Recently Published

I have two pieces published in Issue 7 of The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies: Between the Dust and the Devil: An Interview with Richard Stanley and a review of Marc Price's low-budget British zombie film Colin. Extracts below and please click on the titles to be directed to the full texts:

Between the Dust and the Devil: An Interview with Richard Stanley

Rose: Your films and documentaries tend to feature strong women – Jill in Hardware, Wendy in Dust Devil, Edelle in The White Darkness. There is also the female cowboy who reveals herself near the close of The Preacher Man promo. Why is this character prevalent in your work?

Stanley: My parents separated when I was four years old and I was raised by my mother and two older sisters. Accordingly women tend to dominate my life and work whereas guys tend to come off as schmucks and ne'er do wells. On a wider level you could say its representative of my undying faith in the restorative power of the Goddess over patriarchal order and the sort of repressive dogma espoused by the Holy Roman Church and the other monotheisms. The Goddess rules.

Rose: Can you tell us a little about your intentions for Jill’s role in Hardware.

Stanley: Jill descends from a long line of embattled heroines, a combination of the 'last girl' of the slasher era and the lead character from a Super 8 movie I started shooting when I was fifteen. I saw her as a sort of 'everywoman' - hence her name which is drawn from Jill's America – the main theme on Morricone's Once Upon A Time In The West album – outsider artist, lover, big sister, 21st century cyber warrior and post technological cave girl all rolled into one. She was initially intended not only as the heroine of Hardware but as a continuing character in her own right.

Colin

Working with low-budgets often forces filmmakers to rule out certain genres and narratives and instead forces them to work with a limited cast, a limited crew and equally limited locations and effects. While these parameters may seem restrictive, they can often work to the benefit of the film itself, making the writer and director focus their narrative and work creatively with what is available in order to achieve a film of quality. With this in mind, choosing to make a zombie film – a genre which is heavy on zombie extras, requiring varied locations which should, preferably, be empty of people, and a whole host of realistic and gory effects – initially seems an ill-fated endeavour. Yet Price’s debut film takes the genre and gives it new life by positioning the film from the titular zombie’s perspective. The premise is this: for an unspecified reason, the undead are returning to life and consuming the flesh of the living. Zombies roam the streets as survivors either barricade themselves within their homes or form large groups to hunt down and slaughter the undead hordes. While fighting a zombie in his home, Colin (Alastair Kirton) is bitten and soon dies. Returning from the dead, he joins the undead masses and stumbles along the streets looking for flesh, encountering other zombies, violent survivors and, eventually, his sister (Daisy Aitkens). As Colin’s undead life unfolds, fragments of his human life are revealed alongside the barbaric acts of the survivors, culminating in a film that subtly meditates on the emotional impact of death and subsequent mourning.

Recently Published

Studying the Devil's Backbone

Just before Christmas I received one of my Author Copies of my latest book, Studying the Devil's Backbone:

The Devil’s Backbone (2001) is a Gothic film written and directed by Guillermo del Toro (Pan's Labyrinth, 2006). The story centers on a ghost that haunts an isolated orphanage during the Spanish Civil War. Studying The Devil's Backbone explores the narrative of the film in relation to central concerns, such as genre, theme, iconography, representation, and film language. Through these elements, the volume reads the film’s unique blend of literary Gothic, Western, and War film and the use of bombs, ghosts, and color as visual signifiers. It critiques the central characters and compares their representation of women, monsters, and political context against an examination of mise-en-scene, sound, and special effects. In addition, the author provides a critical biography of del Toro, an analysis of his auteurist traits, and an in-depth bibliography and filmography.

The book is available from the following outlets:

British Film Institute: BFI Filmstore, Columbia University Press, Amazon UK and Amazon.com - click on any of the names to be directed to the book's order page.

Recently Published

My article on the Horror Mockumentary has just been published in the December edition (Issue 30) of MediaMagazine: initially charting the rise of the sub genre, the text then goes on to provide in-depth textual analysis of films such as Cannibal Holocaust, The Blair Witch Project, Dairy of the Dead and Clovefield. The text concludes with an exploration of how the 'real' in these films is marketed to potential audiences.

To order a copy of this edition of the magazine or to subscribe to MediaMagazine, click here.

Recently Published

The Winter 2009 edition of Electric Sheep features my text The Law of the Gun, an essay on the Vigilante film in US cinema, featuring Death Wish, Dirty Harry and Escape from New York.

Notebook Extract

INT. KAHIKA PALMS MOTEL, ROOM No.2 – MID AFTERNOON

Otis turns Gloria around and whilst holding her neck he gently caresses her shoulder blade with the barrel of his gun. She is drawing short and panicked breaths, looking down at her husband. CUT. The side of his face and neck are splattered in congealing blood. He looks back up at her, helpless, knowing what is going to happen. He slowly drops his head and covers his face with his hat, unable to watch this humiliation. CUT. Otis continues to stroke Gloria’s body, trailing the barrel of the gun down her chest, between her breasts, pushing it beneath her bra. He whispers in her ear: “You like this don’t you. Say yes I do.” He pauses and then levers the cup of the bra off, exposing Gloria’s right breast. CUT. Otis grins. He continues to move the gun further down Gloria’s body, pressing himself against her as he pushes the gun into her panties and then between her legs. Gloria inhales sharply. Otis cocks the hammer of the gun and then begins to kiss Gloria, occasionally looking across at her husband.

“At the end of the day nothing really happens. It’s more just verbal abuse and mental intimidation but it’s so much worse than if he did anything”

Rob Zombie

Otis’s torturous act is carried out as a double performance and for a double audience. For Otis there is the dual pleasure of sexual arousal and the pleasure of humiliation. The gun – for Otis and the audience – is clearly a violent phallic symbol. As an extension of Otis is represents his power and authority whilst simultaneously allowing him the opportunity to indulge his perverse sexual needs. Pushing the gun between Gloria’s breasts, caressing her nipple with the barrel and then forcing it between her legs are all blatantly sexually aggressive actions, ones which simultaneously render her husband impotent and him as the powerful, dominant male.

The observers of this torture are both Gloria’s husband and friends and the audience themselves. Standing in front of the three hostages (and the camera), Otis carries out his humiliating actions. The characters watch as the audience watch, unable to move or act for fear of the consequences.

Although Zombie does not use any Point of View shot within this sequence (in fact, he rarely uses any POV shots throughout the entire film) he does force the audience into viewing the intimacy of the violation though using sustained close-up images. These are predominately of the sexual aggressive moments – a close up of the barrel pushing Gloria’s bra away to expose her breast, where the camera lingers on her erect nipple, all bleached out by the coarse sunlight filtering into the room and a further close-up of the gun being forced between her legs. So intense is this scene that these images take on the powerful connotations of the Point of View shot. Acting as a surrogate for this type of image, these close-ups highlight both the violation of Gloria and represent what her husband is seeing.

Given this, the torture itself becomes a double for just as Gloria must undergo the physical violation, her husband and friends must undergo a psychological torture: they can only sit and watch Gloria’s humiliation, bound by the knowledge that if they attempt to help her their actions will either get Gloria or themselves killed. Given Otis’s controlled sense of violence, it is likely that he would kill them both. This sense of character incapacitation finds itself reflected into the audience. Given the beginning of the film, the audience is aware that Otis is not just a psychopath but also a necrophile. The first time he is seen in the film is in ariel shot, lying in bed with both arms wrapped around the corpse of a naked cheerleader. His sadistic touching of Gloria can only lead to one conclusion – her rape and her death, with the order of these events remaining ambiguous. As the viewers gaze remains upon the lingering shots of Gloria’s exposed body the tension mounts as this inevitable conclusion draws near. This awful knowledge is in their eyes and that too is reflected in the eyes of Gloria’s husband. Seemingly aware of this, Zombie allows Otis further time to revel in the moment, making the scene a painful protraction for both the four innocent characters and the audience. And, just as they all think the inevitable is about to happen, Otis pushes Gloria away and tells the men they have work to do.