Abstracts

 

Sara Austin

Images of Horror: Black Childhood as a Site of Resistance in Visual Media

 

Child characters in Black horror interact with the monstrous as a means of resistance to racist violence. In this article, I examine how visual examples of Black horror, including the television series Lovecraft Country (2020), picture books Wee Winnie Witch's Skinny (2004) and Precious and the Boo Hag (2005), and the film Us (2019), re-center Black child subjectivity from images of the body in pain onto community belonging by challenging both the audience and subject divides between the child and adult. These examples acknowledge that threats to Black subjectivity are continuous, but the family remains, grows, and passes on art and love to the next generation. This bringing-together of adults, children, families, and neighbors carries a powerful message of belonging and value as its own Radical Aesthetic within Black horror.

 

Matthias De Bondt

The Emotion of Dread in Cinematic Horror

 

This article concerns itself with the cinematic emotion of dread. Within Horror Studies, cinematic dread has been theorized as a temporal emotion, mostly centered around the confrontation with the monstrous, after which dread evolves into other cinematic emotions of shock and/or horror. For this reason, the function of dread within the horror film experience is only recognized in relation to other emotions it should precede. However, this article argues that dread plays a crucial emotion in the affective workings of some horror films that fall under the term “dread-full” films. Through the close reading of two case studies, namely It Comes At Night and The Blackcoat’s Daughter, the article reasons that dread exists as an inseparable part of the viewing experience of these films and in doing so, argues that the emotion of dread is inherent to the overall cinematic horror experience.

 

Todd Tietchen

Atomic Art and the Ecological Perspectives of David Lynch

 

The work of David Lynch represents an essential engagement with the Anthropocene and its aesthetic forms. This is especially evident in the case of Twin Peaks, which integrates influences from multiple genres and the avant-garde into a complex mythopoeic treatment of planetary ecological crisis. Episode eight of Twin Peaks: The Return, with its Promethean title “Gotta Light?”, grounds Lynch’s mythopoesis in an origin story that builds upon foundational concepts regarding the Anthropocene, including its connections to the atomic age, its grounding suppositions in androcentrism, its complicity in cosmological violence, and the value of post-nature perspectives for understanding the (perhaps inescapably) precarious present.

 

Ron Judy

Han Song’s Weirdly Sublime Anti-Modernity

 

Han Song is a leading 21st-century Chinese science fiction author, but writes with great pathos about a modernity populated by monsters and perverse new social arrangements. From the aeronautical cannibalism of “The Passengers and the Creator” to the ghost labor of “Regenerated Bricks” and zombified workers of “My Fatherland Does Not Dream,” Han’s oeuvre repeatedly emphasizes the demented, and according to him “foreign” aspects of China’s passage into the globalized modernity. In this article I argue that, in the aforementioned novellas Han projects a consistent vision of a “weird modernity” that is at times deeply ethnocentric, localist, and reminiscent of the “Old Weird” authors of the early 20th-century (e.g., H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Seabury Quinn, and Clark Ashton Smith). Reading his work’s anti-modern pathos as a variant of weird fiction enables me to incorporate a Lacanian analysis of his racial others in terms of “enjoyment theft” borrowed from Slavoj Zizek. Han’s work is thus a gallery of unspeakable “sublime objects” that represent the weird potential and threat of modernity—i.e., it expresses China’s still deep-seated anxieties about “opening up” to an alien, non-Chinese “outside” world that seeks to steal, exploit, or subvert its desires.