Relating to Music and Music Fans: An Interview with Nancy Baym (Part II)

There has been some discussion in fandom studies of late about the need to trace multiple and alternative geneologies of fandom. What geneologies seemed important to you as you were writing this book?

One of the frustrating elements of the book was that I wanted to cite genealogies I couldn’t find. I wanted a straight up history of fandom. I wanted a guide to music fandom over the years. I wanted a geneology of fandom taking to the internet and what happened next. A collection of genealogies would have been amazing. I ended up having to cobble together my own version of these histories. I liked thinking with historical takes like Cavicci’s work on music fans in the 1800s, or Reagin and Rubenstein’s analyses. But I remain frustrated by the dominance of narrative media studies in fandom analysis and the general tendency to look toward one fandom rather than tracing the phenomena themselves throughout historical eras and considering how people worked with and against the technologies of the time to make their fandoms happen.

This book includes some extensive autobiographical sections where you discuss different moments in your own life as a music fan. What do you feel these first person accounts contributed to your analysis?

Originally I didn’t intend for that stuff to be in there, but when it came time to write the chapter where I trace the history of music fandom, and discuss how music fandom changed through the internet, I found that, because there weren’t the genealogies I wanted out there, I had to write that history myself. At that point I had a variety of examples but no narrative throughline to hold them together. I realized I was the best throughline I had because my lived experience as a fan whose life as a fan coincided with the internet’s quite well. So one thing the personal accounts contribute is narrative coherence for comparing music fandom in the age of difficult-to-penetrate cassette concert bootleg trading trees to the age of online community and unauthorized download sites. The autobiographical bits also make clear what my stakes are, which I think draws people in to the story I’m telling and helps them relate to it. Being autobiographical also became a way for me to address the stigmas around female fans and our sexuality in fandom. People like their scholars to be human, and I’ve had a lot of people just tell me they found those sections very moving. And I do think there is something that a personal telling, couched in citation and filled with ties to others’ experiences and insights, can convey about the affect of experience that is more challenging with other modes of writing.

You write, “Any position a musician assumes toward fans’ participatory practices sends relational messages about appropriate distances, roles and boundaries between them.” What are some of the ways that musicians have sought to find a balance between social connection and economic/artistic control?

One of the book’s central tenets is that one core dialectic in relational labor is between the desire to treat your audience as a participatory community and as a controllable market. People seek control by trying to enforce where and how people engage with them, by invoking the law and intellectual property rights (real or imagined), and by turning fans and their practices into datapoints they can manipulate through datafication. They seek participation by accepting audience autonomy and by letting them help in countless ways. One of my favorite examples of balance is Kristin Hersh, who controls by corralling her fans to her platforms but has been fan supported through subscription via her site since the late 1990s. I think the rub is that if you are working in capitalism, there are always going to be really strong tugs toward treating audiences as markets you are selling to even if you prefer participation, and if you have bought into the idea that creative work is something you, the creator, own and should control, then that is inevitably going to cause conflict between you and a participatory audience that feels a stake and wants to use it in their own ways.

What forms of audience engagement and participation created the most anxiety for the performers you interviewed? Why?

Nearly everyone I talked to regardless of sex had dealt with stalkers. While some took it in stride, it was quite upsetting for others. The hard part is that they can’t just go online and talk to an adoring audience, they have to deal with criticism, they have to deal with people who think it’s fun to be mean to them, they have to deal with harassment. That creates a lot of anxiety. But there’s a quieter, more pernicious anxiety, which is just keeping up with the learning curve it takes to know what sites people are using, what apps are in, what terms of use have changed, what algorithms seem to be doing now, what metrics – if any – matter, which topics they can safely discuss, and so on. Relationships take work even in the best of circumstances. Maintaining one with diverse crowds who want different things, and doing it in real time, in public, all the time, can be stressful even if you’re good at it and enjoy it.

How might the conflicts which arise around fans “gatekeeping” other fans fit within your model of relational labor?

One of the stressful things for some of the artists I talked with was that they saw fans create internal hierarchies and felt alienated by it. They didn’t like it, they wanted it to be easy for anyone to enter their fandom and they didn’t want any elitism or favoritism within it. And then they’d see how fans were treating one another - whether through gatekeeping or elitism or bullying - and know that if they were to intervene, they’d only make it worse, so they felt kind of agitated and helpless. Figuring out how, if at all, to confront and manage this as an artist is very much an issue of relational labor.

Relating to Music and Music Fans: An Interview with Nancy Baym (Part I)

Nancy Baym has been one of the leaders in internet-focused research for several decades, starting with her foundational work on soap opera fans and online communities (Tune In, Log On, 1999), her exploration of social media (Personal Connections in the Digital Age, 2013), her anthology considering methodology and ethics in internet research (Internet Inquiry, 2013). Each of these books has had a major impact upon how we think about our identities and social relations in the digital era.

So, the release of a new Nancy Baym book, Playing to the Crowd: Musicians, Audiences, and The Intimate Work of Connection, is cause for excitement, and this book does not disappoint. Drawing on interviews with a wide array of different musicians, Baym traces the ways these performers forge relationships with their fans and followers, seeing this activity as relational labor. She situates the current configuration of performer-fan relationships in a larger social and economic history of popular music. What can fans reasonably expect from the stars whose music touches their life and where might performers legitimately draw the line in terms of creating intimacy with their audiences? The book is important to many fields. My focus here is on what it might contribute to fandom studies.

Let’s start with a term that is fundamental to your book, “relational labor.” What do you mean by this term? Can you place it into some context in terms of the current economic status of the creative industries and in terms of shifts in the nature of intimacy in everyday life?

Straight to the heart of the matter! I use the term to describe the ongoing, everyday work of building and maintaining quasi-personal connections with audiences. A lot of people working in creative – and other – industries feel pressure to connect and engage with crowds in some kind of alchemical effort to turn a sense of interpersonal connection into revenue and job security. Making a sustaining living as a professional musician or other kind of creative worker has always been precarious, but seeing interpersonal (rather than just parasocial) connections with mass audiences as a solution to that is distinct to this historical moment. I see this as stemming from the tremendous economic confusion the ever-evolving internet triggers combined with the increased use of interpersonal intimacy as a tool for economic objectives (rather than just a refuge from them) that has origins in the early 20th century. Into this chaos come social media that make continuous, ongoing, daily, mundane interaction not just possible but expected and relational labor seems like it makes perfect sense. I use “relational” to draw attention to the expectations of continuity that “relationship” implies, and “labor” to draw attention to the fact that even when pleasurable, this is a kind of work, and that the value extracted from this work may go not to the people doing the relating but to the platforms through which they relate or to others.

You’ve written now about both soap fans and music fans. What do you see as the primary similarities and differences between the two groups? What might your concept of “relational labor” contribute to our understanding of the fandoms which spring up around fictional media?

There are times and ways that being a music fan is a lot like being a fan of a soap opera, especially when the lives of musicians (real or imagined) become fodder for ongoing drama. In both cases, fans value a lot of the same things: collaborative interpretation, expertise, insight, collections of artifacts, personal encounters with celebrities, and so on. Both sets develop shared practices and in-group languages and literacies. Both are very critical. But there are so many differences. I think the biggest one is that without a storyline, especially an unfinished one, music fans often have much less to talk about. Once you’ve made sense of the most recent release and the tour is over, there’s often very little to say.  Talking about a story is much easier than talking about music. Fictional fandoms still require relational labor, though, even when the characters are not the ones in the relationship, and we see authors and actors engaging in relational labor all the time. Publishers want to know what kind of Twitter following prospective authors have. I think, for instance, about the way J.K. Rowling tweets. Sure, she doesn’t have to engage crowds like that, but she does. Harry Potter doesn’t, but she does, and it may have implications for Harry.  

As you trace the history of music, you suggest that it was the shift away from music as participatory which gave rise to the concept of fan in the first place. Explain.  How might we understand today’s participatory fandom as different from earlier forms of participation that operated around music?

 Historically (and in many places and events now) music was an activity people did together as part of ritual or communal events. You can think of religious rituals, parades, or laboring together in fields.  In these contexts, it didn’t make much sense to think of some people as audiences and others as musicians because the roles were more malleable and because the music was not the point of the event but part of it. Once music becomes a rarified activity that experts at work perform for paying people at leisure, the concepts of audience and fan start to make sense. And once those people are cut out of the interaction loop when mass media make the performers inaccessible, audiences turn to each other, continuing the communal ritual engagement, but without the musicians in the community.  Today’s participatory fandom is in some ways a continuation of the earlier order of participation, but maintains lines between ARTIST and FAN in ways that older participation did not. Fans may be doing all kinds of things to participate in the music process that they didn’t in the latter half of the twentieth century, but there is generally still a very clear boundary between who makes the music and who does not which, in the eyes of some ethnomusicologists, makes it still performative rather than participatory. 

As you note, music fans discovered the internet well before most musicians did. What are the consequences of having the performers enter a space already colonized by their audiences?

The fact that the fans were there first means that anyone who wants to approach the internet as a marketing tool needs to do it on fans’ terms. You see this in music, but you also see it across brands. The CVP of marketing of the company I work for, for example, often talks about serving our fans. By the time anyone seeking to use the internet to cultivate customers got there, audiences had already formed communities amongst themselves and set the norms for what those communities value. The valuing of relationship over distance, for instance, or the valuing of fan-creativity, or of the gift economy didn’t disappear when artists showed up, and they had to contend with them to relate to online audiences successfully. If you enter that space as a performer with a broadcast mentality that you are there to share information and sell your product, you’re seen as doing it wrong. You have to be ready to see the space as a social one where you may be the topic of activity but you are not the center of how it works or impose value systems on its practices.

¡Presente!: A Day Without Immigrants and the Politics of Absence (Part Two)

¡Presente!: A Day Without Immigrants and the Politics of Absence

by Emily Rauber Rodriguez

Civic Imagination: The Ironic Use of Speculative Fiction

The idea of a group of people disappearing on a mass scale—the core imaginative concept in making this strike an effective demonstration—is not new within public consciousness. It conjures serious implications of mass expulsion or even genocide, both of which have direct connections to recent history. However, it also handily borrows from the familiar, arguably speculative, narratives of the Christian rapture and its agnostic American cousin, alien abduction, both of which present alternative interpretations of reality. Latin Americans have a connection to all of these disappearance narratives: the genocide of indiosat the hands of the Spanish invaders; a status as an overwhelmingly Christian-majority continent; and a sordid history of political opponents becoming desaparecidos—literally, “disappeared.”

Latinos, however, have been historically absent throughout most of mainstream speculative visual fiction, a choice that’s all the more resonant when considering that the majority of makers of these texts are white Americans. As John Leguizamo joked in his stand-up special, Freak(1998), the fact that there were no Latinos on Star Trek“was proof that they didn't plan on keeping us around” in the future (Merla-Watson and Olguín 2017, 8). Similarly, Curtis Marez notes the lack of Latino farmworkers in Star Wars, but draws attention to the “power of their animating absence” as a sign of a reactionary move back toward the image of the white American farm boy (2016, 135). In both cases, the lack of Latinos could be intentional or unintentional, but either way demonstrates a larger issue whereby their voices and faces aren’t considered a significant part of these speculative futures (or distant pasts). As Cathryn Josefina Merla-Watson and B.V. Olgun wrote, “Being discursively cut outof the future is tantamount to being cut off from the future” (2017, 8). Similarly, repeatedly ignoring Latinos in these fictional visions of the future seems to suggest that Latinos also already being ignored in the present reality.

Instances of speculative fiction created by marginalized groups, thus, become even more important objects of study. As Chicana scholar and activist Gloria Anzaldua wrote, imagination “has the capacity to extend us beyond the confines of our skin, situation, and condition so we can choose our responses. It enables us to reimagine our lives, rewrite the self, and create guiding myths for our times” (2002, 5). For marginalized groups—those facing racism, poverty, or other discrimination on a daily basis—the specter of future relief from their current struggles seems particularly compelling. Indeed, Latino speculative fiction often draws on presenting solutions to or escapes from real-life issues. William A. Calvo-Quirosnotes that “the Chican@ speculative imaginary deeply intertwines sociopolitical and historical oppressive experiences and engenders a unique typology of speculative productions that emerge from the margins for the margins” (2017, 40). A Day Without a Mexicanfollows this closely, as its future is situated in the otherwise very realistic setting of Los Angeles. Furthermore, the speculative element exists primarily to call attention to the sociopolitical message of the film, not as a way to show off CGI creatures or create a visual spectacle for the audience.

Indeed, although the film uses wacky humor and fantastical imagery, it constantly reminds viewers of its connections to the real world. Both the short and the feature are shot in mockumentary style, using faux interviews, news reports, and B-roll footage, creating a sense of reality. The filmmakers were directly inspired to make the short after witnessing the passage of Proposition 187 in California in 1994, which would have restricted undocumented people from using state services and depended on drawing conservative voters’ ire against Latin American and Asian immigrants. The proposition received support from Governor Pete Wilson and did win the popular voter referendum, though it was later declared unconstitutional. Still, anti-immigrant sentiments remained stoked. Though neither film directly acknowledges Proposition 187, they do incorporate references to the real-life proceedings, such as the character of an anti-immigrant politician with an undocumented immigrant housekeeper; the same situation undercut the senatorial campaign of Republican nominee Michael Huffington. Both films are also interspersed with textual data that emphasizes their connection with reality; for instance, two teachers complaining at how much their workload has increased without their Latino colleagues are juxtaposed with a text banner proclaiming that “20% of California K-12 teachers are Hispanic.” The film’s marketing also called attention to its direct real-world application: to make use of burgeoning mid-2000s viral media, the producers put up a billboard in Hollywood that read: “On May 14th, there will be no Mexicans in California,” along with the movie website’s URL. The film openly invited its viewers to imagine the speculative scenario of the film occurring in their reality, which, ultimately, is what the protest organizers chose to attempt to reenact.

Fundamentally, both the film (explicitly) and the boycotts (implicitly) depended on an ironic deployment of civic imagination. Gianpaolo Baiocchi, et al. (2014, 55)defined the civic imagination as “the ways in which people individually and collectively envision better political, social, and civic environments.” For some people, this better future might indeed come from the perceived community solidarity engendered by all-white, cultural homogeneity; protecting the ethnic and racial uniformity of their group from perceived outsiders—immigrant, Latino, or otherwise—thus becomes their primary civic drive. In essence then, a Day Without Immigrants presented the ideal future of these white supremacists: a world with no immigrants. This technique may seem counterintuitive in that, in order to critique that view, these outsiders should assist in orchestrating their own disappearance. However, the boycotts themselves also made an appeal to community solidarity—only in their case, they appealed to a sense of diversity and togetherness, rather than racial homogeny. Protestors likely hoped that their absence would not only be noticed, but missedby the larger, non-overtly racist population. The discursive purpose of the boycott, then, was to enact the supremacists’ civic imagination as a temporary reality, and, hopefully, prove that it was unfulfilling and even unrealistic. By presenting this unsatisfactory future, it could push more indecisive people to reject that vision and move towards something else. The Day Without Immigrants’ reliance on ironic civic imagination, however, meant that the protestors did not get a chance to present their positive vision of their future, which could explain the lack of direct or continuous results from this action.

While Elisabeth Soep (2016)notes oversimplification as a potential risk of activist engagement through new media, in this case, the simplicity of the plan was perhaps the main reason for its successful spread. While the flyers made the event visible and easy to share on social media sites, the boycotts’ concept—even if one hadn’t seen the film A Day Without a Mexican—was easy enough to explain in the length of a tweet or brief conversation. This correlates to the film’s original format as a short, concept film—with only a few minutes to capture the audience’s attention, the filmmakers of A Day Without a Mexicanhad to distill their intended message into an uncomplicated story and easy-to-envision fictional world. The short film format also necessarily requires viewers to fill in the gaps with their own experiences. Similarly, a simple protest format like “don’t go to work or school” could be enacted in many different ways, thus allowing people to extract the most meaningful interpretations for themselves in how they chose to participate.

The Day Without Immigrants’ conceptual strategies are especially important to note, given its reliance on absence as a driving, yet easily unnoticed, force. In her introduction to This Bridge We Call Home, Anzaldua defines empowerment as coming “from ideas—our revolution is fought with concepts, not guns, and it is fueled by vision” (2002, 5). In this sense, the Day Without Immigrants is nearly a textbook example of empowerment, as it depended foremost on the spread of an idea. If everybody encountered a few missing people throughout their day and did not connect those absences to the strike, the protest would have imparted no significant meaning. And surely, there must have been many instances during this boycott where an immigrant’s absence was indeed not noticed, or at least not connected to the larger action. The film also begins with most people noticing one or two people missing, then having to piece together the larger significance. The most essential element of this movement, then, was to spread the ideaof the strike, and, indeed, of that vision of the future with no immigrants. The concept foremost gave meaning to the actions, and luckily the concept was mostly strong enough to remain in place even when the protests themselves were, by design, invisible.

Part of the film’s cult appeal was its obvious low-budget aesthetic, aided by the mockumentary style and intentionally shoddy graphics, indicating to viewers that it was an outsider and not part of the Hollywood mainstream. The homemade, networked spread of the Day Without Immigrants protest also demonstrated a bottom-up, grassroots process of participatory politics. Kahne, et al. (2015, 41)have defined as participatory politics as “interactive, peer-based acts through which individuals and groups seek to exert both voice and influence on issues of public concern.” The boycott here was planned by the people and for the people, with no official governmental or organizational backing. While protestors are often suspicious of activist organizations—see recent criticisms of the Women’s March (Valens 2018)—this movement offered an alternative to traditional political participation. Like an indie film, the Day Without Immigrants’ lack of mainstream backing seemed to ensure that its message was the most important element; there was no higher power waiting to gain a profit from the labor of the protestors. Both the film and the movement also spread primarily through word-of-mouth, offering each participant a direct connection into the event, likely by somebody they already knew. This interpersonal connection instantly built a community around each object, allowing people to forge social bonds even beyond the immediate context of the film and the protest.

Finally, it’s interesting to note the reverse format of these Day Without Immigrants protests, which made visible people temporarily invisible: protests that seek to make the invisible temporarily visible. In 2015, for instance, marchers in Madrid gathered via hologram to oppose a law preventing mass protests—technically following the law through their bodily absence, yet also calling attention to its danger through their digital presence (Mullen 2015). Similarly, advocacy group Avaaz recently displayed 7000 pairs of shoes on the Capitol lawn, to represent the number of children who have died by gun violence since the Sandy Hook shooting (Killough 2018). In both cases, the protests call attention to people who cannot be present—due to specific failings of the legal system—by claiming physical space for their absent bodies. These striking, ghostly images also contrast the typical images of a mass of people at other protests, allowing them to stand out in a crowded visual media landscape. In some ways, the immigrant story could translate well into one of these types of protests, perhaps representing those who have been lost. But, though they may not be able to control the consequences, immigrants still have the agency to choose whether to make themselves visible. Through their choice to make themselves absent at the Day Without Immigrants, protestors could make a powerful statement that acknowledged their precarious position, while also declaring that they were not invisible—yet.

Conclusion

By using a simple, well-known speculative fiction concept, the Day Without Immigrants protest was able to spread easily, even without the immediate context of the film, A Day Without a Mexican. Ultimately, the Day Without Immigrants wasn’t entirely successful in terms of policy changes, and truly universal participation among all immigrants in all walks of life likely would have had impossible-to-ignore consequences. However, the reality is that this type of protest action could never reach every immigrant in the country, due to their economic and social precarity. Some undocumented immigrants might also resent having to move into the shadows voluntarily, when that is how they are forced live every day. Similar campaigns have appeared over the past year on a more frequent basis, though—including immigrants rights’ organization Cosecha’s 2017 and 2018 May Day boycotts—indicating that absence is still an evocative mode of protest.

Immigrants are bound together primarily by virtue of their shared “uncitizenship” (by birth) of their country of residence, making their civic participation a perhaps less obvious and more intentional act. As a somewhat organically formed expression of activism—shaped and remixed by its participants as it developed—a Day Without Immigrants serves as a reminder to future movements to truly consider the needs of its members, not only in political goals, but also in preferred modes of participation. Although mass marches may be one way to voice the messages of a community, it is, by far, not the only way.

References

Anzaldua, Gloria. 2002. “(Un)natural Bridges, (Un)safe Spaces.” In This Bridge We Call Home: Radical Visions for Transformation, edited by Gloria Anzaldua and AnaLouise Keating, 1–5. New York: Routledge.

Baiocchi, Gianpaolo, Elizabeth A. Bennett, Alissa Cordner, Peter Taylor Klein, and Stephanie Savell. 2014. “The Civic Imagination.” In The Civic Imagination: Making a Difference in American Political Liife, 52–76. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publications.

Calvo-Quitos, William A. 2017. “The Emancipatory Power of the Imaginary: Defining Chican@ Speculative Productions.” In Altermundos : Latin@ Speculative Literature, Film, and Popular Culture, edited by Cathryn Josefina Merla-Watson and B. V. Olguín. Los Angeles: UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center Press.

Chishti, Muzaffar, Sarah Pierce, and Jessica Bolter. 2017. “The Obama Record on Deportations: Deporter in Chief or Not? | Migrationpolicy.org.” Migration Policy. https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/obama-record-deportations-deporter-chief-or-not.

Costanza-Chock, Sasha. 2014. Out of the Shadows, Into the Streets: Transmedia Organizing and the Immigrant Rights Movement. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Federal Bureau of Investigation. 2016. “2016 Hate Crime Statistics.” https://ucr.fbi.gov/hate-crime/2016.

Gamber-Thompson, Liana, and Arely M. Zimmerman. 2016. “DREAMing Citizenship: Undocumented Youth, Coming Out, and Pathways to Participation.” In By Any Media Necessary: The New Youth Activism, edited by Henry Jenkins, Sangita Shresthova, Liana Gamber-Thompson, Neta Kligler-Vilenchik, and Arely M. Zimmerman. New York: NYU Press.

Heredia, Luisa Laura. 2016. “More than DREAMs.” NACLA Report on the Americas48 (1): 59–67.

Kahne, Joseph, Ellen Middaugh, and Danielle Allen. 2015. “Youth, New Media, and the Rise of Participatory Politics.” In From Voice to Influence: Understanding Citizenship in a Digital Age, edited by Danielle Allen and Jennifer S. Light, 35–55. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Killough, Ashley. 2018. “Activists Place Thousands of Shoes on Capitol Lawn in Gun Death Memorial.” CNN. https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/13/politics/shoe-memorial-congress-gun-violence/index.html.

La Torre III, Pedro De. 2014. “Out of the Shadows: DREAMer Identity in the Immigrant Youth Movement - ProQuest.” Latino Studies12 (3): 449–67.

Lucas, Ryan. 2017. “Hate Crimes Up In 2016, FBI Statistics Show : NPR.” NPR. https://www.npr.org/2017/11/13/563737883/hate-crimes-up-in-2016-fbi-statistics-show.

Marez, Curtis. 2016. Farm Worker Futurism.University of Minnesota Press. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctt1c2crhk.

Merla-Watson, Cathryn Josefina, and B. V. Olguín. 2017. “Reassessing the Past, Present, and Future of the Chican@ and Latin@ Speculative Arts.” In Altermundos : Latin@ Speculative Literature, Film, and Popular Culture, edited by Cathryn Josefina Merla-Watson and B.V. Olguin, 492. Los Angeles: UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center Press. http://www.washington.edu/uwpress/search/books/MERALT.html.

Molina, Natalia. 2013. How Race Is Made in America : Immigration, Citizenship, and the Historical Power of Racial Scripts. Oakland: University of California Press.

Mullen, Jethro. 2015. “Spanish Activists Hold Hologram Protest in Madrid.” CNN. https://www.cnn.com/2015/04/12/europe/spain-hologram-protest/index.html.

Robbins, Liz, and Anniie Correal. 2017. “On a ‘Day Without Immigrants,’ Workers Show Their Presence by Staying Home - The New York Times.” The New York Times, February 16.

Soep, Elisabeth. 2016. “Youth Agency in Public Spheres: Emerging Tactics, Literacies, and Risks.” In Civic Media: Technology, Design, Practice, edited by Eric Gordon and Paul Mihailidis, 393–420. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Stein, Perry. 2017. “Restaurants, Schools Close in ‘Day Without Immigrants’ Protest - The Washington Post.” Washington Post, February 16.

Valens, Ana. 2018. “The Women’s March Is Under Fire for Tweeting Barbara Bush ‘Rest in Power.’” The Daily Dot. https://www.dailydot.com/irl/barbara-bush-womens-march-feminists-twitter/.

Zong, Jie, and Jeanne Batalova. 2017. “Frequently Requested Statistics on Immigrants and Immigration in the United States | Migrationpolicy.org.” Migration Policy Institute. https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/frequently-requested-statistics-immigrants-and-immigration-united-states.

Zoppo, Avalon. 2017. “Employees Across U.S. Fired After Joining ‘Day Without Immigrants’ Protest.” NBC News. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/employees-across-u-s-fired-after-joining-day-without-immigrants-n722991.

Zuckerman, Ethan. 2013. “Cute Cats to the Rescue? Participatory Media and Political Expression.” In Youth, New Media and Political Participation, edited by Danielle Allen and Jennifer Light. Cambridge: MIT Press.

¡Presente!: A Day Without Immigrants and the Politics of Absence (Part One)

Periodically, I like to share outstanding student papers that I feel address topics which will be of interest to my readers. The following paper about an imaginative campaign for immigrant rights emerged from a PhD Seminar I taught last spring on Participatory Politics and the Civic Imagination.

¡Presente!: A Day Without Immigrants and the Politics of Absence

by Emily Rauber Rodriguez

“How do you make the invisible visible? By taking it away.”

—  Lyla Rod (Yareli Arizmendi) in A Day Without a Mexican

On February 16, 2017, workers at Wellesley College’s Davis Museum removed all art from display that had been created or donated by immigrants, marking nearly a fifth of the collection. The same day, restaurants across the country—humble corner taquerías, quick-service joints inside the Pentagon food court, high-end establishments run by celebrity chefs—closed their doors. Typically overcrowded classrooms sat empty, with some school districts reporting attendance rates that day dropping by 30 to 40 percent (Robbins and Correal 2017). These disappearances mark just a few examples of the Day Without Immigrants, a planned period of general strikes and boycotts designed to contrast the United States’ dependence on immigrants with increasingly vocal anti-immigrant sentiments. For one entire day, immigrants and allies encouraged each other to stay home from school and work, and to not spend any money—generally making their absence apparent. With no official organization founding the movement, the citizen (and non-citizen) actors themselves fueled much of the event’s spread, creating and remixing Facebook event pages, digital flyers, text messages, and personal conversations to promote the cause.

In one sense then, the Day Without Immigrants attempted to foster awareness by causing a noticeable disturbance in the daily life of people who might not otherwise care about immigration issues, or may not even realize who in their lives were directly affected by them. A colleague missing from work or school, a favorite barista absent from the coffee shop, a regular bus driver replaced on her route—while most people might not normally catalogue the immigration status of every person they meet, this event was designed to call attention to that largely invisible attribute, and emphasize how integrated and essential immigrants are to American society. As an extension of Ethan Zuckerman’s Cute Cat Theory (2013), the Day Without Immigrants might be cast as evidence of a parallel “Delicious Taco Theory”—just as people might not care about government censorship until it blocks them from viewing cute cat photos on Facebook, so too might they begin caring about deportations if it prevented them from easily acquiring tacos. At the same time, the larger framework of the action necessarily realized a vision of the very future proposed by anti-immigrant legislation; to avoid making that vision a permanent reality, the Day Without Immigrants’ risky ideological maneuver was to enact it temporarily. Though the action did not cause any immediate legislative successes or major scale shifts in political discourse, its strategic, theoretical grounding offers a fascinating entry in the discussion of how to increase political visibility for a population who is often deemed politically and culturally invisible.

An eerily similar vision of this future had appeared years earlier in a 1998 satirical mockumentary short called “A Day Without a Mexican,” directed by Sergio Arau and written by Yareli Arizmendi, which Arau and Arizmendi later remade into a feature-length film under the same title in 2004. In both versions of the film, Californians wake up to discover that all Latinos[1]have disappeared (including immigrants as well as American-born Latinos), while the borders of the state have also been enveloped in a thick fog that prevents communication with the outside world. The premise is primarily mined for comedy, especially in relation to Latinos’ vital but often unappreciated role in the service industry, and the films poke fun at the hapless non-Latino characters who are suddenly forced to make their own food, do their own laundry, and raise their own children. Despite the comedic overtones though, A Day Without a Mexicanmakes a serious point about Latin American immigrants’ simultaneous visibility and invisibility: though they are frequently invoked as political pawns, they are often taken for granted and ignored on a personal level. Ultimately, the non-Latino characters—even the overtly racist ones—realize their daily lives are worse without Latinos, and they wholeheartedly embrace them upon their return.

An earlier “Day Without an Immigrant” strike, officially known as the Great American Boycott, had occurred on May Day 2006, closer to the feature film’s theatrical run and initial spread on home video. Sasha Costanza-Chock, who covered the 2006 protest and its spread via social media and Spanish radio in Out of the Shadows, into the Streets, notes that organizers had promoted the May Day action “as ‘A Day Without an Immigrant,’ a direct reference to the 2004 film A Day Without a Mexican” (2014, 23). However, because the film made only $5 million domestically, and played in about 100 theaters, it is doubtful that the majority of people participating in this protest—millions across the country—did so because they were fans of the film. The high-concept nature of the story, though, meant that audiences could easily imagine the basic idea even without seeing the film; that same quality, when applied to proposed political activism in turn, is similarly valuable, as the idea of enacting a “day without immigrants” is also, more or less, self-explanatory. The action had a low barrier of comprehension, both in terms of the reasoning behind it and its potential effects, as well as in understanding how to participate. Again, although that protest did not achieve (nor set out to achieve) a direct result, the widespread participation shows the importance of clear and easy messaging, as particularly aided by drawing on speculative fiction.

In this paper, I will first discuss how centering the action around the axis of visibility and invisibility had special significance for the Latino and Latin American immigrant population, which ultimately made it easier for the concept to spread. I will then discuss the film and protest itself, arguing that the imaginative transitive properties of high-concept speculative fiction make it an especially fitting framework for political action.

Absence/Presence: Latinos and Protest in the United States

According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2015 American Community Survey, the United States contains, as an official estimate, 43.3 million immigrants, accounting for 13.5 percent of the total U.S. population (Zong and Batalova 2017). Hundreds of millions more are the children or grandchildren of immigrants. Yet the country’s self-ascribed mythology as a nation of immigrants—which already disserves the narratives of Native Americans and African Americans—has also conflicted with increasingly restrictive immigration policies throughout the 20thand 21stcenturies. As populations shifted and earlier disdained waves of immigrants, such as the Irish and Italians, became enveloped within the boundaries of American whiteness, other groups became the focus of these anti-immigrant sentiments. Today, the largest groups of immigrants to the United States come from Latin America, including Mexico, El Salvador, and Guatemala, and Asia, including India, China, and the Philippines (Zong and Batalova 2017). As with previous generations, opposition to immigrants is largely focused on these ethnically racialized groups—rather than towards white immigrants from England or Canada—thereby conflating the immigration problem with the parallel issue of racism in America.

Historically, that conflation goes back as far as the concept of citizenship itself, originally as a right granted only to whites[2]and only later yielded to other races. As part of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, which ceded former Mexican territory in the Southwest to the United States, those existing Mexican residents would be eligible for US citizenship. However, as Natalia Molina has argued, the fact that this right to citizenship was based on nationality, rather than race, became “the Treaty’s Achilles’ heel, providing an opening for those who sought to make Mexican ineligible for citizenship for decades to come” (2013, 45). That’s because, officially, American citizenship was still only a right granted to whites. After 1868, the 14thamendment allowed for African Americans born in the United States become citizens; when submitting the paperwork though, naturalization officers could still only describe the applicants’ race as “white” or “black,” as Native Americans and Asian Americans did not yet have the right to citizenship. Thus, the perception of Mexicans and their racialization became largely dependent on their context. In the southwest, officers were more likely to process Mexicans as white, but in the Midwest, they might be assumed to be Native American and thus denied (Molina 2013, 47). As such, Latinos have historically operated outside both legal and cultural understandings of ethnicity in the United States—which hinge on a binary, one-drop formation of race—often making them difficult to position and trace across different locales and eras.

Latin Americans have also been rendered invisible by necessity, due to the fact that they make up the largest percentage of undocumented immigrants. Though exact figures are only estimated, most undocumented immigrants in the United States come from Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras. As a whole, undocumented people must often behave in ways that minimize their visibility, as they face the risk of deportation if apprehended (Costanza-Chock 2014; De La Torre III 2014; Heredia 2016). This leads to working under-the-table jobs, practicing caution in crowds, and avoiding behaviors that might focus undue attention on them. For instance, if ICE is rumored to be conducting raids outside schools or on Greyhound buses, undocumented immigrants may stay home, leaving classrooms and kitchens empty in a similar way to the staged protests. By engaging in this semi-voluntary practice of self-absenting, they are able in one sense to negotiate their absence as a form of agency. The impulse of the Day Without Immigrants worked in much the same way, by allowing immigrants to purposely stage their absence on their own terms on a mass scale.

The parallel to these intentional absences, of course, is the looming threat of involuntary disappearance for the undocumented. Undocumented people regularly performinvisibility in order to avoid some forms of disappearances, such as deportation. Yet at the same time, that invisibility also makes them more vulnerable; because undocumented people often operate outside the formal state system, they can be at added risk of anonymously slipping through the cracks. For instance, migrants crossing the border might travel with no identification on them, or have it stolen or removed. Programs like Operation Identification, out of the Forensic Anthropology Center at Texas State, exist solely in order to identify the bodies of migrants who have died crossing the border and inform their families. The process can take months, if ever solved, meaning that their families have no knowledge of what has happened to their absent loved ones in the meantime—an unexplained disappearance. Additionally, since undocumented people often can’t contact law enforcement for fear of endangering themselves, they are also vulnerable to labor violations, human trafficking, or worse; serial killer Juan Corona targeted Latino farm workers in the 1960s, and murdered 25 before he was caught by chance in 1971. In a country where personhood has often been linked to citizenship, people who are unable to participate within the formal system are effectively rendered invisible. In turn, their actual disappearances may also be expected, ignored, or unknown.

Historically, the major Chicano and Latino protests have also drawn upon concepts of invisibility—particularly through the use of strikes, boycotts, and walkouts. Importantly, these types of actions draw on the principles of 1960s non-violent protest movements, which used presence, and the withholding of violence, to highlight the violence being used against them. In the Delano grape boycott in the 1960s, led by Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta, the workers on strike withheld their bodies from their labor, and asked for the community to support them by notbuying products from farms with unfair labor practices. While protestors did walk picket lines, which put them in immediate bodily danger, the strikes and boycotts allowed simultaneous participation from more vulnerable populations, as well as allowing privileged people to show their allyship without significant effort. Since they were effectively asking people to do nothing, they were likely able to amass many more supporters than they would have if they had asked people to commit time or money. Chavez’s hunger strikes could also be considered an act of withholding, in that, again, he was drawing attention to his cause by notperforming a normal action, as well as physically diminishing himself through weight loss. Similarly, the East LA high school walkouts of 1968 called attention to school curriculums that did not support the large Chicano student populations by, in turn, removing those students from the classroom in protest. In both cases, these protests removed the presence or products of Latino workers, activists, and students, and forced those left to imagine what a world without them would look like.

The Day Without Immigrants built on many of these concepts, helping its message to spread easily to those with familiarity of activist histories. The protest fundamentally played on the duality of absence and presence, a particularly resonant theme for Latinos and undocumented immigrants in particular. The action was also organized almost entirely online via social media, making it safer for politically vulnerable populations to spread the message without putting themselves at immediate risk. Furthermore, although there were corollary marches, the viral concept of the Day Without Immigrants only required one’s absence to partake, meaning that people could participate without danger of retaliatory violence, jailing, or deportation. Participants did face the hazard of getting fired for not going to work, which would have been particularly threatening for this economically vulnerable population; indeed, some protestors did lose their jobs (Zoppo 2017). However, this effect was in part due to the fact that participation in the protest was limited and voluntary, and not universal. If all 43 million immigrants in the United States did disappear, the country would face a devastating labor shortage that would severely impact the entire American economy, and workers would be high demand. One of the challenges the Day Without Immigrants faced, then, was a theoretically solid concept that nonetheless could not be applied perfectly in practice.

Importantly, the 2017 boycott took place less than a month after the inauguration of Donald Trump, who had run a campaign fueled by racist and anti-immigrant rhetoric directed particularly at black, Mexican, and Muslim populations. As such, the Day Without Immigrants was frequently characterized in the media as a direct response to his proposed immigration policies, including the border wall and the travel ban (Robbins and Correal 2017; Stein 2017). Similarly, the 2006 Great American Boycott had been formed in direct response to a proposed congressional immigration reform that year (Costanza-Chock 2014). While that reform did ultimately fail, in the decade that passed, immigrants’ rights activists had witnessed continued deportations, bombings, and seizures even under the comparatively liberal president Barack Obama. Heading into 2017, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agencies had nearly doubled, private immigrant detention centers swelled to capacity, and reports of hate crimes continued to rise (Chishti, Pierce, and Bolter 2017; Federal Bureau of Investigation 2016; Lucas 2017). Although, as of February, Trump was still months away from making new policy legislation, the discursive shift had resonated enough with immigrants to make the action seem urgent even without an immediate legislative foil.

[1]The use of “Mexican” in the title references the perception that many Americans, especially in California, assume all Latinos are Mexican. 

[2]To be specific, white, land-owning men—thus conflating not just race with citizenship, but also class and gender.

Emily Rauber Rodriguez is a PhD student in Cinema and Media Studies at USC School of Cinematic Arts. She previously earned an MA from USC in Cinema and Media Studies, and a BA in Film Studies and Psychology from Barnard College, Columbia University. Emily’s research interests include the depiction, participation, and fandom of Latinxs in speculative fiction film and comics. She tweets at @vintagecameos.

Cult Conversations: Lovecraftian Myth and Paratextual Ripples in Popular Culture by Keith McDonald

Keith McDonald

There is a scene in the 2016 film Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (dir. Gareth Edwards) where in order to extract information from Empire defector Bodhi Rock (Riz Ahmed) the mysterious Rebel faction leader Saw Gerrara (Forest Whitaker) introduces him to a blob-like tentacled creature named Bor Gullet. Gerrera explains the creature's power as it wraps its tentacles around the terrified Rook, “Bor Gullet can feel your thoughts. No lie is safe. What have you really brought me, cargo pilot? Bor Gullet will know the truth. The unfortunate side effect is that one tends to lose one’s mind.” This of course nods both visually and thematically to H.P. Lovecraft where human engagement with strange and powerful creatures leads to the splintering of the mind in what is in essence a psychic rape in the most popular film franchise on the planet. This is not surprising in some ways, Lovecraft’s contribution to Weird Tales was his main outlet and the pulp sensibility and genre focus was part of the soup of influences on the Star Wars mythos.

Mark Jones gives a comprehensive overview of Lovecraft’s influence on popular culture in his essay, Tentacles and Teeth: The Lovecraftian Being in Popular Culture, which acts as a starting point for the following discussion. Of course, there is paratextual merchandise using the image of Bor Gullet in the form of a ‘cutsie’ t-shirt on which it wears a cap with the word “Truth” written on it. If one doesn’t already exist, there will surely be a collectible figurine to be traded on the fan convention circuit and it is paratexts (models etc.) that will be the focus of what follows here.

One can only imagine what Lovecraft would make of the recent release of the Pop Vinyl Cthulu figure, but it is easy (and perhaps lazy) to imagine a less than enthusiastic response. There are thousands of Lovecraftian collectables in circulation in comic book outlets, at fan conventions and online. These are not always drenched in irony though, the majority of the models themselves are intricate, at times unnerving, and invocative of the memorable power of Lovecraft’s creations. The most popular of these creatures is Cthulu itself, which fittingly has a myriad of incarnations (including a plush child’s toy). Alongside this, there are coffee mugs, coasters, mobile phone cases, tote bags and jewelry, much of which can be bought through websites such as cthulushop.com where, when opening a new page to browse, you click on a tab which reads ‘Load more madness.’ This sees literary mythos turned into a growing commercial industry. No doubt some Lovecraft purists will baulk at this and see is as an anathema to the intentions of the author. However, this is Barthe’s concept of ‘the death of the author’ blended with monetized appropriation and user-generated content in physical form. The death of one author does not mean the death of the author’s creations and the ongoing curation of the writer’s incantations. This is fitting in a mythos in which a general disdain for the notions of the time in human culture and indeed humanity loom large. The fact that the internet is used as a portal to ‘load more madness’ and retain the longevity of the creations where ancients always return has its place in popular culture too. As Tara Brabazon states, “[p]opular culture is a conduit for popular memory, moving words, ideas ideologies and narratives through time.” (p, 67) Again, the fact that the lexicon of the Cthulu mythos is retained and recognised is fitting here.

Of course it must be acknowledged that these pop-cultural tokens exist in a wider pantheon of paratextual produce in fan culture, be it in relation to toys, models and commemorative materials and that these do not need to be science fictional or Horror inflected in order to create meaning for some and have cache. However, in Religion and Popular Culture: A Hyper-real Testament Adam Possamai makes a case that fictional religious fantasies are commonly represented in pop-cultural paratexts in for instance the Star Wars, Harry Potter and Tolkien franchises (82). He also points out that whereas many of these pop-cultural fictions work and utilize binary oppositions in relation to morality, Lovecraftian mythos stands out in that insanity and defeat is the terrible resolution (82).

In addition there is the broader canon of horror inflected paratexts circulated in this manner for an extremely long time (pop-culturally speaking) to the extent that we take them for granted (Dracula, Frankenstein etc.). In this context the wider popularization of Cthulian icons is relatively new and niche, yet persistent and growing. This is perhaps due to the curation and extension of the Mythos’ imagery by the likes of filmmakers such as Guillermo del Toro, Ridley Scott and writers such as Alan Moore who in various ways insist upon the return of the entities.

Cthulu-inspired guitar

Justin Mullis points out the nature of the Cthulu mythos, with its sense of irreverence to binary structures and its polymorphous incarnations may be fitting for practices of hybridization and fan and enthusiasts ironic take on the iconic. He writes:

“Because of the heterodox themes found throughout Lovecraft's work, his Cthulhu Mythos has become a natural candidate for...subversion. Drawing on notions developed by anthropologists and historians of religion who have dealt with the related social functions of ritual, play, and joking.”

Cthulu itself as a visual presence is itself many tentacled and these can be seen as both drawing upon existing mythologies (Medusa, Hydra etc.) whist inviting myriad versions of such icons. This may sound rather far fetched, but as noted by Mullis, Lovecraft himself actively encouraged others to expand the product of his own writing including writers such as Robert Bloch. In a world of mass participatory culture, it may be strangely fitting that fans get to access these idols in a range of celebratory, ironic and humorous manners in the vein of the ever evolving mythos. Humor may be seen as derisory to the intentions of the author who is so often presented (rightly or wrongly) as impressively humorless, but these humorous takes do involve intelligence and a sense of a communal shorthand as described by Millus:

“For a joke to work, it must first create a subjunctive world in which its narrative makes sense. It is also crucial that the subject matter that constitutes the joke be recognized by those to whom it is being presented. If one does not understand what a joke is about, then it will fail.”

There is of course a precedent here in terms of textual poaching which can be seen in the form of the figurines used in the Call of Cthulu role playing game which dates back to 1981, and as anyone who has ever played desktop gaming will attest to, rituals and paraphernalia are key. RPGs exist to facilitate live fan-fictions and with these come opportunities for enthusiasts to shape narratives and to customize their own paraphernalia by, for instance, painting and customizing their collection. The term collection here is key. The miniatures in this context are collections within collectives and anyone entering a Games Workshop to see players comparing their latest addition will see that this paratextual practice is a large part of the overall immersion in whatever mythos the participants are sharing. Jenkins notes that fandom was networked through many media forms before the advent of the internet and fan communities have simply spread and evolved with changing times. There is of course a nostalgic fetishism in the case of Lovecraftian paratexts, which echoes the boom in fan-culture. This does though point to the fact that collecting and sharing binds collectives but can also become a part of an individual’s sense of self. In Cult Collectors: Nostalgia, Fandom and Collecting Popular Culture, Lincoln Geraghty writes of the ways in which material objects remind collectors of a non-digital past and their allure lies in their tactility. He writes that they are "solid signifiers of the historical significance of previous media texts." (p,2)

In this sense, collectors of memorabilia are collaborative curators of the mythos from which the items themselves arise and this may explain the proliferation in Lovecraftian creations where the ancient is ingrained and will always return. In this context, fans can become engaged with some of the original material (ironically or not) that is being shepherded along by the makers of the paratexts themselves (e,g, Pop Vinyl) and this is in many ways further bolstered by the popularization of the images and wider mythos in curatorial popular narratives as can be seen for instance in the Hellboy franchise. There is perhaps currently no more famous a curator of paratexts than Guillermo del Toro, who has an admitted obsession with genre memorabilia and is both a prolific curator and a champion of Lovecraft’s work and ethos. In 2016 there was a large travelling exhibition showcasing del Toro’s vast archive of artefacts entitled At Home with the Monsters, which of course included many Lovecraftian tokens including a life size model which glares at visitors. Speaking of his collection del Toro states:

Guillermo del Toro’s At Home with the Monsters

You want to have these icons around you and you want to have that relationship with those items because they define a moment when your soul or your spirit was touched. That is the deepest level of collecting. The more superficial level is hoarding: the anal-retentive need to have it all. (p,33)

It is of course important to consider importance of totems and other objects in the Lovecraft mythos. Many objects (keys, statues, jewelry etc.) are imbued with a terrible potency. Consider the following from Call of Cthulu:

“His name was John Raymond Legrasse, and he was by profession an Inspector of Police. With him he bore the subject of his visit, a grotesque, repulsive, and apparently very ancient stone statuette whose origin he was at a loss to determine. It must not be fancied that Inspector Legrasse had the least interest in archaeology. On the contrary, his wish for enlightenment was prompted by purely professional considerations. The statuette, idol, fetish, or whatever it was, had been captured some months before in the wooded swamps south of New Orleans during a raid on a supposed voodoo meeting; and so singular and hideous were the rites connected with it, that the police could not but realise that they had stumbled on a dark cult totally unknown to them…” (p,54)

Considering this, it may be of no surprise that the cultish and fetishistic nature of some elements of horror fandom are drawn towards attaining and maintaining these replicas in many forms, be this with irony or intricacy (or both) in mind. No doubt some will see this practice as diluting the power of the mythos, particularly in terms of the frivolous nature of some of the products. However, I would argue that in continually resurrecting such images as simulated artefacts (even in resin and vinyl) they chime, however discordantly, with the mythos itself, in that they both preserve and pervert it.

Bibliography

Brabazon, T. From Revolution to Revelation: Generation X, Popular Memory and Cultural Studies. Routledge (2005)

del Toro, G. Guillermo del Toro: At Home with the Monsters. Titan Books (2016)

Geraghty, L. Cult Collectors: Nostalgia, Fandom and Collecting Popular Culture. Routledge (2014)

Gray, J, Sandvoss, C. and Harrington, L (eds.) Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World. NYU Press (2017).

Lovecraft, H.P. The Classic Horror Stories. Oxford University Press (2013)

Jones, M. ‘Tentacles and Teeth: The Lovecraftian Being in Popular Culture’ (in New Critical Essays on H.P. Lovecraft ed. David Simmons. Palgrave Macmillian (2013)

Millus, J. “Playing Games with the Great Old Ones: Ritual, Play, and Joking within the Cthulhu Mythos Fandom.” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts. 26.3 (Fall, 2105) p, 512+

Possamai, A. Religion and Popular Culture: A Hyper-Real Testament. Peter Lang (2005).

Keith McDonald is

Cult Conversations: Desktop Horror and Captive Cinema by Miranda Ruth Larsen

To conclude the Cult Conversations series, we have two essays this week. Today, Miranda Ruth Larsen writes about found footage sub-genre that is increasingly being labelled as ‘desktop horror.’ On Thursday, we have Keith McDonald on the enduring transmedia impact of H.P Lovecraft.

I hope readers have enjoyed the many interviews and exchanges we have been publishing for the past three months or so. It has been quite the ride, and I sincerely would like to thank all the scholars who contributed and taught me so much about horror, exploitation, the Gothic, and cult cinema in general. Thanks to each and everyone of you.

In the meantime, if you’ve enjoyed the series, and would like to contribute to a sequel later in 2019, please send an email to: bproctor@bournemouth.ac.uk.

——- William Proctor

Desktop Horror and Captive Cinema

Miranda Ruth Larsen

Found footage remains one of the more derided permutations of horror cinema. A consistent point of debate, cinema studies and horror fandom alike often judge any new iteration against two benchmark entries in the subgenre: The Blair Witch Project (Myrick and Sanchez, 1999) and Paranormal Activity (Peli, 2007). Both films were considered at the time of their release as simultaneously gimmicky and revolutionary. This is unsurprising given that “horror as a genre is often the first site to interrogate evolving technologies, both within the narrative and through the formal properties of the medium within which it exists” (Daniel 2017, 2).

We must remember that horror is one of the most effective sites utilizing cinema’s power of offscreen space; “the frame, in horror, invites considerations about both the harboring of monsters off-screen and the dangers lurking in the dark corners of a delimited visual field” (Sayad 2016, 48). This often works unconsciously, but the horror film’s potentiality for scares encourages viewers to regularly ponder borders and their depth: what can’t we see and will we see it? For example, the scene pictured below from a ‘conventional’ horror film, The Conjuring (Wan, 2013), is so effective because we have been led by aural cues and Carolyn’s gaze in two shot-reverse-shot sequences to think something is likely coming up the stairs from the basement offscreen. Instead, ghostly hands emerge from the darkness behind Carolyn, along with the creepy whisper “Hey, wanna play hide and clap?”

In the same vein, found footage — even at its worst — makes explicit reference to the terrifying potentiality of the frame through the very conceit of existing as found footage. Inarguably, “with the found footage horror film, the interpenetration of reality and fiction that was traditionally discussed in terms of allegory or topical references has found a new locus: the film’s form” (Sayad 2016, 43). This article will consider one of found footage’s (contended) iterations: the desktop horror film, alternatively referred to as screenlife/social media horror. Rather than view desktop horror as a gimmick (as has been said too often of the subgenre as a whole), I argue that this permutation is in step with two previous trends of found footage: shaky-cam and fixed-cam.

The oft-derided shaky-cam aesthetics of many found footage films brings the terror of the cinematic frame to the forefront, placing the camera in the hands of a character. The name harkens to, of course, terrified people running from something and making the frame unstable. The camera is usually wielded by a few people documenting something; it becomes, essentially, a surrogate for our own field of vision, the clear limitation of our cinematic senses. Many films make explicit reference to the technical capacity of cameras, batteries, and lights in the midst of the unfolding terror. We cannot forget that the cinema screen is the screen of a physical object within the diegesis; we are constantly reminded through dialogue and the actual treatment of the frame. Shaky-cam often concludes with a contrasting eerie stillness reinforcing the camera as an object with limited gaze; the infamous ending of The Blair With Project makes this clear. We don’t get to see what’s happening to Heather as she suddenly becomes silent, because the dropped camera is pointed towards Mike facing the corner — doubling of our own blindness as viewers.

Complimenting this are the aesthetics of fixed-cam found footage films. These films lean towards surveillance camera setups, CCTV footage, or more ‘professional’ mounted cameras throughout the diegesis. The main marker here is the ubiquitous timestamp within the frame, reminding us that we are engaged in a particular mode of watching. In these types of films, much of the content “is composed of static surveillance-style footage designed to prompt the spectator to search the frame for any presence of the supernatural entity” (Daniel 2017, 56). Paranormal Activity largely capitalizes on this, with the routine documentation of Katie and Micah sleeping setting the rhythm of the film. The obsessively identical setup for the camera each night, engineered by Micah, allows viewers to become familiar with the appearance of the couple’s bedroom. The mise-en-scene here is crucial, leading to simple actions like a hallway light turning on and off becoming major events. We are frequently indoctrinated with characters soliloquizing about angles, adjusting sharpness, and trying to capture particular elements of a room. One of the most impactful moments of Paranormal Activity 3 (Joost and Schulman 2011), set in 1988, is when Dennis rigs a camera to slowly pan back and forth between the kitchen and living room by mounting the device on the base of an electric fan. This harnesses a particularly familiar motion — the slow oscillation of a fan — and coaxes our gaze to search, in dread, every newly revealed bit of the frame. The pan takes about 17 seconds to complete, with the buildup occasionally leading to some chilling scenes (see below).

Whether shaky or still, these framing techniques often employ night-vision, another tool for guiding the audience’s focus. Flattening out the usual palette of colors to something tinged green or blue not only adds a sheen of documentary authenticity, but makes every object within the frame charged with potential. When an Xbox Kinect light grid system reveals something otherworldly in the room in Paranormal Activity 4 (Joost and Schulman 2012), we are reminded that a multitude of cameras exist within our own living rooms. At the same time, we are reminded that a multitude of entities may also exist there as well

Desktop horror films, then, highlight the best component of found footage; a hyper-attention to frames and borders. The cameras available to us on a daily basis, including our computers and phones, provide familiar frames of attention. Their layering within the screen mirrors our own technological engagement in daily life. Unfriended’s release in 2014 hyped up the focus on surveillance technology (usually found in steady-cam found footage) and the penchant for the screen as embodied perspective (usually found in shaky-cam found footage) by the focus on Blaire’s desktop. In an early reaction to the film for The Verge, Emily Yoshida notes that:

“The frame remains locked off to the exact area of the desktop; we never see a face bigger than one-sixteenth of the screen. ‘Cuts’ are made by whatever Blaire chooses to bring up on the screen, whether its Facebook Messenger (where Laura communicates with her directly) or a paranormal forum explaining the phenomenon of the dead coming back to possess people via social media (helpfully scrolled through at a comfortable reading pace for us by Blaire while her friends argue in the background). Otherwise, we are never explicitly forced to look at anything; like the first forays into VR filmmaking, the filmmaker (in this case Russian director Levan Gabriadze, in his US feature debut) can only suggest where the eye should go via composition.” 

The premise and execution were done so well that most reflections about the film omit that the last scene takes place outside of the desktop and with a diegetically inconsistent viewpoint. In other words, the technological feat of Unfriended eclipsed the adherence to the conceit and the actual details of the narrative. This becomes clear, four years later, with the release of Searching (Chaganty 2018).

The iTunes landing page for Searching begins with the comment: “Taking the ingenious, entirely-on-a-computer-screen technique of the Unfriended horror movies a little bit further, Searching spins a tense, tightly constructed missing-person mystery out of mouse clicks and switching windows.” Billed horror in some circles and a thriller in others, Searching’s box office success may explain the pinning of this particular iTunes review. Disregarding the quibbles about what genre Searching is, the important thing here is that Unfriended is referenced as a benchmark of cinematic technique, and that Searching is somehow expanding that technique. Unfriended unfolds in real time, giving us Blaire’s desktop. Searching, on the other hand, takes place over days and jumps between multiple computers, cell phones, spycams, and television footage. In many ways, Searching is more like older found footage films; it rings of a documentary aesthetic, a true crime tale without the post-incident talking heads. It is not, as Yoshida points out, the same as how Unfriended “actually looks like our lives, for better or worse” (Yoshida 2015). In many ways, the switching between screens in Searching offers the audience visual respite; in relying on uneventful shots (like iPhone call screens), it tells rather than shows. I would disagree, then, with the iTunes review featured so prominently on Searching’s splash page; while an effective film, Searching actually does little to expand what Unfriended accomplished in terms of the desktop.

Desktop horror films not only ask us to police the borders of the frame like conventional found footage, but to scan the dearth of information contained within the desktop view for clues and abnormalities. We infer characterization from the speed of mouse clicks, the hesitation of entering text, and the way the desktop itself is organized. In Searching, when Dave is looking at Margot’s Facebook page, a trending item on the sidebar is the name Laura Barnes — the vengeful teenager behind all the chaos in Unfriended. This suggests that Unfriended and Searching take place in the same cinematic universe. Similarly, brief attention is given to a photo where Margot sits by herself eating lunch while another group of teenagers poses for the camera. The Facebook post containing the photo tags everyone — all, except Margot, are named after characters from M. Night Shyamalan films. Critics may want to nudge Searching away from the horror label, but the intertextual linkages are there for the attentive viewer.

An earlier entry in desktop horror, The Den (Donohue 2013), was overlooked (likely for reasons of distribution). Found footage horror has always struggled with claims of innovation, and constructing the genealogy of particular techniques is a challenge. It becomes easier, in both academia and mainstream circles, to essentialize and give the credit to a particular film that is widely referenced.

The Den also delves into uncomfortably reflexive territory, as the protagonist of the film is a graduate student researching a particular online portal, the titular Den, which operates with some similarity to Chatroulette. The film utilizes other screens besides the desktop, particularly cop car cameras and phones, but the time spent viewing Elizabeth’s desktop as she navigates the Den makes up the bulk of the film. We’re offered glimpses into different corners of the internet, a wide range of content that is too similar to our own daily forays online. Like Unfriended, there’s plenty of text and imagery here to sort through — impossible to complete in one viewing. In the end, Elizabeth ends up a victim because people “are watching everything.”

Ultimately, desktop horror offers a cinematic experience that many already enjoy in found footage films. We are, for the duration of the film, captive. This fact is emphasized by the treatment of frames and borders, the awareness of the camera’s technological capabilities, and the need for a hyper-attentive, searching gaze. As Sayad contends, “the found footage horror film offers also more radical ways of decentering our gaze and expanding the frame” (Sayad 2016, 64). I would argue that carefully constructed found footage accomplishes this sensory state better than many narrative horror films, because of the collapsing boundaries between the diegesis and reality.

I’d like to end on a question, something I haven’t completely parsed out for myself. Is there an optimal screening situation for desktop horror based on form? I’m not asking in order to privilege a particular mode of spectatorship, believe it or not. Lofty accounts of theater-based cinematic consumption are exaggerated in many cases, where they “often treat this unidirectional attention as if it is affectively overwhelming: spectators are assumed to be more serious, contemplative, and immersed by virtue of the fact that their eyes are ‘glued’ to the screen” (Svensson and Hassoun 2016, 172). In many cases, home viewing is an easier option for controlling the environment; on a recent visit to the US, I found myself routinely distracted by other moviegoers talking and looking at their phones during a film.

I watched both Unfriended and Searching in theaters, and found the amplification of the desktop’s size personally captivating. The immense scale of the desktop in this screening space is undoubtedly impressive. However, for someone else, this could have been ridiculously boring. Conversely, Unfriended: The Dark Web wasn’t theatrically released in Japan, so I watched it on a laptop at home. There’s something impressive about this option as well, an unsettling friction at the boundaries. Yet for someone else, it could be different. Perhaps the optimal screening environment depends on our own personal engagement with screens themselves.

My hope is that with the success of films like Unfriended and Searching, desktop horror will become another avenue for independent filmmakers and those working with small budgets to make some truly terrifying content. Our screens aren’t going anywhere anytime soon, so we might as well realize their potential as windows we may not want to look through.

Works cited

Daniel, Adam J. “Affective Intensities and Evolving Horror Forms: From Found Footage to Virtual Reality.” 2017. Doctoral Thesis: Western Sydney University.

Sayad, Cecilia. “Found-Footage Horror and the Frame’s Undoing.” 2016. Cinema Journal. Vol 55, No. 2.

Svensson, Alexander and Dan Hassoun. “‘Scream into your phone’: Second Screen Horror and Controlled Interactivity.” 2016. Participations: Journal of Audience & Reception Studies. Vol 13, Issue 1.

Yoshida, Emily. “Unfriended is the First Film to Accurately Capture Our Digital Lives.” 2015. The Verge.

Miranda Ruth Larsen is a PhD candidate at the University of Tokyo in the Information, Technology, and Society in Asia program and an Adjunct Lecturer at Bunkyo Gakuin University. She previously earned a Master’s degree in Cinema & Media Studies from UCLA’s School of Theater, Film, and Television. She is the author of “Fandom and Otaku” in A Companion to Media Fandom and Fan Studies. Her found footage horror film tally currently stands at 140, with an aim to hit 150 by the end of 2018.

Twitter: @AcaOtaku

Letterboxd: Mira116

Cult Conversations: Interview with Craig Ian Mann (Part II)

Could you expound on your own question, rhetorical though it may be: “are we so precious about horror's low-brow status that we must pretend it means nothing?” Do you think that horror is still largely disparaged as low-brow? Who are the “we” that may be “so precious” about such status and what might be the reason for this preciousness?

I think there's ample evidence that horror is disparaged. You only have to look at the media articles that pop up every time a new A24 film is released. While I tend to love A24's horror output, there's always a larger sense that each film is somehow a "better" or new kind of horror movie that puts to bed decades of apparently meaningless slash-and-stalk nonsense – which is, of course, total rubbish. So as to whether there is a larger cultural perception that horror is low-brow: yes, definitely. I think there always has been and always will be to some extent. You'll always find a critic who latches onto the latest indie horror sensation as a turning point and unnecessarily tries to argue for the genre's sudden transition from apparent trash to supposed art.

On the other hand, though, I think we are seeing a wider acceptance of horror. I think part of that is the attention that the academy has been giving to the genre since the 1980s and 1990s. In recent years it has also been due to companies like Arrow, Eureka, Shout Factory, Powerhouse/Indicator and so on. By giving horror films prestige treatment, releasing them in beautifully presented packages with an embarrassment of special features, those companies have aided in establishing the genre as a subject for mainstream critics. And the wider acceptance of horror is starting to show in some pretty clear ways: look at the BFI's Stephen King on Screen season. A retrospective of King adaptations (and a selection of horror movies chosen by King) would have been unthinkable for the NFT ten years ago. So it's great to see a wider celebration of popular cinema – though I'll add that I'm extremely wary of framing these changes as a "legitimisation" of horror, as it has always been a meaningful and versatile genre.

Anyway, to expand on the specific point I was making: I really enjoy industrial studies of horror cinema, and it's obvious that there will be a tendency in those works to pitch horror films as saleable products first and foremost (just as I prioritise historical context – it's a natural outcome of taking a certain approach). However, I think it's unnecessarily oppositional to set up those commercial imperatives in direct counterpoint to any framework that attempts to derive cultural meaning from horror. Just because horror films are – sometimes, though not always – designed for mass consumption, that doesn't mean that they don't carry meaning. I think there is a sense in some industrial studies that we must protect horror from an intelligentsia that would ruin its mass market appeal, and I just don't understand that argument. In short, just as I'm wary of attempts to legitimise horror films, I'm also wary of attempts to delegitimise them: to me it seems odd to suddenly reframe horror films as high art, but it's also problematic to reduce them to economics and shut out thematic concerns. Methodological approaches can and should co-exist and intersect.

There have been many accounts in press discourse recently arguing that horror cinema is undergoing a renaissance, or resurgence, of sorts. Do you agree with claims that we are witnessing a new ‘golden age’ of horror cinema?   

Well, I am co-organiser of Fear 2000 (with Sheffield Hallam University colleagues Rose Butler and Shelley O'Brien), which is an annual conference series dedicated to horror media in the twenty-first century – so I certainly think we're in a particularly interesting period for horror films, and there's a lot to say about their continued relevance, popularity and significance.

I'm a particular fan of a group of American filmmakers that either made or are currently making their names producing independent horror movies: Ti West, Glenn McQuaid, Adam Wingard and Simon Barrett, E.L. Katz, Jim Mickle and Nick Damici, Ted Geoghegan, Joe Begos, Mickey Keating, Ana Asensio. These are all writers and directors (and writer-directors) that have some connection to Larry Fessenden, a writer, director, producer and actor who deserves to be more widely studied and who has been involved – in one way or another – in some of the most astonishing horror films made since the turn of the millennium (in fact, several of them have made films produced or co-produced by Glass Eye Pix, Fessenden's production company). So I think American horror is alive and well, and I'm also an avid follower of contemporary British, Canadian and Australasian genre cinema.

And I would agree – with a couple of extreme caveats – that there is some truth to the idea that we are witnessing a "golden age" of horror, but not for the reasons often cited in the popular press. It isn't a matter of quality for me, which seems to be how this debate is most frequently framed. I think we have seen horror resurge in large part because of new opportunities that make it easier for great movies to find a platform. The increasing inclusion and appreciation of horror films on the festival circuit has come to play a huge part in this over the last few decades, as has the increasing number of dedicated regional genre film festivals – such as Sheffield's Celluloid Screams or Nottingham's Mayhem – and boutique home-video distributors. And we're also starting to see the benefit of streaming services like Netflix, Amazon Prime and Shudder as an alternative distribution and exhibition network.

Horror films are finding an audience like never before through these new avenues, which in turn has enabled companies like Blumhouse and A24 to find success selling horror films through the more traditional theatrical routes. So there's a sense that horror cinema is not necessarily getting "better" as such, but that more people are able to see and engage with it. It is certainly a popular and mainstream genre at the moment in a way it hasn't been since the 1980s.

What I don't agree with, however, is the widespread idea that any current "golden age" has occurred because horror films are becoming more meaningful, which ties into our discussion around cultural approaches to horror cinema and attempts to legitimise or delegitimise the genre. Horror films have always been meaningful, and the fact that contemporary genre movies have been clearly influenced by the cultural circumstances of their production – e.g. Get Out (2017) – is nothing new. We don't need to invent new terms for certain groups of films – and I'm primarily talking about the particularly contentious "post-horror", but I'll make clear I'm also thinking of terms like "mumblegore", "deathwave" and so on – to elevate them above the pack or differentiate them from the horror of decades past.

I think the idea that a certain crop of contemporary horror films are somehow more thematically interesting or politically engaged than their predecessors and/or contemporaries is pretty problematic. Horror has always been a rich, varied and versatile genre; creating a new label to describe a select cycle that happens to have met with praise just seems be a way to justify and legitimise enjoying a type of film that might otherwise be considered too trashy for the critical mainstream. But we've been here before; as Silence of the Lambs (1991) was apparently a "psychological thriller," so Get Out is a "social thriller." These kinds of labels will come back around again (and sadly it will probably be sooner rather than later).

How would you respond to Alice Haylett Bryan’s argument about horror (quoted in The Guardian)?

“Certain subgenres of horror are undoubtedly getting more extreme, but this is the case across culture as a whole, with computer games and television programmes such as The Walking Dead. We are now living in an age where real acts of violence, and indeed death, have been screened on Facebook and YouTube. Could it not be argued that this desensitizes viewers on a more fundamental and concerning level?”

Well, I suppose there are three parts to this: whether certain facets of the horror film are becoming increasingly extreme, whether they desensitise us to violence, and whether we should find the real-life horrors available to view on the internet far more troubling. As for the first question, I think the trend for extreme imagery in mainstream horror has passed for the most part. The torture porn cycle has come and gone – with a brief revival in Jigsaw (2017), a film that was ironically criticised for not being gory enough – and the New French Extremity movement seems to have naturally played itself out. The most recent French horror film to be actively marketed as being "extreme" was Raw (2016), which became the subject of an awful lot of hype due to reports of overdramatic reactions on the festival circuit, but the film itself is actually relatively tame. I think there are still some very interesting examples of visceral, sanguinary horror cinema out there, but you have to go digging a little deeper now. Baskin (2015) and Housewife (2017), two films by Turkish filmmaker Can Evrenol, are the first examples that come to mind. But I think the trend for pushing the envelope that was at the forefront of horror in the 2000s is largely over now.

 It's probably not surprising to hear that I don't subscribe to the idea that horror desensitises us to violence. As a culturalist, my stance is that horror films can actually provide a form of catharsis and allow us to work through real-world issues. There has been a particular cycle of American horror films since 2007, for example, that has arisen from the cultural moment following the financial crisis and the Great Recession. These films – so I'm talking about movies like The House of the Devil (2009), The Innkeepers (2011), Cheap Thrills (2013), You're Next (2013), Starry Eyes (2014) and Don't Breathe (2016), for example – often concentrate on poor, disenfranchised and flawed protagonists who find themselves in horrifying situations (sometimes by choice and other times not), and don't walk away because they simply can't afford to. So actually I think horror films can be quite cathartic.

 And yes, I think real-world violence is far more concerning than fictional violence, but I think that has always been true and isn't confined to the age of the internet (though, it's undeniable that if you want to find images of real death it's far easier to do now that it has ever been before). When the likes of Night of the Living Dead (1968), The Last House on the Left (1972) and Deathdream (1974) were released, the average American could watch someone being blown-up in Vietnam while eating their dinner. So I completely agree with Haylett Bryan, really – there are far more worrying things in the world than horror movies.

Well, Haylett-Bryan is also claiming that viewers have been “desensitized” by extreme horror. What are your views on whether or not horror cinema affects audiences to a degree that they are “desensitized” by on-screen violence and that this might impact everyday lives in relation to real-world violence?

I don't know if that is what Haylett Bryan is saying, exactly (her comments on desensitisation are in direct reference to real-world violence, after all). And I think we also need to think about what "desensitisation" actually means in this context. I suppose, on a fundamental level, the more you are exposed to fictionalised images of violence, the less they are likely to shock you next time you see them.

However, human beings are perfectly capable of distinguishing between fact and fiction, so if we are taking "desensitisation" to mean that horror has the potential to numb us to the many horrors of the real world or even encourage us to commit acts of violence ourselves: absolutely not, and I don't think Haylett Bryan is proposing that either. I don't want to speak for her, but I would imagine that she is simply trying to point out that – now that images of real death have proliferated on the internet and can be readily found and accessed – the media should probably stop agonising over the fact that people continue to watch and enjoy horror films.

What are you working on at the moment and what are your research plans for the future?

Well, I spent Halloween at Birmingham City University presenting on werewolf cinema as part of a research seminar series organised by Xavier Mendik and Charlotte Stevens. Since then I've been chipping away at Phases of the Moon, which is due either late 2019 or early 2020. That will be preceded by a Horror Studies article taken from the book; it focuses on the American werewolf films of the 1970s and should be published in the Spring 2019 issue.

I have a few other articles and book chapters that should see publication in the near future, including a piece for the Journal of Popular Film and Television on the relationship between Jim Mickle and Nick Damici's Mulberry Street (2006) and the post-recession economic horror cycle. I've also been working on some research outside of the horror genre and have just written a chapter for an upcoming collection on cult Westerns edited by Lee Broughton. Plans are also coming together for the next Fear 2000 conference, slowly but surely.

I have a number of plans for future research, including an edited collection to follow up on Phases of the Moon and a few monograph ideas. Nothing definitive yet, but I'd like to pursue a project on science fiction or the Western. There are also a number of individual films I'd like to take as a focus for a single volume. We'll see how things develop.

What five films do you think represent the best that Werewolf cinema has to offer and why?

That is a really tough question, but I'll certainly give it a go.

The Wolf Man (1941)

I think it's really hard to underestimate the importance of The Wolf Man for the development of werewolf cinema (and for the modern conception of werewolves in general). It's not the first werewolf film – as far as we know that honour goes to a lost silent short appropriately called The Werewolf (1913) – and it was predated by a couple of extant examples: Wolf Blood (1925) and Werewolf of London. However, it popularised a lot of the tropes we now associate with the monster: transformation linked to the moon, silver as a werewolf repellent, the painful and destressing nature of metamorphosis. All of these elements have their basis in folklore (and Werewolf of London had previously linked a werewolf's transformations with moonlight), but it was Siodmak who canonised them. It was also the popularity of The Wolf Man that led to an entire cycle of werewolf films in the 1940s: The Mad Monster (1942), The Undying Monster (1942), Cry of the Werewolf (1944), She-Wolf of London (1946), as well as RKO's closely related Cat People (1942). And, of course, it spawned three sequels of its own – four if you count Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948). So while the first werewolf films predate The Wolf Man by nearly thirty years, it's certainly the most significant of the early examples.

I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957)

While The Wolf Man popularised a lot of the generic tropes we associate with werewolves, I Was a Teenage Werewolf is one of the most thematically influential werewolf films ever made. As the title suggests, this is the film that established the "teenage werewolf" trope and first used werewolfism as a metaphor for adolescent angst and teenage rebellion. These have remained some of the most prolific and consistent themes in werewolf cinema ever since. Without I Was a Teenage Werewolf, there would be no Teen Wolf (1985) and no Ginger Snaps (2000) – and you can still see its influence today in films such as When Animals Dream (2014), Uncaged (2016) and Wildling (2018). So what started life as a low-budget exploitation movie designed to cash-in on a burgeoning teen market has proven to be a major milestone in the development of werewolf cinema. It's just a shame that the only way to see it now is either on VHS or a bootleg DVD. I'm also a big fan of the other American werewolf movie of the 1950s: The Werewolf (1956), which updates the monster for the atomic age. It played as the B-picture with Earth vs. The Flying Saucers (1956), which is a double-bill I have replicated more times than I'd like to admit…

Werewolves on Wheels (1971)

First of all, Werewolves on Wheels has a title that no one in their right mind could refuse. But it's actually a much more serious film than you might think: it feels like a high-speed collision between Easy Rider (1969), Race with the Devil (1975) and a werewolf film – though I have no idea which other werewolf movie I would compare it to. It's definitely unique. It follows an outlaw biker gang that descends on an isolated temple in the middle of the arid United States and finds a group of Satanic monks living inside; by the time they leave the temple, half of the bikers have been placed under a curse that turns them into werewolves when the sun goes down. Aside from being a gloriously entertaining exploitation film, Werewolves on Wheels is the werewolf movie that most closely aligns with the "New Horror" movement as typified by the early works of George A. Romero, Wes Craven, Tobe Hooper, Bob Clark and so on. It has that apocalyptic feel, that sense of dreadful pessimism and that countercultural spirit that characterised so many independent horror films of the late 1960s and early 1970s. It's an utterly fascinating movie and one worth tracking down – it's available on Region 1 DVD, but for the full experience I recommend a late-night viewing of the limited-edition VHS release put out by Manor Video a few years ago.

The Howling (1981)

This was an extremely difficult choice because I am also a huge fan of An American Werewolf in London and particularly Silver Bullet, which is the Gremlins or Fright Night (1985) of werewolf movies. But ultimately I think The Howling is probably the best werewolf film ever made. It was the first film to introduce what I call the "new werewolf": the huge, monstrous, lupine creatures that have been a mainstay of werewolf movies ever since. It also pioneered a new kind of transformation scene, abandoning the editing tricks used in previous decades and replacing them with a prolonged, visceral and grotesque sequence in which the film's werewolf antagonist goes through a graphic metamorphosis in front of his terrified victim (and it's all the more impressive for the fact that it was achieved on a pretty limited budget). Thematically, it has an interesting link with the body-horror imagery that was becoming so popular in horror cinema at the time, and – as you would expect from a film written by John Sayles and directed by Joe Dante – it's incredibly clever, self-aware and satirical, with a lot to say about the dark side of American culture in the early 1980s. So I'm a huge fan of The Howling, and it is certainly up there with The Wolf Man in terms of its influence. I will even admit to enjoying some of the sequels.

Late Phases (2014)

I think it's important to highlight a recent werewolf film, as there's an unfortunate tendency to write-off everything after the early 2000s – or even after 1981. Late Phases definitely had its supporters though; Bloody Disgusting called it a "masterpiece of the werewolf genre", and I would have no problem agreeing with that. It stars Nick Damici – who is one of my favourite actors – as a blind Vietnam veteran. At the insistence of his son, he moves into a retirement community on the edge of a forest that has become the feeding ground for a werewolf. It has an unorthodox structure, with all of the werewolf scenes in the first and third acts; the middle section follows Damici's character as he tries to discover the monster's identity. So it's essentially the meeting of Rolling Thunder (1977) and Silver Bullet, and it is every bit as good as that sounds. And as a blending of those two movies would suggest, it has some really interesting themes around militarism, religion and social conservatism. I don't want to say too much more because it's a film best seen cold, but I will say that I really like its unique werewolf designs – the creature effects are by Robert Kutzman, so there's some pedigree there. I've also noted above that I'm a big fan of Larry Fessenden, who produces (and appears in a great cameo role as a tombstone salesman).

Craig Ian Mann is an Associate Lecturer in Film and Television Studies at Sheffield Hallam University, where he was awarded his doctorate in 2016. His first monograph, Phases of the Moon: A Cultural History of the Werewolf Film, is forthcoming from Edinburgh University Press. He is broadly interested in the cultural significance of popular genre cinema, including horror, science fiction, action and the Western. His work has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Popular Film and Television, Horror Studies and Science Fiction Film and Television as well as several edited collections. He is co-organiser of the Fear 2000 conference series on horror media in the twenty-first century.

Cult Conversations: Interview with Craig Ian Mann (Part I)

Welcome to the final interview in the ‘Cult Conversations’ series. Last, but certainly not least, the following interview comes courtesy of Craig Ian Mann, whose PhD and forthcoming book centers on the figure of the werewolf in horror cinema. I have had a sneak peak at Craig’s thesis, and found myself reading the full document voraciously. Craig has a great deal to offer the academic landscape, and I’m certain his book will become widely read and, in time, seminal. In the following exchange, Craig and I discuss the origins of his research interests, and get into a debate about so-called ‘reflectionist’ readings of cinematic texts. In the meantime, look out for Craig’s Phases of the Moon: A Cultural History of the Werewolf Film (Edinburgh University Press, 2019).

Your PhD and forthcoming monograph examines the figure of the werewolf in horror cinema. What sparked your interest in the topic? Did it begin with your own fandom? Or was it primarily an academic interest?

It definitely began with my own fandom. I have always been fascinated by monsters, but developed a particular soft spot for werewolves when I was young. The first werewolf film I ever saw was Wolf (1994), which I watched on VHS at a friend's house circa 1998 or 1999 – I can't remember exactly but something like that, anyway. I saw the first werewolf episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003) at around the same time ("Phases", which I pay tribute to a little bit with the title of my forthcoming monograph, even if I ultimately couldn't find room for much discussion of  werewolves on television). It was probably Wolf, "Phases" and R.L. Stine's The Werewolf of Fever Swamp (1993) that sparked my initial interest in werewolf narratives.

For better or worse I have an unshakable completist mentality (particularly in relation to cinema), so once I'd picked up that initial interest it was just a matter of consuming as much werewolf media as I could find. I think the next few werewolf movies I saw were probably The Howling (1981) and Silver Bullet (1985). I watched An American Werewolf in London (1981) for the first time on television a few years later and throughout my teens I either rented or bought everything from The Wolf Man (1941) to Dog Soldiers (2002) via Project: Metalbeast (or Metal Beast, 1995). I eventually caught up with the few classics I'd missed – most notably Werewolf of London (1935) – while I was an undergraduate. I'm still very much a fan now; WolfCop (2014), Howl (2015) and especially Late Phases (2014) are some favourites from recent years.

I first wrote about werewolf films while studying contemporary American horror at Sheffield Hallam University. The module leaned heavily towards cultural understandings of horror cinema as a site for working out real-world anxieties. I found it puzzling that so many monsters – vampires, zombies, Frankenstein's monster – had been the focus of entire books detailing their cultural histories, but there was very little work that approached werewolf media in this way. So I chose to write my undergraduate dissertation on the subject. I took a break and put werewolf films to one side for my master's degree, but came back to it for my doctoral studies and I'm now in the process of adapting the thesis into my first monograph. So it started with my fandom and developed into an academic pursuit.

How long have you been a fan of horror cinema? When did your journey begin and what kind of films precipitated your interest in genre films? 

All my life, really – my taste has always leaned towards popular cinema. I vividly remember watching Westerns and science fiction at my grandparents' house when I was really young, so it was likely those early viewing experiences watching films like Winchester '73 (1950) and Forbidden Planet (1956) that shaped my interest in genre movies.

The first horror film I can remember seeing – when I was five or six years old – is Gremlins (1984). My pervading memory of the first time I saw it is Jerry Goldsmith's music. I watched it over and over again after that. It's probably the film I have seen the most times and remains one of my favourites – I still own the off-air VHS tape I first saw it on. In fact, I still watch it every Christmas Eve and have done without fail since I was a teenager (the film, not the VHS tape – I'm not actually sure if it would still play and I don't want to find out).

Putting werewolf movies to one side, other than Gremlins I can think of a few formative experiences in terms of shaping my interest in horror cinema. The first was not long after my parents first let me have a portable TV in my room. I'm not sure exactly when that was but I was definitely younger than eleven. I stayed up one Friday night and watched Candyman (1992). It scared me absolutely witless but somehow I stayed the distance. The sequel was playing on the same channel the next weekend and I tried to watch it, but ended up switching it off after five minutes.

After that, I have a very clear memory of renting Child's Play 2 (1990), and particularly the final scene in the toy factory. But I think the film that really got me hooked on horror was The Blair Witch Project (1999), which my sister bought not long after its video release. We watched it late one night when my parents were out, and it really got under my skin. I tend to return to it once a year or so and even as an adult it still unnerves me a little bit.

Can you talk more about the way in which the werewolf film expresses “cultural understandings of horror cinema as a site for working out real-world anxieties”? Do you see horror cinema as a ‘reflectionist’ vehicle for cultural and ideological phenomena? And if so, how would you respond to studies, such as Mark Bernard’s Selling the Splat Pack (2014), and Kevin Heffernan’s Ghouls, Gimmicks and Gold (2004), both of which argue that a reflectionist, aesthetic perspective fails to account for the economies of horror cinema—especially the way in which the reflectionist argument masks commercial impulses that aim to construct horror cinema as legitimately political, and therefore not the ‘bad’ object the genre is often framed in historical terms?

I wouldn't call myself a reflectionist, no, in that I don't believe horror cinema (or any kind of cinema) "reflects" the real world as such. And, of course, in recent years that particular term has been generally used by detractors rather than practitioners of cultural approaches. I don't think of films as reflections of a certain time and place, because that would suggest that they are somehow separate or removed from the society that produced them. I subscribe to the idea of cinema as a product of a particular cultural moment, i.e. that it is inextricable from the ideological debates, social norms and cultural shifts particular to the context in which it was produced and released. For me, all movies are political. Whether a film's politics are explicitly intended or not is another matter, and not one that is enormously important to me; the context in which a film is received is more interesting, and a wider culture may not share a filmmaker's values. That said, I think investigating authorial intent alongside textual analysis and a thorough account of the historical context surrounding a film can produce interesting results.

Of course, it would be absurd to suggest that any film has a single fixed meaning; a movie can mean different things to different people in different places and times. It may arise from a certain cultural moment, but by definition that means that not all viewers will receive it in that context – and while I think viewing any film is enriched by an understanding of its place in history, not all viewers will be armed with that knowledge, either. So it's important to make clear that my work explores the cultural significance of genre cinema specifically at the time of its creation and consumption. And even in a film's immediate context I'm interested in the possibility of a multiplicity of readings according to the experiences, values and orientations of different viewers. It isn't always possible to explore all the angles (for reasons of brevity as much as anything), but there are many films I study in the book – I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957), to name an example – that are particularly thematically ambiguous, so I think about how those films can be approached from both sides of the political spectrum. And where there is evidence for it, authorial intent can add another interesting layer.

So, to tie all of those points together I'll take The Wolf Man as a representative example,  for no other reason than because I've been thinking about it recently after discussing it on Twitter. The Wolf Man was written by Curt Siodmak, a Jewish writer and German ex-patriate who fled Nazi Germany to escape persecution, first to Britain and then to the United States in 1937. He found a career as a screenwriter and had his first big hit with The Wolf Man, the story of a British-American, Larry Talbot, who is bitten by a werewolf travelling with a group of gypsies during a trip to his ancestral home in Wales.

From Siodmak's side, this was very much a film informed by his experiences in Germany, and particularly the ways in which the country changed under Nazism. He was quite open about how his traumatic experiences seeped into his screenplays, and once said that there were "terrors in my life that might have found an outlet in writing horror stories." He was particularly interested in how the werewolf represented the transformation of a peaceful man into a murderer (just as Germany transformed from a republic into a fascist state). In fact, Siodmak had left Britain for America to remove himself even further from Hitler; his wife had convinced him to move to Hollywood because she had been terrified of an invasion. So the fact that Talbot is cursed by European forces that have metaphorically "invaded" Britain is also interesting.

This is not a reading that was likely to resonate in the United States at the time of the film's release, though. While there were certainly many German ex-patriots in the country at this time, the average American was unlikely to be able to empathise with a man who fled his home nation in fear for his life. But that's not to say that The Wolf Man wasn't received in the context of war. In fact, the film was released only five days after the attack on Pearl Harbor and four days after the US declared war on the Empire of Japan, so it was very much tied to that cultural context. Before this point, the domestic experience of World War II had largely been the on-going debate between interventionists and non-interventionists. So in this sense, an American who is suddenly attacked by a foreign aggressor (in the form of the European gypsies who arrive in Britain and bring the werewolf's curse with them) is extremely relevant in that place and time.

David J. Skal argues that The Wolf Man and its three sequels – Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943), House of Frankenstein (1944) and House of Dracula (1945) – parallel the American war effort, and there's certainly a case to be made that the sequels extend the original film's themes. After he is attacked on home soil, Talbot spends the next three films travelling to Visaria, Universal's fictional European country, and doing battle with all manner of irredeemably evil European monsters: Frankenstein's creature, Dracula, hunchbacks and various mad scientists with conspicuously Germanic names. So Talbot becomes analogous to an American soldier, forced to embrace violence and do awful things for the greater good – there's a real sense of personal sacrifice as a theme throughout all four of these films.

So The Wolf Man clearly meant one thing to Siodmak, something else when it was released to theatres shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor, and something else again when viewed alongside its own sequels, but in all cases it is important to consider its wartime context. It's interesting that even the famous poem can be interpreted either from the perspective of creator or consumer:

Even a man who is pure in heart
            And says his prayers by night
            May become a wolf when the wolfbane blooms
            And the autumn moon is bright.

The wording of the final line changed slightly in the sequels, but the poem remained basically the same. It's clear that the central message here is that even essentially "good" people can turn to violence in extraordinary circumstances, and that applies both to the German people embracing Nazism and the servicemen sent to fight the Axis forces once America had been drawn into war. That's just one example of how we can see the werewolf film as a site for exploring real-world anxieties.

So I hope that that answers your initial question. To say a little bit about the idea that cultural readings (rather than "reflectionist" readings) fail to account for the economics of horror cinema, I can certainly see that argument. Culturalists are generally more interested in thematic meaning and sociohistorical context than the circumstances of a film's production, and I don't necessarily see anything problematic in that – just as I don't see anything problematic in the fact that industrial approaches tend to put the film itself to one side. To find a form of holistic analysis that can account for everything is an impossible ideal. Single methodologies can't possibly offer a complete and definitive account of any movie, and mixed methodologies are likely to have shortcomings in attempting to cover all the angles. I'm also not an academic who quickly suggests that any particular framework should be considered entirely invalid or without merit. Though there are, of course, perspectives I prefer to take in my own work – and I certainly have my own scepticisms, too – there is always scope for scholars to take different approaches to the same material.

As for the idea that thinking about horror films in terms of culture, society and politics overlooks the fact that genre cinema is made to turn a profit, I find it interesting that this argument is most often levelled at culturalists who study horror. It seems odd to me that cultural readings of, say, science fiction cinema or the Western (two other popular genres that have also been historically driven by commercial imperatives) are widely accepted alongside industrial accounts – i.e. we generally buy that science fiction's visions of the future and the Western's reworkings of the past both tell us something about the present, despite the fact that they are both popular genres – but attempts to discuss the politics of horror films in this way are now more frequently challenged or disregarded. This has always seemed like a strange reverse-snobbery to me; are we so precious about horror's low-brow status that we must pretend it means nothing? Similarly, the idea that a film can be actively sold as subversive or oppositional does nothing to change the fact that the film itself can still be seen to be subversive or oppositional. I see no reason why studies of production, distribution and exhibition can't exist alongside analytical or text-based scholarship, and in fact the two can often complement and enrich each other. In short, it is possible for a film to be both a commercial product and a cultural artefact.

If I may be challenging, it seems that, on the one hand, you argue you “subscribe to the idea of cinema as a product of a particular cultural moment, i.e. that it is inextricable from the ideological debates, social norms and cultural shifts particular to the context in which it was produced and released,” but also competing interpretations may be available—and thus assuredly “extricable”. It seems that the former is a reflectionist stance—although I appreciate that detractors have adopted the term ‘reflectionist’ as a pejorative so I accept that “cultural reading” is more sufficient and less charged. If a film—let’s remain with The Wolf Man for a moment—is inextricable from its war-time context and that Siodmak’s authorial intention as you recount is a reflectionist perspective, as well as the notion that a democracy of interpretation exists that may operate outside of cultural, social and ideological contexts, I want to ask if you mean that films are inextricable from historically contingent contexts from a scholarly perspective? For if audiences can and do interpret films in a wide variety of ways, then it seems that they are indeed “extricable” at the point of reception.  How would you respond to this?

For me, understanding the cultural context surrounding a film is of vital importance, hence my comment that film and history are "inextricable" in my eyes. But that's my view – of course films can be and often are extricated from that context and, as I've said, it would be plainly ridiculous to suggest otherwise. Films are read in many different ways by many different people. However, it is the work of a culturalist to make those initial historical circumstances clear and to interrogate how popular culture relates to them, i.e. to reintroduce context where it might otherwise be absent. So I am absolutely a believer in democracy of interpretation, but I also think any reading of a film is enormously enriched by an understanding of its place in history.

That doesn't mean, however, that films are to be taken as "mirrors," nor should they be considered to have any single, fixed meaning even in their immediate context. This is why I reject "reflectionism" as a term. When we discuss a film as a product of a cultural moment, we don't have to assign a definitive meaning to it. We can consider, per my comments on The Wolf Man, how a creator's values or interpretations may align with or differ from the larger culture that receives a film. Similarly, we can consider how different societal groups might read their own values into the same movie.

So I mentioned I Was a Teenage Werewolf briefly above. This is a film that has been the subject of a reasonable amount of academic attention in comparison to many other werewolf films. Most scholars agree that it is a product of a particular moment in American history – one that witnessed the rise of youth culture and a widespread moral panic surrounding juvenile delinquency. After all, it is about an adolescent who transforms into an animal. Even if we want to ignore its thematic content, it was sold by American International Pictures as a movie aimed squarely at the emerging teenage market (the trailer begins by addressing "teenage guys 'n' dolls").

Beyond an acknowledgement of that initial context, though, readings have varied wildly. In Seeing Is Believing (1983), Peter Biskind argues that it is an exceptionally conservative film that delivers a grave warning to teenagers: society will not tolerate delinquents. On the other hand, Mark Jancovich's reading in Rational Fears (1996) recentralises teenagers at the film's target audience, and suggests it is more accurately read as a film that expresses adolescent frustrations with an overbearingly conservative society. These readings are ideologically opposed, but they both relate directly to the film's historical context. And they are both equally valid; the film's narrative and aesthetics provide ample evidence to support either interpretation. So yes, context is enormously important to me and it is always a priority in my work – but I am interested in exploring multiple perspectives. I also recognise that alternative approaches will extricate films from their cultural moment entirely and go a different way. That's all part of academic debate.

Craig Ian Mann is an Associate Lecturer in Film and Television Studies at Sheffield Hallam University, where he was awarded his doctorate in 2016. His first monograph, Phases of the Moon: A Cultural History of the Werewolf Film, is forthcoming from Edinburgh University Press. He is broadly interested in the cultural significance of popular genre cinema, including horror, science fiction, action and the Western. His work has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Popular Film and Television, Horror Studies and Science Fiction Film and Television as well as several edited collections. He is co-organiser of the Fear 2000 conference series on horror media in the twenty-first century.