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5 - Postmortem Victimhood: Necrovalue in Phantasm and Dead and Buried
- Edited by Madelon Hoedt, Marko Lukić, Sveučilište u Zadru, Croatia
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- Book:
- Re-Imagining the Victim in Post-1970s Horror Media
- Published by:
- Amsterdam University Press
- Published online:
- 26 March 2024
- Print publication:
- 09 January 2024, pp 95-112
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Summary
Abstract
Don Coscarelli’s Phantasm franchise and Gary Sherman’s Dead and Buried stage scenarios where the dead are brought back as undead labourers via embalming. This process is one of the technologies involving a postmortem condition in which the dead body is brought to life once again as an object. This new status as object pushes postmortem technologies towards capitalism, the latter based on processes of thingification where nature (including humans) is objectified to ensure exploitation. This chapter reads Phantasm II (1988) and Dead and Buried (1981) as examples of revictimisation, where necrotechnologies keep the bodies alive even when the victims scream for release and proper rest. As such, the films advocate for the rights of the postmortem subject amidst necropolitics.
Keywords: necropolitics, 1980s, capitalism, embalming, necrotechnologies, thingification
Capitalist ideology sustains the logic of labour-power, competition, accumulation, qualification and alienation. If the proletariat want money to get access to commodities, the market must be embraced, the whole working class becoming the victim of the continuing exploitation of wage labour. There is a “compelling parallel between a worker’s exploitation and alienation under capitalism and a victim’s exploitation and alienation at the market place,” since “workers must consider both the fruits of their labour and their labour itself as another man’s propriety” (Schwöbel-Patel 148). Not even retirement means the end of exploitation, as many senior people throughout the world must continue working to ensure economic survival after retirement from working at minimum wage. We came into this world to work, and only death stops the logic of being a cog in the machine of capitalism.
Horror fiction, however, can stage a scenario where the human continues labouring even after death, thus presenting a nightmarish version of the grand narrative of never-ending exploitation. Don Coscarelli’s Phantasm franchise (1979–98) revolves around a supernatural mortician known as the Tall Man (Angus Scrimm) who kills and reanimates the dead as his misshapen slaves. The films establish a mythology in which human corpses must work for the Tall Man as a labour force. Gary Sherman’s Dead and Buried (1981), opening just two years after the first Phantasm, stages a similar premise.
Chapter 12 - ‘Cut me and I Bleed Dior’: The Dark Side of Glamour in American Horror Story
- Edited by Richard J. Hand, University of East Anglia, Mark O'Thomas, University of Greenwich
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- Book:
- American Horror Story and Cult Television
- Published by:
- Anthem Press
- Published online:
- 01 March 2024
- Print publication:
- 14 November 2023, pp 207-218
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Summary
It is Christmas Eve, and a character interpreted by Joan Collins has killed her husband. The punishment comes to her soon. Imprisoned in the house during a heavy snowfall, she is stalked by an escaped psychopath dressed as Santa Claus. The description above is not from the British horrorthemed portmanteau film Tales from the Crypt (Freddie Francis 1972) but from episode seven of the eighth season of AHS: ‘Apocalypse’ (FX 2018), which recreates the famous tale of a femme fatale hunted down by a serial killer donning a Santa Claus costume.
One of the elements that remains from the classic horror tale is the glamour that Collins always carries with her. As argued by Carol Dyhouse, ‘Joan Collins's career as a glamour icon spanned more than half a century’ (Dyhouse 2010, 142) since she was featured in the 1950s in the aptly named magazine Glamour. Interestingly, Dyhouse traces the origins of the word ‘glamour’ to its roots in association with black magic and the sinister. According to her, ‘the word “glamour” was obscure before 1900. It meant a delusive charm and was used in association with witchery and the occult’ (2010, 9). Indeed, the Encyclopedia of Wicca & Witchcraft explains that glamour is ‘the art of enchantment. In occult lore, glamour is the ability to create an illusion around a person, place, or thing’ (Grimassi 2000, 184). It was related to gypsies, Spanish ‘duendes’ (goblins) and the art of visual manipulation or ‘deceptio visus’ (Blanco-Carrión 2016, 27–52).
AHS, an anthology series known for its mix of camp aesthetics and queerness, evokes this first meaning, returning glamour to its historical roots: a charming surface with a dark side. Beyond the glitz, feathers, furs and sequins, we will argue, lies an underside that has often gone unnoticed but that the series emphasizes: as Postrel (2013) notes ‘the flip side of glamour is horror. Glamorous archetypes like the vampire, the con man, the femme fatale and the double agent remind us of how easy it is to succumb to manipulation and desire’ (Postrel 2013, 121), as glamour anaesthetizes and aestheticizes horror via prettiness. The glamorous component is the ‘up’ side of the fabric, and the horror is the ‘under’. As Liz Taylor (Denis O’Hare) says in AHS: ‘Hotel’ (2015); ‘cut me and I bleed Dior’:1 horror and glamour synthetized in one short sentence.
8 - The Case of the Spanish Gialli: Crime Fiction and the Openness of Spain in the 1970s
- Edited by Sarah Delahousse, City University of New York, Aleksander Sedzielarz, Wenzhou-Kean University, China
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- Book:
- Transnational Crime Cinema
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 19 October 2023
- Print publication:
- 31 December 2022, pp 140-154
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Summary
Giallo (Italian for ‘yellow’) cinema was a cycle of films made in Italy beginning in the late 1960s and through the 1970s. The term derives from the yellow covers of the paperback mystery novels the Italian publishing house Mondadori sold cheaply after 1929. The paperbacks were so popular that the in ‘Italian usage the term can apply to any crime fiction’ (Dyer 2015: 204), including crime cinema. The Italian cycle of crime films known as giallo (or gialli, in plural) was one of the most stylistic corpora of films ever made. Filled with strident colours, black-gloved killers, red herrings, confusing plots, jazz soundtracks, art-house sensibilities, beautiful women, very long titles and spectacular murders, the cycle tapped into vernacular social and cultural anxieties of the era. The corpus ‘represents the encroaching hegemony of modernity on the private’ (Koven 2006: 58) when Italy became modern and cosmopolitan almost overnight.
As Mikel Koven argues, the giallo is a vernacular cycle, deeply embedded within the social fabric of its time and geography. Paradoxically, it triggered a transnational trend. Furthermore, the italian giallo itself was a product of cross-fertilisation. As Austin Fisher explains, the giallo plugs into a ‘rich vein of transcultural borrowing in Italy, through which foreign narrative models offer a filer for the familiar locale’ (2017: 260). The giallo derived heavily from the German krimi films based, in turn, on crime novels wrote by British author Edgar Wallace (Koven 2006: 5). ‘The Italian giallo mixed the krimi with the police procedural and added a twist of its own; an almost fetishistic attention to the murderer and the killings’ (Fisher 2017: 260). The Italian cycle ended in the earlier 1980s, not before serving as inspiration to one of America’s most renowned cycles: ‘the giallo might usefully be seen as the missing link between the protoserial killer narratives of Frederic Brown and Cornell Woolrich and the American slasher’ (Hunt 2000: 330).
There is a resurgence of interest on the Italian giallo cycle, with new studies such as Alexia Kannas’ Giallo!: Genre, Modernity, and Detection in Italian Horror Cinema and Alexandra Heller-Nicholas’ The Giallo Canvas: Art, Excess and Horror Cinema published in 2020 and 2021, respectively. Still understudied, however, is the Spanish gialli, a cycle of films made in Spain through the ‘tardofranquismo’ (late Francoist period, roughly from 1960 to 1975).
8 - Changing Societies: The Red House, The Hanging Tree, Spencer's Mountain, and Post-war America
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- By Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns, Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA)
- Edited by Matthew Carter, Manchester Metropolitan University, Andrew Patrick Nelson, Montana State University
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- Book:
- ReFocus: The Films of Delmer Daves
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 15 September 2017
- Print publication:
- 13 May 2016, pp 166-183
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Summary
A dramatic clash of different cultures, broadly conceived, animates many of Delmer Daves’ films. In some cases, this clash takes the form of complex racial negotiations, as in Westerns like Broken Arrow (1950), Drum Beat (1954), and The Last Wagon (1956). In others, the clash is between nations, as in Never Let Me Go (1953) and Kings Go Forth (1958). Still others emphasize differences of class, as in A Summer Place (1959) and most of Daves’ subsequent melodramas. These conflicts seldom have clear winners and losers, and instead often end with some form of negotiation or reconciliation between the opposed forces. In this way, Daves’ films can be seen as dramatizing social progress: the passage from one social stage to another that supplants, in an act of improvement, the preceding one.
This chapter explores how Daves manages these complicated transformations as they take place within characters and their communities. I examine three films as representative of Daves’ concern with the rational, evolutionary passage from one social state to another. These are The Red House (1947), The Hanging Tree (1959), and Spencer's Mountain (1963). Drawn from three different decades, with each representing a different genre—mystery, the Western, and family melodrama, respectively—these films demonstrate that Daves’ interest in social progress was not a philosophy that the director explored only at one point in his career, or within one particular genre, but was a sustained, consistent authorial concern over the course of his lengthy filmmaking career.
Daves clearly believed in the possibility of social improvement rooted in the idea that, in a healthy community, every social stage will be, indeed, should be, better than the immediately preceding one. This outlook is an outgrowth of the belief, common in post-war American culture, that social transformation could be achieved through the rational application of the critical and ethical values of equality and justice to contemporary problems. The idea of a gradualist, ever-progressing, and increasingly better society, represented in Daves’ cinema, reflected the desire of moviegoers in America and elsewhere to become “better selves” in the post-war period.
THE RED HOUSE: THE ENTRANCE INTO SOCIABILITY
The popularization of psychoanalysis in the United States in the years leading up to and following the Second World War had a profound impact on American society and culture, especially in the ways in which parents understood their relationships with their children.