A Dream is a Wish You Manifest into Your Own Reality: Celebrating All Disney Princesses as Feminists

This is the fourth in a series of blog posts created by PhD students in my seminar, Public Intellectuals: Theory and Practice

A Dream is a Wish You Manifest into Your Own Reality: Celebrating All Disney Princesses as Feminists by Lauren Alexandra Sowa

A teenage girl escapes a reluctant assassin by fleeing through an uncharted wilderness and finds refuge in managing and organizing a half-dozen miners (each with a unique, if not challenging, personality). A compassionate young woman, who is trapped in a 24/7 care-giving position through an abusive family dynamic, finds the courage to fight against her circumstances with strength and kindness. An heiress, with a hit on her life, must spend sixteen years living under an alias, separated from her family, yet makes the best of circumstances by caring for the environment; however, she is captured and drugged nonetheless, but still has the tenacity to recover from the ordeal with grace. Are these the plot-lines from new, gender-norm-breaking, female empowerment films? No – they are the plot-lines of the three original Disney Princess fairy-tales: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Cinderella, and Sleeping Beauty. In my summarization of these narratives, I have not misrepresented the heroines, but bestowed credit to them where it is often overlooked (if not negated). Disney Princesses are often critiqued for normalizing gendered behavior, specifically emphasizing their unrealistic beauty standards and focused goal of obtaining a prince to fulfill their happily-ever-after. However, as a Disney Aca-Fan and feminist, I object to this over simplification. This is not to say that I blindly defend Disney and their depiction of the Princesses, but I do take issue with this all or nothing stance. I agree with the critics in that the Disney Princesses uphold gender norms regarding dress and beauty. Other critics point to studies that indicate an increase in gender-stereotypical behavior in young girls who actively participate and play in the Disney Princess story-verse. But before pulling an Ursula and trapping the princess’ voices in a conch shell, let us take a hard look at the reality. To call the Walt Disney Company a major media conglomerate is an understatement. Much like Maleficent, the company has turned into a dragon that just keeps growing bigger and stronger. Disney culture and fandom is prevalent, powerful, and indomitable. However, when faced with some of Disney’s problematic narratives and images, I’m certainly not suggesting we just “let it go.” But I think it is incredibly fair, if not preferable, to take both a critical and celebratory view of these highly visible and influential narratives that are both culturally significant and pervasive.

There are many ways to be a feminist. For me, being a feminist and a Disney fan are not mutually exclusive. I would even argue that Disney princesses ARE feminists. Feminism not only believes in the equality of all genders, but also the equality of all races, classes, sexual-orientations and abilities/ disabilities as well as care and consideration for the environment. As I will detail in this blog post, all the Disney Princesses are feminists. They fight for their goals, follow their instincts, and treat everyone (regardless of class or beauty) with love and respect. They are also greatly impassioned by the natural environment, to the point of personifying their animal companions (show of hands of fans who can’t bear to order a flounder at a seafood restaurant – I know I can’t). Still, many viewers focus on the Princesses’ lack of agency and need for a man to be their hero. In recent years, and most likely in response to this criticism, Disney has released a series of princesses who more clearly defy their own stereotype. However, this does not mean that the previous princesses lacked autonomy or feminist qualities. Regardless of a Prince Charming, they have been breaking stereotypes and motivating young girls to fight for their goals with or without the presence of a romantic plotline. This post will explore the self-motivated, non-romantically driven actions of the Disney Princesses. Furthermore, I will look at a second, participatory project inspired by these narratives: the Dream Big, Princess initiative, where 21 young, female filmmakers from 13 countries created short films about inspiring women. Here is an example of the juxtaposition of the Dream Big, Princess campaign with the dreams of Disney’s animated Princesses.

The #DreamBigPrincess photography campaign encourages kids around the world to dream big. Thank you for dreaming big! By liking and posting #DreamBigPrincess photos on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter, you helped Disney Worldwide Services achieve our goal to donate US $1M to the United Nations Foundation's Girl Up campaign.

I have classified the Disney Princesses into three groups, mostly by era, to discuss them with more clarity. Understanding the cultural context of each time period is essential to grasping how each princess was breaking normative behavior. Disney’s Golden Age Princesses include Snow White from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), Cinderella from Cinderella (1950), and Aurora from Sleeping Beauty (1959). Disney’s Renaissance Princesses include Ariel from The Little Mermaid (1989), Belle from Beauty and the Beast (1991), Jasmine from Aladdin (1992), and Pocahontas from Pocahontas (1995). And Disney’s Post-Modern Princesses include Mulan from Mulan (1998), Tiana from The Princess and the Frog (2009), Rapunzel from Tangled (2010), Merida from Brave (2012), Anna and Elsa from Frozen (2013) (although Elsa technically goes from Princess to Queen a quarter of the way through the film), and Moana from Moana (2016).

Of the Post-Modern Princesses, the earliest and most obvious example is Mulan (1998). While Mulan falls into the generally accepted Disney Renaissance era, her personality and narrative align more with this most recent group of princesses, and I see her as the transition into this modern depiction. Mulan is not “a perfect bride or a perfect daughter” by her society’s standards. However, to save her aging father, she cuts her hair, borrows his armor, and poses as a man to fight in the upcoming war. She is not driven by romance, nor is she looking to be rescued. She struggles in a male-dominated world to prove herself and her capability. The only way she could be taken seriously is to shed all feminine attributes and learn to wield her strength both emotionally and physically.

Other examples of Disney Princesses who exhibit more apparent and straightforward examples of feminism are Tiana, Merida, and Elsa. Tiana is an independent woman who works hard in a New Orleans’s café and takes control of her life by pursuing her dream of running her own restaurant one day. Particularly moving lyrics from her song “Almost There” state:

“Trials and tribulations

I've had my share

There ain't nothin' gonna stop me now

'Cause I'ma almost there

I remember Daddy told me

Fairy tales can come true

You gotta make 'em happen

It all depends on you

So I work real hard each and every day

Now things for sure are going my way”

The song "Almost There" from Disney's "The Princess and the Frog" All content in this video belongs to Disney

Now, if this song doesn’t inspire young girls to work hard for what they want and not depend on a man to make it happen for them, I am not sure what does.

Moving forward, both Merida and Moana are strong-willed, fierce adventurers, whose stories focus on familial love and self-realization.

Then, there is Elsa, an incredibly powerful (figuratively and literally – the woman can build an ice palace and create a talking snowman with some serious weather control powers) princess who then actually becomes a Queen. Although we didn’t need yet another addition to the already over-saturated line-up of blonde princesses, Frozen IS based on a Scandinavian fairy-tale. The less obvious feminist (and non-blonde) from Frozen is Elsa’s little sister, Anna. Anna falls in love with the first man she sees, to which Elsa responds, “You can’t marry a man you just met” (a blatant critique of and attempted reconciliation with past princess narratives). And while this feels unfair to Anna, and romantic love is a prevalent frame-of-mind for her, the majority of the movie focuses on her personal journey to save her kingdom and her sister, even putting herself at risk several times without hesitation to sacrifice her life for Elsa. She shows that her bravery and independence is not reliant upon a man – the act of true love is for her sister.

Rapunzel has also been met with some criticism, as on a surface level, she falls into stereotypical Disney Princess tropes of femininity (but serious #hairgoals, amiright?). However, she navigates the adventure wielding her frying pan as a weapon and acting independently of Flynn Rider (who she is falling for, but who was only playing her initially) and her overbearing Mother (who is really just her kidnapper). She also has been locked in a tower for 18 years, so I think we can cut her some leeway (but not her hair, because then it loses its power).

Disney’s Renaissance Princesses are a complicated group to unpack. Belle is usually touted as a feminist; but if to qualify as a feminist one just has to have a love of reading and not want to marry Gaston, we might need to adjust the bar we set for Disney Princesses. Belle is an independent thinker and a woman of action. She rushes on horseback into the woods to rescue her father when he doesn’t return from the invention convention. She sacrifices her freedom to save her father from The Beast. Belle doesn’t heed The Beast’s “rules” or warnings from her animated, inanimate object friends and does as she likes whilst in his castle. She is smart, stubborn, and isn’t going to be controlled by anyone, no matter how physically overbearing he (Gaston or The Beast) might be.

Princess Jasmine is an interesting case through which to examine feminist strength. Highly offensive examples of Said’s Orientalism (are we in Saudi Arabia? Is that the Taj Mahal? Lyrics such as: “where they cut off your nose if they don’t like you face, it’s barbaric, but hey, it’s home”) aside, Jasmine is undervalued. She is the first Disney Princess of color, which made her an important figure for diversity and inclusivity in Disney media. Yes, Disney still has a long way to go in this regard, and Princess Jasmine marks the beginning. She is criticized for her overtly sexualized attire, however I would argue that body shaming or slut shaming is an un-feminist behavior. The clothing of women is a complicated topic, and Jasmine deserves respect whether or not she bares her midriff. And she is, after all, the first Princess in pants.

Jasmine is resistant to the patriarchy’s attempt to dictate her future. She refuses every royal suitor and is unwavering in her belief that she should have control over her life. She even disguises herself as a peasant to escape the palace and shows compassion for those of lower class status than herself, especially when she tries to help give food to a young child on the streets.

Pocahontas is the embodiment of environmental feminism. She is deeply connected with nature and compassionately shares her views on sharing space and caring for living things with Captain John Smith. Falling in love with him happened naturally, but was never her goal. In fact, she wasn’t too excited about her arranged marriage to Kocoum. She sings:

“Should I choose the smoothest course

Steady as the beating drum?

Should I marry Kocoum?

Is all my dreaming at an end?”

Just around the Riverbend from Pocahontas with lyrics ON SCREEN. Disney owns everything. *I and a lot of other people an relate to this sing in many ways. ~Enjoy.

Pocahontas, akin to Jasmine, wants more from life than to be married off as a Princess bride. They want the agency to choose or not choose love, rather than be told who they must love by a patriarchal system. It is their set of given circumstances that are un-feminist, not their behavior.

As this blog is called “Confessions of an Aca-Fan,” I would like to take the opportunity to make a confession here. I have never had a positive response to Ariel, because I was always frustrated that she wanted to physically change who she was to get a man and could only do so by literally giving up her voice. However, upon further reflection, I have misjudged her. In the first 10 minutes of the film, she breaks all the rules of a damsel in distress when she is the one who saves the prince, not the other way around.

She uses brute strength to pull a man twice her weight through the ocean and onto the shore. Furthermore, her fascination with life out of the sea stems much deeper than her infatuation with Prince Eric. She has been collecting shore-life artifacts her whole life. “Gizmos and gadgets aplenty” are not something you accumulate overnight. Yes, she wants to win Prince Eric’s heart, but her dream is to be “up where they walk, up where they run, up where they stay all day in the sun.” She also has the impression that on the land “they don’t reprimand their daughters.” This, we know, unfortunately is not true. The land is just as patriarchal as the sea. But the important focus here is that she yearns for a place where she can make her own choices as one of the “bright, young women.”

The final group of Disney Princesses are the original three, the Disney’s Golden Age Princesses, which brings me full circle (of life). Snow White, Cinderella, and Aurora demonstrate strength and grace under exceedingly unfair circumstances. Both Snow White and Cinderella were betrayed by the women in their lives who were supposed to give them care and protection. Aurora was cursed by an enraged woman who was not on the invite list. These women are not victims of patriarchy, but survivors of abuse at the hands of other women. Yet, rather than be embittered, they rise above their given circumstances, care for the creatures around them, and take risks to survive and thrive. Feminists are in romantic relationships and feminists are not in romantic relationships. For these Princesses specifically, if one wants to judge their actions solely on their narrative ending with a Prince Charming, be my (our) guest. But to do so by minimizing the complexity of their given circumstances and writing them off as prince-crazy social climbers, is quite simply, bibbidi- bobbidi-dumb!

All this to say, it is not a huge stretch to connect the actions of all the Disney Princesses to the functionality of the Dream Big, Princess campaign. The Dream Big, Princess campaign is just one example of how Disney Princesses inspire real world feminist behavior in their fans. Disney provided the opportunity to 21 young filmmakers to each shoot a short docu-video through their interviews with a global, female role model who embodies the resourcefulness and grit of Disney Princesses. These role models followed their dreams and worked hard to make them her reality. The young film makers featured were: Luiza Yoshida Bonifacio (age 16) of Brazil, Javiera Hernandez Morales (age 19) of Chile, Eugenie Chereau (age 21) of Argentina, Alyssa Schiavon Gandini (age 22) of Brazil, Eloisa Chapa Ortiz (age 15) of Mexico, Bethel Kyeza (age 16) of the UK, Sarah Gulley (age 19) of New Zealand, Lola Lizot (age 18) of France, Marisa Torre (age 17) of the USA, Marisa Umeh (age 18) of the USA, Soukaina Tachfouti (age 18) of Morocco, Tapiwa Maoni (age 18) of Malawi, Kayla Adams (age 18) of the USA, Louise Zeng (age 17) of the USA, Xiaochun Zhang (age 22) of China, Madhurima Khadilkar (age 19) of India, Nivaal Rehman (age 17) of Canada, Maryam Rehman (age 17) of Canada, Mariana Anaya (age 17) of Mexico, Jessica Zhang (age 16) of the USA, and Maud Webster (age 16) of the UK. These young women represent a diverse array of cultures and perspectives. This project gives them the opportunity to develop their media making skills and highlight the journey of female athletes, artists, entrepreneurs, and activists. This link showcases their docu-videos.

 Furthermore, during the time of the campaign, for every photo or video shared by anyone with #dreambigprincess, Disney donated a $1 (up to $1 million) to Girl Up, the United Nations Foundation’s initiative supporting girls’ leadership and empowerment. Following this hashtag leads to thousands of posts from women of all ages sharing their stories of strength and perseverance. Yes, this is absolutely a marketing campaign disguised as an empowerment project. Moreover, it is an example of commodity activism. The Walt Disney Corporation benefits financially from this project as this drives the sales of its products. However, that does not negate this project’s positive impact; the girl participants are given a platform and their work will in turn inspire others. My contention is that Disney, its parks, stories, and merchandises will not turn into pumpkins at the stroke of midnight. This cultural phenomenon is here to stay. Therefore, it is advantageous to celebrate the ways in which we can tease out the good, the empowering, and the educational from this storyverse.

We can all learn from the Disney Princesses’ moxie. They persevere through loss, discrimination, and obstacles. More than their romantic relationships and physical appearances, they are heroines. So when young children say they want to be like a Disney Princess, we should support them. These characters and narratives don’t just teach that dreams come true; they teach that dreams can be obtained through persistence and bravery.

Lauren Alexandra Sowa is a 3rd year Ph.D. student and Annenberg Fellow in Communication at USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. She holds a Master of Communication Management degree from USC’s Annenberg and received her BFA with Honors in Theatre with a Minor in Sociology from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. Currently, Lauren is studying representations of intersectionality in episodic narratives through casting practices and exploring how audiences utilize media to perform and/or redefine identities. Broadly, her primary intellectual interests include Cultural Studies, Fandom, Television/ Pop Culture, and Intersectionality. Lauren is also a member of SAG-AFTRA and AEA having performed in national commercials, television shows, and professional theater productions in Chicago, New York and Los Angeles. She studied Improvisation at Second City in Chicago and trained in the Professional Acting Shakespeare Program at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in London (RADA). 

Understanding the Rules and Norms at Play in Magic: The Gathering

This is the third in a series of blog posts created by PhD students in my seminar, Public Intellectuals: Theory and Practice

Understanding the Rules and Norms at Play in Magic: The Gathering

by Calvin Liu

Imagine this scene for a moment.

You’re playing a game of poker with three other people, their names are Sam, Zhu, and Maria. These people are strangers to you, you saw them playing across the room and they invited you into the game. The game isn’t for any sort of real stakes. All the winnings amount to here are bragging rights. Throughout the game, you get the sense that these people know each other. Listening in on an in-joke here and there, you gather that they at least regularly play this game together. Occasionally you get included into the conversation, exchanging bits and pieces of yourself and your experience playing poker. The game winds down to a close and it’s time to reveal hands. Maria reveals a pair of tens. Zhu reveals a pair of fives. The two laugh. Sam reveals a pair of threes. “Well that’s just how it goes sometimes,” he says with a smile. Finally it’s your turn to reveal. 

You put down a Royal Flush. 

The other three go quiet. After a moment of awkward silence, they push their chips towards you and you play another round. This round is a little quieter than the last. The three other players still talk between each other, but the conversation feels different this time. You weren’t exactly clear on the context of their conversations earlier, but you at least could glean some overarching meaning. This time though, it’s inscrutable. All the esoteric references the players throw between each other is like some lost language to you. 

You push through it and keep playing, after all, you’re the stranger in the group. Again, it’s time to reveal hands. Maria shows a pair of eights and looks at Zhu. Zhu shows Ace high in hand and shrugs. Lastly Sam rolls his hand onto the table, showing 7 high and passes you an expectant look. 

With a small pit developing in your gut, you reveal a Full House.

More silence ensues, and you quickly excuse yourself form the table, feeling you’ve spent your luck for the day. You take a seat back at another part of the establishment and bury your eyes in some article. Over time, you hear the poker table returning back to its light-hearted socialization. You keep to your article, glad that you don’t find yourself being invited back.

This story is a loose allegory of some of my own experiences. But, rather than poker, my awkward little games were in the trading card game, Magic: the Gathering. I hope the tale to serve as a more accessible gateway to talk about Magic: the Gathering and thinking over group engagements with play.

For those unfamiliar, Magic, also known as MTG, is a high fantasy trading card game created by Wizards of the Coast in 1993. Magic is a long-lived game with plenty of its own history and stories to tell that many people have written at length about. I myself have enjoyed the game since 1998, which would mean I’ve been playing Magic for as long as I’ve been in the educational system. But, this blog post is going to be written primarily for people who are unfamiliar with the game. For that reason, I won’t be going too much into the mechanics and weeds of Magic and want to focus more on what’s happening between the people playing the game. 

Normally, Magic is played with two people, with each player aiming to defeat the other through a variety of means. However, Magic is a multimodal game with many different rulesets and styles of play that players may choose to follow. I wanted to focus on one popular style of play, and my preferred format: Commander. Commander, also known as EDH (Elder Dragon Highlander), is a uniquely multiplayer format. Rather than the regular 1v1, EDH usually involves a total of 4 players pitted against each other in an all-out free-for-all. The objective in EDH is the same as a 1v1 game, have all the other players defeated.

The philosophy of the game mode also differs from most forms of play. While many formats emphasize prowess at defeating your opponent, EDH instead focuses on the social aspects of play. Players are expected to socialize during, before, and after a game is played. You can see this reflected in the rules committee’s philosophy for EDH.

The free-for-all environment and social nature of this format leads to all manners of political shenanigans. Bargains are made, alliances are formed, and quickly broken, targets are marked, changed, and remarked. Common phrases and deals one might hear in a game of EDH are “I won’t kill you if you help me kill that other player,” or “Give me these resources or I will hurt you,” and “That player’s a jerk/too powerful/slowing down the game, let’s team up and kill them.” 

Yet, with all these social dimensions added on, EDH is still a game of Magic: the Gathering. The rules of the game still dictate your victory by outperforming and eliminating the other players. However, despite having codified rules, a whole separate set of expectations and norms develop among playgroups of EDH. Recall the example above about poker. Nothing in the rules of poker prohibits you from displaying a Royal Flush or a Full House. The game rules in fact encourage you to make such moves to ensure your success. Yet, making those moves may incur the scorn of and distaste of other players. Socialization may suddenly become closed to you. Coded conversations and esoteric reference, may be used as forms of exclusion or conspiracy. 

Why would playing the game the way the rules suggest you do, incur such social and political sanctions from other players? There are many factors, but the ones I wanted to focus on are social contracts and invisible social rules. 

Recall that EDH positions itself as a social format. The format encourages players to interact beyond the confines of the game environment. The mechanical rules of the game of Magic, thus serve as a proxy for social interaction. The way a person interacts with these rules and types of cards they choose to play are read as statements about their personality, intent, decorum, and experience. As these games play out, the ways that people play form a social contract where invisible rules are drafted. Actions in a game that incur social and political penalties are not necessarily about whether game rules are being violated, but whether these social contracts have been breached. Certain cards and interactions become taboo as they become indicative of undesirability socialites within a group.

For example, when playing powerful cards that assure victory, the user may hear phrases such as “I wanted to keep the game going,” or “Why do you have to be so competitive?” No mechanical rules are violated in these situations, the game allows for such cards to be played and encourages such victories to be won. Yet, the unwritten social rules in this group encourage the game to endure to prolong interaction. These phrases are indicative of social values that focus on human interactions over game objectives. By choosing to win, that player effectively makes a counter statement along the lines of “I don’t want to socialize with you further on this.”

These social contracts are not limited around concepts of victory or success in Magic. In another vein, some groups hold taboos towards cards that prolong the game, which may be indicated with phrases such as “You’re just durdling” or “Just get on the with the game.” In these scenarios, playing cards that prolong the game may be read as statements of “I am forcing you to engage with something you don’t want to.” Each playgroup develops its own preferred set of socialites, codifying them as “house rules.” However, these rules may not necessarily be visible to strangers and newcomers. This can cause friction for people trying to join new groups.

Consider again the idea that game rules serve as proxies for how we socialize between each other. The important part of that statement is the word proxy. It’s not a direct conveyance of social values and behaviors, it’s a relay, a representation.  This allows for some nuanced forms of socialization. Let me give an example in one of my personal experiences playing EDH. 

I was playing amongst a group I was generally unfamiliar with. We’re having a good time, talking about our strategies and little idiosyncrasies of Magic: the Gathering. It was our third or fourth game at a campus cafeteria and it was already well into the night. Everyone else at the cafeteria had left, but we had stayed to play one last game. Mid-way through the game, I play a card called Prophet of Kruphix, a card that has a reputation for being one of the more powerful ones in the game. There’s a bit a groaning from my opponents. 

Up til now, the atmosphere had been friendly and casual. But when I play Prophet of Kruphix, a switch flips. My opponents quickly make a pact to get me out of the game. The talks between them become more tactical as how to disrupt my plans or complaining how unfairly powerful Prophet of Kruphix is. The mirth of the earlier conversations is gone, and I begin shuffle in my seat. It’s apparent I’ve committed some faux pau, but I keep playing, hoping the tension would end along with the game. Through what I felt was a series of good decision making, I am able to survive the team up and pull myself to victory.

My opponents are less than pleased. They grumble that my victory had been off of one card. I could have listed a handful of other play decisions I made, but instead I offer an apology, saying that I included the card due to its synergy with my strategy. One of the players raises their voice at me and exclaims “Shut up!” They then walk off, pointedly leaving me by myself after a whole evening of what had otherwise been a pleasant exchange of interests. From the distance I can hear them still complaining about Prophet of Kruphix for a little while longer, but it quickly settles back to chat about Magic in general, just without me included.

That experience has by far, been the worst experience I have had in my twenty years of playing Magic: the Gathering. Though why does it still sting so personally for me, when my opponents main complaints were about the card and game? The way we play games and the ways we behave in reference in them, allows expressions that may not be appropriate in “normal” socialization. At face value, the opponents teaming up on me and shutting me off from the conversation could be read as a game statement of “You have too much of an advantage and must be dealt with.” But there’s a subtext here, one not just about my playstyle and my position in the game, but about how those inform the type of person I am seen to be and my ability to assimilate into the group. 

By opting to play an exceptionally powerful card, I break a social contract that is obviously apparent to the group, but invisible to me as a newcomer. While from my perspective, playing such a card was an exercise in my knowledge and prowess of game interactions, this violation proxies certain perceptions on me as a person: “He’s not skilled enough to win without this card,” or “He’s too competitive, he’s a killjoy.” Saying such directly, especially in a public space, would be inappropriate. Thus, they were said indirectly through complaints about the card, targeting and collusion. These modes of play acted as proxy for the exclusion and ostracism that would follow once the game was finished. 

If only these things came with a manual for newcomers.

—————

Calvin Liu is a communications scholar with a BS and MS in Information and Computer Science from the University of California, Irvine. Calvin takes an interdisciplinary approach of exploring the role of play. He examines how forms of play and technology act as proxies for the construction and negotiation of social rules. His previous work involved an ethnography into the furry fan community, a subculture sharing an interest in anthropomorphism and zoomorphism. His work in the furry subculture merged posthumanist framing alongside new media literature to analyze how identities are negotiated across artifacts and performances. Currently, Calvin is examining the relationship play has towards the construction and performance of identities. You can reach via email (liucalvi@usc.edu)

Damned If We Do, Damned If We Don’t (Fit Stereotypes): Navigating Contradictory Expectations of Women In The Workplace

This is the second in a series of blog posts created by the PhD students in my Public Intellectuals: Theory and Methods seminar.

Damned If We Do, Damned If We Don’t (Fit Stereotypes): Navigating Contradictory Expectations of Women in the Workplace

by Sierra Bray

“When I’m assertive, I’m a bitch. When a man is assertive, he’s a boss. But when you’re a girl, you have to be, like, everything. You have to be dope at what you do, but you have to be super sweet and you have to be sexy… and you have to be this and you have to be that and you have to be nice it’s like… I can’t be all those things at once. I’m a human being!”

-Rapper Nicki Minaj on facing impossible expectations in her career

In the spring of the first year of my communication Ph.D. program, I received a message on Facebook from a former colleague, “Jessica,” whom I worked with at a previous marketing job years before starting graduate school. Besides occasionally liking each other’s social media photos (she has very cute kids), we hadn’t communicated much since we were coworkers. So, it was much to my surprise when Jessica privately messaged me—not with casual pleasantries, but to voice her feelings about a Facebook post I had recently shared about my research. 

My post had outlined some results of an experiment that my colleagues and I presented at an academic symposium [SB1] (complete with a picture of us standing next to our presentation with arms outstretched like Vanna White—I will forever be pro-corny photo poses). 

In a nutshell, our study showed that males tend to perceive an assertive woman in the workplace (one who spoke dominantly and directly) as less likable than a more passive woman. The finding that raised the most eyebrows was that older men in particular perceived the assertive woman as less likable and less competent. In any case, women who spoke up at work didn’t seem to fly too well with men. 

Though the presentation at the symposium gained us a few interested nods and technical questions about our methods, I was blown away by how much my Facebook post resonated with many women in my life who had dealt with negative blow-back from acting assertively at work. My beloved aunt Shelly added a succinct yet powerful comment on my post:

This is also where “Jessica” comes in. Her private message to me read:

As evident in this short note, I always remembered Jessica as someone with a bold personality, a sharp sense of humor, and most importantly, someone who was damn good at her job. That these traits would ultimately push her into so-called “bitch counseling” (I hear HR professionals shuddering at this phrase in the distance) is but one personal story of women who have dealt with these biases at work when acting assertively.

congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez defends herself against tweets that ridicule her for not looking “spirted, warm and original as usual” as Donald Trump gave the State of the Union address.

In my own experience, I constantly find myself trying to gracefully walk the line between being competent and confident, yet likable and conscientious of others in professional settings. Sometimes this aspiration manifests in something as simple as fussing over how many exclamation marks to use in an email—sound familiar to anyone? If this straddling seems like a false dichotomy[SB2] , that’s because it is one. Of course, one can be direct and get along well with others—in fact, I believe these are traits that everyone (of all genders) should at least strive to exhibit. 

However, research shows that subconscious attitudes push people to see these types of traits as binaries: if women act more assertive, they’re often automatically perceived as less of a team player, and vice-versa. Even more troubling, people tend to punish women who don’t always exhibit traditionally “feminine” stereotypes, such as being a team player, caring about relationships over self-advancement, and using more passive communication. Women who instead show more traditionally (and stereotypically) masculine traits at work—like using direct communication, being assertive, and acting confidently—can frequently face negative attitudes from others. 

These types of attitudes can be especially vicious toward women in leadership positions. At the time of writing this article, the first results from Googling “female bosses” drum up troubling headlines (and curiously all images of white, femme women) like: 

“8 Tips to Survive Working for a Female Boss”

“What’s Up with Bitchy Female Bosses?”

“Female Bosses: Why do Women Tear Down Other Women?”

“Female Bosses are a Nightmare, Reveals Study”

Screenshot of the top six Google Image results for “female bosses” as of February 2019.

(Side note: if interested in harmful representations that arise from search engine algorithms, you must read Safiya Noble’s brilliant work, Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism.) 

The fancy term for this scorn against women in leadership positions is role congruity theory, originally coined by scholars Alice Eagly and Steven Karau. The theory suggests that people who adhere to traditional gender norms are rewarded, and those who violate gender norms will likely experience backlash.

The result for women in the workplace? We are perceived less favorably than men as candidates for leadership positions, and when we are in leadership positions, we tend to face negative attitudes—thus, circling back to Jessica’s Facebook message about “bitch counseling.”

These types of gendered expectations can be especially stifling for women of color. In Henry Jenkins’s Public Intellectuals class, we recently read the piece Black Women Intellectuals by feminist scholar and author bell hooks. In the piece, hooks outlines how sexism and racism reinforce the idea that “Black women are on this planet primarily for the purpose of serving others” (p.153)—and that Black women may not pursue intellectual professions at least partly because of these expectations. 

Feminist author and scholar bell hooks

hooks notes how intellectualism and the life of an academic requires time to isolate oneself and to emerge into scholarly work. However, while men are often lauded for this type of isolation, women—and Black women in particular—are often looked upon disdainfully if she steps away (even momentarily) from her community for her own pursuits. 

“Within patriarchy, men have always had the freedom to isolate themselves from family and community, to do autonomous work and re-enter a relational world when they chose, irrespective of their class status. It is the image of a male figure seeking aloneness to do the work of the mind that is common in mass media, and not that of the female. That patriarchal world which supports and affirms male re-entry into family and community after time apart often punishes females for choosing to do autonomous work”— bell hooks in Black Women Intellectuals [SB3] 

Currently all of the images on Wikipedia’s “Intellectuals” page are of white men as of February 2019—many depict an isolated man looking off into the distance, as exemplified by these portraits of Milton Friedman and Jacques Barzun (the first person to add a picture of bell hooks to this Wikipedia page can email me for a prize).

Yet if these biases weren’t frustrating enough, here’s another twist: studies show that when women do “fit” certain feminine stereotypes, such as starting a family, this can negatively impact her as well. The New York Times recently published an article titled, Pregnancy Discrimination Is Rampant Inside America’s Biggest Companies, which detailed how pregnant women are “systematically sidelined in the workplace,” not considered for promotions and raises, and fired when voicing their concerns. 

My own research backs up negative attitudes toward mothers, especially in the tech industry. In an experiment, I tested how people reacted to different online profiles of female software engineers—one who described herself as a mother, while the other did not. Overall, people perceived the “mom engineer” as a lower-quality employee and less committed to work than the engineer who did not talk about motherhood. And, perhaps unsurprising from recent news stories, significant negative attitudes came from men and participants who worked in the tech industry. 

Protesters outside the Supreme Court in Washington D.C. in December 2014 rallying around Peggy Young, a UPS worker who was fired for being pregnant.

I bring up this topic of motherhood bias to show the contradictory—and at times, seemingly impossible—standards that women are held to in the workforce. A woman who speaks up for herself is direct, and ambitious? She’s allegedly not very feminine, and not very likable. A woman who expresses her pride in being a mom and a successful software engineer? She’s not cut out to be a dedicated employee (insert long sigh here.)

On top of the seemingly endless biases outlined so far, let us also acknowledge the exponential struggles that queer and trans women face in the workforce. More than 75% of transgender people have experienced a form of workplace discrimination, and at least 25% have lost a job due to bias (according to the National Center for Trasngender Equality). Additionally, a 2016 Harvard study found that employers were roughly 30% less likely to request an interview from a female job applicant perceived as LGBTQ than one perceived as heterosexual. Thus, many queer and trans women may experience extra distress on top of the plights I’ve described so far. 

Ultimately, my research showing that these workplace biases exist is not meant to guide women how to act—it isn’t a road map promising how to get ahead by acting particularly feminine or masculine (in my eyes, anyone selling that type of road map is likely a fraud). Rather, I hope it brings some solidarity and awareness of the double-binds many women face. 

Don’t trust someone who urges you to use these harmful stereotypes to help you get ahead in your career.

As someone who constantly buries my head in research about these biases, it’s easy to become forlorn and to feel helpless about the state of things (channeling the words of my aunt Shelly’s Facebook comment, sometimes it really does“feel like it’s never going to change”). However, while I dedicate my career to looking into systematic workplace oppression, I also try to offset it with nurturing my interpersonal relationships with badass women in my life (and this also helps my own well-being). This support may look like sending advice via text on how to negotiate a raise, venting and providing a hug when something sexist happens in a meeting, or setting aside time to get coffee with older professional women who inspire me (recognizing that having a network with these types of role models is a privilege in its own right). 

At times it can feel impossible to conquer it all—for me, to attack oppressive structures, to advance in my career, to nurture relationships with my colleagues, and to enjoy quality time with my family. But in the aforementioned wise words of Nicki Minaj, “I can’t be all those things at once. I’m a human being!”—and there is comfort in taking stock in that. 

Sierra Bray is a Ph.D. fellow and researcher at the University of Southern California Annenberg School of Communication. Employing both qualitative and quantitative methods, Sierra’s research converges at the intersection of organizational communication, cultural studies, and science and technology studies. Before graduate school, Sierra worked in strategic communication, marketing, and business consulting in both agency and corporate environments. Her current research focuses on how women, people of color, and people of other historically marginalized identities navigate and negotiate power in professional settings. You can reach Sierra via email (sierra.bray@usc.edu) or connect with her on LinkedIn.

What Does Art Do? Emblematic Representation and Performance Among Skid Row Artists

This is the first of a series of posts written by the PhD students in my seminar, Public Intellectuals: Theory and Practice. This professional development course, offered by USC Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism, explores many different public dimensions of scholarship and teaching, including blogs, podcasts, op-eds, digital humanities, and policy white papers. Over the next two weeks, I am going to be sharing what the students produced on the blogging assignment. I know they would love to see feedback from readers.

What Does Art Do? Emblematic Representation and Performance Among Skid Row Artists

by Hoan Nguyen

I had an appointment with Jane on a Friday morning in Skid Row, an isolated neighborhood located just east of downtown Los Angeles. We wanted to meet at the Los Angeles California Action Network (LA CAN) where she infrequently came to play the piano in the Freedom room. She showed up very early,looked excited when I brought a camera ready to record her performance. Unfortunately, the Freedom room was fully occupied with people preparing for a party to celebrate the life of Fela Kuti – a Nigerian musician and activist. Jane’s face melted on hearing the news. Apparently she had carefully prepared for the “show”, wearing a nice grey suit and a beautiful bracelet: just one day earlier when I bumped into her for the first time, she looked pale in a wear and tear outfit, sitting on a fragile chair on the sidewalk. 

So we sat down for a long conversation in the LA CAN library instead. Jane eagerly shared her life stories: one of the most educated women in Skid Row, she was trained in a reputable music department at high school, and got a college degree in nursing in Indianapolis. She used to work in a music studio, writing songs and co-producing music, before sliding into homelessness. She talked a lot about her childhood growing up in a church where she sang and created songs for the church choir. Religion is a major part in her life; and so is music. “God brought me here in Skid Row,” she said. 

As a homeless artist, she had no musical instruments at hand except her voice. The Freedom room is her beloved place, where she can still play the piano. She sang emotionally a couple of times during our conversation. Songs heal her soul. Music tells her stories. 

“(Music) is my voice to the world. And I've been given a gift.  And I've been trained. I don't have any complaints about my singing or playing. And what's more than is that it touches people’s heart. People who live here like me who I play in front of. Some are Skid Row residents, some work here. Some of them are at Union Station and they're profoundly touched by what they hear.”

My encounter with Jane led me to wonder about art, performance, and their underlying meanings in the lives of Skid Row artists. Historically being treated as an urban ghetto hosting abandoned people as the disabled and the mentally ill, Skid Row is rarely associated with art. Art was not my initial research agenda, either. My ethnographic journey, however, awakened my curiosity and fascination with the role of non-mainstream art in this space. 

So what do art and art performance do here? 

At first glance, art is a means for individuals’ creative expression, which is perhaps a shared role of art for any artistic community! However, specific to Skid Row, art and performance, as revealed in Jane’ narratives, is associated with the creators’ personal experiences as homeless people. My fieldwork gave me more insights into the lives of these artists and musicians. I learned that homeless people use art to reflect on their transient lives on Skid Row streets, and beyond that, their desires to connect with the outside world.  Aside from songs, there were paintings, zine collections, spoken words, and music video production, among others. 

As with Jane’s, I was impressed by Pepper’s story. I met him at the Skid Row farmers’ market on a bright morning. He is a painter. People in the vicinity told me that he drew some of the best graffiti on various walls around Skid Row. During our in-depth interview, I asked him about the subject matter of his paintings and what messages he wanted to share with his audiences. He shared that his drawings told stories about beautiful things he noticed around him. 

“What about the flowers? What about the wild birds in the air? Do you care about those? So you see I deal with reality. I don't butter stuff up. If it's going to rain, I'm going to tell you it's going to rain and you might want to get ready. I'm like, hold up. Hold up. Hold up. Isn’t that rain is a good thing, right? It refreshes the air, it brings new life […]

Love, you knows, no hatred, love is beauty. Love is peace. Love is happiness. Paintings and drawings are somewhat the same as a song cuz they talk about love. Okay, my job is to bring peace of love. When I die, the next generation young kids can guide them do much. Just saw. I can show that you need no gun. You need not worry. You don't need to be fighting to be you. Love, you know. 

He also composes song lyrics and co-produces some music videos circulated on YouTube. He showed me his popular video, namely Everlast’s “Long At All,” within which he is the main character, telling stories about war, life in street, and the ephemeral nature of human life.

everlast #whiteyfordshouseofpain Everlast - 'Long At All' - Official Music Video From "Songs of the Ungrateful Living" Available now: https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/songs-ungrateful-living/id466965056 Listen now along with the new album Whitey Ford's House of Pain: https://fanlink.to/wfhop Everlast USA Tour // Get tickets - https://fanlink.to/wfhop_usa 11/07 - Rochester, NY 11/09 - Clifton Park, NY 11/10 - Poughkeepsie, NY 11/11 - Lancaster, PA 11/13 - Newport News, VA 11/15 - Leesburg, VA 11/16 - Pittsburgh, PA 11/17 - Flint, MI 11/30 - San Antonio, TX 12/02 - Houston, TX https://www.facebook.com/everlastmusic https://www.twitter.com/OGEverlast https://www.instagram.com/ogeverlast https://www.soundcloud.com/whiteyford http://www.martyr-inc.com/ Directed by: Estevan Oriol

As my urban ethnographic journey advanced over the course of four months, I realized that individual work, like that of Jane and Pepper’s, is but part of a bigger picture. The other part, well organized and more publicized, is collective work buttressed by arts-based organizations and activists in the locality. Major organizations include Studio 526 and Urban Voice Project where Skid Row artists congregate frequently to practice and perform. There is also an annual art festival, namely Festival for All Skid Row Artists, deemed to be the central art event established to create a public space for Skid Row artists to showcase their works, celebrate their lives, interact with one another and the general public. 

I went to the 9th Festival for All Skid Row Artists taking place at San Julian Parkin early November 2018. I was thrilled when seeing many artists displaying their works and performing on stage during the two-day event. 

Artworks displayed at the 9th Festival for All Skid Row Artists, November 2018

In tandem with the annual festival, the Urban Voice Project held a performance event at the Central Library in downtown Los Angeles, which attracted the general public.

Looking into these well-organized activities and public events, I recognized their profound implications for the homelessness and artist identities and politics of resistance that went beyond individualistic experiences. Arguably, public performances and art displays, taken together, told a story of a unified community of homeless people in Skid Row. A story of a landscape of despair. A story of the transient lives being sidelined into marginalization and isolation.

Uploaded by Hoan Sarah Nguyen on 2019-02-10.

Skid Row Zine:Lost/Found

Singing a beautiful song or performing spoken words on stage, the artists also asked the public to not look down at Skid Row, but instead, to listen to its people’s stories and understand their daily struggles. They showed a strong sense of resistance against housing injustices and social discrimination. 

At the very least, art is also a space for the creators to strategically represent their collective identity as a valued community of creativity, dignity, connectivity, and love. 

Unfortunately, the dominant discourse, both in academia and the wider society, is often skewed towards seeing art mainly as a therapy employed by social service providers to help the homeless heal their mental health problems. With that misconception, the homeless are perceived as a social problem, and so Skid Row is seen as contaminating rather than generative. 

My involvement with the community, however, suggests otherwise. I realized that Skid Row art makers are true artists. Their artworks are in turn not simply healing therapies but a tool for creative expression, collective representation and resistance. Performance is their social justice project. Art could be a powerful bridge connecting Skid Row and the outside world. 

Being one of the most stigmatized populations in America and elsewhere in the world, homeless people are more often than not physically isolated, subject to discrimination, and socially invisible. When mentioned at all, they are likely to be belittled as the disabled and passive receivers of social assistance. Outsiders hardly see any potential in them, unaware of the fact that there might be talented artists.Such expressions might invite us to rethink stereotypical assumptions. More importantly, we need to open our heart to listen to their stories and make changes in their lives through everyday practice. It can be as simple as looking at homeless people differently as they approach us on the side walk, engaging them in conversions about their life, or lending support to arts‐based organizations. Policy makers and the general public alike need to better understand the community’s lived experiences on the ground. They have to identify not only the marginalized people’s problems but also their potentials, aspirations, and agency. Only then can we meaningfully engage with the people who are living with the problems confronting America’s  cities.

Hoan (Sarah) Nguyen  is a doctoral student and graduate fellow at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, University of Southern California. Her research interests include social inequality, digital divides, human agency, discrimination in the digital media, and technology for social change. Her studies examine social implications of technology use, role of digital media such as the Internet and mobile platforms in transnational migration processes and the empowerment of marginalized communities.

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

How has the increased intimacy between performers and audiences shifted the meaning and importance of authenticity on the one hand and mystique on the other as they relate to the nature of being a “rock star”?

Well of course one defining element of intimacy is that you are meant to be authentic. Mystique may lure you in but once you’re intimate, it has no place. That’s clearly in opposition to the traditional (ha!) view of the rock star, where they are meant to be at a distance and filled with mystery. So new media and the push toward intimacy push people away from mystique toward “authenticity.” But “authenticity” is a terribly problematic term, and in this context it’s always performed (and sometime highly crafted for public consumption) anyway. It’s not actually clear to me that the masses really yearn for “authenticity” so much as they want direct interaction and immediacy. They only want authenticity when someone behaves like their imagined version of them. And there seem to be plenty of cases where we still want mystique. Take Daft Punk or Banksy. The loss of mystique is something some artists are grateful for, they’re thrilled to leave the trope of the rock star in the past and get back to something more egalitarian. Others feel like the mystique protects the music, or them, and it’s a challenge to figure out how to present themselves in a way that, as one person put it, has “boundaries without the appearance of having boundaries.” 

There is a growing interest in the concept of the “anti-fan,” represented by a recent anthology around this topic. What can the study of “relational labor” contribute to our understanding of the concept?

You can’t talk about doing relational labor without talking about anti-fans because the act of going online to communicate with fans means that you are going to encounter anti-fans. I’d like to think that the shift this book offers from audience perspective to artist perspective helps us think more about what anti-fan practices do to the humans who create the work or being hated, how those people respond to it, and perhaps how communication platforms might be better designed to lessen its impacts. Some of the older musicians I talked to laughed it off, but others had a hard time with it, even some of the famous ones you might think wouldn’t care. In a theoretical sense, from the artists’ perspective, fans are just one set of the audience they have to relate to, and there are a lot of spots on the spectrum between fan and anti-fan and also a lot of people on axes that are totally orthogonal to that one. Though I love fan studies, I hope audience studies can be more attuned to other variants of audience as well and perhaps relational labor helps us see those different facets of audience more clearly, because they call for different modes of relating.

The ethical dimensions of fandom are a recurring theme across the book and you end with a direct statement, “All of us are audiences and all of us have a responsibility to think about the well-being of those who create what we use and cherish.” What are some concrete ways you feel that fans might shoulder this responsibility?

Thanks for asking that. When you center the experience of the artist you realize pretty quickly that, even at its best, relating to audiences is hard work that puts a person’s selfhood on the line in ways that are profoundly personal. Here are a few concrete suggestions. The don’ts: Don’t expect – let alone – demand personal responses to your messages. Don’t ask favors of them that you wouldn’t ask a stranger. Realize that disclosing personal topics to them may be upsetting to them and don’t expect them to be able to help you sort out your problems even if their work does. If you’re going to say things about them that aren’t nice, don’t tag them in it. And on the other side, do tell the artists you love that you appreciate them. Tell them what their work means to you. I was really surprised to hear from nearly everyone I talked to how much it meant to hear from people who had seen their show or really thought about a song. Fans often think the artists don’t care, but like everyone else, they want to know that their work makes a positive difference in people’s lives. And a crucial, ethical do: pay for the art you love and support the fundraising activities artists offer.

You also end the book with some statements about what audiences and performers should be able to expect from each other. What would need to change for the creative industries to fully embrace the potentials of this proposed social contract?

I think we’d have to get to a point where we start from the premise that the culture industries have value because people value culture, and that culture is above all about human relationships and social order. For the last several decades, the goal of the culture industries has been to make money and the rest has come after. If we were all starting with the question of how we build better culture and how we strengthen and support relationships and communities, then we could have healthier conversations about the “value” of creative work and treat everyone involved with more reverence.   

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.

Cult Conversations: Interview with Robin Means Coleman (Pt.II)

You also state that the horror genre has at times been “marred by its ‘B-Movie,’ low budget and/ or exploitation reputation.” Are you arguing that it is this reputation that has marred the genre by way of critical disparagement; or that B-Movie, low budget, exploitation cinema is disreputable or lacking in quality?

I want to emphasize the word “reputation” in your question and, earlier, I talked about horror’s B-movie “stereotype.” My point is that I do not want people to think that horror is fixed in some low quality purgatory. Certainly, there are horror films that are dreadful, or are a mixed bag in terms of quality of script and production. More, once the direct-to-video age hit, the format afforded an influx of movies that would never be ready for big screen primetime. I get that. However, the genre does seem to be excommunicated in ways that other genres are completely taken down. Honestly, we live in a world where Adam Sandler’s Billy Madison (1995), Will Ferrell’s Bewitched (2005), and just about anything with Marlon Wayans in it is not tanking the entire comedy genre.

Look, what I believe is that we are retroactively repudiating an entire genre when we did not always believe horror was wholesale objectionable. Are we really prepared to write off Universal Pictures’ horror films—The Mummy (1932), The Phantom of the Opera (1925), Frankenstein (1931), The Invisible Man (1933)… of course not. So perhaps, just perhaps, a snobbery around horror is more recent. Maybe it was the 1970s splatter and 1980s torture films that we are thinking of when we reject horror. This is a snobbery that is marked by who is making the movie and what kind of stories are being told. That is why knowing a more complete history of the genre is so important.

In your book on Horror Noire you state, “there are a great many horror films that contribute to the conversation of Blackness,” while at the same time, Steven Torriano Berry explains in his foreword that, like Hollywood fare in general terms, Black characters were often the first to die—if they were included at all. Can you explain the way in which the horror genre has historically contributed to “the conversation of Blackness”?

In the book, my particular interest is in horror films that focus on Blackness—Black horror films like Def by Temptation or The Blood of Jesus. And, I talk about horror films that have Black people in it, but whose focus is not especially on Black lives and histories, films like Angel Heart or The Serpent and the Rainbow. I write that these two approaches offer up “an extraordinary opportunity for an examination into how race, racial identities, and race relationships are constructed and depicted.” More, I assert, “certainly horror has always been attentive to social problems in rather provocative ways.” (p. 8). On the whole, I argue that horror is the ideal genre for digging into narratives of American social politics, identity formation, understandings of race, and ideology-making. The book is Du Boisian in that it is informed by his interest in the “strange meaning of being Black” in America.

One way to think about the “strange meaning of being Black” is to understand that Black characters do not always die first in horror movies, and why they don’t. In ‘Blacks in horror films’ (not to be confused with ‘Black horror films’), Black people often serve a particular purpose. They are brought in to reinforce stereotypes of menace, monstrosity, uninhibited violence, and abject deviance. So, if, say, a White anti/hero shows up and vanquishes the Big Black Boogeyman, then what does that say about Blackness and Whiteness? Now, when a real monster hits the scene—an alien, a mutated animal, a zombie—how do we feel about the odds of Whiteness and its superiority? That—setting up Blackness as fearsome, but then destroyed—is truly the strange meaning of being Black in horror films.

The phenomenal critical and commercial success of Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017) seems to represent a significant shift in the politics of Hollywood cinema, a film that operates as “a searing, satirical critique of systemic racism,” as Ricardo Lopez of Variety put it. At the same time, however, “systemic racism” clearly remains an enormous issue in the United States—and elsewhere, of course—with the Black Lives Matter movement being an example of Civil Rights activism in the 21st Century. What do you think about the way in which films, such as Get Out, are critically celebrated and championed by entertainment critics (and audiences), while systemic racism seems to be growing in the real, non-fictional world. What do you think about the relationship between Get Out and the way that the radical right has swiftly grown into a political powerhouse? Do you think that the success of Get Out works ideologically to persuade audiences that systemic racism in the 21st century is not as serious as press discourses would have us believe? Or do you think the film promotes a more progressive, positive message?   

Get Out is far from the first horror film to address civil rights, race, and racism. To say that is to turn a blind eye to the 1970s-- an entire decade of Black movie-making that spoke directly to White supremacy, exploitation, classism, and discrimination. To say that is to erase the art of Bill Gunn, Melvin Van Peebles, Ivan Dixon, Ossie Davis, D’Urville Martin, Gordan Parks…

MARIO VAN PEEBLES

But, I understand how people today could think that only Get Out could have something to say about the issues that Black Lives Matters works to intervene on, or that systemic racism seems to be “growing.” These issues are 18th, 19th, 20th, and 21st century issues, and Black popular culture has always had something to say about them. When Jordan Peele says that his primary inspiration for Get Out—a film about liberal racism-- is Rosemary’s Baby, I suspect Gordan Parks, Jr. is rolling over in his grave. Parks’ stories of Black genocide weren’t really any more fantastic than that which Get Out is premised on. More, if you know anything about film, you know that these stories about racism have been taken up for years in an attempt to talk back at an ever persistent systemic racism. Get Out stands on the shoulders of Sugar Hill, Three the Hard Way, and JD’s Revenge, whether it wants to admit it or not. But failing to acknowledge this history leaves people to think that Get Out is the most powerful anti-racism voice when, in fact, Black filmmakers have been shouting for more than a century (think: Oscar Micheaux). It is only now that the mainstream is really paying attention our voices.

Don’t get me wrong. Get Out is a brilliant film, and one of my favorites. But, I wonder what the trade-off is to, in some measure, erase Blackness for audiences to attend to Blackness. Take Peele’s movie Us (2019). Peele has been insistent that the movie is not about race. What?! There is no film ever made that is not about race. Rosemary’s Baby is about White people. The Exorcist is about White people. Silence of the Lambs is about White people. Christine is about a White kid and his evil car. Poltergeist is about a White family in their haunted White suburban enclave. Us is about a Black family. It sees Blackness, as revealed by the use of Luniz’s I Got 5 on It as the soundtrack to a lesson on keeping a beat and catching rhythm.

So, Us, like Get Out is likely going to work progressively. Our road there will be a bit more direct with a Peele offering a clearer message about the ideological work his films do.

 Writing for the BBC, Nicolas Barber asks if “horror is the most disrespected genre.” Do you agree that this is the case? 

I hate to be contrary but, honestly, I am growing weary of this line of inquiry around horror.  It comes up so often. Every single popular article starts with this narrative of horror-as-stigma. Every interview I participate in—except when interviewed for horror magazines, interestingly enough--starts here. Questions about ‘how did you become a horror fan?’ really seem to be asking, ‘just how did you get into this screwy genre? What the heck went wrong in your childhood?’ Good grief.

Maybe at this point, horror is a disrespected genre because we have not figured out how to write about it with more regard and in less pedantic ‘define the genre and account for its low budget and exploitation’ ways. Horror does not need mainstream approval, and in some ways benefits without it. Mainstream horror gives us dreck like The Mummy (2017) starring Tom Cruise. Outside of so-called “elevated” horror you get smart, interesting scares like It Follows (2014).

Get Out has been viewed as one of the films that are spearheading a “new Golden Age of Horror,” and that the genre is undergoing a “renaissance,” or “resurgence.” What do you think about these claims? Are we currently experiencing a ‘New Golden Age of Horror’? Is contemporary horror cinema underpinned by a radical shift in recent years?

So, are we in the middle of a horror renaissance? Has Get Out (2017), A Quiet Place (2018), and The Babadook (2014) marked a new golden age? This point from the BBC article what merits our attention, as it is right:

But, Anne Billson, a novelist and critic, summed up those fans’ feelings in a tweet: “Whenever a horror movie makes a splash... there is invariably an article calling it ‘smart’ or ‘elevated’ or ‘art house’ horror. They hate horror SO MUCH they have to frame its hits as something else.”

So sure, these horror films give us a reprieve from the Saw, Hostel, Human Centipede torture porn and grossness of the horror world. They are less gory, smarter, and more palatable. They also have better budgets, celebrity power, and distribution behind them. They succeed because care has been taken to invest in their success. Their mainstream popularity sets them apart. If that is the definition of “renaissance” then yes, we are in one. But, I watched over 3000 horror films to write Horror Noire, films that became cult classics, films that spawned sequel after sequel, and films that captured the pulse of social movements. While, I argue in the book, that the horror films’ foci shifted from decade to decade, they were always here.

They will always be here.

And finally, what are your five favourite horror films, and why?

This is one of my favorite questions!

Get Out (2017)

This is a horror film that is not as fantastical as one might imagine. When Chris meets Rose’s family for the first time, especially her father, Dean, the film perfectly captures the toxicity of White-savior liberalism. What I love most about the film is how it lays bare suburban horrors while revealing the love, beauty, and strong community of the urban.

Dog Soldiers (2002)

So, this is not  a Black horror film, but I could watch this movie-turned-cult classic all day, every day. It is about a squad of British soldiers who find themselves in trapped in the highlands of Scotland battling werewolves. This movie is about 100 minutes, and it accomplishes so much with back story, character development, tension, and humor. The cast is amazing: Sean Pertwee (Gotham, 2014-), Kevin McKidd (Trainspotting, 1996), and Darren Morfitt (Doctor Who, 2010). It first premiered on the Sci Fi channel, and I was not impressed. I did not know then that they had edited the life out of the film, stomping it into the ground until it was a dry, unimaginative mess. Later, I saw the original cut on DVD, and I was stunned. Neil Marshall had written and directed a masterpiece, a real imaginative take on the werewolf genre. The movie won a few film awards, and fans have been anxiously waiting for years for a promised follow-up movie (that might never materialize).

Def by Temptation (1990)

If you are studying Black horror, this is a must-see film. Its writer, director, and producer is Black—James Bond III. The all-star cast is Black—Samuel L. Jackson, Kadeem Hardison, Bill Nunn, and Bond. There are  cameos by jazz saxophonist Najee and singer/actress Melba Moore. Even Ernest Dickerson the famed (Dexter, Day of the Dead, The Wire, Malcolm X) cinematographer and director is doing his cinematography magic. And, the story is squarely centered on Black life (north versus south) and Black religious (sin and salvation). What I think is really cool is that one of the heros in the film is Bible-toting “Grandma.” These days teen stars are cast in films, and I love that an elderly Black woman is a scene stealer.

Night of the Living Dead (1968)

I came for the glimpses of Pittsburgh and the zombies. I saw a brilliant, gorgeous, commanding, heroic Black man in Ben. Ben completely shattered representations of docility that had been previously assigned to Black men. This movie also shook me. I think Night marked the beginning of the end of my childhood— Ben is such a perfectly complex and human representation who is also an innocent. To have a Black man win, and then have that snatched away through a lynching. My God! It tears at my soul even today.

Chloe, Love is Calling You (1934)

I like this film so much that I have written about it. The film focuses on a Black character, Mandy, who gives this racist, White family hell for lynching her husband, Sam. It’s a 1934 film, and we are supposed to read Mandy as irredeemably evil. Mandy, even cross-dresses as Baron Samedi a loa of Haitian Vodou. And still she lives! She’s a totally unexpected Final Girl.

Professor Robin R. Means Coleman is Vice President and Associate Provost for Diversity and a Professor in the Department of Communication at Texas A&M University. A nationally prominent and award-winning professor of communication and African American studies, Prof. Coleman’s scholarship focuses on media studies and the cultural politics of Blackness. She is the author of Horror Noire:  Blacks in American Horror Films from the 1890s to Present (2011, Routledge) and African-American Viewers and the Black Situation Comedy: Situating Racial Humor (2000, Routledge).  Prof. Coleman is co-author of Intercultural Communication for Everyday Life (2014, Wiley-Blackwell), the editor of Say It Loud! African American Audiences, Media, and Identity (2002, Routledge), and co-editor of Fight the Power!  The Spike Lee Reader (2008, Peter Lang). She is also the author of a number of other academic and popular publications. Her research and commentary has been featured in a variety of international and national media outlets. Prof. Coleman’s current research focuses on the NAACP’s participation in media activism.

Cult Conversations: Interview with Robin Means Coleman (Pt.I)

With the release and enormous success of Jordan Peele’s Get Out in 2017, the politics of race has become a hot topic—and rightly so! It is with this in mind that Professor Robin Means Coleman’s Horror Noire: Blacks in American Horror Films from the 1890s to the Present came highly recommended—by David Church, no less. I cannot urge interested scholars to seek out this monograph enough, be in in the field of horror studies, critical race theory, sociology, or film and media studies more generally. Professor Coleman has had quite the eclectic career, writing on Black comedy, Spike Lee, and African American audiences, among other subjects, for the best part of two decades at this point. In the following interview, Professor Coleman and I delve into her own aca-fandom and the politics of the horror genre. But firstly, make sure you head off to your digital shopping mall to pick up Horror Noire! I guarantee you won’t be disappointed.

Also, Robin has a new documentary film, also called Horror Noire, coming to Shudder worldwide on February 7th 2019. During the first week of February, there will be a Hollywood premiere event with the following guests: "Discussion following with Ashlee Blackwell (co-writer/producer), Xavier Burgin (director), Tananarive Due (executive producer), Tony Todd (actor, CANDYMAN), William Crain (director, BLACULA), Ken Foree (actor, DAWN OF THE DEAD), Keith David (actor, THE THING). Moderated by Lisa Bolekaja."

Check out the trailer here.

—-William Proctor

Would you identify as a fan of the horror genre in general terms?

In 1998, I published my first book, African American Views and the Black Situation Comedy: Situating Racial Humor, which did not just focus on situation comedies, but on Black situation comedies. In 2011, I published my fourth book, Horror Noire: Blacks in American Horror Films from the 1890s to Present, which did not just focus on horror films, but on Black horror films. Fandom certainly brings me to the genres that I study. However, I give these genres precious attention because I believe they are important—a move of scholarly activism—to recuperate these purported ‘bad’ objects that set its sights on Blackness, and do so in an entertaining way. I want to remind scholars that the Black sitcom Roc (1991-1994) is just as socio-politically insightful as All in the Family (1971-1979). I want to remind scholars that the Black horror film Def by Temptation (1990) is just as gleefully spooky, wrapped up in a ‘how are we living our lives’ message, as A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984). In my work, I give prominence to Blackness because naming a thing need not be bad, and invisibility of history, culture, and experience gets us nowhere. It also helps a great deal that I am more than a fan; I am someone who truly respects (and can ably engage in critique of) genres like Black horror.

Did your journey into horror begin as a fan or as an academic?

Fandom came first. The academic focus followed.

I happily lay my interest in horror and science fiction at the feet of Bill ‘Chilly Billy” Cardille. William Robert Cardille (1928-2016) was born, raised, and worked as a TV and radio broadcaster in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I, too, was born and raised in Pittsburgh, and I grew up on a healthy diet of Bill Cardille’s programming—I remember him as our weather announcer and for three decades he was a host on the Jerry Lewis Muscular Dystrophy Association Labor Day Telethon. He started at WIIC-TV (Channel 11) in Pittsburgh in 1957, more than ten year before I was born. In 1964, he began hosting his most popular program Chiller Theater, and was dubbed “Chilly Billy.” Late on Saturday nights, around 11:30pm, Chilly Billy would come on and show a double or even a triple feature—something like Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), followed by Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932) or Bride of Frankenstein (1935), A Study in Terror (1965), and The Raven (1935). I would ask my mother to fry up a batch of chicken livers and bake a chocolate cake—hey, this is what I liked as kid!—and we would lay across her bed, eat cake and livers, and watch Chiller Theater until I could no longer keep my eyes open.

Today, reflecting back, I have come to understand two things about that experience. First, I really liked Chilly Billy’s style of hosting Chiller Theater. He was himself. He did not dress up in some vampire costume and make-up to host the show. He wore a suit and tie, just as he did when delivering the news or weather. He was himself, affable and informed. That brought a respectability to the genre that I know now deeply influenced me. Second, it informed my taste in the kind of horror that I like to watch and study. Chiller Theater goes off the air on New Year’s Eve in 1983 just as slasher and torture porn horror is really taking hold. The 1980s was the era of “video nasties,” as they were called in the UK. I could not imagine the homey Bill Cardille bringing these particular kinds of movies to audiences on broadcast television. Black horror movies, for the most part, are not wall-to-wall splatter. They are story-driven and sociopolitically-driven, like a Get Out (2017). They typically are not propelled by gore. I love studying those kinds of narratives; I guess that is the Chilly Billy in me.

I often tell people that writing about Black horror began as a sort of birth right. As I said, I was born and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, which was also home to George Night of the Living Dead Romero. That is pretty cool—Bill Cardille and George Romero! Romero filmed the seminal, now cult classic zombie horror film Night of the Living Dead (1968) around the Pittsburgh metropolitan area, and even featured local Pittsburgh personalities in the film. So, here is the connection: George Romero casts Bill Cardille to do a cameo as himself, a reporter, in Night of the Living Dead. Cardille shows up on set in his WIIC-TV station wagon. More, since Romero shot Night in real communities, using real locals, they came out to see Cardille; they recognize him. In the movie, Cardille does a real interview about a fiction. He very seriously interviews a Sheriff McClelland, played by an actor, about the rising zombies, “Chief, if I were surrounded by eight or ten of these things, would I stand a chance?”

Later in my life, when I would go shopping in the Pittsburgh-area shopping mall, Monroeville Mall (or ‘the Mall’ as we called it back in the day), I was keenly aware that I was quite literally walking in the footsteps of George Romero. The Mall was the mundane-turned-terrifying claustrophobic centrepiece of Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1979).

In Horror Noire: Blacks in American Horror Films from 1890s to the Present, you argue: “the boundary-pushing genre of the horror film has always been a site for provocative explorations of race in American popular culture.” Historically, the horror genre has often been critically excoriated for reactionary politics, while in recent years there has seemed to be a shift. Given the broad reach of your book in historical terms, what have you found out about these “provocative explorations”? How might you describe Horror Noire for readers unfamiliar with your work? 

Actually, I did not know that the horror genre has been excoriated for reactionary politics! In fact, I am not entirely sure what this means. Is the claim that horror throws us into some kind of horrid cycle where some good thing happens, but the genre reacts in a way that is so contrary that it impedes true progress of that good thing? And, this view is reserved for the horror genre? That’s a no for me dawg.

My view of the genre is absolutely the opposite: as one of the most innovative, unrestricted genres it is able to be brave and take the most perilous risks in exploring social, cultural, political, and identity topics. It challenges the status quo, exposes the limits of normativity, and makes us question our blind investment in concepts that we accept as common sense.

Let me be clear about horror being an “unrestricted genre.” Horror is not bound by some respectability expectations. Horror movies are not released during Oscar season in the hope they will garner the approval and acclaim of critics. They are not Oscar bait films like those period dramas put out by the Weinstein Company like The Kings Speech (2010), The Butler (2013), or The Imitation Game (2014). My point, horror is free. It is liberated from the confines of being an “epic.” Though, sometimes horror sheds its B-movie stereotype to capture the imagination of the industry—think The Silence of the Lambs (1991) or The Exorcist (1973).

The horror genre is daring pedagogy. It is like a syllabus of our social world. You want a complex study in racism and location (urban vs suburban), watch Get Out (2017). You want to interrogate police brutality, the carceral state, and a person’s breaking point, watch Soul Vengeance (1975). You want morality tales, check out The Blood of Jesus (1941). Dawn of the Dead (1978) provides critiques of conspicuous consumption. Scream, Blacula, Scream (1973) rejects the stereotypical portrayals of voo doo.

This does not mean that horror always gets things right. The tightly scripted morality tale Def by Temptation (1990) has so much going for it, but it is deeply problematic in its treatment of  queer identities. JD’s Revenge (1976) also presents a high quality script, but propagates domestic violence.

I do not see provocative explorations as a recent phenomenon; rather, I see this in horror’s very DNA. One simply has to see it. For example, when, in 1896, George Méliès conjures up demons, skeletons, ghosts, and witches before they are vanquished in the shadow of a crucifix in his short film “Le Manoir du Diable” (“The Haunted Castle”), Méliès is not simply entertaining us, he is challenging us to come to terms with the intersections of our imagination and Judeo-Christian belief systems.

Professor Robin R. Means Coleman is Vice President and Associate Provost for Diversity and a Professor in the Department of Communication at Texas A&M University. A nationally prominent and award-winning professor of communication and African American studies, Prof. Coleman’s scholarship focuses on media studies and the cultural politics of Blackness. She is the author of Horror Noire:  Blacks in American Horror Films from the 1890s to Present (2011, Routledge) and African-American Viewers and the Black Situation Comedy: Situating Racial Humor (2000, Routledge).  Prof. Coleman is co-author of Intercultural Communication for Everyday Life (2014, Wiley-Blackwell), the editor of Say It Loud! African American Audiences, Media, and Identity (2002, Routledge), and co-editor of Fight the Power!  The Spike Lee Reader (2008, Peter Lang). She is also the author of a number of other academic and popular publications. Her research and commentary has been featured in a variety of international and national media outlets. Prof. Coleman’s current research focuses on the NAACP’s participation in media activism.

Cult Conversations: Interview with Steve Jones (Part II)

Can you expand on your point that “we also don’t really need political reality represented via horror right now”? Don’t you think that cinema could, and should, critique the current political landscape?

I was being facetious, implying that our current political reality is horrific enough without the need to exaggerate it via horror’s lens. Filmmakers can certainly critique the current political landscape (and here I'm talking about capital-P Politics). That said, there has to be a purpose. Typically, horror filmmakers don’t make films as forms of activism, but instead opt for critique, satire, and consciousness-raising from a broadly leftist political perspective. Those forms are much more pertinent at moments when there is a lack of such discourse. Horror can articulate and illuminate a minority viewpoint, for instance, or make strange that which has become commonplace. Making an anti-Brexit movie in the current climate seems ineffective insofar as that view is the leftist status quo. To illustrate – and my thanks to Victoria McCollum for pointing this out on Twitter – Nick Pinkerton’s review for The First Purge in (Sight and Sound) puts it this way: "The First Purge has things to say about contemporary America, but who doesn't? And who cares, if it only has another pathetic yowl to add to the din?".

What ‘hidden gems’ have you discovered on DTV or streaming services? And what indie horror films would you recommend to readers?

I was really impressed with Malady (2015), Circle (2015), and Coherence (2013), all of which are underpinned by smart ideas and make great use of limited locations. Eat (2014) and Excision (2012) have been criminally overlooked. Shudder released Dearest Sister (2016), which I'd been dying to see (I contributed to its Indiegogo campaign). This isn’t horror, but I buy anything that Third Window Films release. They have a fantastic eye for quirky drama.

One difficulty I have here is that I wouldn’t necessarily recommend some films. I found both Landmine Goes Click (2015) and Be My Cat: A Film for Anne (2015) effective, but I suspect that many readers would find them unappealing or even objectionable because they are (intentionally) uncomfortable to sit through. The same goes for Unearthed Films’ releases. They are highly reliable in their niche and I regularly buy from them, but I wouldn’t generally recommend a film like Flowers (2015) per se.

You mention the term ‘micro-budget,’ a concept that has been gaining traction in recent years, much of which is attributed to the phenomenal success of Blumhouse Production. Is there a difference between low-budget and micro-budget, do you think? Or is micro-budget a signifier of a different economic model? Press discourse seems to emphasize that Blumhouse are doing something ‘new,’ with producers, such as Platinum Dune’s Brad Fuller, making claims about Blum’s ‘five-million dollar model’ as relatively recent. With horror generally being ‘cheap’ to make, as you suggested earlier, what marks out micro-budget horror from other low-budget examples from the genre. After all, eighties ‘slasher’ franchises, such as Halloween, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and Friday the 13th, were all low-budget films in comparison to the blockbuster tradition.

As you suggest, these distinctions are not well established and the lines are blurry. To give ballpark figures (and I'm pulling these out of the air), I'd consider anything between say $3-$10m low budget, anything under about $3m to be ultra-low budget, and anything $500k and below to be microbudget. Those are just rough brackets, but it gives you a sense of the kinds of films I'm referring to. The term ‘micro-budget’ has gained traction as so many more features can be made for so little thanks to affordable digital cameras and pretty decent low-cost editing software. Many of micro-budget horror features are funded by crowdfunding campaigns, typically made on budgets of $10k-$25k. Some are even lower than that: Amateur Porn Star Killer was reputedly made for $45 according to its director. Films like that tend to be passion projects (otherwise they wouldn’t get made), and I find that dedication infectious.

It is interesting that you equate micro-budget with $500K and below. The current popularity of Blumhouse films, and discourses surrounding Jason Blum’s economic model, unequivocally put the micro-budget finances in the £5million range. As you said, these commercial distinctions are blurry. Perhaps micro-budget is in a higher range than low budget, more akin to mid-budget? Or do you see the term as more of a discursive marketing instrument than a legitimate descriptor? How do you think scholars might address these economic concepts in more cohesive ways? 

 The issue may stem from a broader reluctance to engage with very cheaply made films. The press certainly might consider $5m a miniscule budget, but press critics almost exclusively focus on theatrical releases. A film made for $25k might screen at specialist festivals, but it is unlikely to make it into the multiplex. Academia fosters similar biases towards larger-scale releases. It is challenging writing about films with such small budgets because, without the broader marketing that larger budgets allow, such films remain relatively obscure. Demonstrating the significance of such films to peer reviewers is hard when they haven’t previously heard of a film or think that discussion of such films would not appeal to a broader readership. Consequently, it is difficult to publish on such films, and so they remain undocumented in the academy, and so the discourse regarding budgets remains unchallenged, and so it goes.

It seems vitally important to me to distinguish between a film made for less than $500k and a film made for $5m. Lumping them together as “microbudget” does disservice to how different the production, marketing and distribution processes are. One term I haven’t yet mentioned is “no budget” film. I dislike the term because I’m pedantic (i.e. no budget = $0), so I try to avoid it. I'm sure some would use the term “no budget” to refer to the very minimal budgets I'm taking about.

It would be really useful to have a set of economic standards that filmmakers, academics and critics could refer to so as to clarify the differences. Such stipulations might exist, but I haven’t yet encountered a universally accepted set of economic brackets (I’ve just seen the kinds of “plucked from the air” generalisations I offer here).

 What do you think of the state of cult and horror studies in the current moment? Is it led mostly by white men, or is there a general mixture of racial and gender diversity? Which scholars do you think readers should seek out?

The area is certainly growing. Doctoral students and early career researchers are helping to develop the field in interesting directions. That said, I spend most of my time reading outside of cult and horror studies by proxy of my gravitation towards ideas as the starting point. As a reasonably young subject area, horror studies still does not have a long history of theoretical approaches to draw on. Much of horror studies is also oriented around specific texts/examples. That seems to be the standard way we work in this area. However, that tendency either limits the author’s ability to make broader points about the ideas, or means the broader applicability is somewhat “hidden”. In comparison, philosophy articles put the ideas up-front, so my attention is drawn towards work in that discipline. I'm reluctant to recommend specific scholars because I'm likely to be nepotistic. My general recommendation is to stray way outside the field. Pick up a book on theoretical fluid mechanics or something and bring those ideas back to the table. I'd much rather read something leftfield than another Deleuzian or Freudian analysis.

So much is being published that I'd find it difficult to make any meaningful estimates about diversity. My feeling is that the field is fairly even in terms of gender, although my view may be skewed by the subject matter I engage with. Purely anecdotally (e.g. by thinking about conference attendance), I'd say that the field isn’t very diverse in racial terms. On that, a shout out to www.graveyardshiftsisters.com who are promoting horror-related scholarship by and about Black women. The site has some fantastic resources and is well worth checking out.

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?”

I concur that if we have a particular goal such as collectively aiming to make the world a safer place, then there are better things to direct our attention towards than subsets of horror fiction. There are plenty of real-world harms and injustices that one could prioritise instead.

I disagree with the generalisation that some subgenres of horror are becoming ‘more extreme’. I have written at length about the ways ‘extreme’ is employed so I won’t rehash the argument at length here. To give you an overview of my position (and this is not meant as a direct criticism of Bryan’s statement): ‘extreme’ is typically used as if its meanings are absolute and self-evident. In practice, it is a contingent term, by which I mean that it refers to context-dependent judgements (rather than absolute standards). The adjective ‘extreme’ is commonly employed as if it describes the object  being referred to (in this instance, horror films), while offering little (if any) descriptive content. The quotation above carries various sets of values that need unpacking before I could comment with any specificity on Bryan’s position, but the quotation certainly seems to make an implicit correlation between differing kinds of extremities in visual media and “worsening” (possibly cultural decline, certainly some harm to viewers in the form of desensitization). I would guess that Bryan’s comments may have been led by a specific question about desensitisation – it certainly looks that way from the article – so I suspect that these value-based correlations might be coming from the interviewer. My broader concern is that this kind of obscured value-positing is common in the discourse of “extremity”, particularly in the press.

This is an inelegant overview, but I have written about it in Porn Studies journal should any readers want a more detailed (and articulate) rendition of my position.      

 As you touched on earlier, horror cinema has often been disparaged and delegitimized in film culture. Have there been any shifts towards appreciation and legitimation in recent years? Or is horror cinema still viewed mainly in pejorative terms, in either the academy or in entertainment discourses?

Generally speaking, I’d say that horror is still broadly disparaged. There have been many positive shifts, including a notable increase in scholarship on horror (which has been growing since the late 1980s), and the formation of Horror Studies journal (which signifies that the discipline has generated sufficient critical mass to warrant a dedicated print publication). Nevertheless, horror is still seems to be an easy target for journalists. Get Out’s success at the Academy Awards feels like it was in spite of its alignment with horror (as was the case for Misery or The Silence of the Lambs in the early 90s). By proxy of its status as popular culture, horror doesn’t have the gravitas of drama or art film. That kind of distinction holds firm.

What are you working on for your next project and for the future?

I have several chapters in the pipeline, but my main ongoing project is a monograph on contemporary revenge films, which I’ve been working on for about four years now. My main stumbling block is that revenge has been conceptualised in so many ways that the scholarship (mainly from philosophy, anthropology and psychology) is a mess. To make matters worse, so many films have ‘revenge’ in the title, the tagline, or in the dialogue, and yet there is no hint of revenge (as motive or act) in the film itself. Consequently, I’ve seen well over 800 films for the project, and only around 250 of those are relevant. Frankly, if I'd have known what I was getting myself into, I'd have never started. I need to buckle down on it (and stop myself getting distracted) so that I can finish drafting. I have a pile of ideas for projects beyond that, but at this rate I’ll be retired or dead before I get to any of them.  

And finally, what five films would you recommend that you feel represents ‘the best’ that horror/ cult cinema can offer and why?

I need to narrow this down, so I'm going purely for horror here (no-one wants to hear me extolling the virtues of Cool as Ice or Dirty Dancing 2: Havana Nights …again).

A Nightmare on Elm Street (Wes Craven, 1984)

I'll admit that it is flawed, but I love this movie so dearly. It was my gateway into “real” horror when I was a about 9 or 10, and I was instantly hooked. I have seen it at least once a year since then, and it offers something new to me every time I watch it. The film has such a strong core. The narrative is well-paced, punctuating a reasonably slow unravelling of the mystery with startling moments of horror. Some of the effects look a little hokey now, but others – especially those involving the revolving room – are remarkable. The story’s core good-evil dynamic is powerful. Freddy is a well-developed villain even though he is barely present. Nancy is one of my favourite characters in film; smart and courageous, but vulnerable enough to be relatable (i.e. she isn’t superhuman). The premise – the interplay of dreaming/internal/metaphysical and waking/external/physical – is philosophically interesting. The film’s moral dilemmas concerning the parent’s vigilantism and Freddy’s attack on the Elm Street children is richer than is typically acknowledged. Elm Street is my go-to example to illustrate how smart popular gory horror can be.

The Loved Ones (Sean Byrne, 2009)

I had to feature some “torture porn” somewhere on this list, and this film gets nowhere near as much love as it deserves. The Loved Ones is a tight compound or intricately balanced elements that feel like they could explode at any moment. Tonally, it is a strange mixture of romance, teen angst, perversity, dark humour, and hideous violence. I have no idea how Byrne manages to make the film feel like a cohesive whole, but it works. Aesthetically, the gruesome bloodshed is met with beautiful cinematography. The film’s pink/blue colour scheme is luscious, and that complementarity echoes the film’s marriage of differing thematic tones. The Loved Ones’ secret weapon, however, is Robin McLeavy, who plays the film’s antagonist. Her performance is incredible. She walks a tightrope between sweet and rabidly psychotic, but she somehow never fully tips into or abandons either mode. Consequently, it is never wholly clear what Lola is capable of and what she will do next. A great example of contemporary visceral horror.

Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives (Tom McLoughlin, 1986)

It may not be serious or thematically rich, but Jason Lives is the definition of entertainment. From the ludicrous opening sequence right though to Alice Cooper’s end credit theme, the film is a riot. Horror and comedy are difficult to balance. It is easy to do when going for over-the-top gross splatter a la Peter Jackson’s Braindead (which is also excellent), but Jason Lives manages to be genuinely funny while also being as scary as any other Friday the 13th film. It is also a great sequel; it builds on the established story, but Mcloughlin also recognises exactly what the series needs after Part IV’s promise of a “Final Chapter” and the stalled attempt to relaunch the series with Part V. The fact that the 80s fashion and music are now so dated only makes it more enjoyable, so it has aged well. More than anything, Jason Lives illustrates that horror can be fun. If I encounter anyone who doesn’t understand that aspect of the genre, I point them here.

August Underground’s Mordum: The Maggot Cut (Fred Vogel, Cristie Whiles, Michael Todd Schneider, Jerami Cruise, and Killjoy, 2003)

Given the themes arising out oi the interview, I feel obliged to represent “extreme” microbudget horror here. August Underground’s Mordum is a well-known example, but it is also indicative of this kind of horror. The content is gratuitously offensive. Much of the run-time is occupied by the antagonists screaming at each other, so it is arduous to sit though even when the antagonists are not killing or abusing their victims. I prefer Michael Todd Schneider’s version of the film as it has more in the way of plot than Vogel’s edit. The love triangle between the antagonists and the group’s decline are fleshed out in greater depth in the Maggot cut compared with the Toetag edit. The plot anchors the film, although it still feels raw and the action seems out of control. That frenzied feeling is facilitated by Whiles’ performance, which is indescribable. Mordum is equal parts found footage horror and unpretentious performance art. At times, it is redolent of Kurt Kren’s Viennese Actionist films. At others, it is closer to atrocity footage. It feels like the gates of hell have opened and someone was there to capture it on film.

Safe (Todd Haynes, 1995)

Horror doesn’t have to be loud and bloody, and it doesn’t have to feature ghosts and monsters in order to be terrifying. This is one of the most common misconceptions I encounter when talking to claim not to like horror movies. There are many horror films that deal in existential dread – Zulawski’s Possession and Bergman’s Persona are prominent examples – but few are as quiet at Safe. Haynes portrait of a character’s decline into self-delusion is wonderfully subtle. The film crawls along, so the atmosphere is muted. This restrained approach allows Julianne Moore to deliver a nuanced turn as Carol, the film’s hypochondriac protagonist. Carol crumbles under the invisible pressures of what we’d now term white middle-class privilege. Nothing happens to Carol, and that oppressive nothingness leads her to self-destruct. The film’s underlying logic is that her comfortable state leads her to feel like she does not matter, even to herself. Carol’s decline is symptomatic of her attempt to find meaning, and Moore ensures that the character remains relatable. Simultaneously, Carol’s hypochondria and a backdrop of pollution/impending environmental disaster provide sceptical distance from her. The film’s tone remains neutral, so the viewer has space to remain critical of Carol’s affluence. Safe illustrates how intelligent and understated horror can be.

Steve Jones is Head of Media in the department of Social Sciences at Northumbria University, England, as well as Adjunct Research Professor in Law and Legal Studies at Carleton University, Ottawa. His research principally focuses on sex, violence, ethics and selfhood within horror and pornography. He is the author of Torture Porn: Popular Horror after Saw (2013) and the co-editor of Zombies and Sexuality. His work has been published in Feminist Media Studies, Sexuality & Culture, Sexualities,  and Film-Philosophy. He is also on the editorial board of Porn Studies. For more information, please visit www.drstevejones.co.uk

Cult Conversations: Interview with Steve Jones (Part I)

This week’s cult conversation is with Steve Jones, author of the excellent Torture Porn: Popular Horror After Saw, which I cannot recommend highly enough. Steve’s scholarship is rigorous and bold, and to cap it all off, he is also a wonderful human being. In the following interview, we get into the torture porn fiasco, the state of contemporary indie horror, queries about the constitution of fandom, and other topics. I thoroughly enjoyed debating with Steve, and I hope you all enjoy this installment of Cult Conversations.

—William Proctor

Your debut monograph examines the so-called ‘torture porn’ cycle of the noughties. How would you describe the torture porn phenomenon to someone who would like to learn more? Is it a coherent genre, for example? Or more akin to what Jason Mittell describes as discursive or a “cultural category”?

‘Torture porn’ is a label coined and propagated by journalists, which is used to describe a body of mainstream (theatrically released) films, mainly horror films. The journalists who championed the term considered ‘torture porn’ films to contain “extreme” depictions of violence. The films referred to – including Saw, Hostel and The Human Centipede – typically focus on protagonists being held captive against their wills.

The label ‘torture porn’ carries various connotations. ‘Torture’ refers to the physical trials the characters undergo. Sometimes the characters are expressly tortured (as in Hostel). On other occasions, the characters suffer as they attempt to escape from the antagonists. The term ‘torture’ also implies that the films are arduous to watch. Press critics referred to feeling like they were being “tortured” because they were “forced” to endure these films as part of their jobs. The term ‘porn’ also carries multiple connotations. In one respect, it stems from a contemporaneous discursive trend of referring to any “gratuitous” depiction as ‘porn’; e.g. social media posts depicting close-ups of delicious meals are described as ‘food porn’. The implication here is that ‘torture porn’ films focus on violence or gore in such detail or in such a prolonged way as to be gratuitous or unnecessary. A second connotation is that these films are ‘porn’ because they focus on sexual violence (which, broadly speaking, is false). A third connotation is that the antagonists “get off” on torturing the protagonists. A fourth is that the audience for these films find the torture sexually gratifying, and/or that the filmmakers encourage audiences to take sexual pleasure in watching others suffer (again, the films provide scant evidence to support this stance). Thus, ‘porn’ suggests that these mainstream horror movies are morally bankrupt, perverse and corrupting. In sum, ‘torture porn’ was used to disparage these films.

‘Torture porn’ isn’t a subgenre per se. The diverse films referred to as ‘torture porn’ were artificially brought together under that banner by critics. In trying to make sense of the trend, I identified that the films dubbed ‘torture porn’ shared the common traits of a) belonging to the horror or violent thriller genres, and b) depicting protagonists trying to escape from confined locations, but they have little else in common.

It is my hope that the term will eventually be co-opted by fans. Roughly the same connotations surrounded the terms ‘slasher’ and ‘video nasty’, and both have subsequently been accepted by fans. At present, the label still seems to carry negative overtones, which is a shame given that many of these films are worthy of serious consideration. Although the production bubble burst around 2012, numerous horror/thriller films are still being made that would have been swept up in the press furore if they had been released a decade ago.

 Can you talk more about these ‘negative overtones’ in press discourse in relation to Torture Porn? What “common traits belonging to the horror or violent thriller genres” do you see as significant in genealogical terms? Can you give any examples of films that historically share these “common traits”?

This is necessarily sweeping – I spend three chapters setting this up in the book – but broadly speaking, the negative discourse suggests the following (and I dispute each of these characterisations):

•  Torture porn is unique because the films comprised of graphic, gory, realistic, sadistic violence

• Torture porn films offer little in the way of narrative and characterisation, because they are concerned only with violence, bloodshed and suffering

• Torture porn filmmakers seek to out-do each other, creating ever-gorier depictions in order to shock

• Since torture porn films offer nothing but violence and shock, torture porn’s pleasures are one-dimensional

• By encouraging viewers to take sadistic sexual pleasure in watching others suffer, torture porn erodes moral values

• Thus, torture porn is at best culturally worthless, and at worst genuinely endangers the populace. Thus, torture porn’s creators are greedy and irresponsible

• And anyone who willingly consumes these films is mentally deficient, perverse, and/or culturally undiscerning.

Re: the second question, and “the films dubbed ‘torture porn’ shared the common traits of a) belonging to the horror or violent thriller genres, and b) depicting protagonists trying to escape from confined locations” - what I meant is this:

When I wrote the book, 45 films had been called ‘torture porn’ in three or more separate articles in major English language news publications. I looked at those films to work out what the narratives had in common (so that I could pin down what critics saw as the defining features of ‘torture porn’). There are very few traits that all 45 have in common. One is that all 45 films are either horror films or violent thrillers. The second is that in all 45 films, protagonists are depicted trying to escape from confined locations.

What sparked your interest in the phenomenon? Did it emanate from your own fandom? Or was it developed through academic interest first and foremost?

 My interest was initially sparked by seeing films such as Saw and the 2003 remake of Texas Chainsaw Massacre, both of which I enjoyed. I wrote several pieces on films that were described as ‘torture porn’, and the opportunity arose to write the book when Palgrave expressed an interest in the theme. It was only then that I started to reflect on the press discourse and that these films were being called ‘torture porn’. Prior to that, I had ignored the label as just another attempt by the press to disparage horror, based on taste judgements and press critics’ insufficient knowledge of the genre. My interest in the press discourse came about as part of contextualising the book, and trying to understand what the critics using the term were objecting to.

I consume horror in my leisure time, and I have done since I was a kid. That relationship with horror precedes my academic interest in the genre (which only began with my PhD). For me, the two modes of engaging with horror – as academic and as consumer – are different. They are intertwined inasmuch as I find the genre intellectually rewarding; it routinely challenges my pre-conceptions, and I return to the genre because I enjoy that challenge. Many of my academic articles originated from that kind of initial stimulation. However, my enjoyment is not itself academically significant, so it doesn’t play much of a role in my academic work. I begin my academic writing with the assumption that the reader either does not know or does not care about the films I am referring to. I also frequently write about films that I did not enjoy and would not endorse to other consumers. Even though I follow the genre personally and professionally, I don’t really consider myself a fan. I don’t identify with the kind of enthused devotion to the genre that fanaticism suggests. I have certainly defended the genre as an academic, but I don’t think of my work as celebrating horror.

I agree wholeheartedly that your work does not celebrate the horror genre. Like the best academic work, be it in horror, cult or fan studies, one can certainly study something that they love without championing or celebrating the genre. But if I may challenge you on the idea that fandom equals “fanaticism”—a highly problematic description—and that this means you do not identify as a ‘fan’ per se. In your previous statement, you emphasize a strong binary between academic and consumer. I don’t mean to suggest that being a consumer of horror and cult media means that your academic identity and research is therefore contaminated in some way—although I would say that the binary between academic/consumer is often much more fluid and dialectical than this kind of semiotic splitting.

 Regarding ‘fanaticism’, I'm going by the etymology of ‘fan’ (an abbreviation of ‘fanatic’), so I didn’t consider it a controversial connection. I'm not trying to imply that fanaticism is negative, just that it implies a degree of enthused celebration that I don’t identify in my personal engagements with horror. Perhaps ‘consumer’ isn’t strong enough to describe my bias towards horror over other genres, but I can’t think of another term that captures the extent to which habit drives my engagement with the genre. I look out for new horror films being added to Netflix or new Blu-ray horror releases, and those practices are at least partially the product of routine. Obviously there is nothing unique about that, I'm just trying to pin down the distinction between my engagement with horror compared with the level of celebration and enthusiasm exhibited by people who attend horror conventions, queue to get autographs, have multiple tattoos of their favourite films and so forth. It seems like those individuals are getting something more out of the genre than I do, or are exhibiting their enjoyment of the genre in a way that I don’t. To me, those individuals are fans, and to call myself a fan would be to do a disservice to the cultural practices that those individuals engage in.

Hopefully that distinction will help to explain my other comments about academic and personal engagement. I'm not trying to posit a complete split between my personal engagement with horror and my academic engagement. As I say, there are ways in which they are intertwined. What I'm trying to capture is that (to me, at least), fandom connotes celebration. There are films I love, but I don’t write academic work based on that enjoyment. Again, just as an attempt to pin down what I mean, I have heard some other academics making this kind of statement – ‘I just saw [film x], I loved it, I need to write something about it’ – with the implication that they enjoyed the film as a consumer and want to express their enjoyment of the film via academic writing, even though they don’t yet have a formulated idea on which to base their argument. To be clear, I don’t see anything wrong with that approach. I'm not suggesting that this amounts to intellectualising one’s enjoyment (although I'm sure that does happen). I'd guess that if the individual does write something based on this starting point, they dig into the film to capture and articulate whatever they enjoyed about it. I surge to approach films in that way because it doesn’t cross my mind to write unless I have a grip on the idea/argument. I often think ‘I just saw [film x], and it got me thinking about [idea y]: I might write about [idea y]’. It doesn’t matter whether I enjoyed [film x], what matters is that I have [idea y]. If I only have ‘I just saw [film x], I loved it’, then the trail just ends there.

I hope that clarifies the distinction I'm making when I say that my enjoyment as a consumer doesn’t play much of a role in my academic work.

 Your statement about torture porn still carrying “negative overtones” seems like a defence of the films grouped arbitrarily beneath that banner. It is, as you remarked, “a shame given that many of these films are worthy of serious consideration.” In essence, is this not a kind of defensive measure against entertainment journalists’ penchant for ‘disparaging’ the genre?

 As I say, I have defended horror – and torture porn in particular – against disparagement. Those defences are about acknowledging the value or cultural significance of a film or set of films in face of negation of that value or significance. That project is distinct from celebration, and the defence does not necessitate enjoyment.

How would you describe your attachment to, say, A Nightmare on Elm Street? Do you collect cult objects, whether blu-ray/ DVD, posters and other memorabilia? Rather than being a fan of the horror genre in general terms, would you identify as a fan, or perhaps some other appellation, of a limited range of texts/ franchises/ objects? Or are you arguing that you have no affective attachment to the texts and objects you study in your academic pursuits?

A Nightmare on Elm Street is my favourite film inasmuch as I’ve seen it many more times than any other film, and my enjoyment of it has lasted nearly 30 years. I have various objects associated with the film – an autographed picture of Robert Englund, a replica glove, Freddy figures, and so forth – but these were all bought for me by people who know that I like the film. I don’t recall buying anything like that for myself. I own multiple copies of the film, not because I collect them, but because access to the film and formats have changed; e.g. I bought a DVD to replace my VHS, then bought a Blu-ray to replace my DVD. I have bought versions of the films to access various extra features (commentaries, documentaries, behind the scenes FX footage), as well as various books and documentaries about the film series. The latter is the strongest expression of my fandom. I don’t own anywhere near as much paraphernalia for any other film or series. It still seems like such low-level engagement that I'm reluctant to call myself a fan: I feel like a “Fred Head” (as the really devoted fans are called) would scoff at the idea that my engagement is sufficient to be considered “real” fandom. I have referred to myself as an ‘Elm Street nerd’ occasionally, so maybe that is a better appellation.

My personal attachment to A Nightmare on Elm Street meant that I had ample documentary material to draw on when writing about the series, but my engagement with the supplementary materials was different when looking at it for research compared with pleasure or personal interest. I have been considering writing something on Elm Street for a while, mainly because it seemed wasteful that I was not using the knowledge I’d accumulated about the series. Without the idea, however, I was stuck.

I'm certainly not suggesting that I have no attachment to the films I write about as an academic. Rather I'm suggesting that my personal enjoyment of a film and my professional engagement with the same film are distinct in ways that I find to be significant. My academic engagement with films neither augments nor diminishes my enjoyment of them. My personal enjoyment does not help me to write academically about films.

 You have also written about one of the most transgressive films of the new millennium, and perhaps one that makes popular ‘torture porn’ films, such as Saw and Hostel, seem vanilla in comparison—that is, Fred Vogel’s August Underground (2001). I admit that I have not yet seen the film or its sequels as I was put off by descriptions from scholars and friends, many of whom cautioned me about viewing the film (and I have pretty strong stomach for horror!). What are your thoughts about August Underground? Does it fit into the discursive category of ‘torture porn’? Is there a moral dimension that should be considered in scholarly terms?  What do you think the objectives of the filmmakers might be? And do you think the film has a right to exist?

 In terms of plot, August Underground is comparable to torture porn insofar as depicts individuals being held captive and being tortured. However, August Underground’s focus is almost exclusively on the antagonists. In contrast to torture porn, the audience does not get to know much about the captives, and the film does not follow their attempts to escape. I personally find August Underground interesting, but it is intentionally “aggressive” towards the audience. It isn’t for everyone, and it doesn’t strike me as being designed to entertain. If you are cautious based on the description, then avoid it; it is almost certainly exactly what you are imagining, except it also contains long-periods where nothing happens. Although it is seldom mentioned (because the violence is so attention-grabbing), much of the running time is spent on the killers driving around, engaging in mundane leisure pursuits. By design, August Underground is as tedious as it is harassing, and that adds to the realism. The monotonous sections are important to the film’s structure, leaving space to process the horror. Vogel’s intention, as I understand it from interviews, was to create the most realistic looking snuff-style film he could. The image is intentionally degraded to look like a n-th generation VHS copy of home camcorder footage, with no hint as to its origins. If one were to watch it on an unlabelled VHS with no prior knowledge about the footage or where it has come from, one would be forgiven for believing the murders to be genuine. Elsewhere I’ve argued that the combination of fictionality and realism encourages viewers to reflect on the ethical implications of what it might be like to encounter genuine snuff (not that such a thing exists) or atrocity footage more generally.

I don’t believe that any film has a right to exist, so August Underground has as much claim to that right any other movie. As far as the moral dimensions are concerned, August Underground is a work of fiction made by consenting adults. The production itself does not raise unique moral concerns (i.e. the same concerns apply to fiction filmmaking in general). The content intentionally flouts taboos, but again the same moral concerns apply much more broadly. I don’t hold a particular moral objection to taboo-flouting in art, although I appreciate that some people will find August Underground offensive or tasteless. I do not see any evidence that the film is, for instance, a form of hate speech directed towards a particular individual or set of people. In that regard, I do not consider the film’s subject matter to be morally problematic, even though the fictional characters in the film commit immoral acts (all of which are contrived).

There are legal considerations relating to distributing (and purchasing) the film internationally even though it is fictional, and these carry attendant ethical considerations. If the film were circulated on unmarked VHS tapes – and this is rumoured to be one of August Underground’s early marketing techniques – then the film’s realism and taboo-flouting content may raise other problems. The film is so realistic that if stripped of context, a viewer might reasonably consider the crimes represented to be genuine. One could imagine a situation in which police time was wasted investigating the footage, for example, and I would have a moral problem with that diversion of resources. Moreover, it could seriously disturb an unwitting viewer, although I suspect that such viewers would turn it off almost immediately. Filmmakers are responsible for creating a set of images, and viewers are primarily responsible for deciding which images they consume. That relationship is problematised if the film were circulated without adequate contextualisation (on an unmarked VHS, for example). In that case, the person distributing the tape (whether that is the filmmaker or another party) would act irresponsibly in leaving the footage in public places. I'm stretching the point, but it is nevertheless a consideration given that the film certainly circulated in bootleg forms among horror collectors (I first encountered it in 2003 via a bootleg DVD rip with only the title written on it).

In press discourse, there are currently many claims being made about the resurgence of horror in cinema and that we are experiencing a new ‘golden age’ for the genre. Do you think this is true?

Pretty much any financial and critical success within the genre is cause for celebration given that horror is so frequently denigrated. I see little evidence that we are in some kind of ‘golden age’, however, at least in the press’s understanding of the genre. Horror is a financially successful genre on the whole (usually because the films are relatively cheap to make). Its visibility in the theatrical context tends to come in peaks and troughs, so I don’t find the current peak especially remarkable. The critical success of films such as Get Out, It Comes at Night, A Quiet Place and so forth again is nothing new per se, and nor are critics’ attempts to suggest that these are “elevated” or “post-” horror films. The same modes of thinking surrounded movies such as The Shining, for instance. The discourse about a ‘golden age’ is driven by press critics who ignore so much of the work being produced within the genre, particularly lower-budget horror. Some of that work is making a much more significant contribution to the genre than these critically lauded theatrical releases are. Much of the ‘golden age’ work is not especially interesting or inventive. For example, although it is well-made, It Comes at Night re-treads ground that should be extremely familiar to most followers of horror. I can only presume that the critics who lauded it as original and fresh haven’t seen many zombie movies and so could not perceive how derivative it is. That said, if It Comes at Night’s critical success helps other horror filmmakers to secure funding, then that is great. If funders and distributors are emboldened to take risks on lower-budget or new filmmakers because of critical and financial successes within the genre, then I'm all for talk of a ‘golden age’.

Has the ‘torture porn’ cycle ended? What do you think of contemporary horror cinema? And what are your thoughts about current cycles, trends and so forth? 

As a period of heightened production, the torture porn bubble burst around 2012. However, numerous films continue to be released each year that fit the remit, including Hounds of Love (2016), Escape Room (2017), and most prominently Jigsaw (2017). The press still use the term quite regularly. Various films (such as mother!) have been referred to as torture porn in reviews, and uses of the term in major English-language world publications has not dipped below 100 uses per year since 2006. I won’t say too much more as I have a short chapter about the current state and future of torture porn coming out in an edited collection soon. Suffice it to say that there are plenty such films still being produced, even if they aren’t attracting the same level of negative press (because they are mainly DTV releases). I'm sure there will be a torture porn resurgence at some point.

We are in an odd moment horror-wise. Many of the recent major cycles – remakes, found-footage, zombies, supernatural movies like Insidious – are rolling along but are somewhat played-out. Overt socio-political horror such as the Purge series and Get Out seem to be enjoying some success given the fractious climate, but we also don’t really need political reality represented via horror right now. Twitter is full of people proclaiming that we are living in the end-times, so I don’t know that we’ll see a massive boom in socially-conscious horror. It is just as likely that we’ll see the rise of silly, fun escapist horror, or a continuation of the nostalgia of “classic” screenings (including quite recent “classics”). 

Indie horror is looking great at the moment, and that area doesn’t receive anywhere near as much attention as it should. Digital technology is helping filmmakers to create remarkably good-looking films for next to nothing. 15 years ago, microbudget features essentially looked like amateur home videos. Now, even Steven Soderbergh is shooting horror on an iPhone 7. The formal differences between low and moderately budgeted horror are becoming harder to spot in horror-drama (films that are not FX-heavy), and I hope that results in more viewers giving lower budget films a chance. Streaming platforms like Shudder and Amazon Prime are also helping to put an array of films in front of consumers. Browsing through cover images and plot blurbs on Prime video is the closest experience I’ve had to the glory-days of video rental stores, and the stakes for a “bad rental” are so low now. That might mean people turn off very quickly – I’ve found myself abandoning films on Netflix that I would have made myself sit through had I rented the same film on DVD – but it may also mean that hidden gems are discovered by larger audiences.

Steve Jones is Head of Media in the department of Social Sciences at Northumbria University, England, as well as Adjunct Research Professor in Law and Legal Studies at Carleton University, Ottawa. His research principally focuses on sex, violence, ethics and selfhood within horror and pornography. He is the author of Torture Porn: Popular Horror after Saw (2013) and the co-editor of Zombies and Sexuality. His work has been published in Feminist Media Studies, Sexuality & Culture, Sexualities,  and Film-Philosophy. He is also on the editorial board of Porn Studies. For more information, please visit www.drstevejones.co.uk

Cult Conversations: Interview with Stacey Abbott (Part II)

Given its historical vintage, what is it about the figure of the vampire that continues to fascinate audiences?  How has the vampire been updated, revised and resurrected in different historical contexts?

Well, that is a huge question. I teach an entire module on this and only scratch the surface but here goes.  I think that there are a lot of reasons why the vampire fascinates audiences. To begin with they embody taboo subjects about death, ageing, and mortality.  Death remains the great unknown and a subject that we don’t talk about but, for the most part, we are all afraid of it. But the vampire confronts us with death and offers or represents an alternative.  Vampires don’t age. This is both uncanny – something that doesn’t age is fundamentally weird – and attractive.  Vampires are both dead and live forever. There is something terrifying and attractive about that, which in itself is part of the allure – they attract and repulse.  So there is something contradictory and liminal about the vampire. They are like us but not, familiar and unfamiliar, attractive and repellent.

Vampires are also outsiders who embody transgressive identity and otherness.  They usually come from somewhere else and embody the dangers and allures of strangers but they are also inherently liminal in terms of identity, gender, sexuality. Historically, they embodied an otherness to be feared – in Dracula the vampire is the foreign other infiltrating and infecting England – and this still occurs in films such as 30 Days of Night which is also about border crossing. But increasingly vampires tap into our own identification with the ‘other’ or our sense of being an outsider. This is why they have become increasingly sympathetic. Because many people are more likely to identify with their strangeness then with the Van Helsing’s of the world.  So where female sexuality was punished in Dracula, it is celebrated in The Vampire Lovers and Daughters of Darkness. I think that the sense of otherness that they embody is why they have been, in recent years, so popular with teenagers. Adolescence is defined by feeling different, alien in your own body or in your social circles and the vampire is a very convenient metaphor for that sense of strangeness. In the case of Twilight the vampire offers an escape from Bella’s feelings of being awkward, clumsy, plain and also isolated. To become a vampire for her means becoming special, strong, beautiful but also to be accepted as part of a family and community – one of the cool kids. I am not saying that this is a good thing or not but I can see the attraction of this text for adolescent girls which I think is stronger than, or at least as strong as, the romance narrative.  The Lost Boys offered a similar narrative with Michael on the cusp of adulthood and masculine responsibility and being presented with an alternative that embodied a more fluid conception of gender and sexuality (the film is more preoccupied by Michael’s relationship with David than with this female love interest Star). Becoming a vampire also, for Michael, means staying young and beautiful forever. The film offers a conservative conclusion where Michael rejects these temptations and accepts his place as the head of the house and as part of a heteronormative relationship, but the pleasure of the film is in the possibility of rejecting this conception of normality.

The vampire has evolved and been updated in many ways. As the world became more secular, the significance of religion to the genre waned. Films such as Near Dark and Blade  throw out the old rules that seem somewhat out of date. They integrate with other genres such as the western and science fiction to refresh the conventions and make them more frightening again.  The vampires in Near Dark are frightening because they are purely driven by the desire for chaos, they go anywhere and do anything. They are brutal and nothing can stop them except the rising sun.  Other films from Martin to The Hamiltons to Transfiguration, present the vampire as a type of serial killer and presents vampirism as an illness or social influence, tapping into changing perceptions and conceptions of mental health. Is Martin a vampire or the victim of abuse having been told that he was cursed from an early age? One of the major trends has been the way in which the vampire has been increasingly presented as a form of disease or plague. Rather than being an individual creature invading the modern world, vampires in Ultraviolet, Stakeland, I Am Legend, and The Strain represent a plague that spreads across the world.  The vampire has become more apocalyptic.  This is in part a backlash, I think, against the rise in popularity of the romantic vampire in the form of Twilight but also the success of the zombie in literature, film and TV.  We live in apocalyptic times and our vampires are becoming a bit more apocalyptic.  

Finally, I think the vampire often challenges our sense of ‘normality’ by offering an alternative. Sometimes that alternative is positive and sometimes it isn’t but the genre constantly gets us to question what it means to be normal and what is more monstrous – the monster or normality itself.

Given that Buffy the Vampire Slayer is over twenty years old, why do you think the character remains culturally relevant? What do you think about the news that Buffy will continue in another form (and with a new slayer)? 

As mentioned above, I teach a course on vampire film and television and every year I am delighted to see that a number of students have seen Buffy and define themselves as fans. Often, they have come to the show because it was recommended by a parent or older sibling but it still has currency. Yes, clothes and hair styles have changed and the computers are wonderfully dated. I mean an entire narrative strand revolves around a floppy disc falling down behind a teacher’s desk. Do modern audiences even know what a floppy is? And if Ms Calendar could have backed up Angel’s cure to the Cloud, then the story of season two who have ended very differently.  So twenty years on, it is dated in places. But I believe that the horror of adolescence and growing up is timeless and by couching these horrors through the metaphor of the monster-of-the week allows the series to transcend the trappings of time period. Issues such as bullying, social anxiety, loneliness, internet predators, sexual violence and domestic abuse are timeless and the monster narratives explore these in detail.

As a feminist text, the focus on not just a kick-ass heroine but a woman trying to negotiate her path in the world and standing up to patriarchy – whether in the form of the Watcher’s Council, the high school principal, the Mayor, a dominating father or the Initiative (which is yes led by a woman but is a government run, patriarchal institution) – still holds sway.  Buffy gives a speech about power in the episode ‘Checkpoint’ (5.12) as she confronts the leaders of the Watcher’s Council who have attempted to diminish her self-confidence in order to assert control over her. She tells them how everyone has been ‘lining up to tell me just how unimportant I am. And I’ve finally figured out why. Power. I have it. They don’t. This bothers them’. This speech stands as a testament to how patriarchy and any form of dominant social order often attempts to maintain its position by belittling and undermining those they are attempting to control. The best way to assert control is to convince others that they need authoritative rule. The way in which she pauses the narrative to stand up to this authority and diminish their power by revealing their machinations – as well as throwing a sword at one of them (well who hasn’t wanted to do that) –  is as timely today as ever.  Buffy is about power: female power, the power of family, friendship, the sharing of power and the dismantling of power.

Of course, the show isn’t perfect and it is a product of its time. When it was on the air between 1997-2003, there were very few LGBTQ characters on network television and having Willow come out was incredibly progressive for the time. But now it is far more commonplace on television and the hesitancy in showing Willow and Tara kiss or display their sexuality in an overt way, particularly in season four and five, seems old fashioned now. Similarly, the character Xander Harris has received a great deal of criticism in recent years, particularly in the #metoo era, because his treatment of Buffy is often seen as problematic. Most notably, the series has received a great deal of criticism for its depiction, or lack thereof, of people of colour. They are either absent, demons or stereotypical.  The spin-off Angel tried to compensate for this by being set in a more multi-cultural Los Angeles and featuring the African American character Gunn as a regular. But there remain issues and there has been a great deal of discussion of this theme with respect to both shows.

This was why I was not surprised when I heard the news about a new Buffy series that would be more multi-cultural and socially inclusive. Originally couched in the media as a reboot, I was initially quite sceptical.  Why reboot Buffy as it is a loved series that is skilfully written and directed and that still holds up as quality television? Yes, there are issues but they are part of its place within a period of television history.  Also, rather than reboot an old show with a multicultural cast, it seems more useful to create something new with a multicultural cast. But as more came out about the project and the new showrunner, Monica Owusu-Breen, it became clear that this isn’t going to be a reboot but rather than an extension of the narrative world and potentially something quite new. A new Slayer with new stories and I am all in favour of that.  I think that there is a lot of scope in the story line and potential to update the Slayer narrative to suit the current televisual landscape. This seems ideal to me as you will introduce Buffy to new audiences while appealing to established fans of the original series.  I look forward to seeing what Owusu-Breen has in mind.

What are you working on at present and what have you planned for future research?

I have a few projects in various stages of development. I am currently co-editing, with Simon Brown, a special issue of Slayage, reflecting on the legacy of Angel which will be published to mark its 20th anniversary in 2019. The more I watch and rewatch Angel, the more Angel’s struggle to negotiate the moral grey areas of adulthood feels relevant. Also, the way in which the show challenged and undermined traditional notions of masculinity still feels fresh and pertinent within the contemporary televisual landscape. The decision to replace Sunnydale’s Hellmouth under the high school with the multi-dimensional corporate lawfirm Wolfram & Hart as the site of all evil seems to speak volumes to the horrors of the 21st century. This show isn’t about one named and clearly identifiable Big Bad but a patriarchal culture of evil that is fuelled by big business.  Its mantra that you have to keep fighting even when the odds seemed stacked against you feel like an important lesson in the contemporary climate.   

Lorna Jowett and I are co-editing a book for the University of Wales Press on Global TV Horror. We wanted to follow up our TV Horror: Investigating the Dark Side of the Small Screen (2013) with something that reflected on the growing popularity and availability of horror on television and its increasing global presence. So this is an exciting project, working with people writing about TV Horror from around the world, including the UK, US, France, Brazil, Spain, Japan, New Zealand and Canada.

As for my own writing, I am very excited to be writing the BFI Film Classic on Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark (1987).  This was Bigelow’s first solo-directed film and I would argue it remains one of her most visually and narratively striking films. It did not do very well when it came out but it found a cult audience on video in the late 1980s. Narratively it follows a young man, Caleb, who is turned into a vampire and must decide if he is prepared to give up family, responsibility and his humanity in favour of the outlaw life of a vampire. The vampires – particularly as played by Lance Henrikson, Bill Paxton and Jenette Goldstein -- are far more engaging and attractive despite their undeniable blood lust and violence. Significantly they seem to both embody the dark side of the nuclear family while also representing an alternative to traditional family values. This film raises some really interesting questions about blood, duty, family and chosen families. It has been criticized as featuring a conservative ending, much like The Lost Boys, but I am inclined to read the film as more ambiguous in its politics and that is something I’ll be discussing in the book. Visually it merges the vampire and horror genre with the western and road movie and features stunning Noir-ish night time cinematography and Bigelow’s recognisable kinetic style. It is a delight to begin to unpack the film’s complexities, both narratively and visually, in this book.

In terms of future projects, I am in the process of developing two long term projects. The first is a co-authored book with Simon Brown, looking at the horror genre through adaptation. This isn’t going to be a book that simply compares ‘original text’ with adaptation. As I said above, I am very interested in media specificity and so this book will consider how the horror genre adapts to different forms and media. So we will be looking at adaptations of horror from novel to film, film to stage, comic book to television, and so on. It is a great time for horror and we have enjoyed doing some of the preliminary work on this by going to see the stage adaptations of Let the Right One In, Carrie, and The Exorcist and thinking through the different ways in which horror is adapted to suit different media and performance styles.

The other project is a monograph on horror and animation, bringing together two of my great loves. I have been teaching the History of Animation for years but this will be my first foray into animation in terms of my research. There are two strands to this project. I am interested in the presence of horror in media for children from Scooby Doo to Nightmare Before Christmas to ParaNorman. How and why are the tropes mobilized for this particular audience and to what end? Is horror rendered safe through animation? But I am also interested in the ultimately uncanny nature of animation – making the inanimate animate – which comes to the fore in stop-motion animation. So my work in this book will not be exclusively focused on children’s animation or even narrative film but it will look at works that galvanize the surrealism and uncanniness of stop motion – so lots of Svankmajer. As I said, both projects are in early stages and I am still developing my ideas.

And finally, what five films or television series would you recommend that you feel represents ‘the best’ that the horror genre can offer and why?

If I have to limit my choices to five then I will not include any of the texts I have already discussed in detail here, including Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel and Near Dark. It seems better to open up the discussion to significant texts that I haven’t had the opportunity to talk about in any detail.  

Vampyr (Carl Theodor Dreyer Ger 1932)

This film embodies the Gothic potential that is an inherent part of cinema. Taking place in a landscape that seems to exist on the border between reality and dreams, life and death, it tells a familiar vampire story – woman is fed on by vampire until vampire is destroyed and she is released -- but told in a distinctly cinematic fashion. It is filled with disembodied shadows, superimpositions and double-exposures, alongside a ghostlike roving camera, a disjunctive use of sound, and a mise-en-scène filled with momento mori, including skulls, skeletons, and Grim Reapers.  Watching this film is like being invited to cross the veil into the land of dreams and nightmares where you are never certain what is real and what is not. It is a haunting landscape of the undead.

Les yeux sans visages [Eyes without a Face] (George Franju, Fr 1959)

This is a haunting film of a completely different kind that feels up-to-date with a vengeance. Set in contemporary Paris, it tells the story of an internationally leading plastic surgeon whose daughter has been severely disfigured in an accident and so he attempts to repair her through a face transplant. The only problem is whose face is he transplanting? The doctor’s nurse stalks the streets of Paris, looking for isolated young women to lure back to the surgeon while the daughter Christiane wanders her family home, wearing an exquisite and yet disturbing porcelain mask that makes her appear as a ghost haunting the family home.  Like contemporaneous horror films, Psycho and Peeping Tom, this film reimagines horror as emerging from family and home – no longer a source of comfort and security but the birthplace of the monstrous. Additionally, the surgery scenes are filmed with medical precision and lend the film a gruesome form of body horror that continues to unsettle even the most committed horror fans.

Night of the Living Dead (George A Romero, USA, 1968)

A landmark independent horror film that contributed to the transition of horror away from the period Gothic tales to contemporary horror. A siege narrative about a group of strangers trapped in a house as the dead return from the grave with a hunger for human flesh, this film (along with its sequel Dawn of the Dead) established the template for the contemporary zombie film. Filled with decomposing zombies, graphic depictions of cannibalism, and explosive confrontations between the living, the film offers a nihilistic view of humanity that became typical of the period. Featuring an African-American lead, the film taps into the culture of racial tension that surrounded the Civil Rights movement and still fills relevant today. Significantly, Romero shot the film with gritty, realistic aesthetic that rendered the horror all the more unsettling and contemporary.  Using the rise of the undead as a threat to the status quo, the film questions who are the more monstrous the zombies or the living.

American Mary (Jen and Sylvia Soska, Can, 2012)

Canadian filmmakers Jen and Sylvia Soska offer us a distinct and disturbing twist on the rape/revenge formula presented with Cronenberg-esque fascination with body horror. The film tells the story of a medical student who pays for her education by performing underground, illegal extreme body modification surgeries. After she is drugged and raped by a group of her medical professors and tutors, she drops out of school and decides to use her body modification skills in an unusual and cathartic form of revenge. This is a film that challenges notions of beauty and the monstrous, normality and the disturbed. It offers a distinctive female perspective on violence and rape while also confronting the audience with provocative images of the body that unsettle traditional conceptions of cinematic beauty and voyeurism. It is a fascinating film that does not disappoint.   

Hannibal (Bryan Fuller, US, 2013-15)

The past ten years has been an incredible period for the horror genre on television with so many amazing series, pushing the boundaries of what is acceptable on television. Hannibal  stands as an exciting example of the potential for network television to be as provocative and experimental as cinema. Based on characters from Thomas Harris’ Red Dragon, the series infuses the police forensic procedural with the aesthetic tastes of serial killer Hannibal Lecter. Each episode contains a crime scene that is laid out like a work of art, blurring the lines between the macabre, the gruesome and the beautiful. This is a series that challenges us to sympathise with Hannibal while also confronting us with  the horrors of his actions. Focusing on the relationship between Hannibal and FBI profiler Will Graham, the series becomes increasingly experimental in its style, blurring the lines between nightmare and reality as Graham comes increasingly under Hannibal’s influence.  This is an aesthetically rich series with lush visual style and an experimental musical score like nothing you’ve ever heard before. It is a must watch for the horror film.

Stacey Abbott is a Reader in Film and Television Studies at the University of Roehampton. She is the author of Celluloid Vampires: Life after Death in the Modern World (2007), Angel: TV Milestone (2009), Undead Apocalypse: Vampires and Zombies in the 21st Century(2016), and co-author, with Lorna Jowett, of TV Horror: Investigating the Dark Side of the Small Screen (2013). She has also written extensively about cult television and is the editor of The Cult TV Book (2010), Reading Angel: The TV Spin-Off with a Soul (2005) and TV Goes to Hell: An Unofficial Road Map to Supernatural (2011). She is currently co-editing, with Lorna Jowett, a book on Global TV Horror and is writing the BFI Classic on Near Dark.

Cult Conversations: Interview with Stacey Abbott (Part I)

For many scholars in Fan Studies and Cult/ Horror Studies, Stacey Abbott needs no introduction. Her work on various currents of pop culture and genre—including Supernatural, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and sister show Angel, as well as the vampire and the zombie in general terms—are required reading on many University degree programmes. Stacey is a robust scholar, and I’m proud to say that many of her publications sit within arm’s reach on my groaning shelves at home. In the following interview, Stacey and I discuss her own fandom, her academic pursuits and the state of horror in the 21st Century, among other things. I hope you enjoy this installment of Cult Conversations.

How would you describe your research interests for readers not familiar with your work?  

Increasingly these days I describe myself as a horror studies scholar as so much of my work comes back to horror and the Gothic. But more broadly, one could describe me as a genre specialist as I am very interested in science fiction alongside horror. I have written on romantic comedies as well and hope to write about musicals one day.  One of the key focuses of my interest in genre is how and why genres develop and change from an industrial, technological and cultural perspective. I am very interested in media specificity, for instance, how does the horror genre work on television and how is that different from film. But also how do genres come to embody or represent changing socio-political climates and cultures.  Through these interests I have come to specialise in texts that feature monsters such as vampires and zombies. My PhD was on vampire films and this interest in vampires then led me to the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel, which led me to writing about cult and genre television, another major interest of mine. I started out as a film scholar but increasingly my work moves back and forth between film and television.

Do you recall when the horror bug first bit you? Did you identify as a fan of the genre prior to becoming a scholar? Or was it your academic pursuits that you led to vampires, slayers and zombies?  

I grew up with an obsessive passion for the cinema but did not prefer one genre over another. I would move comfortably from screwball comedy to musicals to horror (and still do). But I did always have a taste for horror. In fact, I was recently listening to Alice Cooper’s song ‘Steven’, which is on his Welcome to My Nightmare album, and I have clear memories of listening to the song as a child (my older brother was an Alice Cooper fan) and finding this song really scary and absolutely enthralling. I have always been fascinated by the fact that something can be enticing and scary at the same time. I remember watching The Exorcist and Halloween on TV as a child and they made a big impact on me. Watching horror films on television was a key starting point for my interest in TV horror. I also remember my older brother telling me about The Texas Chainsaw Massacre when it came out. He found it terrifying and I was fascinated by the idea of this film and that it would scare my brother in that way. I couldn’t see it until years later and I was really nervous about seeing it because of that memory. I worked in a video store as a teenager so would regularly take out videos of slasher movies and watch them with my friends.  So, I did identify as a fan but I wasn’t involved in broader horror fan culture until years later.

My passion for horror did grow as I became more academically involved in the study of film. The more I studied the genre, the richer I found it and the more I enjoyed the films. So as an undergraduate film student, I wrote about Psycho, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Angel Heart and I gave a presentation on Robin Wood’s ‘The American Nightmare’ and the more I studied film the more I came to feel that there was something cinematic about horror. I loved the aesthetics of the genre and the way in which aesthetics could generate emotion. So, my passion for the topic has been fuelled by academic study and my academic study has fuelled my passion for the genre.  Similarly, I started writing about vampires as a Masters student at the University of East Anglia and I would never have guessed that I would still be writing about them but the more I studied the folklore, literature and the cinematic and televisual heritage, the more I realised that there was so much to say about the genre and of course more and more films keep coming out, so there is always more to say.

What is it in particular that continues to fascinate you about the genre? What are your primary fan-objects and can these differentiated from the objects you study?

My fascination with the horror genre is two-fold I suppose. I am fascinated by the aesthetics of horror, whether this be the special make-up effects and intense gore of 1980s body horror or the gothic aesthetics of the genre in the 1920s and 1930s.  For instance, I have recently written on the use of sound in early werewolf films and how the transition to sound cinema facilitated a new aesthetic conception of horror.  So I am interested in the industrial factors that contribute to the changes within our understanding of the horror genre. But I am also fascinated by the cultural implications of horror. How do these films generate fear; do they tap into cultural fears or particular cultural moments? What can the genre tell us about ourselves?  What we fear - or perhaps what fears the genre taps into – can be quite telling. And it isn’t always about fear. The vampire genre, for instance, often oscillates between attraction and repulsion. So it also confronts or provokes us with desires as well as fears.

For me there is a very fine line between fan-object and object of study. For instance, I am a huge fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel and part of my fandom is integrated with my desire to analyse and break down what is going on in these texts. What are they doing that I find so interesting? But that does not mean being uncritical. In fact, I find that fans can often by hyper-critical. While as a scholar I need to negotiate my fandom with my scholarship, I don’t think that this is entirely unique. I think that academics are often fans of the objects of their study. That is why we study them.  Dickens scholars are usually fans of Dickens.  Horror scholars are fans of horror.  

To go back to your question, my primary fan-objects with respect to horror are Night of the Living Dead (and all of Romero’s zombie films), Martin, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I am a particular fan of horror that came out of the 1960s and 1970s.  But I also love 1980s films such as Fright Night and The Lost Boys. Too many to choose from. And there are some amazing films that have come out in recent years, such as Stakeland, The Babadook, American Mary and so many others.

You have recently completed work on a chapter about The Purge and the way in which it intersects with contemporary US politics. Can you summarize your argument?  

In the 1970s Robin Wood made the argument that the American Horror Genre had potential to be the most progressive of popular genres because it could tap into and express the desire for social change that he saw as fundamental to the post-Vietnam/Watergate era. The genre’s nihilism was expressing the rage of a generation.  This argument has become quite prevalent in defining horror of the 1970s. My aim in writing about the Purge films was to examine the relevance of Wood’s argument in the contemporary political landscape, in particular how we read these films that in many ways seem to be consciously rehearsing this argument, questioning what happens in horror when the subtext becomes text.  Are the filmmakers trying to use the genre for political purposes or are they simply taping into recognisable themes to make them seem more relevant and commercial? So as part of this argument, I reflect on how the franchise negotiates its commercial imperative with political commentary on class and race in the United States. The franchise seems increasingly, and self-consciously, relevant within the contemporary US socio-political landscape. I suppose, another thread to the argument, is to challenge recent conceptions of post-horror, which suggests that films with socio-political readings are somehow new or make them more than horror. I argue that this is what a lot of horror does as part of its natural matrix.   

Following on from that question, are the politics of contemporary horror cinema being underpinned by a marked shift? And what do you think of the notion of cinema as a “reflection” of a broader cultural, social and political climate?   

I think that there has often been a relationship between horror and politics and during periods of particular political strife, cinema taps into this tension.  We see this in the 1930s and the depression, 1950s and the cold war, etc. So I would not see the contemporary horror landscape as unique. In fact, for every Purge film or Get Out, there is a Paranormal Activity – a film that is not overtly presenting itself as political. But within a complex political landscape, I think horror is a very fruitful genre for filmmakers to explore social or political issues. Get Out – like Night of the Living Dead before it -- is an excellent example of this.  Horror often allows filmmakers to take familiar scenarios to their extreme to expose the true horrors that underpin the everyday – like the racial tension between Ben and Mr. Cooper that is exposed due to the stresses of a zombie apocalypse in Night of the Living Dead or the middle-class racism that underpins the plot of Get Out. Of  course, the horrors that underpin the everyday don’t have to be political. A film like Hereditary uses horror to explore the impact of grief and the pain of loss. We don’t talk about death very often and horror is an outlet to perhaps talk about it or tap into and express feelings of loss. The Babadook similarly explores grief and the difficulties of being a single parent, often expressing the inexpressible. So horror can express many things from the personal to the political.

But we shouldn’t read horror cinema as purely a reflection of a single political reading and/or ideology. There are conflicting readings of the alien invasion films of the 1950s that read them as examining the horrors of Communism while others read them as exposing the horror of social conformity. These readings may differ from film to film and/or they may often co-exist in some films.  Sometimes filmmakers intend for their films to offer a social or political commentary as with Get Out but often they are a product of multiple influences which can open the door to multiple readings.  

This brings us to the second part of your question. I think we need to be cautious about thinking of cinema – any type of cinema – as a reflection of the real world. Cinema is not a mirror but rather a product of a wide range of influences, voices, contexts. These can often be contradictory.  So, I tend to think of cinema as a construct rather than a reflection.  This does not mean that we can’t read them in relation to broader cultural, social and political climate or events. I think that cinema – like the filmmakers who make films and audiences who watch them – is a product of its time and its cultural, industrial contexts.  And horror is a very rich text to unpack in this manner. The Purge films seem to consciously critique a culture of racism and violence in the US, as well as an economy that seems to benefit from this culture of fear. At the same time, they aestheticize and in many ways celebrate gun culture. While they seem to critique the NRA, it is always the men with guns who save the day.  As a series of films, they raise many interesting ideas that are exciting to unpack. I am fascinated by the contradictions.

In academic and press discourse, it seems that horror remains discursively constructed as oppositional, disparaged and maligned. Do you agree that this is the case?

I would tend to agree. Of course, there have been changes to attitudes about horror. It is more accepted as a subject of study, although you might still find some critics or members of the press questioning the study of vampires at university. Vampires and zombies are, however, taught in universities across the UK and the North America, on top of countless modules on horror. The London Film Festival regularly programmes horror films, although under the banner ‘Cult’ and from August 2013- January 2014 the British Film Institute devoted a four month season to the Gothic, which included some of the best of past and contemporary horror and Gothic cinema. Some would argue that it would have been harder to plan such a season had it been called Horror and even under the banner of Gothic, there was resistance. But overall, it was a great success and a sign of progress in terms of the genre’s recognition.

Having said that, I think that the genre is still often maligned or perceived as disreputable. The most common way that this manifests at the moment is through the way in which terms such as ‘post-horror’, ‘smart horror’, or ‘elevated horror’ are being used in the press as a way of distancing some films from other examples of horror. These terms suggest that recent films, such as Get Out, A Quiet Place, and Hereditary, are different or separate from horror because they are intelligent, skilful, or thought provoking. What these terms don’t recognise is that horror has always been these things or had the potential to be these things. Bride of Frankenstein, Cat People, Night of the Living Dead, and The Brood are all intelligent, skilful, and thought-provoking films. Of course, some films function more viscerally than intellectually, and these terms seem to suggest that they are a lesser form of horror and I would argue against this. The beauty of the horror genre is that it can function in multiple registers and is constantly shifting and changing. If it didn’t the genre wouldn’t work. So, a film that is deliberately trying to provoke the audience through graphic depictions of gore is potentially as interesting and significant as a film that appeals to our intellect. And many films do both. Wes Craven, David Cronenberg, and Jen and Sophia Soska (to name a few) are masters of visceral and intellectual filmmaking.  They are not necessarily mutually exclusive concepts.

To describe horror as ‘oppositional’ is not necessarily a negative, rather it is kind of the point. Horror is meant to make us uncomfortable and the best horror can take us to dark places and challenge us in an intellectual and/or visceral way. Every once and a while a film – or television series- comes out that pushes the boundaries of acceptability – Psycho, Eyes without a Face, The Exorcist, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, A Serbian Movie or The Human Centipede 2 – and these films  can fall fowl of censors and critics. But to me that often means they are doing what horror should do – provoke, make us think and make us uncomfortable.  In television this happens too. The Walking Dead generated a lot of controversy for the premier episode of season seven ‘The Day Will Come When You Won’t Be’. It was criticised for going too far; pushing the boundaries of acceptability for television; traumatizing its audience. It was repeatedly compared to ‘torture porn’  -- a phrase which is used to connote exploitative graphic horror  and is itself highly problematic and inaccurate in its comparison to this episode.  But to me that is when a horror text gets interesting. For a series set during a zombie apocalypse, where people get eaten by zombies every week, characters regularly meet gruesome ends, and which showcases the decay of the zombie body in graphic detail, I am fascinated by what about this series premiere was perceived as going too far. Many critics fell back on familiar arguments about how horror desensitizes audience to violence but if the reaction to this episode showed anything, it proved that audiences were not desensitized. They responded viscerally and emotionally – whether they were angry or traumatized or grief stricken. The ability to generate that emotion and reaction is truly amazing and one of the many reasons I love horror.

In what ways is Buffy the Vampire Slayer a “cult” text? What marks the series out as “cult,” especially considering it was so impactful in mainstream terms?  Do you view Buffy as characterised by the horror label?

Cult is, of course, a slippery term and there are many ways of thinking about a text as cult. One way of thinking about cult is to see it as standing in opposition to the mainstream but this then raises questions about what we mean by mainstream. Buffy may have been impactful by influencing other series in terms of representation of women and the development of long-running narrative arcs, as well as contributing to a culture change in terms of the presence of horror on television. And it has entered into broader cultural consciousness with, for instance, Entertainment Weekly celebrating the show’s 20th anniversary last year. It has a high recognition factor. But even at its peak it was still generating small audiences as compared to mainstream franchises such as CSI or reality television. It was broadcast on smaller networks – first the WB and then UPN – who were interested in targeting particular audiences rather than the largest audience share. It is about a teenage girl -– named Buffy – who fights and kills vampires. This is a show that is not aimed at everyone but is aimed at particular niche audiences.  While I would argue that everyone should watch Buffy because it is brilliant and, at its best, an example of outstanding acting, writing and directing (not to mention music, editing, action choreography etc), it just isn’t going to appeal to everyone. Some people aren’t going to get past the ‘kill vampires’ bit or the name ‘Buffy’ or the, at times, low budget special effects and make-up.  There is something in the constitution of the series, and even the title, that is setting up the show as cult or at the very least a show aimed at an audience who ‘gets it’. 

Also, it came on the air during the early days of internet fandom and was key to showing the potential that the internet had to offer fan culture in terms of online forums, sharing/production of fanfiction. I think that the series, clearly coming out at the right time, encouraged an engaged fandom who wanted to discuss, analyse, and create. It was emotionally engaging and it was appointment-TV. Remember this was a series broadcast weekly for 23 weeks of the year and then you had to wait until September for the next season. This left a lot of space and time for fans to want to fill with discussion and fan creation; fill in those narrative blanks (like what Buffy and her friends did over the summer).  

Finally, it was created by Joss Whedon and a brilliant team of writers and directors who wanted this show to be more than a popular series but one which generated passion and loyalty on the part of its fans.  Most of them self-identify as ‘fans’ of some form of cult television and wanted their audience to feel that type of loyalty and love for this series that they had felt for other shows like Star Trek or The Night Stalker. So they embraced the cultness of the text, engaging with fans in online forums; encouraging and supporting fan creations; and engaging with fans at conventions.

As to the second part of your question, I absolutely see the show as characterised by horror. Now today we look it and it, of course, seems tame and incredibly restricted in terms of what it could show or not show. But this is where context is important. When it came on the air, there was very little in the way of horror on television, particularly American network television.  Of course, it hadn’t always been this way. Horror was prevalent in the 1970s for instance, and the 1980s saw a number of horror anthology series being produced. But in 1997, there was The X-Files, which while incredibly indebted to horror, sold itself as science-fiction.  HBO’s Tales from the Crypt ended in 1996. There just wasn’t that much in the way of horror on the air. There were censorship restrictions on what you could show and a hesitancy for networks to pursue horror as it was seen as a more niche genre.  So, to be horror, it was common for series to mask their horror-leanings within a genre matrix.  The X-Files is science-fiction/horror and Buffy is teen comedy/drama and horror and Angel is Film noir and horror. These are just a few combinations.

But Buffy’s focus on exploring the monster as metaphor for adolescence is completely based upon horror conventions and tropes. It is replete with vampires, zombies, ghosts, werewolves, slashers, giant praying mantises, Frankenstein monsters, demons, evil politicians, mad scientists, and the list goes on. It uses these monsters to explore the evil that surrounds us and exists within us. Aesthetically, it often draws its visuals from German Expressionism and Gothic cinema and operates in dialogue with established horror traditions or classics of the genre – such as Dracula and Halloween. The show walks a fine line between its various genre leanings in order to manage the horror so that the material remains suitable to the show’s target teenage audience and to the network’s need to conform to FCC regulations. So the dark visual style is balanced by a bright and colourful visual style but the series never lets you forget that the darkness is still out there or that the most violent horrors might emerge in the bright light of day such as when the very human Warren shoots Buffy and Tara.

For me Buffy, and subsequently Angel, represents a key transitional moment when it became clear you could do horror on network TV and there was an audience for it. It is notable that after they were both off the air, Supernatural starts on the WB which is a series that is hugely indebted to both shows and overtly sold itself as horror. While it also offers hybrid generic matrix, integrating horror with melodrama and comedy in much the same way as Buffy, it could sell itself as horror in a way that Buffy had to downplay.  Post-2005, we start seeing the floodgates opening to horror on TV and now we live in a very different televisual landscape where some of the most exciting things in horror are happening on television – see Hannibal, Penny Dreadful, American Horror Story, In the Flesh, The Terror – I could go on for ever.

Stacey Abbott is a Reader in Film and Television Studies at the University of Roehampton. She is the author of Celluloid Vampires: Life after Death in the Modern World (2007), Angel: TV Milestone (2009), Undead Apocalypse: Vampires and Zombies in the 21st Century(2016), and co-author, with Lorna Jowett, of TV Horror: Investigating the Dark Side of the Small Screen (2013). She has also written extensively about cult television and is the editor of The Cult TV Book (2010), Reading Angel: The TV Spin-Off with a Soul (2005) and TV Goes to Hell: An Unofficial Road Map to Supernatural (2011). She is currently co-editing, with Lorna Jowett, a book on Global TV Horror and is writing the BFI Classic on Near Dark.  

Cult Conversations: Interview with Ekky Imanjaya (Part II)

What films stand out as exemplars of the sub-genres you mention, such as Kumpeni and Perjuangan? Can you explain more about these sub-genres in the Indonesian context? Do they draw upon Western traditions (such as the Italian Cannibal boom of the 1970s, for instance? Are there any sub-genres you think are exclusively generated by Indonesian filmmaking?

Actually, I already wrote about the subgenres in my papers in 2009 and 2014. Here, I will elaborate again.

I find Karl Heider’s theories useful to do genre mapping of popular genres, considering that only few scholars wrote seriously and deeply about popular films, let alone exploitation and B-grade movies. Heider suggests various genres and types into which most Indonesian films can fit comfortably (Heider 1991, 39-40). Heider argues that popular genre films are the best examples to do a cultural analysis on since films directed by auteurs or for the purpose of artistic expressions were intentionally detached from their cultural origins. 

I argue, based on Heider’s theory, that there are two basic types of classic Indonesian exploitation films. The first one are films that have stories rooted in Indonesian tradition, history, folklores, or storytelling. Commonly, these kinds of films are full of strangeness, exoticism, and otherness, according to the perspectives of Western fans. The Legend genre, Kumpeni genre, and Horror genre belong to the first basic type of the films, all of which contain elements of mysticism and/or traditional folklores.

Suzzana in White Crocodile Queen (1988)

The Legend Genre includes dramatizations of traditional legends or folktales. The main protagonists usually have supernatural powers. This genre includes costume dramas, historical legends, or legendary history.  For Example: Snake Queen and White Crocodile Queen.

Suzzanna as snake queen

The Kumpeni genre are films which tell stories of the conflict between the Dutch and the Indonesians (17th-19th centuries). The term Kumpeni is the local term of compagnie which comes from Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (VOC), or  the Dutch East India Company (1602-1799). The prototypical plot pits the eponymous hero with supernatural and mystical powers  (Jaka Gledek, Jaka Sembung, Pak Sakerah) against the Dutch forces. Jaka Sembung or ‘The Warrior’ series is the best example of this sub-genre.

Horror in the “Crazy Indonesia” context”  deals with supernatural powers and supernatural monsters, and have a direct connection with traditional folklores. For example: Queen of Black Magic, Mystics in Bali, and Satan’s Slave.

The second type are the ones that have many similarities with international exploitation films. I argue that there are three genres formulated by  Heider with these kinds of characteristics:

Firstly, the Japanese Period Genre. Set in Japanese colonial era (1942-1945), usually about Indonesian women who are kidnapped  and harassed by the Japanese army, and later, became a prisoner or saved by a Japanese officer. This genre is very close to ‘womensploitation’ and Women in Prison films.  War Victims is a good example of this genre.

Secondly, Perjuangan (struggle) period films, which are about the battles to defend a nation’s independence (Heider 1991, 42-43); these look similar to mainstream American action B-grade films.  Both genres are rooted in historical stories of wars in Indonesia. Examples of these films include Daredevil Commandos, Blazing Battle, and Hell Raiders.

And lastly, cannibalism or, as Heider’s puts it, ‘expedition films’.  Some scholars and critics call these “Jungle films” (Tombs and Starke 2008, Sen: 1999, Tombs 1997). The plot consists of a group of “civilized” people discovering unknown places and encountering its native inhabitants (Heider 1991, 45), as in Primitif and Jungle Virgin Force. In an interview with Mondo Macabro filmmakers, Gope Samtani the producer clearly mentioned the 1970s Italian Cannibalism as the inspiration to make Primitif.

JUNGLE virgin force (1983)

There are also films that simply imitated WIP formula, such as Escape from Hell Hole, and Virgins from Hell.

Of course,  there are some hybrid films with the characteristics of more than one genre, and can be categorized and fit in some sub-genres of Western exploitation categories. For example, I argue that characteristics of the Mockbuster or Remakesploitation (in Iain Smith’s term) are embedded in Lady Terminator, which is a blend of Legend and Horror, and has “adopted” parts from Terminator mixed with the traditional folklore of The Queen of South Sea; whereas Intruder is a Rambo rip-off. 

As with much of Western exploitation, then, the Indonesian tradition seems to borrow and plunder already existing and successful properties from North America, Lady Terminator and Intruder’s Rambu being two of your examples. Would this be a fair assessment?  Are there other examples of Indonesian exploitation cinema “remaking” or “adapting” elements of US mainstream filmmaking?

I must go back to the early 1980s when  the government founded Prokjatap Prosar (Kelompok Kerja Tetap Promosi dan Pemasaran Film Indonesia di Luar Negeri/ The Permanent Working Committee for the Promotion and Marketing of Indonesia Films Abroad) and brought  Rapi Films’ Gope Samtani  and Parkit Films’ Raam Punjabi to international film markets in prestigious film festivals such as Cannes, Berlinale, and Milan’s MIFED (Mercato Internationale Del Film Del TV & Del Documentario)  (1982-1983).  The producers learned how to deal with global  film markets, to understand the global demands and tastes, and how to sell their own films to potential buyers. And starting in 1985, after Prokjatap Prosar got dismissed in 1983, they  went independently to international film markets, including Milan, Cannes, Berlinale, and Los Angeles.  

And, after learning the nature of transnational film markets,  they intentionally started to make films that could fit in global market’s taste and demand, and one of the strategies is by doing joint-production as well as using Caucasian actors.  Although in 1984 Rapi Film collaborated with Rapid Film GMBH (Munich,   Germany) to make No Time to Die (Danger - Keine Zeit zum Sterben / Menentang Maut), the joint-production trend started  in 1987 as  Rapi Films and Troma Entertainment co-produced  Peluru dan Wanita, globally known as Jakarta (Triangle Invasion) directed by Charles Kauffman). The co-production projects between two film companies produced three more films, including the infamous wrestling and redubbing film Ferocious Female Freedom Fighters.

Other film companies followed the co-production mode.  Some such films included  Bidadari Berambut Emas (Lady Dragon 2, Ackyl Anwari, 1992),  Harga Sebuah Kejujuran (globally known as Java Burn/Diamond Run, Deddy Arman & Robert Chapell, 1988), and Jaringan Terlarang (Forceful Impact, Ackyl Anwari 1988), and  Dangerous Seductress (Bercinta dengan Maut, Tjut Djalil, 1992).  In these films, they tried to duplicate  the look and the feel of Western exploitation films.

Not only imitating the style of American exploitation films, they also include foreign actors, both professional (Billy Draco, Mike Abbott, Chyntia Rothrock, among others) and amateur ones (Barbara Constable and Ilona Agathe Bastian were tourists, Peter O’Brian was an English teacher), and directors (such as Guy Norris) in these films. Actually, a  year before Jakarta, there was a movie titled Dendam Membara (Final Score, Arizal 1986) starring Chris Mitchum.

So, we can see Indonesian films with Rothrock starring in them in  Angel of Fury/Triple Cross (1990) and Tiada Titik Balik (Lady Dragon, 1992).  

Beside that, as  mentioned earlier, I argue that there are Americanized exploitation subgenres in “Crazy Indonesia” films, similar with the formula and characteristics of   womensploitation, mockbusters,  cannibalism, and women-in-prison films. I claim that, based on the formula and characteristics,  Japanese period films are  Indonesian version of women-in-prison films, and  War Victims is one of the films.  WIP films in Indonesian contexts include Virgins from Hell and Hell Hole.

Lastly, I must mention the success story of Primitif, Barry Prima’s first movie. In an interview filmed by Pete Tombs and Andrew Starke (titled Fantasy Films from Indonesia), the producer openly admitted that they made Primitif in order to make local “Jungle Film”, just like the trend of Italian’s Cannibalism.  This is the first film being sold in international film market--sold in the 1979 Cannes Film Festival through an Italian distributor, SBO. Interestingly, the distributor seemed to hide the fact that Primitif was an Indonesian film.   Primitif was also screened in a West German TV station in  1979 and 1980.  

And finally, which five films would you choose that represent the ‘best’ that Indonesian exploitation cinema offers and why?

Lady Terminator (Tjut Jalil, 1988).

I think the film is one of the most popular and most discussed films online related to Indonesian movies. It is on the list of 100 Cult Cinema (Mathijs & Mendik, 2011) which includes films such as The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) and El Topo (1970).   The film is a perfect example how the filmmakers tried to blend Hollywood’s action film (namely Terminator) and legend genre with famous local folklore and mysticism. In its promotional material, it says :” “Even the jaded patrons of 42nd street were shocked to see how the lustful Lady T dispatched her victims...!".       

In Indonesian context, the film caused “moral panic” and was banned after 11 days of public screenings in 1989  because the film was considered as being  “too nasty”.  The film got post-production overseas and without  passing any official censorship, and returned to Indonesia illegally  in home video format.

Mystics in Bali  (Tjut Djalil, 1981)

In his book, Mondomacabro: Weird and Wonderful Cinema around the World, Pete Tombs named the chapter of Indonesian films by “Mystics in Bali”. Later, Mondo Macabro DVD  labels the film as “The Holy Grail of Asian  Cult Cinema”.

The film is infamous among global online fans for its exoticism and weirdness of “Far East mysticism”, such as “the flying head eating unborn child” and “the lady who turned into a pig”.  the promotional material says: “This is the film that introduced a new kind of monster to the world’s cinema screens. A sensation on its initial release in Asia, Mystics in Bali was deemed too bizarre and shocking to be screened in the West.” One of my colleagues, Jan Budweg, informed me that he found a document in Germany stating that the film was banned in the country for being “too weird”.

The film tells a story about how to become a Leak, “the most powerful black magic in the world”. And, interestingly, when most of local horror films are strongly related to Islamic teachings and Muslim clerics became  the “savior”, Leak is a Baliness ghost with the rich culture of Bali’s Hinduism.

Jaka Sembung (The Warrior) (Sisworo Gautama Putra, 1981)

Let me start with my own experience in 2008. After I finished presenting my final paper at Universiteit van Amsterdam, some of the young students approached me and expressed their gratitude for watching the action of Rawarontek or  Pancasona charm. “Thank you for introducing me with this Asian  superhero. Here, there is no such thing like it, especially when the separated body and head can unite after being chopped off.”.

Jaka Sembung is my favorite local hero. I consider him as local Superhero since he has supernatural* powers  and fight against colonialism and protect his people. 

And one of the “magic” of the film, as well as other films, is the Special Effect, thanks to El Badrun.

Special Silencers (Arizal, 1979)

Also one of the most discussed “Crazy Indonesia” films in the internet. In AVManiacs, November 2011, the fans consider the film as “.. one of the craziest, goriest, wildest, over-the-top Indo-fantasy-flicks ever” and “…gore, violence, trees growing out of peoples bodies in very gory detail, bad kung-fu, bad romance, Corny dialogue, weirdness, weird magic, fire, torture by smelly shoes, rats, snakes, more gore, Barry Prima, Eva Arnaz…”.  Moreover, the film is “…even crazier than the Turkish stuff I've seen.”.  No need further explanation, I guess.

Ferocious Female Freedom Fighters (Jopi Burnama, 1982)

This is the first Indonesian films being circulated globally in DVD format as well as the first (and the only?) film being redubbed intentionally (in VHS release: 1997).

DVD release: Oct 14, 2003) for marketing purpose by an international distributor.  Lloyd Kaufman’s Troma Team  decided to rework the original film by rewriting and rerecording the dialog and music score in order to make it into a “Troma film”.  They call this reworking process “Tromatized”.  As a  result, influenced by Woody Allen’s What’s Up Tiger Lily (1966), the film has totally different story and flavour.

In his 1998 book (co-written with James Gunn), Lloyd wrote “We change a kickboxing Rambo type of hero into an Elvis impersonator. We change the lady in the film from a serious Indonesia heroine into a Jewish-mama-type of person…”.  They also add new sound tracks including, as Kaufman puts it in his book, “…numerous instances of farting, bad sportsmanship, and a chronically masturbating little boy who was singularly obsessed with his ejaculate and the size of his mother’s breasts”.  

In 2001, Joko Anwar wrote a phenomenon of the discussion of Indonesian B-grade movies in some midnight movies forums,  in the Jakarta Post. And  he mentions the film: “Troma pushes it to the lowest point of stupidity by redubbing it with very dumb dialog that plays for pure laughs”.

Satan’s Slave (Sisworo Gautama Putra, 1980)

Considered as one of the scariest film by 1980s generation in Indonesia, this film is the first local Zombie film enriched with local tradition and context. The film has no  specific  motive that commonly exists in domestic horror films, such as “ oppressed female character, mostly being raped,  became a ghost and seek revenge”. The powerful female  shaman just picked  random people who “are far from religious path” to become satan’s slave. So, it could be anyone, it could be us.

The film is the reason Joko Anwar remade Pengabdi Setan (2016) and brought it to the next level and made this B-grade film into an artistic world class horror films and became the first position in 2016 box  office films and gaining more than 4 million spectators—the first Indonesian horror film in that position.

Ekky Imanjaya is a faculty member of Film Program, Bina Nusantara University (Jakarta). He just finished his PhD study in Film Studies at University of East Anglia. The title of his thesis is “The cultural traffic of Classic Indonesian Exploitation Cinema”. His scholarly papers were published in some journals, including Cinemaya, Asian Cinema, Plaridel, Jump Cut, and  Cinematheque Quarterly. His popular articles were published in some media, including Rolling Stone Indonesia, Catalogue of Taipei International Film Festival, and Südostasien.  In 2015, Ekky guest edited a special issue titled "The Bad, The Worse, and The Worst: The Significance of Indonesian Cult, Exploitation, and B Movies" in Plaridel: A Philippine Journal of Communication, Media, and Society.