In which I return to Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian (2005), a literary fiction vampire novel about historians fighting against Dracula across three generations—which once meant so much to me and which I now find both frustrating and disappointing.
Tag: Genre: Horror
Playing “Black Book” (2021)
Developer Morteshka's masterpiece Black Book is a Russian folk horror fantasy game thick with culture and history, with memory and belief; beautiful, heart-breaking, entrancing, and more, it is at once intoxicatingly real and hauntingly fantastical.
Reading “Capitalism: A Horror Story: Gothic Marxism and the Dark Side of the Radical Imagination” by Jon Greenaway
John Greenaway's Capitalism: A Horror Story is a careful, clever, and thorough work of Marxist and especially Marxist utopian theory, offering a history of the Gothic Marxist intellectual tradition and careful readings of circa two dozens horror films and novels that raises questions about the politics of genre.
Reading “Household Horror: Cinematic Fear and the Secret Life of Everyday Objects” by Marc Olivier
Marc Olivier's Household Horror is a study of the material networks of household objects in the domestic world of more than a dozen horror films, and also an argument for why object-oriented ontology is a terrible and terribly useless theoretical project.
Reading “Linghun” by Ai Jiang
Ai Jiang's Linghun criss-crosses the haunted house genre, subverts expectations about the purpose and mood of the haunted, indexes the suburban hellscape of (post)neoliberalism as the locus of horror, and ruminates nearly constantly on death, dying, grief, and the ties that bind us to the past, to family, to community.
Watching “No One Will Save You” (2023)
Brian Duffield's directorial debut, No One Will Save You, is a brilliant film that utilizes conventions from several genres, including alien horror and home invasion thrillers, to play out the psychodrama of a character whose isolation and unspoken traumatic past call out for audience identification.
Genre Fantasies 