nomadic, buffalo hunting tribes. The looming threat of American expansion was still barely noticeable. But things changed quickly, and soon the tribes were locked in an existential struggle with the U.S. for control of the heartland of North America. One man rose among these tribes to lead his people to resisting the inevitable for over two decades. By the time he was 10 years old, the boy who would become the Lakota leader Sitting Bull, had killed his first bison by running him down and putting an arrow through its heart. In the opinion of his fellow tribesmen, his ability as a hunter and as a warrior was only second to his generosity in taking care of widows and orphans. In this first episode of this series, we’ll see Sitting Bull dueling man-to-man against a Crow chief, adopting a boy from an enemy tribe, avenging his father (Conan The Barbarian-style), having visions, acquiring shamanic powers, dealing with marriages and grief, leading the first round of warfare against the U.S., and much, much more." Part 2; Part 3; Part 4; Part 5]

Buffington, Jack. "Reinventing the Supply Chain: A 21st-Century Covenant with America (Georgetown University Press, 2023)." New Books in Business, Management, and Marketing (May 5, 2023) ["When the COVID-19 pandemic led to a global economic "shutdown" in March 2020, our supply chains began to fail, and out-of-stocks and delivery delays became the new norm. Contrary to public perception, the pandemic strain did not break the current system of supply chains; it merely exposed weaknesses and fault lines that were decades in the making, and which were already acutely felt in deindustrialized cities and depopulated rural towns throughout the United States. Reinventing the Supply Chain: A 21st-Century Covenant with America (Georgetown UP, 2023) explores the historical role of supply chains in the global economy, outlines where the system went wrong and what needs to be done to fix it, and demonstrates how a retooled supply chain can lead to the revitalization of American communities. Jack Buffington proposes a transformation of the global supply chain system into a community-based value chain, led by the communities themselves and driven by digital platforms for raising capital and blockchain technology. Buffington proposes new solutions to problems that have been decades in the making. With clear analysis and profound insight, Buffington provides a clear roadmap to a more durable and efficient system. Jack Buffington is an assistant professor of the practice in supply chain management in the marketing department at the Daniels College of Business."]

Chow, Vivienne, et al. "Chungking Express — Wong Kar Wai puts "Dreams" on the menu." MUBI Podcast (April 27, 2023) ["Shot on a shoestring in six wild weeks, CHUNGKING EXPRESS is the movie that put legendary Hong Kong filmmaker Wong Kar Wai on the international map—along with his star, pop diva Faye Wong...and her Cantonese cover of The Cranberries's hit "Dreams." Host Rico Gagliano learns how the song, the director, and the singer all came together to capture Hong Kong at a moment of anxiety and hope—and how the tune still unites people in karaoke bars across Asia. Featuring Cranberries guitarist Noel Hogan, Hong Kong-born indiepop star Emma-Lee Moss (aka Emmy The Great), Variety and Artnet writer Vivienne Chow, "Chungking" score co-composer Roel A. Garcia, and NPR critic-at large John Powers—the author, with Wong Kar Wai, of "WKW: The Cinema of Wong Kar Wai.""]

Demuth, Bathsheeba. "Reindeer at the End of the World." Emergence Magazine Podcast (April 4, 2023) ["In this narrated essay from our archive, ecological historian Bathsheba Demuth explores the allure of the apocalyptic arc—the ending of an “old” world and the promise of a new, “perfect” one. As she crosses the easternmost edge of northern Russia, Bathsheba traces the rise and the ruin of the Soviet ideology that imposed its utopian vision of a tamed and commodified tundra upon the Native Chukchi people and their herds of reindeer. Finding uneasy parallels between such aims and today’s capitalist ideals, she considers survival against systems of power, and wonders how we might re-imagine the apocalyptic arc as the world as we know it ends."]

Desmond, Matthew. "Poverty, By America: How U.S. Punishes the Poor & Subsidizes the Wealthy." Democracy Now (April 18, 2023) ["A new study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association finds that poverty is the fourth-greatest cause of death in the United States. Roughly 500 people die from poverty in the U.S. every day. Our guest, sociologist Matthew Desmond, is the author of the new book, Poverty, by America, the follow-up to his Pulitzer Prize-winning book Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City. 'There’s so much poverty in America, not in spite of our wealth, but because of it,' says Desmond in an in-depth interview."]

Flight, Thomas and Tom van der Linden. "Her." Cinema of Meaning #57 (April 6, 2023) ["With new A.I. technologies on the rise, Thomas Flight and Tom van der Linden revisit Spike Jonze’s Her to discuss the extent of its prescience, the effects of technological progress on human culture, and the true nature of consciousness."]

Gavin, Liam, Mike Lee-Graham, and Mike Muncer. "Occult Part 21: A Dark Song." The Evolution of Horror (March 20, 2020) ["For the final in-depth discussion of the series, Mike is joined by Mike Lee-Graham to discuss A DARK SONG in spoilerific detail. Mike also chats to the film’s writer and director, Liam Gavin, about making one of the best cult horror films of the 2010s. "]

Ilievska, Ana and Robert Pogue Harrison. "Failing Intelligence: A Pandemic of Thoughtlessness." Open Source (May 4, 2023) ["We’re humbled—we’re also scared—by the power of chatbots like GPT-4 to do pretty much everything that word people have ever done, but faster and maybe more to the point. The twist in this conversation is that our guests are professional humanists, guardians, and teachers of the hard-earned old wisdom of books, not machines. And the double twist that they want to argue is that the enemy here is not evil AI: it’s us, who have enfeebled the old culture to a vanishing point in the practice of our politics, our media, our most expensive elite universities. Robert Pogue Harrison is our Dante scholar at Stanford, our professional humanist, and a West Coast friend in smart podcasting. We asked ChatGPT about his voice, and we got the instant answer that his voice “has a certain mellowness and introspection” that go with his “keen ear for language and a precise, articulate way of expressing his ideas.” He’s joined by Ana Ilievska, initials A.I. She is Robert’s colleague from Europe in humanistic studies at Stanford. Recently, in the podcast Entitled Opinions, they both defended AI as a wake-up call, maybe in the nick of time, to rescue humanity, human stewardship, human culture from its corrupted condition. They both said they expect their students to use AI and to learn from it."] 

West, Stephen. "What if Consciousness is an Illusion?" Philosophize This! #181 (June 23, 2023) ["And maybe on a more general note, just when it comes to this lifelong process of trying to be as clear thinking of a human being as you possibly can be, maybe part of that whole process is accepting the fact that there is no, single, monistic way of analyzing reality that is the ultimate method of understanding it. Maybe understanding reality just takes a more pluralistic approach, maybe getting as close to the truth as we can as people takes looking at reality from many different angles at many different scales, and maybe phenomenal consciousness is an important scale of reality that we need to be considering. "]

Zadeh, Joe. "The Conscious Universe." NOEMA (November 17, 2021) ["The radical idea that everything has elements of consciousness is reemerging and breathing new life into a cold and mechanical cosmos."]

Horror Genre, Weird Studies, and Monster Theory

  [This is being developed for my Fall 2023 ENG 281 film course and to track my interest in the "wyrd/weird" and "monster theory."]

I classify "weird fiction" as not necessarily a genre-in-itself, instead it operates in the interstices of mainstream genres, creating through poetic prose, vivid imagery, hallucinatory experiences, existential angst, dream logic and shocking stories, a powerful effect upon the reader, provoking them to start to see the mundane world with a slant. If you look at the etymology of 'wyrd' it originates as the "power to control destiny" (no doubt in a magical or ritual sense) and morphs to the latter "weird" meaning of "unearthly" or strange. These stories stay with you, taking root deep inside your consciousness, reverberating like the ripples of a deep pond disturbed by a thrown rock and provoke you to rethink what you have always taken for granted. There is a commercial genre called "the new weird" (also an older pulp magazine "weird" usually involving cosmic horror) and some of these books/authors would be slotted into my broad genre classification here (many are not), but in the spirit of actual weirdness I include other books/films that operate under the aesthetic classification described above without being marketed as "new weird." The disturbance to perceived reality also may take place through a decoding/encoding process that challenge and restructure (exposing the myths and inconsistencies) dominant narratives/pathways (also see situationist détournement and derive). Often these weird narratives represent/present a dream logic as being just as important/relevant as our waking logic. The purpose is to expose the cracks in the foundations of controlling narratives, destabilizing them through weird narratives that shake the assured assumptions of its adherents. The concepts of carnivalesque revelry and the dialogic nature of consciousness as theorized by Mikhail Bakhtin are equally important, in that they involve the reversal of a dominant order and/or an exposure of the fantasy of the controlling order, in the process revealing the many perspectives/voices that are silenced/masked. As disturbing as these can be for many, perhaps the most problematic aspect of many weird narratives would be the decentering of humans (as the center of the universe) and explorations/recognitions of non-human perspectives. Importantly, in the context of my own American culture, this also involves narrative & theoretical displacement of our particular hegemonic way of seeing & being as the baseline for thinking about and understanding the world. In film studies there has also been a classification of Mind Fuck films which would be included here. All of these can provide a cathartic release from the anxiety/terror of the really fucked-up weird situation we are living through and the twisted creatures that our at the helm of planet earth. [Editorial note: my definition was originally written during the 2020 COVID-19 Pandemic]. Under no circumstance is weird meant in a derogatory way.  Anyone who does a deep dive into science, especially theories of consciousness and reality, knows that science is seriously weird. I appreciate works that challenge our constructed reality, pushing us to see that there is not just one way. Also it should be understood that what seems weird to some may seem obvious and normal to others. One of the great benefits of learning across time and space/places is that it can, following Bertolt Brecht, "make the familiar strange." Michael Dean Benton (May 2020; revised July 2022)

I am indebted to Jeff & Ann Vandermeer's theorization & mapping of The Weird,  G. Smalley's website 366 Weird Movies, Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock's collection Monster Theory Reader, Erich Kuersten's Acidemic, J.F. Martel and Phil Ford's Weird Studies, Mike Muncer's The Evolution of Horror, and the community involved with The Outer Dark. Special thanks to life coach Ryan Watts who insightfully remarked "you are a conceptual person" (sometimes you need someone to point out the obvious) and for listening to me talk about my interests in these subjects.

--------------------------------------------

8 1/2 (Italy/France: Federico Fellini, 1963) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive) ["Guido Anselmi, a film director, finds himself creatively barren at the peak of his career. Urged by his doctors to rest, Anselmi heads for a luxurious resort, but a sorry group gathers—his producer, staff, actors, wife, mistress, and relatives—each one begging him to get on with the show. In retreat from their dependency, he fantasizes about past women and dreams of his childhood."]

28 Days Later (UK: Danny Boyle, 2002) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive) ["Twenty-eight days after a killer virus was accidentally unleashed from a British research facility, a small group of London survivors are caught in a desperate struggle to protect themselves from the infected. Carried by animals and humans, the virus turns those it infects into homicidal maniacs – and it’s absolutely impossible to contain."]

2001: A Space Odyssey (USA/UK: Stanley Kubrick, 1968) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive) ["Humanity finds a mysterious object buried beneath the lunar surface and sets off to find its origins with the help of HAL 9000, the world’s most advanced super computer."]

A Clockwork Orange (UK/USA: Stanley Kubrick, 1971) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive) ["In a near-future Britain, young Alexander DeLarge and his pals get their kicks beating and raping anyone they please. When not destroying the lives of others, Alex swoons to the music of Beethoven. The state, eager to crack down on juvenile crime, gives an incarcerated Alex the option to undergo an invasive procedure that’ll rob him of all personal agency. In a time when conscience is a commodity, can Alex change his tune?"]

The Act of Killing (Denmark/Norway/UK/Sweden/Finland: Joshua Oppenheimer, 2012) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive) [“In Southeast Asia, as in other places, dictators appoint rats and cockroaches as their executors, and they live to tell their tales. This experimental documentary is a horror show, a dagger, a guillotine, a confession box in an insane asylum. It’s also a very frightening lesson on history and how we remember it” — Kong Rithdee]

Adaptation (USA: Spike Jonze, 2002) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive) ["Nicolas Cage is Charlie Kaufman, a confused L.A. screenwriter overwhelmed by feelings of inadequacy, sexual frustration, self-loathing, and by the screenwriting ambitions of his freeloading twin brother Donald (Nicolas Cage). While struggling to adapt "The Orchid Thief," by Susan Orlean (Meryl Streep), Kaufman's life spins from pathetic to bizarre. The lives of Kaufman, Orlean's book, become strangely intertwined as each one's search for passion collides with the others'."]

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (USA: Ana Lily Amirpour, 2014) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Archive) ["In the Iranian ghost-town Bad City, a place that reeks of death and loneliness, the townspeople are unaware they are being stalked by a lonesome vampire."]

Aguirre, The Wrath of God (West Germany: Werner Herzog, 1972) ["A towering vision. As grand as the mist-enshrouded mountains and as chaotically mad as a raft overtaken by monkeys; Herzog's film removes any barrier between audience and character, fact and fiction, reality and dreams. By the end, even the ordinary is swirling, collapsing its horrific, surreal depths into a single image of colossal weight. Not one second is detached from Werner Herzog's own journey. Its voyage beyond the expanses of civilization mirror the unyielding ambition of artistry, showcasing the possibilities and dangers of cinema through a stolen camera lens. It's the kind of movie that makes you wonder not only "how'd they do that?" but "why?", and although…" - Silent Dawn]

Ahmad, Aalya. "Feminist Spaces in Horrific Places: Teaching Gender and Horror Cinema." Offscreen 18.6/7 (July 2014) ["My objective for “The Monstrous Feminist” was not to “convert” feminists into horror fans, although that did sometimes happen, but to open up horizons for both horror and feminisms. Firstly, I wanted to offer horror as a site of critical reflection to students who might be unaccustomed to combining their feminism with film or literary theory and cultural studies. Secondly, I wanted to expand on well-known feminist theoretical analyses that seemed to lock feminisms into perpetual struggle with horror, raising intriguing questions of gendered spectatorship. In what follows, I will briefly review a few of these theories in discussing the experiences of the “Monstrous Feminists,” who repeatedly demonstrated that the feminist classroom can engender interpretive strategies beyond the scope of the “male gaze” first conceptualized by Laura Mulvey in “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975). Mulvey’s influential essay tends to exclude the possibility of a gaze that is not only acutely aware of what horror does with and to women, but also of what feminists might do with and to horror."]

Ajram, Sofia. "Monstrum Montreal Time-Loop Lecture." Personal Website (November 2019) ["The wealth of time loop stories out there testifies to the resonance of a concept which raises questions about choice and fate, cause-and-effect, puzzles and purgatory. This two-week course will offer a framing definition of "time loop" films, tracing their origins to the origins of film in the 1890s and looking at the cinematic universe of Justin Benson & Aaron Moorhead in The Endless (2017), Spring (2014) and Resolution (2012). The course will consider how the Hero's Journey archetype theorized by Joseph Campbell applies to "time loop" films, as well as Benson and Moorhead's metatextual and metafictional approach to storytelling, their use of Lovecraftian tropes, and their Brechtian aesthetics. Finally, we will look at the monster in The Endless within the context of exoticism in horror (e.g., how King Kong, Creature from the Black Lagoon, etc. are made horrific by their spectacularly unfamiliar environments, and how this translates to the mutual space of The Endless and its sister film Resolution, which take place in the same uncanny environment, unsettled by the presence of white settlers encroaching upon indigenous territory."]

Alien (UK/USA: Ridley Scott, 1979) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive) ["During its return to the earth, commercial spaceship Nostromo intercepts a distress signal from a distant planet. When a three-member team of the crew discovers a chamber containing thousands of eggs on the planet, a creature inside one of the eggs attacks an explorer. The entire crew is unaware of the impending nightmare set to descend upon them when the alien parasite planted inside its unfortunate host is birthed."]

Amelie (France/Germany: Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2001) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive) ["Amélie is a fanciful comedy about a young woman who discretely orchestrates the lives of the people around her, creating a world exclusively of her own making. Shot in over 80 Parisian locations, acclaimed director Jean-Pierre Jeunet ("Delicatessen"; "The City of Lost Children") invokes his incomparable visionary style to capture the exquisite charm and mystery of modern-day Paris through the eyes of a beautiful ingenue."]

American Nightmare (USA: Adam Simon, 2000: 71 mins) [Amy Lynn on Amazon: "This is a documentary about horror films and their impact on the world between 1968-1979. We get to hear the points of views of the directors of some of the most frightening classic horror films ever made. ... Tobe Hooper, John Carpenter, David Cronenberg, John Landis, Wes Craven, George Romero and more. We get an in depth look at the politics and upheaval of the 60's and 70's and how they influenced ... the horror genre..."]

American Psycho (USA: Mary Harron, 2000: 102 mins) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive) ["A wealthy New York City investment banking executive, Patrick Bateman, hides his alternate psychopathic ego from his co-workers and friends as he delves deeper into his violent, hedonistic fantasies."]

A Nightmare on Elm Street (USA: Wes Craven, 1984) and its sequels Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive) ["There is something undeniably resonant about the simplicity of A Nightmare on Elm Street’s premise: a killer that targets you in your sleep. A gaggle of teens are preyed on by the vengeful ghost of the pederast Freddie Krueger, who holds a grudge against their parents. Unlike other slasher killers of the time, Krueger (an iconic role for Robert Englund) was a monster in life and empowered by death, relentlessly torturing teenagers in their safest of safe places: their own dreams. Wes Craven takes full advantage of the aesthetic possibilities of dream logic, creating some of the most terrifying and celebrated images of modern horror." – Anna Bogutskaya.]

Annihilation (UK/USA: Alex Garland, 2018) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive) ["Lena, a biologist and former soldier, joins a mission to uncover what happened to her husband inside Area X -- a sinister and mysterious phenomenon that is expanding across the American coastline. Once inside, the expedition discovers a world of mutated landscapes and creatures, as dangerous as it is beautiful, that threatens both their lives and their sanity."]

Apocalypse Now (USA: Francis Ford Coppola, 1979) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive) ["In Vietnam in 1970, Captain Willard (Martin Sheen) takes a perilous and increasingly hallucinatory journey upriver to find and terminate Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando), a once-promising officer who has reportedly gone completely mad. In the company of a Navy patrol boat filled with street-smart kids, a surfing-obsessed Air Cavalry officer (Robert Duvall), and a crazed freelance photographer (Dennis Hopper), Willard travels further and further into the heart of darkness."]

Armstrong, Raymond. "All Consuming Passions: Peter Greenaway's The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover." Reel Food: Essays on Food and Film. ed. Anne L. Bower. Routledge, 2004: 219 - 234. {Professor has a copy of the book.] 

Arrival (USA: Denis Villeneuve, 2016) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive) ["Linguistics professor Louise Banks (Amy Adams) leads an elite team of investigators when gigantic spaceships touch down in 12 locations around the world. As nations teeter on the verge of global war, Banks and her crew must race against time to find a way to communicate with the extraterrestrial visitors. Hoping to unravel the mystery, she takes a chance that could threaten her life and quite possibly all of mankind."]

Aster, Ari. "Hereditary." Film Comment Podcast (June 14, 2018) ["For the release of horror sensation Hereditary, we invited the film’s director, Ari Aster, to come for a wide-ranging chat. The talk was moderated by FSLC Editorial Director Michael Koresky, who wrote of Hereditary in our May/June issue: “We are compelled by our family stories, but they are often constructed narratives, given to biases, subjectivities, fictions. If at times Hereditary feels more like an askew domestic melodrama than a horror movie, that’s not accidental.” Aster talks about his love of Ingmar Bergman, his fear of The Wiz, his next project, and the arduous road to staging a scene just so.

Atkins, Peter, et al. "Horror Cafe." (Posted on Youtube: Originally aired on BBC September 15, 1990) ["A round-table discussion about horror, featuring Clive Barker, Ramsey Campbell, Lisa Tuttle, Roger Corman, John Carpenter and Peter Atkins."]

S

Audition (Japan: Takashi Miike, 1999) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive)

The Babadook (Australia: Jennifer Kent, 2014) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive)

Bacon, Simon, ed. Horror: A Companion. Peter Lang, 2019. [Professor has a copy.]

Balaban, Bob, et al. "Altered States (1980)." The Projection Booth #216 (April 28, 2015) ["Based on the book by and adapted for the screen by Paddy Chayefsky, Ken Russell's Altered States tells the tale of Edward Jessup (William Hurt), a scientist who’s looking for answers to some of the big questions of life, memory, spirituality, and more. He meets, marries, divorces, and reconciles with Emily (Blair Brown) over the course of a decade of study where he ingests some questionable substances while subjecting himself to sensory deprivation. Here Eddie finds a way to travel back in time through his own body’s chemistry to the days of primeval man."]

Bamboozled (USA: Spike Lee, 2000) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive)

Banks, Julie. "Innocent When You Dream: Affect and Perception through Lucile Hadzihalilovic’s Innocence." Screening the Past (September 2013)

Barker, Jennifer Lynne. The Aesthetics of Antifascist Film: Radical Projection. Routledge, 2013. [Get through interlibrary loan]

Barton Fink (USA: Joel and Ethan Coen, 1991) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive)

Battle Royale (Japan: Kinji Fukasaku, 2000) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive)

Beasts of the Southern Wild (USA: Benh Zeitlin, 2012) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive)

Benjamin, Walter. "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." (Originally published 1936: copy on Marxists Internet Archive)

Berrett, Trevor, David Blakeslee and Scott Nye. "Jack Clayton's The Innocents." Criterion Cast #187 (October 25, 2017) ["This genuinely frightening, exquisitely made supernatural gothic stars Deborah Kerr as an emotionally fragile governess who comes to suspect that there is something very, very wrong with her precocious new charges. A psychosexually intensified adaptation of Henry James’s classic The Turn of the Screw, cowritten by Truman Capote and directed by Jack Clayton, The Innocents is a triumph of narrative economy and technical expressiveness, from its chilling sound design to the stygian depths of its widescreen cinematography by Freddie Francis."]

The Big Lebowski (USA: Joel and Ethan Coen, 1998)  Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive)

Birdman (USA/Canada: Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2014) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive)

"Black Horror: The Revolutionary Act of Subverting the White Gaze." Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies (February 2018)

Blade Runner (USA/Hong Kong: Ridley Scott, 1982) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive)

Blade Runner 2049 (UK/USA/Canada: Denis Villeneuve, 2017) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive)

Blue Velvet (USA: David Lynch, 1986) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive)

Bobiy, Mikaela. "Sensory Overload: Unconscious Communication and Inter-Personal Psychosis in David Cronenberg’s The Dead Zone." Monstrum 5.1 (June 2022)

Bond, Lewis. "Andrei Tarkovsky - Poetic Harmony." (Posted on Youtube: April 29, 2016)

Booth, Max, III. "Fun in the Funhole: Exploring Kathe Koje's Cipher." LitReactor (February 19, 2018)

Bradley, S.A. "Addendum of Doom: The Folk Horror Edition." Hellbent for Horror #2.5 (March 23, 2016) [Discussion of the films The Blood on Satan's Claw (1971), Wake Wood (2009), and Kill List (2011).]

---. "Fear of God: Faith Based Horror." Hellbent for Horror #41 (May 18, 2017) ["Religion is a comfort to some, and a horror to others. Some very good horror movies focus on deeds done in the name of the Almighty. The characters in these movies hear voices, or have dreams, and they’re compelled to act in strange and horrible ways. Are they mad? Are they? These movies haunt you because there’s not an easy answer."]

---. "The First Kiss." Hell Bent for Horror #1 (March 6, 2016) [Discussion of Nicholas Roeg's 1973 film Don't Look Now.]

---. "If You Aren’t Afraid in The Woods, You Haven’t Gone Deep Enough." Hell Bent for Horror #2 (March 18, 2016) [Discussion of the films The Hallow (2015), Eyes of Fire (1983), and Witchfinder General (1968). Also Algernon Blackwood's 1910 short story "The Wendigo."]

---. "Killed by Death." Hellbent for Horror #33 (February 27, 2017)

---. "My Horror Manifesto." Hellbent for Horror #66 (February 9, 2018)

---. "My Ride's Here: Remembering George A. Romero." Hellbent for Horror #48 (July 27, 2017)

---. "The Old Gods of Springtime Horror." Hellbent for Horror (April 10, 2018) ["Things might look bright and warm during Springtime, but there's something sinister underneath the surface. The pastel colors of the flowers camouflage the blood and death in the soil that helped them grow. When the difference between life and death depended on a bountiful harvest, people made human sacrifices to appease the Old Gods of the earth. In this episode I talk about horror movies devoted to the Old Gods of Springtime, man's uneasy connection to the earth, and how groups of people can be scarier than the Old Gods themselves."]

Bradley, S.A. and James Hancock. "Enfant Terrible: Roman Polanski's Monsters." Hellbent for Horror #38 (April 19, 2917)

Brazil (UK: Terry Gilliam, 1985) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive)

Breznican, Anthony. "Black Storytellers Are Using Horror to Battle Hate." Vanity Fair (August 3, 2020) ["After Get Out, movies such as Antebellum, the upcoming Candyman retelling, and other tales of terror and the macabre are part of a cultural exorcism centuries in the making."]

Bridle, James. Ways of Being - Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence. Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2022. ["Artist, technologist, and philosopher James Bridle’s Ways of Being is a brilliant, searching exploration of different kinds of intelligence—plant, animal, human, artificial—and how they transform our understanding of humans’ place in the cosmos. What does it mean to be intelligent? Is it something unique to humans or shared with other beings— beings of flesh, wood, stone, and silicon? The last few years have seen rapid advances in “artificial” intelligence. But rather than a friend or companion, AI increasingly appears to be something stranger than we ever imagined, an alien invention that threatens to decenter and supplant us. At the same time, we’re only just becoming aware of the other intelligences that have been with us all along, even if we’ve failed to recognize or acknowledge them. These others—the animals, plants, and natural systems that surround us—are slowly revealing their complexity, agency, and knowledge, just as the technologies we’ve built to sustain ourselves are threatening to cause their extinction and ours. What can we learn from them, and how can we change ourselves, our technologies, our societies, and our politics to live better and more equitably with one another and the nonhuman world? The artist and maverick thinker James Bridle draws on biology and physics, computation, literature, art, and philosophy to answer these unsettling questions. Startling and bold, Ways of Being explores the fascinating, strange, and multitudinous forms of knowing, doing, and being that make up the world, and that are essential for our survival."]

Bringing Out the Dead (USA: Martin Scorsese, 1999)  Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive)

Brockmann, Stephen. A Critical History of German Film. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2010.  [Has chapters on The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), Metropolis (1927), Aguirre, The Wrath of God (1972), Wings of Desire (1987), and Run Lola Run (1998).] Professor has copy of the book - ask if you want a chapter copied.]

Bronson, Zak. "Thinking Weirdly with China Miéville." Los Angeles Review of Books (November 13, 2018)

Bulkin, Nadia, Mike D. and Tyler Unsell. "A Dark Song." The Horror Pod Class (April 18, 2019) ["Today we are talking to one of our favorite horror and weird fiction authors, Nadia Bulkin! We discuss a really great movie that she turned us on to on Netflix called A Dark Song. Specifically, we discuss the concept of the Sublime and how it interacts with horror fiction."]

Bulkin, Nadia, et al. "The Outer Dark Symposium 2019, Part 5: Ecstatic Weird Panel." The Outer Dark (October 10, 2019) ["In this podcast The Outer Dark presents the fifth installment of The Outer Dark Symposium on the Greater Weird 2019 including the panel ‘The Ecstatic Weird: The Weird as a Source of Transcendence and Awe’, moderated by Gordon B White and featuring Nadia Bulkin, Selena Chambers, Kurt Fawver, Orrin Grey, and Liv Rainey-Smith, as well as readings by Jeff Strand, Kurt Fawver, and Zin E Rocklyn. Also Gordon B White presents Reviews from The Weird including Spirits Unwrapped (Lethe Press), edited by Daniel Braum, and Luminous Body (Dim Shores), by Brooke Warra. The readings and panel were recorded live on Saturday March 23, 2019 at Silver Scream FX Lab in Atlanta, GA. Reviews from The Weird was recorded on Oct. 3, 2019."]

Butler, Andrew Mark. "Ontology and Ethics in the Writings of Philip K Dick." (Ph.D Thesis at University of Hull: October 1995)

The Cabin in the Woods (USA: Drew Goddard, 2012) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive)

Cade, Octavia. "Women, Monstrosity and Horror: Gynaehorror by Erin Harrington." Strange Horizons (September 18, 2017)

Cam (USA: Daniel Goldhaber, 2018) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive)

Cardin, Matt. "On Horror: Cosmic and Personal." Against Everyone (August 8, 2023) ["There are few genres that have inspired such a furor of regulation, stigma, and anger (aside from pornography, and pornography may be beyond genre and in fact its own form... more on that some other time). Horror is regulated by governments, has been the topic of countless moralistic exams rations and moral panics, has been blamed for disintegrating societies, and more. Horror itself horrifies. And when horror does become accepted, at best it is said by critics to "transcend the genre." Which means it's really just transcending the stigma the critics have by re-asserting it. This happens so often that this is a belabored observation, and nevertheless the claim to transcendence keeps happening. But who am I to talk about beleaguered horror? The fact is, it is also wildly popular. Even a terrible horror movie can be quite popular, and the most consistently bestselling author of all time is a horror writer. What does that mean? Across these episodes, I’ll be talking about horror in its many forms: cosmic horror, body horror, suburban horror, monster horror, possession horror, and more; with some of my favorite horror creators and horror thinkers. We'll be asking the deep questions and seeing what unlit paths they lead us down. What is horror for? Why do we condemn it even as we flock to it? What is the horror-nature of being? What happens when the imagination explores the violence, the darkness, and the screaming in the inner landscape and when we conjure it into art? You don't have to know much horror or even like horror to follow along with these episodes; each one will reveal a horror of life, of being human. Horror remains the best tool to investigate evil and to overcome it. To kick off this series, I'll start with the tension between the horrors of the cosmos and the horrors of the personal, with horror scholar and writer, Matt Cardin."]

Carrol, Noel. The Philosophy of Horror or Paradoxes of the Heart. Routledge, 1990.

Carter, David. "The Climb to The Holy Mountain." A Place for Film (September 5, 2017)

Cemetary Man (Italy/France/Germany: Michele Soavi, 1994) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive)

Clark, Ashley. "Alien abductions: 12 Years a Slave and the past as science fiction."  Sight and Sound (April 14, 2015)

---. Facing Blackness: Media and Minstrelsy in Spike Lee's Bamboozled. The Critical Press, 2015. [Professor has copy.]

Clasen, Mathias. Why Horror Seduces. Oxford University Press, 2017. [Professor has copy.]

Close Encounters of the Third Kind (USA: Steven Spielberg, 1977) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive)

Cloud Atlas (Germany/USA/Hong Kong/Singapore: Tom Tykwer, Lana Wachowski and Lily Wachowski, 2012) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive)

Clover, Carol J. "Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film." Misogyny, Misandry, and Misanthropy. Eds. R. Howard Bloch and Frances Ferguson. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989: 187-221.

Collins, Brian, et al. "Polymath Robert Eisler: Episode 1 Man Into Wolf." New Books in Biography (June 9, 2020) ["In this episode, we discuss how I discovered Robert Eisler’s Man into Wolf: An Anthropological Interpretation of Sadism, Masochism, and Lycanthropy and unpack the book’s argument that modern humans are descended from primates who imitated the hunting practices and pack hierarchies of wolves during the scarcity of the ice age. We also hear from a crime novelist and a sociologist who were inspired by Man into Wolf in their own work and examine Eisler’s take on evolution."]

Cosmopolis (France/Canada/Portugal/Italy: David Croneberg, 2012) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive)

Cox, Damian and Michael P. Levine. Thinking Through Film: Doing Philosophy, Watching Movies. Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. [Has chapters on La Jetee (1962), Funny Games (1997), The Matrix (1999), and Memento (2000). Professor has a copy.]

Crash (Canada/United Kingdom: David Cronenberg, 1996) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive)

Creed, Barbara. "Horror and the Monstrous-Feminine: An Imaginary Abjection." (Excerpt of essay originally published in Screen, January 1986)

---. Return of the Monstrous Feminine: Feminist New Wave Cinema. Taylor & Francis, 2022. ["This follow-up to the classic text of The Monstrous-Feminine analyses those contemporary films which explore social justice issues such as women’s equality, violence against women, queer relationships, race and the plight of the planet and its multi-species. Examining a new movement – termed by Creed as Feminist New Wave Cinema – The Return of the Monstrous-Feminine explores a significant change that has occurred over the past two decades in the representation of the monstrous-feminine in visual discourse. The Monstrous-Feminine is a figure in revolt on a journey through the dark night of abjection. Taking particular interest in women directors who create the figure of the Monstrous-Feminine, in cinema that foregrounds everyday horrors in addition to classic horror, Creed looks at a range of diverse films including The Babadook, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, Nomadland, Carol, Raw, Revenge, and the television series The Handmaid’s Tale. These films center on different forms of revolt, from inner revolt to social, supernatural and violent revolt, which appear in Feminist New Wave Cinema. These relate in the main to the emergence of a range of social protest movements that have gathered momentum in the new millennium and given voice to new theoretical and critical discourses. These include: third and fourth wave feminism, the #MeToo movement, queer theory, race theory, the critique of anthropocentrism and human animal theory. These theoretical discourses have played a key role in influencing Feminist New Wave Cinema whose films are distinctive, stylish and diverse."]

Crimson Peak (USA: Guillermo del Toro, 2015) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive)

Curti, Roberto. "Teruo Ishii, the Outcast." Offscreen (May 31, 2003)

Cwik, Greg. "Corman and Poe: Decadent Degradation." Reverse Shot (October 20, 2022) ["Undoubtedly the most sustained and lavish cinematic project around Poe’s work is B-movie legend Roger Corman’s cycle of films based on the master's stories, released by American International Pictures between 1960 and 1964. Translating Poe to a visual medium is an inherently tricky endeavor: though the plots of his stories lend themselves to film, with their exquisite imagery of the eerie and evil, the everlasting poignancy of his work is his deftly diabolical use of language to conjure moods of ominous ineffability (“So violent a rudeness, untenanted by any tangible form," he says of the ruthlessly affluent Prospero in his 1842 story “The Masque of the Red Death,” a description that defies visualization). His is a sui generis sinisterness, an assault of adjectives and serpentine syntax, and a supreme rebuttal to the preference for simplicity in prose that would become trendy in the mid twentieth century. But Corman, like Baudelaire, found a kindred spirit in Poe. The films, shot in scope with luscious colors and crystalline compositions that belie their small budgets, are not literal adaptations, but amalgamations mingling different stories with the typical Corman touches and the elegant and unnerving elocution of recurring star Vincent Price."]

Daisies (Czechoslovakia: Vera Chytilová, 1966: 74 mins) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive)

Dalpe, Victoria, et al. "State of the Weird 2019, A Roundtable Discussion." The Outer Dark (October 24, 2019)  ["Victoria Dalpe, Gwendolyn Kiste, John Langan and Teri.Zin (Zin E Rocklyn) join host/moderator Scott Nicolay for the most epic episode of The Outer Dark since The State of the Weird 2018. The roundtable conversation kicks off with reactions to pronouncements that the Weird Renaissance/boom is over at a time when so many talented writers from disenfranchised groups (women, PoC, LBGTQ+, disabled) are expanding and transforming Weird fiction with game-changing work. The authors discuss how more perspectives lift all writers and increase readership, the importance of having editors of color and other marginalized groups, changing the definition of agency especially in relation to mentally ill characters, the need to retool storytelling in ways that reflect diverse experiences and not just the same old archetypes, why Weird fiction is a fertile space for exploring different narrative and genre expectations, steps writers and readers can take to support new voices, recognition of Michael Kelly for the now retired award-winning Year’s Best Weird Fiction series (Undertow Publishing), Nightscape Press as an example of a risk-taking press, ‘Trojan Horsing’ diverse authors into anthologies along with the same big names, a Small Press Challenge for listeners, questions from the audience, and the future of Weird fiction."]

The Dark Knight (USA: Christoper Nolan, 2008) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive)

Davis, Erik. "Weird Shit." Boing Boing (July 14, 2014)

Davis, Nick. "Possession: Hopelessly Devoted to You." Reverse Shot (July 22, 2022) ["Andrzej Żuławski’s Possession has the feel of something produced by a coven, not a crew. It’s the kind of movie envisioned by all those obsidian novels about occult cinema, your Nightfilms and your Zerovilles, though nothing can equal the direct experience of such unhinged impulse and imagination on screen. An infamous target of worldwide censorship, Possession isn’t just “designed to provoke,” a goal that often relies paradoxically on familiar scripts. We’ve all seen plenty of work by artists keen to set us squirming, pushing the very buttons we expect them to push. It’s much rarer to sense each member of a creative confederacy testing their own most dangerous limits, jumping onto the tracks and licking that third rail. It’s rarer still for that charge to feel undimmed after four decades."]

Dead Man (USA/Germany/Japan: Jim Jarmusch, 1995) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive)

Deibler, Emily. "The Sublime's Effects in Gothic Fiction." The Artifice (December 29, 2015)

Deighan, Samm and Kat Ellinger. "Lust for a Female Vampire Lover: The Evolution of Lesbian Vampires in Cinema, Part 1." Daughters of Darkness #1 (March 12, 2016) ["This first episode of three begins by examining the lesbian vampire from her origins in eighteenth century Gothic literature, particularly Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s unfinished poem “Christabel” (1797) and Irish writer Sheridan Le Fanu’s story “Carmilla” (1871), both of which explore themes of monstrosity, repressed sexuality, and female identity. “Carmilla” — the source material for the majority of lesbian vampire films — follows a lonely young woman named Laura, who makes a strange, seductive new friend, Carmilla, whose designs on Laura are decidedly sanguinary. Carl Theodor Dreyer’s surreal horror film Vampyr (1932) was the first to adapt “Carmilla,” however loosely, but was followed soon after by the more straightforward Universal horror film, Dracula’s Daughter (1936). The latter — with its depiction of an elegant, sympathetic female vampire reluctantly driven to act out her bloodlust out on female as well as male victims — was among the first to portray vampirism as a blend of madness, female hysteria, sexual dysfunction, and addiction. Dracula’s Daughter would influence subsequent adaptations of “Carmilla,” like Roger Vadim’s lush arthouse effort Blood and Roses (1960) and obscure Italian Gothic horror film Crypt of the Vampire (1964). The film co-starred Hammer star Christopher Lee, who spends much of the running time in an outrageous smoking jacket. Speaking of Hammer studios, the episode wraps up with a discussion of their Karnstein trilogy, a watershed moment for lesbian vampire cinema. Films like The Vampire Lovers (1970), Lust for a Vampire (1971), and Twins of Evil (1971) — as well as some of the studio’s outlier efforts like The Brides of Dracula (1960) or Countess Dracula (1971) — left a bloody mark on vampire films. With minimal violence and plenty of nudity from buxom starlets like Ingrid Pitt, these films generally depict aristocratic vampires preying on innocent young ladies in pastoral settings. A film like The Vampire Lovers was famous for its use of lesbianism and casual nudity, but is quite restrained compared to the films discussed in episode two by European directors like Jess Franco and Jean Rollin."]

---. "Lust for a Female Vampire: The Evolution of Lesbian Vampires in Cinema, Part 2." Daughters of Darkness #2 (March 28, 2017) ["Kat and Samm continue their three-part discussion of lesbian vampire films, this time with a focus on European cult directors like Jess Franco, Jean Rollin, and Walerian Borowczyk. They begin their discussion with the career of the prolific Jess Franco, who produced a number of films with lesbian vampire themes, namely Vampyros Lesbos (1971). This starred his first muse, Soledad Miranda, as the mysterious Countess Carody, who sunbathes by day but thirsts for blood at night. Franco also adapted Bram Stoker’s novel with the relatively traditional Count Dracula (1970), but continued to explore his own perverse variations on vampire mythology in Dracula’s Daughter (1972) and the explicit Female Vampire (1975), with his longtime partner Lina Romay. Also explored is the work of French director Jean Rollin, known for his dreamlike, often surreal vampire films such as The Rape of the Vampire (1968), The Nude Vampire (1970), The Shiver of the Vampires (1971), and Requiem for a Vampire (1973). While these films infrequently use overt depictions of lesbianism, they are generally concerned with pairs or groups of female vampires banded together against the world. In films like Fascination (1979), about blood-drinking socialites, and The Living Dead Girl (1982), the tragic tale of a love that survives beyond death, Rollin expanded on his early themes. The episode concludes with a discussion of a few films that touch upon the legend of historical murderer and alleged blood-drinker Elizabeth Bathory. Most importantly is Belgian film Daughters of Darkness (1971), the podcast’s namesake, which follows a newly married couple who encounter an elegant and possibly ageless woman at a seaside hotel."]

Deighan, Sam and Mike White. "The Cremator (1968)." The Projection Booth #341 (September 19, 2017) ["Czechtember continues with a look at Juraj Herz's The Cremator (AKA Spalovac mrtvol). Released in 1968, the year of the Prague Spring, the film stars Rudolf Hrusínský as Karl (or Roman) Kopfrkingl, a man dedicated to the idea of liberating the soul from the body through the practice of cremation. Samm Deighan joins Mike to discuss collaborators and the madness that gripped the world in the 1930s and '40s."]

Demonlover (France: Olivier Assayas, 2002) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Archive)

Dennis, Zach, et al. "Freaks." Cinematary #164 (October 6, 2017)

Derry, Charles. Dark Dreams 2.0: A Psychological History of the Modern Horror Film from the 1950s to the 21st Century. McFarland and Co., 2009.

The Devil's Backbone (Spain/Mexico: Guillermo del Toro, 2001) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Archive)

The Devils (United Kingdom: Ken Russell, 1971) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Archive)

Dick, Philip K. "If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who use the words." Dialogic (January 8, 2009)

Dickey, Colin. "The Suburban Horror of the Indian Burial Ground." The New Republic (October 19, 2016) ["In the 1970s and 1980s, homeowners were terrified by the idea that they didn't own the land they'd just bought."]

"Director Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘Shadow of a Doubt’ – ‘Psycho’ – ‘The Birds’." Sound on Sight #309 (February 29, 2012)

Diresta, Renee. "Online Conspiracy Groups Are a Lot Like Cults." Wired (November 13, 2018)

District 9 (USA/New Zealand: Neill Blomkamp, 2009: 112 mins) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive)

Dixon, Wheeler Winston. "An Artist Always Paints His Own Portrait": : Jean Cocteau’s Testament of Orpheus (1960)." Senses of Cinema #95 (July 2020)

Dogtooth (Greece: Giorgos Lanthimos, 2009) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive)

Doherty, Caitlin. "Enter: Monsters." New Left Review (January 28, 2022) ["In an introduction to Frankenstein, written for a new edition of the work in 1831, Mary Shelley recounted a question she had been asked frequently in the thirteen years since the novel’s publication: how had she, ‘then a young girl, come to think and to dilate upon so very hideous an idea?’ A prying concern permeates the query, as if the monstrosity of the work’s content must indicate perverse conditions of production, some titillating mistreatment inflicted on the nineteen-year-old Shelley that could justify the creation of a new category of monster. For Julia Ducournau, director of the Palme D’Or-winning Titane (2021), the fallacy of the question would be obvious. No backstory is necessary: to be a young girl is monstrous inspiration enough."]

Don't Look Up (USA: Adam McKay, 2021) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive)

Donnie Darko (USA: Richard Kelly, 2001) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive)

Dorian, M.J. "H.R. Giger: A Beautiful Darkness." Creative Codex #9 (September 2, 2019) ["H.R. Giger is considered by many to be the most evil artist in history. Join us as we take a deep dive into the abyss where Giger's strange ideas are born. In this episode we also explore: how did Giger create a style so distinct that people see it as 'out of this world'?"]

The Double Life of Veronique (Poland/France/Norway: Krzysztof Kieslowski, 1991) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive)

Dowd, A.A. "Hereditary is the most traumatically terrifying horror movie in ages." A.V. Club (January 23, 2018)

Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (USA/UK: Stanley Kubrick, 1964) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive)

Drain, Heather, et al. "Celine and Julie Go Boating." The Projection Booth #277 (June 28, 2016) ["Jacques Rivette's Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974) tells a story of friendship, adventure, and magic between two women (Juliet Berto and Dominique Labourier) in Paris."]

Dunn, Rob. "Home Alone, with 200,000 Friends." American Scholar (February 5, 2021) ["As we in the United States approach a full year of spending even more time than usual at home, and away from friends and family, we’re all a little bit lonely. But even though it might feel as if your immediate family and your pets are the only signs of life in your house—you’re not as alone as you might think. The modern American house is a wilderness: thousands of species of insects, bacteria, fungi, and plants lurk in our floorboards, on our counters, and inside our kitchen cabinets—not to mention the microbes that flavor our food itself. The trouble with wilderness, however, is that we always want to tame it. Cleaning, bleaching, sterilizing, and killing the organisms in our houses has had unintended—and dangerous—consequences for our health and the environment. Biologist Rob Dunn, a professor in the department of applied ecology at North Carolina State University, joins us to impart some advice about how to graciously welcome these unbidden guests into our homes."]

Effress, Inna, Matthew M. Bartlett, and Jon Padgett. "Quarantine Readings." The Outer Dark #78 (July 2020) ["The eighth installment of The Outer Dark Quarantine Reading series features Inna Effress, a Weird fiction rising star, and some Weird double trouble with Matthew M. Bartlett and Jon Padgett (0:35:50), collaborating on their first duet. Inna reads ‘The Devil and the Divine’ (0:13:04), which will appear in the first issue of the much anticipated Weird Horror magazine from Undertow Publications, coming in October. Matt and Jon read the beginning of the epistolary title story of The Latham-Fielding Liaison (0:46:05), part of The Secret Gateways hardcover boxset coming from Nightscape Press and funded by a Kickstarter campaign. As alway, the writers also share their own experiences with lockdown living, their creative news including a story by Inna in Noir Nation, a novel by Matt coming from Broken Eye Books in 2021, and Jon’s update on his editorial/publishing ventures Vastarien: A Literary Journal and Grimscribe Press. Plus everyone’s quarantine reading recommendations."]

Eggert, Brian. "Suspiria." Deep Focus Review (October 26, 2018)

Eig, Jonathan. "A Beautiful Mind(fuck) -- Hollywood Structures of Identity." Jump Cut #46 (2003)

Embrace of the Serpent (Colombia/Venezuela/Argentina: Ciro Guerra, 2015) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive)

Eraserhead (USA: David Lynch, 1977) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive)

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (USA: Michel Gondry, 2004)  Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive)

Exit Through the Gift Shop (UK/USA: Banksy, 2010) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive)

Ex Machina (UK: Alex Garland, 2015) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive)

The Exorcist (USA: William Peter Blatty, 1973) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive)

"Eyes Wide Shut (UK/USA: Stanley Kubrick, 1999)." Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive)

Fales, Adam. "Horror in Revision: On the Contemporary Gothic." Los Angeles Review of Books (January 23, 2018)

Fantasmarium. "The Fisherman by John Langan." Medium (September 5, 2019)

Fawver, Kurt. "Why Weird, Why Now?: On the Rationale for Weird Fiction's Resurgence." Thinking Horror #1 (October 2015): 139 - 150. [Professor has a copy - ask me if you want to read it]

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (USA: Terry Gilliam, 1998) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive)

The Ferroni Brigade. "Beginnings Are Useless: A Conversation with Andrzej Żuławski." Notebook (March 12, 2012)

Fhlainn, Sorcha Ní. "Postmodern Vampires." This Is Not a Pipe (November 26, 2020) ["Sorcha Ní Fhlainn discusses her book Postmodern Vampires: Film, Fiction, and Popular Culture with Chris Richardson. Ní Fhlainn is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies and American studies at Manchester Metropolitan University, United Kingdom. She is a founding member of the Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies and author of Postmodern Vampires: Film, Fiction, and Popular Culture (Palgrave, 2019). She has published widely on socio-cultural history, subjectivity and postmodernism in Film Studies, American studies, Horror studies, and Popular Culture. Previous books include Clive Barker: Dark imaginer (Manchester UP, 2017), and The Worlds of Back to the Future: Critical Essays on the Films (McFarland, 2010), and articles in Adaptation (Oxford UP), and Horror Studies (Intellect). She is currently leading a research project and writing a monograph on the popular culture of the 1980s."]

Fight Club (USA: David Fincher, 1999) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive)

Files, Gemma, Orrin Grey and Tyler Unsell. "Blood Quantum." Horror Pod Class #32 (July 2, 2020) ["The dead are coming back to life outside the isolated Mi’gMaq reserve of Red Crow, except for its Indigenous inhabitants who are strangely immune to the zombie plague."]

Fisher, Mark. The Weird and the Eerie. Repeater Books, 2016.

The Forbidden Room (Canada: Evan Johnson and Guy Maddin, 2015) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive)

Ford, Phil and J.F. Martel. "Art is a Haunting Spirit." Weird Studies #11 (April 25, 2018) ["M. R. James' "The Mezzotint" is one of the most fascinating, and most chilling, examples of the classic ghost story. In this episode, Phil and JF discover what this tale of haunted images and buried secrets tells us about the reality of ideas, the singularity of events, the virtual power of the symbol, and the enduring magic of the art object in the age of mechanical reproduction. To accompany this episode, Phil recorded a full reading of the story."]

---. "Below the Abyss: On Bergson's Metaphysics." Weird Studies #76 (June 24, 2020) ["According to the French philosopher Henri Bergson, there are two ways of knowing the world: through analysis or through intuition. Analysis is our normal mode of apprehension. It involves knowing what's out there through the accumulation and comparison of concepts. Intuition is a direct engagement with the absolute, with the world as it exists before we starting tinkering with it conceptually. Bergson believed that Western metaphysics erred from the get-go when it gave in to the all-too-human urge to take the concepts by which we know things for the things themselves. His entire oeuvre was an attempt to snap us out of that spell and plug us directly into the flow of pure duration, that primordial time that is the real Real. In this episode, JF and Phil discuss the genius -- and possible limitations -- of his metaphysics."]

---. "The Dark Eye: On the Films of Rodney Ascher." Weird Studies #12 (May 2, 2018) ["American filmmaker Rodney Ascher is a master of the weird documentary. Whether he be exploring wild interpretations of a classic horror film in Room 237, bracketing the phenomenon of sleep paralysis in The Nightmare, studying the uncanny power of the moving image in "Primal Screen," or considering the sinister power of a kitschy logo in "The S from Hell," Ascher confronts his viewers with realities that resist final explanations and facile reduction. In this episode, Phil and JF follow Ascher's films into the living labyrinth of a strange universe that isn't just unknown, but radically unknowable."]

---. "Does Consciousness Exist, Part One." and "Does Consciousness Exist, Part Two." Weird Studies #17 & #18 (June 6 & June 13, 2018) ["In this first part of their discussion of William James' classic essay in radical empiricism, "Does 'Consciousness' Exist?", Phil and JF talk about the various ways we use the slippery C-word in contemporary culture. The episode touches on the political charge of the concept of consciousness, the unholy marriage of materialism and idealism ("Kant is the ultimate hipster"), the role of consciousness in the workings of the weird -- basically, anything but the essay in question. That will come in part two." & "JF and Phil finally get down to brass tacks with William James's essay 'Does Consciousness Exist?' At the heart of this essay is the concept of what James calls 'pure experience,' the basic stuff of everything, only it isn't a stuff, but an irreducible multiplicity of everything that exists -- thoughts as well as things. We're used to thinking that thoughts and things belong to fundamentally different orders of being, but what if thoughts are things, too? For one thing, psychical phenomena (a great interest of James's) suddenly become a good deal more plausible. And the imaginal realm, where art and magic make their home, becomes a sovereign domain."]

---. "Ecstacy, Sin and 'The White People.'" Weird Studies #3 (February 21, 2018) ["JF and Phil delve deep into Arthur Machen's fin-de-siècle masterpiece, "The White People," for insight into the nature of ecstasy, the psychology of fairies, the meaning of sin, and the challenge of living without a moral horizon."]

---. "The Medium is the Message." Weird Studies #71 (April 15, 2020) ["On the surface, the phrase "the medium is the message," prophetic as it may have been when Marshall McLuhan coined it, points a now-obvious fact of our wired world, namely that the content of any medium is less important than its form. The advent of email, for instance, has brought about changes in society and culture that are more far-reaching than the content of any particular email. On the other hand, this aphorism of McLuhan's has the ring of an utterance of the Delphic Oracle. As Phil proposes in this episode of Weird Studies, it is an example of what Zen practitioners call a koan, a statement that occludes and illumines in equal measures, a jewel whose shining surface is an invitation to descend into dark depths. Join JF and Phil as they discuss the mystical and cosmic implications of McLuhan's oracular vision."]

---. "Morning of the Mutants: On the Castrati." Weird Studies #72 (April 29, 2020) ["For over two centuries in early modern Italy, boys were selected for their singing talent castrated before the onset of puberty. The goal was to preserve the qualities of their voice even as they grew into manhood. The procedure resulted in other physiological changes which, combined with an unnaturally high voice, made the castrati the most prodigious singers on the continent. As Martha Feldman shows in her book The Castrato, a masterpiece of cultural history, the castrated singer was such a singular figure that he invited comparisons with angels, animals, and kings, attracting adoration and ridicule in equal measures. The castrato was a true liminal being, and as JF and Phil discover in this episode of Weird Studies, an unlikely herald of the present age."]

---. "On Aleister Crowley and the Idea of Magick." Weird Studies #9 (April 11, 2018)

---. "On Hyperstition." Weird Studies #36 (December 19, 2018) ["Hyperstition is a key concept in the philosophy of Nick Land. It refers to fictions which, given enough time and libidinal investment, become realities. JF and Phil explore the notion using one of those optometric apparatuses with multiple lenses -- deleuzian, magical, mythological, political, ethical, etc. The goal isn't to understand how fictions participate in reality (that'll have to wait for another episode), but to ponder what this implies for a sapient species. The conversation weaves together such varied topics as Twin Peaks: The Return, Internet meme magic (Trump as tulpa!), Deleuze and Guattari's metaphysics, occult experiments in spirit creation, the Brothers Grimm, and the phantasmic overtones of The Communist Manifesto. In the end we can only say, "What a load of bullsh*t!""]

---. "On Lost Highway." Weird Studies #83 (September 30, 2020) ["David Lynch's Lost Highway was released in 1997, five years after Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me elicited a fusillade of boos and hisses at Cannes. The Twin Peaks prequel's poor reception allegedly sent its American auteur spiralling into something of an existential crisis, and Lost Highway has often been interpreted as a response to -- or result of -- that crisis. Certainly, the film is among Lynch's darkest, boldest, and most enigmatic. But of course, we do the film an injustice by reducing it to the psychological state of its director. Indeed, one of the contentions of this episode is that all artistic interpretation constitutes a kind of injustice. But as you will hear, that doesn't stop Phil and JF from interpreting the hell out of the film. Just or unjust, fair or unfair, interpretation may well be necessary in aesthetic matters. It may be the means by which we grow through the experience of art, the way by which art makes us something new, strange, and other. Perhaps the trick is to remember that no mode of interpretation is, to borrow Freud's phrase, the one and only via regia, but that every one is just another highway at night..."]

---. "On Lovecraft." Weird Studies #29 (October 9, 2018) ["Phil and JF indulge their autumnal mood in this discussion of Howard Phillips Lovecraft's work, specifically the essay "Notes on the Writing of Weird Fiction" and the prose piece "Nyarlathotep." Philip K. Dick, Algernon Blackwood, and David Foster Wallace make appearances as our fearsome hosts talk about how the weird story differs from conventional horror fiction, how Lovecraft gives voice to contemporary fears of physical, psychological and political infection, and how authors like Lovecraft and Dick can be seen as prophetic poets of the "great unbuffering of the Western self.""]

---. "On the I Ching." Weird Studies #82 (September 16, 2020) ["The Book of Changes, or I Ching, is more than an ancient text. It's a metaphysical guide, a fun game, and -- to your hosts at least -- a lifelong, steadfast friend. The I Ching has come up more than once on the show, and now is the time for JF and Phil to face it head on, discussing the role it has played in their lives while delving into some of its mysteries."]

---. "Orbis Tertius: Borges on Magic, Conspiracy and Idealism." Weird Studies #32 (October 31, 2018) ["Jorge Luis Borges's story "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" is a metaphysical detective story, an armchair conspiracy thriller, and a masterpiece of weird fiction. In this tale penned by a true literary magician, Phil and JF see an opportunity to talk about magic, hyperstition, non-linear time, and the power of metaphysics to reshape the world. When Phil questions his co-host's animus against idealist doctrines, the discussion turns to dreams, cybernetics, and information theory, before reaching common ground with the dumbfound appreciation of radical mystery."]

---. "Philip K. Dick: Adrift in the Universe." Weird Studies #10 (April 18, 2018) ["In 1977, Philip K. Dick read an essay in France entitled, "If You Find this World Bad, You Should See Some of the Others." In it, he laid out one of the dominant tropes of his fictional oeuvre, the idea of parallel universes. It became clear in the course of the lecture that Dick didn't intend this to be a talk about science fiction, but about real life - indeed, about his life. In this episode, Phil and JF seriously consider the speculations which, depending on whom you ask, make PKD either a genius or a madman. This distinction may not matter in the end. As Dick himself wrote in his 8,000-page Exegesis: "The madman speaks the moral of the piece.""]

---. "Weird Music, Part One." Weird Studies #27 (September 26, 2018) ["In this first of two episodes devoted to the music of the weird, Phil and JF discuss two works that have bowled them over: the second movement of Ligeti's Musica Ricercata, used to powerful effect in Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut, and the opening music to Cronenberg's film Naked Lunch, composed by Howard Shore and featuring the inimitable stylings of Ornette Coleman. After teasing out the intrinsic weirdness of music in general, the dialogue soars over a strange country rife with shadows, mad geniuses, and skittering insects. And to top it all off, Phil breaks out the grand piano."]

---. "What a Fool Believes: On the Unnumbered Card in the Tarot." Weird Studies #77 (July 8, 2020) ["'What a fool believes he sees, no wise man can reason away.' This line from a Doobie Brothers song is probably one of the most profound in the history of rock-'n'-roll. It is profound for all the reasons (or unreasons) explored in this discussion, which lasers in on just one of the major trumps of the traditional tarot deck, that of the Fool. The Fool is integral to the world, yet stands outside it. The Fool is an idiot but also a sage. The Fool does not know; s/he intuits, improvises a path through the brambles of existence. We intend this episode on the Fool to be the first in an occasional series covering all twenty-two of the major trumps of the Tarot of Marseilles."]

---. "Whirl Without End: On M.C. Richards' Centering." Weird Studies #35 (December 5, 2018) ["The first step in any pottery project is to center the clay on the potter's wheel. In her landmark essay Centering: In Pottery, Poetry and the Person (1964), the American poet M. C. Richards turns this simple action into a metaphor for all creative acts, including the act of living your life. The result is a penetrating and poetic reflection on the artistic process that values change, unknowing, and radical becoming, making Richards' text a guide to creativity that leaves other examples of that evergreen genre in the dust. Phil and JF get their hands dirty trying to understanding what centering is, and what it entails for a life of creation and becoming. The discussion brings in a number of other thinkers and artists including Friedrich Nietzsche, Norman O. Brown, Carl Jung, Antonin Artaud, and Flannery O'Connor."]

Frazer, James George. The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion. Project Gutenberg, 1922.

Freud, Sigmund. "The Uncanny." (First published in Imago, Bd. V., 1919; reprinted in Sammlung, Fünfte Folge. [Translated by Alix Strachey.])

Funny Games (Austria: Michael Haneke, 1997) and (USA/France/UK/Austria/Germany/Italy: Michael Haneke, 2007) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive)

Gallagher, Ryan and James McCormick. "Erle Kenton's The Island of Lost Souls." CriterionCast #128 (August 3, 2012) ["A twisted treasure from Hollywood’s pre-Code horror heyday, Island of Lost Souls is a cautionary tale of science run amok, adapted from H. G. Wells’s novel The Island of Dr. Moreau. In one of his first major movie roles, Charles Laughton is a mad doctor conducting ghastly genetic experiments on a remote island in the South Seas, much to the fear and disgust of the shipwrecked man (Richard Arlen) who finds himself trapped there. This touchstone of movie terror, directed by Erle C. Kenton, features expressionistic photography by Karl Struss, groundbreaking makeup effects that have inspired generations of monster-movie artists, and the legendary Bela Lugosi in one of his most gruesome roles."]

Get Out (USA: Jordan Peele, 2017) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive)

Gidney, Craig Laurance. "Dreaming a Weird That Shimmers." The Outer Dark #74 (June 2020) ["In this podcast Anya welcomes back Craig Laurance Gidney to discuss his novels A Spectral Hue (Word Horde, 2019) and Hairsbreadth (Eyedolon/Broken Eye Books, 2020; support their Patreon to read this serialized novel). The conversation begins with Craig’s experience living in Washington, D.C., in a time of pandemic and Black Lives Matter protests. Craig then reads the opening of A Spectral Hue (0:11;11) and delves deep into the creative process behind this groundbreaking Weird novel. Discussion includes the book’s roots in his fascination with Outsider Art, the transformative beauty of The Weird and creating art out of trauma, why traditional cosmic horror from the white cis male gaze doesn’t scare him, the muse as intrusion, his passion for writing and art that is ‘a beautiful mess’ and ‘dream logic’, a non-Western perspective on the trope of ‘possession’, threading memory and ‘tasting’ words, writing process as ‘mosaic’, leaning into The Weird as character, a new story featuring Emily Bronte, color and Tanith Lee, Leonora Carrington, and Mervyn Peake, as well as why it’s not necessary to have closure in endings. The dialogue then shifts to Hairsbreadth in which Rapunzel meets Black Girl Magic including incorporating African-American folklore such as the boo-hag, affinity with Victor LaValle’s The Changeling, finding a Weird community, and a recent abundance of Weird fiction journals including soon-to-be-launched queer flash fiction journal Baffling which Craig is co-editing. The interview closes with news and his recommended authors including Black Girl Unlimited by Echo Brown, Patricia McKillip’s Riddlemaster series, and Head to Toe by Joe Orton."]

---. "Weird Beauty: The Weird Fiction of Tanith Lee." Weird Fiction Review (September 19, 2017)

Gone Girl (USA: David Fincher, 2014) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive)

Grafius, Brandon. Reading the Bible with Horror. Fortress Academic, 2019.

Graham, Zack. "A Fantastic Novel of a Black Hustler in 1920s Harlem." National Book Review (February 19, 2016) [Review of Victor LaValle's The Ballad of Black Tom (2016).]

Grant, Barry Keith. Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Bloomsbury, 2019.

Grey, Orrin and Tyler Unsell. "Gags the Clown and Cosmic Horror." Signal Horizons (April 16, 2020)

Griffiths, David. "Queer Theory for Lichens." Undercurrents #19 (2015)  ["The symbiotic view of life suggests that we are not individuals, and that we have never been individuals. While the traditional view of organisms (including humans) is that they are self-contained, discrete, and autonomous individuals, scientific research is increasingly suggesting that this is misleading; the view of organisms as individuals is perhaps no longer viable. This is illustrated in the symbiotic bacterial ancestry of the mitochondria in “human” cells, as well as in the contemporary symbiotic relationships that are at work in the human gut microbiota. Eating, digesting and living are impossible without our symbiotic relationships. The brief natural cultural history of lichens that I have offered illustrates these points and demonstrates that if life and nature are to be found anywhere, it is not autonomous individuals but the constitutive comminglings, involvements, and interconnected relationships that make up the ecological mesh."]

Habib, Conner. "The Spiritual Life of Horror." Against Everyone #201 (October 28, 2022) ["Horror has played such an important part in my life since childhood, and continues to grow in its influence on me. But I find most explorations - especially academic ones - into horror a bit banal. Can we think of horror beyond its political/economic function and metaphorical value? What does it do to us spiritually and culturally? What does it offer?"]

Halloween (USA: John Carpenter, 1978) Dialogic Cinephilia (Online Ongoing Archive)

Hancock, James and Bradley J. Kornish. "Fear of the Unknown." Wrong Reel #198 (November 7, 2016) ["Author Bradley J. Kornish (co-host of the Four Brains One Movie podcast) joins us to discuss the career of H.P. Lovecraft and the incredible documentary ‘Lovecraft: Fear of the Unknown’ (2008)."]

Hancock, James and Tony Stella. "Talking Japanese Ghost Stories." Wrong Reel #335 (November 2017) ["Illustrator Tony Stella returns to discuss some of his favorite Japanese ghost stories on film: ‘Ugetsu’ (1953), ‘Onibaba’ (1964) & ‘Kuroneko’ (1968)."]

Hancock, James and Victor Rodriguez. "Top Ten Lovecraft Adaptations." Wrong Reel #489 (December 2019)

The Handmaiden (South Korea: Park Chan-Wook, 2016) Dialogic Cinephilia (Online Ongoing Archive)

Harrison, Sheri-Marie. "Us and Them." Commune (June 6, 2019) [On Jordan Peele's 2019 horror film Us.]

Heath, Jr., Glenn. "The Addiction." Not Coming to a Theater Near You (October 1, 2012)

Heath, Roderick. "Hour of the Wolf (1968)." Film Freedonia (October 15, 2020) ["As a filmmaker, Ingmar Bergman synthesised two vital artistic modes, the psychological realism of Scandinavian theatre, and the essential faith of Modernism, that understanding of the world depended on perception and therefore art had to find ways to replicate modes of perception, groping towards a rational understanding of the irrational impulse. And yet Bergman’s fascination, even obsession with pathological behaviour and with the dark and tangled roots of the modern psyche and civilisation repeatedly drew him towards the fantastical, the hallucinatory, and the oneiric, conveyed through cinema that often reached back to the supple blend of naturalism and expressionistic stylisation achieved in early masters of Scandinavian cinema like Carl Dreyer, Benjamin Christensen, and Victor Sjöström. So, much as it might once have infuriated some of his high-minded worshippers in his heyday to say so, Bergman’s films very often grazed the outskirts of Horror cinema, and sometimes went the full distance. The anxious, unstable, beleaguered tenor of Bergman’s mature work often employed imagery sourced from the same wellsprings as Horror’s lexicon of preoccupations and metaphors."]

Heller-Nicholas, Alexandra. "Andrzej Żuławski and the powerlessness of language." Overland (February 25, 2016)

---. "Ms. 45." The Cinephiliacs #90 (March 17, 2017) ["Cinema is not just watching: it's shivering, sweating, and screaming. Those aspects of the moves are part of what drives Australian film critic Alexandra Heller-Nicholas. The co-editor of Senses of Cinema discusses her interest in horror films through a number of multimedia projects from radio to image collages on Twitter. They also dive deep on her books on rape-revenge, Dario Argento's Suspria, and now her latest on Abel Ferrara's exploitation classic, Ms. 45...or does the film actually belong to its lead actress Zoë Lund? The two look at the unique tension between director and performer, and how this surprisingly complex film has become an icon for feminist horror buffs."]

---. Silence and Fury: Rape and The Virgin Spring." Screening the Past (September 1, 2010)

---. "Three Mothers Redux: Kathy Acker, Pina Bausch, Tilda Swinton and Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria." Senses of Cinema #88 (October 2018)

Her (USA: Spike Jonze, 2013) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive)

Heron, Christopher. "A Woman Constructing Her World: Anna Biller Interview (The Love Witch)." The Seventh Art (April 5, 2017) ["American independent filmmaker Anna Biller discusses her latest film, The Love Witch (2016), which investigates gender and psychology through the prisms of love and witchcraft. Following Viva (2007) and her preceding short films, the aesthetic of The Love Witch is a bricolage of different formalist reference points found across the writing, performance, sets, music and more. Through this unique world building, Biller explores the underlying narcissistic personality of the complex main character, Elaine, as well as a means to explore notions of fantasy, desire, patriarchal structures, craft, and meta-level symbolism, among its many themes. We discuss these components of the film, its reception, critical misunderstandings of cinema history, and the realities of making films as a woman."]

High Life (Germany/France/UK/Poland/USA: Claire Denis, 2018) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive)

Hiroshima mon amour (France/Japan: Alain Resnais, 1959) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive)

Holtmeier, Matthew. Entertainment-wise, a motherfucker: Critical race politics and the transnational movement of Melvin van Peebles." Jump Cut #59 (Fall 2019)

The Holy Mountain (Mexico/USA: Alejandro Jodorowsky, 1973) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive)

The Host (South Korea: Bong Joon-Ho, 2006) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive)

Hostel (USA: Eli Roth, 2005) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive)

House (Japan: Nobuhiko Ôbayashi, 1977) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive)

Hudson, David. "Terence Nance's Random Acts of Flyness." Current (August 6, 2018)

I Heart Huckabees (USA/Germany: David O'Russell, 2004) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive)

Ince, Kate, et al. "Eyes Without a Face." The Projection Booth #278 (July 5, 2016) ["Georges Franju's Eyes Without a Face (1960) is an atmospheric "anguish story" about a young woman who's lost her face and the overbearing father who works to give her a new one. Special Guest Kate Ince, author of the French Film Directors book Georges Franju, relates Franju's career and themes."]

Inherent Vice (USA: Paul Thomas Anderson, 2014) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive)

Innocence (Belgium/France/UK/Japan: Lucile Hadžihalilović, 2004) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive)

The Innocents (Norway/Sweden/Denmark: Eskil Vogt, 2021) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive)

Interstellar (USA/UK/Canada/Ireland: Christopher Nolan, 2014) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive)

In the Realm of the Senses (France/Japan: Nagisa Ôshima, 1976) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive)

The Intruder/L'intrus (France: Claire Denis, 2004) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive)

Irreversible (France: Gaspar Noé, 2002) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive)

It Follows (USA: David Robert Mitchell, 2014) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive)

Janisse, Kier-La. House of Psychotic Women: An Autobiographical Topography of Female Neurosis in Horror and Exploitation Films. FAB Press, 2014. 

Jaws (USA: Steven Spielberg, 1975)  Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive)

Jenkins, Jamie, Mark Mcgee and Mike White. "Invasion of the Body Snatchers." The Projection Booth #130 (September 3, 2013) ["From the deep reaches of space the pods arrive, ready to take over the human race, erasing our humanity and turning us into walking vegetables. We're looking at the four versions of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (and a few other films)."]

Jinx and Chris Maynard. "The Endless." Following Films (April 24, 2017) ["The Endless is the latest film from directors Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead. It's the story of two brothers who return to deal with the cult from which they fled a decade ago, only to find that there might be some truth to the group’s otherworldly beliefs."]

Joker (Canada/USA: Todd Phillips, 2019) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive)

Jones, Matthew. "Politicizing the Horrific: How American Anxieties Play Out on Screen." Philosophy in Film (March 25, 2017)

Joshi, S.T. The Weird Tale. University of Texas Press, 1990.

Kasman, Daniel. "Between Day and Night: Bertrand Bonello Discusses Zombi Child." Notebook (May 30, 2019)

Kaufmann, Anthony. "It's Happening Here: Trump's America and Totalitarian Dystopias." Keyframe (November 17, 2016)

The King of Comedy (USA: Martin Scorsese, 1982) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive)

Kohn, Eduardo. How Forests Think: An Anthropology Beyond Humans. University of California Press, 2013.

Koresky, Michael. "Altered Beast: Tropical Malady Meets Mulholland Dr.." Reverse Shot (May 19, 20005)

Koshy, Yohann. "The Revolution Will Be Weird and Eerie." Vice (February 20, 2017) ["Mark Fisher's 'The Weird and the Eerie' tells us how to embrace the future."]

Koski, Genevieve, et al. "Double Troubles, Pt. 1 - Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)." The Next Picture Show #170 (April 2, 2019) ["Jordan Peele’s new US extends a long history of horror stories that use doppelgängers to explore identity, one that includes as a cornerstone Philip Kaufman’s 1978 adaptation of INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS. This episode we delve into the film’s eerie version of San Francisco to talk about how its atmosphere of dread and late-‘70s malaise distinguishes it from other versions of this story, and amplifies the human drama within this classic alien-invasion narrative."]

---. "Double Troubles, Pt. 2 - Us." The Next Picture Show #171 (April 9, 2019) ["Our pairing of devious doppelgängers arrives at Jordan Peele’s new US, which brings into 2019 some of the same themes of paranoia and dread seen in one of its many predecessors, Philip Kaufman’s INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS. After comparing our reactions to US’s “messy by design” narrative and the conversations that have sprung up around it, we bring these two films together to compare how they reflect their respective eras, how each works as horror, and the weird character relationships that underscore the human drama behind the allegory."]

---. "It Comes at Night / The Thing (Pt. 1)." The Next Picture Show #82 (June 27, 2017)

---. "It Comes at Night / The Thing (Pt. 2)." The Next Picture Show #83 (June 29, 2017)

Krämer, Peter. Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Bloomsbury, 2014. [Professor has a copy.]

Küçük, Serdar. "Bird Box and Apathetic Blindness." Film Criticism 43.3 (2019)

Kuersten, Erich. "Cinema Archetype #1: Trickster." Acidemic (January 23, 2012) ["For sake of polarization of type we've limited this to males, but of course the trickster is by nature beyond gender, beyond personal gain as well. He lives in a state of identity flux, bound to no one persona (though perhaps he can be in service of an abstract cause, like 'the paper') and is seldom on the level as far as sincerity and yet this allows him perhaps greater leeway in his altruistic ambitions, for he need gratify no urge, for him there there is no one persona to 'want' anything. You are most likely to meet him on the road to knowledge, and if a trickster helps you on your way, be grateful but not indebted. And beware: for every two or three favors he gives, one wry screw-over is guaranteed. But you can't just walk away after two favors, what if the third is legit, too? Dude, turns out none of them are favors, they're gin and tonics. He'll confuse the simple and clarify the incoherent, and never justify anything, let alone means or ends. Take Elliot Gould's doctor in MASH for example,who seamlessly incorporates an operation on the child of a prostitute into his Tokyo boondoggle and just as effortlessly employs blackmail of the resident officer to make it happen. He expects no reward from the mom and brooks no condemnation from the Army, he demands neither a freebie nor accepts a guilt trip; he doesn't think ahead or crave validation - he's just a dancer in the Shiva flame. That's a trickster."]

---. "CinemArchetype #2: The Anima." Acidemic (January 29, 2012) ["Jung described the anima--the ego of the feminine unconscious to the male conscious mind--as like the sphynx or the Mona Lisa - enigmatic, cryptic, mostly silent - neither alive nor dead nor undead, but a dweller in the space beyond such trivialities. Her refusal to be known fully by her outer male / consciousness is perhaps an underlying cause of so much patriarchal oppression in our world. We can't silence her midnight reproaches so we try to silence her outer projections. But it never works. In order to placate her we must make an effort to 'find out what she wants' through much patient sitting in asanas and art. She is the ultimate 'unknown' that the male ego spends its life trying to seduce, make contact with, capture on canvas, harness, destroy, embrace... but she can never be fully known or possessed, only accepted as the enigma she is. And thank god, because if she was ever understood fully, the world would open up into the pure white light of the infinite. And then what do you do with your time? Where do you find your inspiration?"]

---. "CinemArchetype #3 - The Animus (the Daemon Lover)." Acidemic (February 2012) [" The Jungian archetype of the animus is a different beast, literally, than the ethereal anima. Like its feminine conscious twin it plays many parts - unicorn, daemonic lover or rapist, a symbol of the raw animal violence wrought upon a maturing girl's body by maturity, menstruation, sex, marriage, reproduction, and maturity. He can appear in dreams and films: as a lover, a son, a killer, a phantom, academic advisor, old Nietzschean shoemaker, father, brother, horse, pizza delivery boy, werewolf or a zombie prince, depending on the work you've done to exhume his corpse from the basement of your brain."]

---. "CinemArchetype #4: The Hanged Man." Acidemic (February 12, 2012) ["The hanged man is neither here nor there, nor now nor then. He exists in many doorways. He is the threshold lingerer. He is not quite the shaman or the knave, neither awake nor asleep. Faced with any fork in a road he won't pick one less or more traveled but instead climb the nearest tree and hang there, creating his own weird path, the third option - no path at all.]

---. "CinemArchetype #5: The Human Sacrifice." Acidemic (February 28, 2012) ["The innocence lost as a maiden leaps into an active volcano or a heart comes out in an Aztec human sacrifice, the ripping to shreds of a recently deflowered forest nymph boy to ensure a good harvest--where does it--the 'innocent' property--go? It's all deeply archetypal, with Jesus on the cross being the most glaring instance. The whole notion of 'he died for our sins' is deeply linked to the sacrifice of the virgin boy at harvest time in pagan matriarchies. His blood is spilled over the fields to water them with nutrients in an agrarian rendition of the sacrament. Come spring, a terrible beauty is born... again."]

---. "CinemArchetype #6: The Intimidating Nymph." Acidemic (March 2, 2012) ["We've all heard the words that bags both dirt and douche have for sexually active women: skank, slut, and ho. You would think a girl who is generous with her sexuality would be respected and revered amongst such people, who presumably want to get laid one day. But any club that might want their membership is not only deigned but derogated. Phrases like 'suck my dick' and 'cocksucker' are instead the height of insult rather than gentle requests, reflecting deeply repressed sexophobic anxiety. In any sexually sane society they would be positives; "may your parts be fairly and gently sucked" could be a nice way of ending a letter to a friend, for example. After all, most of all of us love oral sex... so why, forgive the expression, badmouth it?"]

---. "CinemArchetype #7: The Shadow." Acidemic (March 2012) ["The Shadow is that most threatening of archetypes, the malevolent root chord of the subconscious. As opposed to the anima/unconscious which is more collective and soul-based, the subconscious is the basement of repressed memories and desires, a dank cellar stuffed with taped-shut moving boxes that still shift back and forth occasionally like something's trying to escape from them. Freud's big short sighted flaw in his visualization of the subconscious was perhaps insisting that these dark lower storage cubby holes were merely to store the still-beating heart of our repressed memories and desires. For the purposes of 'the Shadow' this is no doubt true. As soon as we learn to hate ourselves, the shadow is there to take the hate off our backs so we can function in daily life. But in successfully denying the eros, the freedom, the lust and passion and abandon of uninhibited desire, the conscious subject eventually becomes stale, plays it safe, has nothing interesting to say, becomes a derivative Body Snatchers pod-style copy of their former self. If they want to get their mojo back they need to traipse gingerly down into the basement and poke around in those taped-up boxes, find some vitality and get the hell out of there fast, maybe work out a treaty --let the demon out in a small safe setting --a kickboxing class, the dance floor, or--as Buddhists do--via sex. If this is not done, the conscious self grows weak and watered down and the repressed shadow goes up in proof.. until it finally explodes in a whiskey still fireball / autonomous complex."]

---. "CinemArchetype #8: The Primal Father." Acidemic (March 2012) ["... In the horde, enjoyment is not readily available to everyone. It is confined to the strongest, the primal Father, who hoards all enjoyment (i.e., all women) for himself. This Father enjoys without restraint, but only until such time as the sons, jealous of his enjoyment, conspire to murder him. According to Freud, this murder of the primal Father is the first social act, and the prohibition of incest—or, of enjoyment—follows directly on its heels. In establishing a social order in the wake of the primal Father’s murder, the sons recognize that, if they are to live together in relative peace, they must agree to a collective renunciation of enjoyment. Without this collective renunciation, no one can have any feeling of security, because there is nothing to mediate a life-and-death struggle for enjoyment. Force itself—and force alone—prevails: the strongest can enjoy himself, and all the weaker ones will not survive. The sons, however, had already opted out of this life-and-death struggle at the moment they conspired to murder the primal Father. In this first moment of collective action, the renunciation that would ultimately become the incest prohibition has its genesis. After this point, the enjoyment embodied by the primal Father becomes only a memory, the object of fantasy for all those who have agreed to give it up. That is, the murder of the primal Father has the effect of triggering fantasies about the enjoyment that he experienced prior to his death. These fantasies sustain those who have sacrificed their own enjoyment in the collective renunciation that made the murder possible, and they provide the reassurance that, if enjoyment is inaccessible now, at least it once was accessible for someone. (26)" - Todd Mcgowan, Lacan and the Emerging Society of Enjoyment]

---. "CinemArchetype #9: The Devouring Mother." Acidemic (March 2012) ["It's amazing--though not surprising--how relatively hard it is to find strong 'Devouring Mother' archetypes in cinema -- they abound in Greek myth, eastern religions, fairy tales, and in the great works of Tennessee Williams, Hitchcock, David Lynch, and Italians, but patriarchal forces have been at work declawing the devouring all-powerful chthonic mother since the dark ones of Rome first weeded Mrs. God (Asherah) out of the bible (she does show up in the 'forbidden gospels'); in modern American Hollywood we like our moms saintly and pasteurized -- the Dee Wallace of ET and the Jo Beth Williams of Poltergeist--the decent MILFs out making lemonade and s'mores while the menfolk hunt demons and collect gold skulls--or not at all. I mention those two Spielberg productions since I'd blame him more than most for this decline, the reduction of the myth to a 16 year old boy's hero journey, with moms staying home on shore while the boys go out on the boat. What Spielberg never sees is that the boat may be boy's town, but the ocean is mom's purview; she's the shark, and she's coming to eat you up! The fake shark may have been named Bruce, but if JAWS is a myth at all the shark MUST be a female. There is no such mention, as if females don't devour the world in every natural hierarchy order except man's."]

---. "Druggie Vampire Women of B&W City: A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, The Addiction, Nadja." Acidemic (April 1, 2015)

---. "Nightmare USA: : 10 Wild, Weird Gems of Off-Brand 70s Horror Americana (via Stephen Thrower)." Acidemic (July 17, 2020)

---. "Sex is a Hen Decapitated: Bluebeard and the Eroticism of Catherine Breillat." Acidemic #6 (2010)

Kwiatkowski, Al and Brad Strauss. "Andrzej Zulawski." Director's Club #126 (March 14, 2017)

La Commune (Paris 1871) (France: Peter Watkins, 2000) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive)

Lady Vengeance (South Korea: Chan-Wook Park, 2005) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive)

Laing, Olivia. " Wilhelm Reich: the strange, prescient sexologist who sought to set us free."  The Guardian (April 17, 2021) ["He believed orgasms could be a healing force and coined the term ‘sexual revolution’. Reich’s understanding of the body is vital in our age of protests and patriarchy, writes Olivia Laing."] 

La Jetée (France: Chris Marker, 1962) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive)

Land of the Dead (Canada/France/USA: George Romero, 2005) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive)

Langill, Molly. "‘Mad Women’ in Robert Altman’s 3 Women and Images." Offscreen 18.8 (August 2014)

Lanzagorta, Marco. "Great Directors: John Carpenter." Senses of Cinema (March 2003)

LaValle, Victor and Benjamin Percy. "Creepy Stories (and More)." LitHub (October 31, 2019) ["How writing about politics relates to horror. LaValle explains how devices like monsters make it possible to write about how something feels, rather than merely what happened; Percy discusses doppelgängers, and asks whether politically, the call is coming from inside the house."]

Let the Right One In (Sweden: Tomas Alfredson, 2008) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive)

The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (USA: Wes Anderson, 2004) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive)

Lindbergs, Kimberly. "Ancient Evil is Now a Modern Industry: Thirst (1979)." Cinebeats (October 13, 2020)

LoBrutto, Vincent. "Surrealism in Cinema: Un Chien Andalou." Becoming Film Literate: The Art and Craft of Motion Pictures. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2005: 77-83. [BCTC Library: PN1994 L595 2005]

The Lobster (Greece/Ireland/Netherlands/UK/France: Yorgos Lanthimos, 2015) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive)

Lodge, Guy. "The horror? How Suspiria leads the way for arthouse scares." The Guardian (October 24, 2018) ["In Luca Guadagnino’s lavish remake of the giallo classic, genre formula is upended for something far more audacious. It’s the latest ‘art-horror’ to confuse audiences."]

Lolita (United Kingdom/USA: Stanley Kubrick, 1962) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive)

Longworth, Karina. "Why Antichrist Is a Feminist Horror Film." Slate (October 23, 2009)

"Lost Isles." Grand Old Movies (November 2015)

Louison, Evan. "Forbidden Truths, the Symmetry of Myth, and a Friendship Uninterrupted by Death: Werner Herzog on Nomad: In the Footsteps of Bruce Chatwin." Filmmaker (August 28, 2020)

Lovecraft, H.P. "At the Mountains of Madness." (Originally published February–April 1936  in Amazing Stories)

The Love Witch (USA: Anna Biller, 2016) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive)

Lucas, Bruna Foletto. "Phases of the Moon: A Cultural History of the Werewolf Film." Monstrum #4 (October 2021) ["In Phases of the Moon: A Cultural History of the Werewolf Film, Craig Ian Mann takes the reader on a rich exploration of the cinematic figure of the werewolf throughout the years predominantly in, but not restricted to, horror narratives. As indicated in the title of the book, Mann proposes a new approach to the study of the monster that departs from, what he calls, the ahistorical and reductive psychoanalytical interpretation of the werewolf as the “beast within” (10). Mann’s conclusions are similar to those seen in zombie and vampire scholarship (Auerbach 1995; Waller 1986; Abbott 2007); however, as he writes throughout, the main goal of the book is not to provide original conclusions regarding the films’ subtext, but to show that the lupine monster can be read as more than a monstrous eruption of the psyche and that it can be a versatile metaphor to explore contemporary, culturally-based anxieties and fears."]

Mad Max: Fury Road (Australia/USA: George Miller, 2015) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive)

Mafe, Diana Adesola. Where No Black Woman Has Gone Before: Subversive Portrayals in Film and Television. University of Texas Press, 2018. [Has chapters on Children of Men and Beasts of the Southern Wild.]

The Manchurian Candidate (USA: John Frankenheimer, 1962) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive)

Marsh, James, et al. "Terry Jones' Monty Python's Life of Brian." CriterionCast #121 (April 5, 2012)

Martel, J.F. "Consciousness in the Aesthetic Imagination." Metapsychosis (July 11, 2016)

---. Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice: A Treatise, Critique, and Call to Action. Evolver Editions, 2015. [Professor has a copy.]

M*A*S*H (USA: Robert Altman, 1970) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive)

Matarazzo, Heather and April Wolfe. "The Invitation." Switchblade Sisters #3 (November 23, 2017) ["This week, April sits down with actress, producer, and director Heather Matarazzo (Welcome to the Dollhouse, Saved, The Princess Diaries). They talk about a movie directed by last week's guest Karyn Kusama, the 2015 film The Invitation. April and Heather discuss the effectiveness of the setting as well as the powerful performance of Tammy Blanchard. Heather also talks about what it's like navigating a corrupt Hollywood system as a woman, having her role recast two weeks before a production, and what interests her about violence committed by women in cinema."]

Mathijs, Ernest and Xavier Mendik, eds. The Cult Film Reader. Open University Press, 2008. [Professor has a copy - ask if you want to borrow or if you want a photocopy of a particular chapter.]

The Matrix/The Matrix Reloaded/The Matrix Revolutions (Australia/USA: Andy Wachowski and Lana Wachowski, 1999/2003/2003b)

Maude, Kit, Rob Prouse and Sam Pulham. "The Naked Woman by Armonía Somers." Sherds Podcast #27 (February 8, 2020) ["The Naked Woman by Armonía Somers was originally published in Spanish in 1950. The translation was made by Kit Maude and the book is published by The Feminist Press. On her thirtieth birthday, the main character, Rebeca Linke undergoes a violent physical and mental transformation. She leaves her home in only an overcoat and wanders through the local forests and fields. When she is spotted in broad daylight, divested of her clothes, the event sends tremors through the rural village, penetrating the hearts, bodies and minds of its inhabitants. Some view her as the return of Eve, some as a malignant curse. In either case, the village must confront this happening, and undergo its own transformation. Over the course of the episode, we discuss the author’s violent expression of feminine autonomy, consider it in the context of the gothic, and examine the response of a staid patriarchal society to the concept of feminine desire.]

Mayer, Sophie. "Horror in Paradise." The F Word (August 7, 2014) ["Sophie Mayer looks at Lucia Puenzo's Wakolda, film narrating the Patagonian epilogue to extremely dark period in European history"]

McAuley, Paul. Brazil. Palgrave/Macmillan, 2014. [Professor has a copy.]

McDonagh, Maitland. Broken Mirrors, Broken Minds: The Dark Dreams of Dario Argento. University of Minnesota Press, 1991. ["Italian filmmaker Dario Argento's horror films have been described as a blend of Alfred Hitchcock and George Romero, psychologically rich, colorful, and at times garish, excelling at taking the best elements of the splatter and exploitation genres and laying them over a dark undercurrent of human emotions and psyches. Broken Mirrors/Broken Minds, which dissects such Argento cult films as Two Evil Eyes, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, Suspiria, and Deep Red, includes a new introduction discussing Argento's most recent films, from The Stendahl Syndrome to Mother of Tears; an updated filmography; and an interview with Argento."]

McGowan, Todd. The Impossible David Lynch. Columbia University Press, 2007. [Professor has a copy.]

---. "Is It Future or Is It Past?" Hammer & Camera #27 (February 23, 2020) ["Episode 27 sees the Hammer & Camera crew tackling the work of longtime loadstone David Lynch for the first time. Specifically, we're talking 2017's Twin Peaks: The Return, and we're joined by author, professor, and fellow Lynchian, Dr. Todd McGowan. We talk about what's special about Lynch and his approach to cinema, what's great about Twin Peaks, whether or not The Return is "cinema," and delve deep into the thematic elements of one of the most interesting series of television ever produced."]

---. The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan. State University of New York Press, 2007. [Professor has a copy.]

McInroy, Jack, Daniel Mills and Steve Walsh. "Dhalgren (1975) by Samuel R. Delany." Sherds #28 (April 10, 2020) ["Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren was originally published in 1975. Since its publication, Dhalgren has had its fair share of proponents and enemies - it has been called both the best and the worst book ever to come out of the field of science fiction. Over the course of its eight-hundred pages, we follow our main character, the Kid, as he wanders listlessly through devastated city of Bellona, located somewhere in the United States on the border between utopia and dystopia. It is a city where time dilates and contracts, buildings spontaneously combust, obscuring mists curl through the streets. And here, all society’s misfits and outcasts have gathered under its twin moons. In this conversation we discuss the extent to which Dhalgren can be considered science fiction, examine the role of its metafictional games, and think about its presentation of racial and sexual politics."]

McKenna, Terence. Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge. Bantam Books, 1993.

McMillan, Candice. "How Trump and #metoo Have Scared Us Into the New Decade." Chaz's Journal (March 10, 2020)

Melancholia (Denmark/Sweden/France/Germany: Lars Von Triers, 2011) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive)

Memento (USA: Christopher Nolan, 2000) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive)

Memories of Murder (South Korea: Bong Joon-Ho, 2003) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive)

Midsommar (USA: Ari Aster, 2019: 140 mins) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive)

Michel, Brett and Stephen Slaughter Head. "Kaneto Shindô’s Kuroneko (1968)." Captive Eye #8 (April 2, 2012) ["Steve and Japanese film expert, Brett Michel, discuss Kaneto Shindô’s classic ghost story, KURONEKO (1968), the precursor to modern Japanese horror films like Ringu (1998) and Ju-on (2002)."]

Mittell, Jason. Narrative Theory and Adaptation. Bloomsbury, 2017. [Professor has copy.]

Moreno-Garcia, Silvia, et al. "It Is a Tiger that Destroys Me: Latin American Literature as Weird Fiction Panel at NecronomiCon 2019." The Outer Dark #59 (November 7, 2019)

Moulton, Jack. "Jungleland." Letterboxd News (September 26, 2019) ["'You’re in the most beautiful place you’ve ever seen, but it’s hell.' Colombian filmmaker Alejandro Landes takes us deep inside the extreme filming conditions of his acclaimed jungle thriller Monos, and the art of letting life come onto the page."]

Mulholland Dr. (France/USA: David Lynch, 2001) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive)

Muncer, Mike. "The Evolution of Folk Horror: Parts 1 - 17." Evolution of Horror (June 21, 2018 - October 8, 2018)

---. "The Evolution of the Ghost Story: Parts 1 - 20." Evolution of Horror (January 10, 2018 - May 25, 2018)

---. "The Evolution of the Slasher: Parts 1 - 14." The Evolution of Horror (August 27, 2017 - December 15, 2017)

---. "The Evolution of the Vampire: Parts 1 - 27." The Evolution of Horror (May 5 - December 15, 2022)

Muraresku, Brian and Graham Hancock. "The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion with No Name." The Joe Rogan Show #1543 (June 21, 2020) ["Attorney and scholar Brian C. Muraresku is the author of The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion with No Name. Featuring an introduction by Graham Hancock, The Immortality Key is a look into the psychedelic origins of the world's great spiritual practices and what those might mean for how we view ourselves and the world around us. Hancock's most recent book is America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization."]
 

Murdoch, Jim. "Time Out of Joint." The Truth About Lies (July 30, 2009) [On Philip K. Dick]

Murphy, J.J. Me and You and Memento and Fargo: How Independent Screenplays Work. Continuum, 2007. [Has chapters on Safe (1995), Gummo (1997), Memento (2000), Mulholland Dr. (2001), and Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005).]

Naked Lunch (Canada/UK/Japan: David Cronenberg, 1991) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive)

Nastasi, Alison. "We Exist: The Female Horror Directors of 2014." Balder and Dash (December 29, 2014)

Nelson, Victoria. "On The Secret Life of Puppets." Weird Studies (November 13, 2022) ["Victoria Nelson saw it first: Popular culture teems with occult ideas, vestiges of bygone belief, fragments of ancient magic disguised as common entertainment. Her 2001 work The Secret Life of Puppets is in many ways the ur-text of weird studies, so prescient and probing it is even more relevant now than it was when it first appeared. In episode 128, Phil and JF discussed Nelson's wonderful first novel Neighbor George (2021). In this episode, Nelson joins the hosts of Weird Studies to talk about the vision that drove her to write Secret Life along with its equally insightful follow-up, Gothicka."]

The Neon Demon (France/USA/Denmark: Nicholas Refn Winding, 2016) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive)

Night of the Living Dead (USA: George Romero, 1968) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive)

Oldboy (South Korea: Chan-Wook Park, 2003) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive)

Only Lovers Left Alive (UK/Germany/Greece: Jim Jarmusch, 2013) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive)

The Outer Dark [Scott Nicolay's podcast with a focus on weird fiction. Associated with This is Horror.]

Owen, M.M. "Our Age of Horror." Aeon (September 19, 2018) ["In this febrile cultural moment filled with fear of the Other, horror has achieved the status of true art"]

Pan's Labyrinth (Spain/Mexico: Guillermo Del Toro, 2006) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive)

Penny Slinger: Exhibitions (Link to her art. Description of the documentary (link goes to trailer) Penny Slinger: Out of the Shadows: is the incredible untold story of the pioneering British artist Penny Slinger, who came of age in London’s 1960s counter-culture with a radical vision of female sexuality. So powerful was this body of work that 45 years later its influence can still be felt."]

Performance (UK: Donald Cammell and Nicholas Roeg, 1970) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive)

Petkova, Savina. "Notebook Primer: Mermaid Cinema." Notebook (April 15, 2021) ["An introduction, via the aquatic creature's form, to the many films that feature mermaids."]

Phillips, Alastair and Julian Stringer, eds. Japanese Cinema: Texts and Contexts. Routledge, 2007. [Has chapters on Woman in the Dunes (1964), In the Realm of the Senses (1976), Ring (1998), and Spirited Away (2001).]

Phillips, Maya. "Sorry to Bother You and the New Black Surrealism." Slate (July 18, 2018) ["Like Get Out and Atlanta, Boots Riley’s gonzo satire realizes the best way to depict black people’s reality is to depart from it."]

Picnic at Hanging Rock (Australia: Peter Weir, 1975) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive)

PKD Otaku (Publication with 41 issues available online at last count: "It exists to celebrate, explore and discuss the work of Philip K Dick."]

Pontypool (Canada: Bruce McDonald, 2008) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive)

Poole, W. Scott. Wasteland: The Great War and the Origins of Horror. Counterpoint Press, 2019. [Your professor has a copy.]

Prewitt, Zach. "The Best Horror Cinema of the 21st Cinema." (Posted on Vimeo: October 2016)

Psycho (USA: Alfred Hitchcock, 1960)  Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive)

"Punishment Park." Masters of Cinema (March 27, 2013)

Purac, Selma A. "Selling 'Silence' in Contemporary Horror: Krasinski’s Quiet Consumers." Monstrum #4 (October 2021) ["John Krasinski’s 2018 horror film A Quiet Place broke through the noise of a box office dominated by blockbusters and pre-existing properties.1 Acclaimed by critics, the relatively modest production, which cost only 17 million dollars to make, went on to gross over 340 million dollars worldwide (AQP Numbers). In part, this success is rooted in the film’s focus on the horror soundscape, which is central to its very premise."]

Quiroga, Rodrigo Quian. "Neuroscience Fiction." New Books in Neuroscience (September 10, 2020) ["In NeuroScience Fiction (Benbella Books, 2020), Rodrigo Quian Quiroga shows how the outlandish premises of many seminal science fiction movies are being made possible by new discoveries and technological advances in neuroscience and related fields. Along the way, he also explores the thorny philosophical problems raised as a result, diving into Minority Report and free will, The Matrix and the illusion of reality, Blade Runner and android emotion, and more. A heady mix of science fiction, neuroscience, and philosophy, NeuroScience Fiction takes us from Vanilla Sky to neural research labs, and from Planet of the Apes to what makes us human. The end result is a sort of bio-technological “Sophie’s World for the 21st Century”, and a compelling update on the state of human knowledge through its cultural expressions in film and art. Dr. Rodrigo Quian Quiroga is the director of the Centre for Systems Neuroscience and the Head of Bioengineering at the University of Leicester. His research focuses on the principles of visual perception and memory, and is credited with the discovery of "Concept cells" or "Jennifer Aniston neurons" - neurons in the human brain that play a key role in memory formation."]

Raup, Jordan. "Annihilation." The Film Stage (February 21, 2018) ["More terrifying than any creature Hollywood could dream up is the unraveling of one’s mind—the steady loss of a consciousness as defined by the memories, motivations, and knowledge built up from decades of experience and reflection. With Annihilation, Alex Garland’s beautiful, frightening follow-up to Ex Machina, he portrays this paralyzing sensation with a sense of vivid imagination, and also delivers a cadre of horrifying creatures to boot."]

Reilly, Phoebe. "From Babadook to Raw: The Rise of the Modern Female Horror Filmmaker." Rolling Stone (October 27, 2016)

Repo Man (USA: Alex Cox, 1984)  Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive)

The Ring (USA/Japan: Gore Verbinski, 2002) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive)

Ringu (Japan: Hideo Nakata, 1998) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive)

Robinson, Andrew. "Bakhtin: Carnival against Capital, Carnival against Power." Cease Fire (September 9, 2011) ["The dominant worldview of medieval Europe was of a natural order which is hierarchical, stable, monolithic and immutable, but poised on the brink of disaster or ‘cosmic terror’, and hence in need of constant maintenance of order. This is similar to Aristotle’s view. For Bakhtin, such a view is oppressive and intolerant. It closes language to change. The fear of ‘cosmic terror’, the pending collapse of order if things got out of control (or the threat posed by the Real to the master-signifier), was used by elites to justify hierarchy and to subdue popular revolt and critical consciousness. Today, we might think of this vision of monolithic order in terms of fantasies of ‘broken Britain’, of civilisation under siege from extremists, and a discourse of risk-management (and the crisis-management of ‘ungovernability’) in which ‘terrorism’, disease, protest, deviance and natural disaster fuse into a secularised vision of cosmic collapse. This vision of collapse has infiltrated legal and political discourse to such a degree that any excess of state power seems ‘proportionate’ against this greater evil. The folk view expressed in carnival and carnivalesque, and related speech-genres such as swearing and popular humour, opposes and subverts this vision. For Bakhtin, cosmic terror and the awe induced by the system’s violent power are the mainstays of its affective domination. Folk culture combats the fear created by cosmic terror.""]

Rogin, Michael. "Kiss Me Deadly: Communism, Motherhood and Cold War Movies." Ronald Reagan, The Movie and Other Episodes in Political Demonology. University of California Press, 1988: 236-271. {Your professor has a copy.]

Romney, Jonathan. "Inside Your Head: Conceptual Science Fiction." Sight and Sound (February 24, 2015)

Salo, or 120 Days of Sodom (Italy/France: Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1975) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive)

"Sam Raimi's Low Budget Camera Rigs for Evil Dead." Curly Horns and Iron Teeth (May 25, 2016)

Schalk, Sami. Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction. Duke University Press, 2018.

Schneider, Kirk. Horror and the Holy: Wisdom-Teachings of the Monster Tale. Open Court, 2013. ["Throughout history, human beings have been strangely fascinated by the monstrous and the macabre. In Horror and the Holy, a study of the classic horror story, Kirk Schneider explains the compelling power of such tales as a result of our thirst for the sacred, and identifies elements of the holy in familiar blood-curdling yarns.True horror arises when the mundane becomes unexpected and when the contained breaks free of its confining chains to become unlimited. Anything boundless tends to become terrifying, argues Schneider. It is infinitude, which draws us to the unsavory, infinitude that lurks behind dread. Sheer bliss, paradise, or Nirvana therefore always has the potential to turn into horror, as limits fall away and the boundless expanses of infinity open up. While ecstasy is a glimpse of the infinite, terror is full disclosure. Drawing upon a detailed and telling analysis of eleven well-known horror stories, Dr. Schneider finds that a spiritual understanding of life can be attained through horror. Classic horror steers a middle path between fanaticism and despair: the path of wonderment. Horror teaches us that human personality is paradoxical; that revulsion and disgust are the obverse of excitement and freedom, and that both poles are vital to individual, social, and ecological well-being."]

Segade, Alexandro. "We Belong: On Sense 8." Art Forum (August 24, 2017)

Se7en (USA: David Fincher, 1995) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive)

Sense 8 (Netflix: J. Michael Straczynski, Andy Wachowski and Lana Wachowski, 2015 - ) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive)

The Seventh Seal (Sweden: Ingmar Bergman, 1957) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive)

The Shining (USA/UK: Stanley Kubrick, 1980) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive)

Singer, Olivia. "Lessons We Can Learn From The Rocky Horror Picture Show." AnOther (October 30, 2015)

The Skin I Live In (Spain: Pedro Almodovar, 2011) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive)

Stavrakopoulou, Francesca. "God: An Anatomy (Knopf, 2022)." New Books in Ancient History (November 14, 2022) ["The scholarship of theology and religion teaches us that the God of the Bible was without a body, only revealing himself in the Old Testament in words mysteriously uttered through his prophets, and in the New Testament in the body of Christ. The portrayal of God as corporeal and masculine is seen as merely metaphorical, figurative, or poetic. But, in this revelatory study, Dr. Francesca Stavrakopoulou presents a vividly corporeal image of God: a human-shaped deity who walks and talks and weeps and laughs, who eats, sleeps, feels, and breathes, and who is undeniably male. God: An Anatomy (Knopf, 2022) present a portrait—arrived at through the author’s close examination of and research into the Bible—of a god in ancient myths and rituals who was a product of a particular society, at a particular time, made in the image of the people who lived then, shaped by their own circumstances and experience of the world. From head to toe—and every part of the body in between—this is a god of stunning surprise and complexity, one we have never encountered before."]

Stalker (Soviet Union: Andrei Tarkovsky, 1979) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive)

The Strange Color of Your Body's Tears (Belgium/France/Luxembourg: Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani, 2013) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive)

Strick, James. "(Re)Introduction to Wilhelm Reich." Against Everyone #59 (February 12, 2019) ["Psychoanalyst, sexual liberationist, radical philosopher, and brilliant scientist Wilhelm Reich remains one of the misunderstood and influential rebels in recent history. I've always been a fan of Reich's, but frankly, did not fully understand him myself: His work is so radical that it challenges many of our most basic assumptions about the world and our culture. I've been wanting to do an AEWCH episode on Reich for a long time, but most people who write about him misinterpret his work and end up producing messy books that don't do him justice. Enter Dr. James Strick, professor at Franklin & Marshall College, historian of science, and author of the excellent book, Wilhelm Reich, Biologist from Harvard University Press. I first heard of James's work when former science colleagues of mine, who all studied under Lynn Margulis with me, told me about his work on Reich. Both Margulis and Reich were intensely polarizing figures, but Reich is the one so dangerous to the status quo that his work was seized and destroyed by the US government.
James and I cover much of the breadth of Reich's work, including his Sex-Pol work; why people choose to be oppressed and chose their oppressors; why Marxists feared Reich even as he was working with and for them (and the same with the psychoanalysts!); why Reich felt he had to measure libido, and how he thought he could do that; why pleasure matters; a Reichian perspective on Trump; Reich's concept of character armor; how Reich used dialectical materialism in his scientific work; Reich's discoveries about cancer; cloudbusters; what orgone energy and orgone accumulators are, anyway; and more!"]

Subissati, Andrea and Alexandra West. "Man Eater: Ravenous (1999)." Faculty of Horror #70 (February 25, 2019) ["Andrea and Alex head West to explore the notions of Manifest Destiny and the Frontier Myth in Antonia Bird’s Ravenous. Combining historical context through a modern gaze, Ravenous proves you are who you eat."]

---. "Party of Five: The Mist (2007)." The Faculty of Horror #74 (June 29, 2019) ["Is it the apocalypse or just the start of a new era? Can it be both? Andrea and Alex delve into everything from the military to existentialism, brought to life by Frank Darabont’s controversial adaptation of Stephen King’s novella. "]

---. "Season of the Witch: Witches in Film Part 3, The Witch (2015) and The Autopsy of Jane Doe (2016)." The Faculty of Horror #60 (March 25, 2018) ["The past few years have seen the figure of the witch become a cultural touchstone for progressives and conservatives alike. From the resurgence of astrology, tarot, and natural healing methods to feminist rallying cry, the witch has never been more inclusive or divisive. Through analysis of two recent films, Andrea and Alex examine the witch’s new meaning in contemporary Western society, and why she remains a symbol of subversive feminism."]\

---. "Violent Visage: Eyes Without a Face (1960)." Faculty of Horror (March 30, 2019) ["Andrea and Alex unmask Georges Franju’s 1960 masterpiece Eyes Without a Face and peer into the damaged landscape of a post-World War II France, body modification and why sometimes, father doesn’t know best."]

Tafoya, Scout. "The Post-Punk Cinema Manifesto: Side A." and "The Post-Punk Cinema Manifesto: Side B." Vimeo (2017)

Taubin, Amy. "Free Range." Film Comment (July/August 2017) ["With Okja, Bong Joon Ho creates his most dramatically protean adventure yet—a work of interspecies friendship, galloping satire, and monstrous truths."]

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (USA: Tobe Hooper, 1974) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive)

Thacker, Eugene. "Horror of Philosophy: Three Volumes." New Books Network Seminar (September 28, 2015) ["Eugene Thacker‘s wonderful Horror of Philosophy series includes three books – In the Dust of this Planet (Zero Books, 2011), Starry Speculative Corpse (Zero Books, 2015), and Tentacles Longer than Night (Zero Books, 2015) – that collectively explore the relationship between philosophy (especially as it overlaps with demonology, occultism, and mysticism) and horror (especially of the supernatural sort). Each book takes on a particular problematic using a particular form from the history of philosophy, from the quaestio, lectio, and disputatio of medieval scholarship, to shorter aphoristic prose, to productive “mis-readings” of works of horror as philosophical texts and vice versa. Taken together, the books thoughtfully model the possibilities born of a comparative scholarly approach that creates conversations among works that might not ordinarily be juxtaposed in the same work: like Nishitani, Kant, Yohji Yamamoto, and Fludd; or Argento, Dante, and Lautramont. Though they explore topics like darkness, pessimism, vampiric cephalopods, and “black tentacular voids,” these books vibrate with life and offer consistent and shining inspiration for the careful reader. Anyone interested in philosophy, theology, modern literature and cinema, literatures on life and death, the history of horror…or really, anyone at all who appreciates thoughtful writing in any form should grab them – grab all of them! – and sit somewhere comfy, and prepare to read, reflect, and enjoy."]

---. "Weird, Eerie, and Monstrous: A Review of The Weird an the Eerie by Mark Fisher." Blackout (June 8, 2018)

The Thing (USA: John Carpenter, 1982) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive)

Thomas, Lou. "Raw director Julia Ducournau: ‘I’m fed up with the way women’s sexuality is portrayed on screen'" BFI (April 6, 2017)

Thorpe, Charles. Necroculture. Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. [Professor has a copy.]

Titane (France/Belgium: Julia Ducournau, 2021) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive) ["We can all stop wishing it a long life: the new flesh is thriving, living rent-free in Julia Ducournau‘s fucked-up titanium brain, oozing from every frame of her bizarrely beautiful, emphatically queer sophomore film, and thence seeping in through your orifices, the better to colonize your most lurid, confusing nightmares, as well as that certain class of sex dream that you’d be best off never confessing to having. “Titane,” Ducournau’s follow-up to her sensational debut “Raw,” is roughly seven horror movies plus one bizarrely tender parent-child romance soldered into one machine and painted all over with flames: it’s so replete with startling ideas, suggestive ellipses, transgressive reversals and preposterous propositions that it ought to be a godforsaken mess. But while God has almost certainly forsaken this movie, He wouldn’t have been much needed around it anyway. Ducournau’s filmmaking is as pure as her themes are profane: to add insult to the very many injuries inflicted throughout, “Titane” is gorgeous to look at, to listen to, to obsess over, and fetishize."]

"Tropical Malady: The Transformation of Memory." Filmsick (October 5, 2010)

Trouble Every Day (France/Germany/Japan: Claire Denis, 2001) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive)

True Detective (HBO: Nic Pizzolatto, 2014 - ) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive)

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Thailand/Germany/Spain/France/United Kingdom: Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2010) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive)

Under the Skin (UK/USA/Switzerland: Jonathan Glazer, 2013) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive)

Unsell, Tyler, et al. "Weird Fiction." Horror Pod Class #2 (January 31, 2018)

Us (USA: Jordan Peele, 2019) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive)

Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (Czechoslovakia: Jaromil Jires, 1970) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive)

VanderMeer, Jeff. "When Science Fiction is Fiction." On the Media (August 14, 2020) ["While apocalyptic narratives have been part of popular culture for centuries and are common subject matter for films and literature, such stories now seem scarily realistic given the increasing impact of climate change. Brooke speaks with science fiction writer Jeff VanderMeer about the responsibility of fiction to illuminate the threats of climate change and human degradation of the planet, and how he imagines what our existence will look like in the coming years. His novel is Borne, and part of his Southern Reach Trilogy has been adapted as a movie."]

Vandermeer, Ann and Jeff Vandermeer. The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories. Tor, 2012. [Professor has a copy - ask if you need a story copied.]

Videodrome (Canada: David Cronenberg, 1983) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive)

Vint, Sheryl. "Don’t Let the Future Be Written For You: Sabrina Vourvoulias’s Ink." Los Angeles Review of Books (December 27, 2012) ["Set in a near future (one that perhaps seemed nearer still before the recent presidential election), the novel imagines a world in which immigration law has become overtly totalitarian, drawing an absolute line between the citizen and any “aliens” residing within the US. The title refers to a practice of border control in which one’s status is tattooed permanently onto one’s skin: naturally-born citizens are unmarked, but all others have tattoos whose distinctive colors make immediately visible their visa status, with black tattoos denoting the most despised immigrant class, temporary workers who are also fitted with GPS trackers. As the novel opens, we learn of the new legislation regarding tattoos, and it is soon revealed that an English-only ordinance has passed as well; as the plot unfolds, the legal repression of non-white subjects is further exacerbated by curfews (for those with tattoos only) and legislation regarding an infectious disease — which suspiciously seems only to target anyone with a tattoo — that is used as a pretext to strip such immigrants of their rights as legal residents, confine them to Inkatoriums for “treatment,” and eventually sterilize many without consent."]

Waking Life (USA: Richard Linklater, 2001) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive)

Weinstock, Jeffrey Andrew, ed. The Monster Theory Reader. University of Minnesota Press, 2020. [Professor has a copy - let him know if there is a chapter you would like photocopied.]

"Weird Fiction." Horror Pod Class #2 (January 31, 2018) [Michael Benton -- What is very interesting to me is the idea that the "new weird" genre is speaking to a 21st Century dis-ease with the impossibility of truly knowing reality. Propaganda, disinformation & official lies instantaneously and repeatedly disseminated through ubiquitous screen technologies, radically transforming science/technology/theories that even leave those that devote their lives to a particular discipline overwhelmed, and a general distrust from the general population in their traditional experts/leaders. This is played out vividly in Vandermeer's trilogy and Garland's film as the main characters struggling to understand/survive the transmutating Area X/The Shimmer are scientists/soldiers.  ]

West, Stephen. "Plato." Philosophize This! (June 20, 2013)

Wilkins, Budd. "Birthing Bad: Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist Through the Lens of 'Nordic Horror.'" Acidemic (2011)

Willis, Paul. "“She Knew Then That She was Going to Die of Her Femininity”: The Making of the Ayahuasca Drama Icaros: A Vision." Filmmaker (April 19, 2017)

The Witch (Canada/USA: Robert Eggers, 2015) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive)

Womack, Ytasha L. Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture. Lawrence Hill Books, 2013.

Woofter, Kristopher, et al. "'The Death of Death': A Memorial Retrospective on George A. Romero (1940-2017)." Monstrum 1.1 (April 2018) ["George Andrew Romero died on 16 July, 2017 at the age of 77. This retrospective treats all sixteen of the films Romero directed, with a mention of those he scripted. The critical perspectives here vary from the personal to the theoretical. Contributors were encouraged to respond in the way that they felt most appropriate to the film they chose, and to their experience with it. Some respondents are seasoned Romero scholars and addicts, some are coming to the material via Stephen King or literary antecedents such as Edgar A. Poe and E.C. Comics, and some are coming to Romero’s work absolutely fresh. This retrospective honors a visionary who changed the face of horror; but, perhaps more importantly, it hopes to encourage further interest in the diverse work of an important American filmmaker who never stopped seeking new ways to force his audience to experience their moment."]

Young, Anne. "Seeing Red from the Depths: Daria Nicolodi’s Secret Revenge." Monstrum #4 (October 2021) 

----------------------------------------------------------



This Video Essay Was Not Built on an Ancient Burial Ground from Offscreen on Vimeo.

A History of Horror from Diego Carrera on Vimeo.