‘The environment is us’

2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 315-331
Author(s):  
Kali Simmons
Keyword(s):  
Horror Film ◽  
White Supremacist ◽  
Environmental Racism ◽  
Indigenous Lands

This article examines the triangulation of whiteness, Blackness, and Indigeneity in the ‘creature feature’ sf-horror film Prophecy (Frankenheimer US 1979), arguing that the film’s renderings of environmental racism ultimately function to justify white supremacist heteropatriarchal maintenance and surveillance of Black and Indigenous lands and bodies. A close examination of Prophecy’s representational and ideological shortfalls - in particular its renderings of Black and Indigenous maternity - reveals troubling entanglements between settler-colonial logics of geography, ecology, monstrosity, and subjectivity.

The Enduring Cult of The Bride with White Hair: Chivalry and the Monstrous Other in the Hong Kong Fantasy-Horror

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Martin
Keyword(s):  
Hong Kong ◽  
International Marketing ◽  
Conjoined Twins ◽  
White Hair ◽  
Horror Film ◽  
Love Affair

The Bride with White Hair (Ronny Yu, 1993) tells the tale of a heroic swordsman’s ill-fated love affair with a woman transformed by hatred into a white-haired killer, elevated the figure of the frosty-follicled executioner into one of the most enduring icons of the Hong Kong horror film. The timelessness and mysticism of the story lends itself to a highly hybridized type of horror, offering wuxia (swordplay), magical fantasy, romance and erotic scintillation alongside bloody fights, savage violence, and a monstrous depiction of malevolent conjoined twins. This chapter examines this film as emblematic of a particular cultural moment in the development of the Hong Kong fantasy-horror, appealing to a global fanbase for its supposedly transgressive and erotic content, and analyses the film in terms of its generic hybridity, its depictions of disability and morality, as well as in the context of the international marketing and reception of cult Hong Kong horror of the 1990s.

Un/re/production of Old Age inThe Taking of Deborah Logan

Somatechnics ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 178-194
Author(s):  
Agnieszka Kotwasińska
Keyword(s):  
Alzheimer’S Disease ◽  
Old Age ◽  
Horror Film ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Loss Of Control ◽  
Found Footage ◽  
Progressive Loss ◽  
The Face ◽  
Female Embodiment ◽  
Main Protagonist

The article offers a re-examination of abjected femininity and old age through a close reading of The Taking of Deborah Logan (2015), a found footage horror movie centered on spectral possession. While to a large extent the movie replicates an infamous monstrous old woman trope, it also effectively questions typical Alzheimer's disease (AD) narratives, which tend to portray life with AD as a story of unmitigated loss and debility. In The Taking of Deborah Logan, potentially destabilizing moments occur when in the face of progressive loss of control, memory, and bodily functions, the main protagonist is momentarily experienced as resisting the dehumanisation and loss of agency conventionally associated with AD and possession alike. The aim of this article is thus three-fold. The first part sketches the processes through which possession narratives generate a highly ambivalent space for aging femininity in horror film, and how aging, disability, and AD intersect both in popular understanding and in film. In the second part, the author examines how The Taking of Deborah Logan, as a found footage horror, shapes a discussion about selfhood, agency, and monstrous embodiment. Finally, the author argues that it is through the concept of transaging that one can find ways to destabilise traditional understandings of old age, female embodiment, and AD, and offer new narratives that highlight monstrous, if ambivalent, agency.

Horror and Death: Rethinking Coco's Border Politics

2020 ◽  
Vol 73 (4) ◽  
pp. 41-49
Author(s):  
Orquidea Morales
Keyword(s):  
The United States ◽  
Horror Film ◽  
Walt Disney Company ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Walt Disney ◽  
Day Of The Dead ◽  
Animated Film ◽  
Border Politics ◽  
The Dead ◽  
The U.S

In 2013, the Walt Disney Company submitted an application to trademark “Día de los muertos” (Day of the Dead) as they prepared to launch a holiday themed movie. Almost immediately after this became public Disney faced such strong criticism and backlash they withdrew their petition. By October of 2017 Disney/Pixar released the animated film Coco. Audiences in Mexico and the U.S. praised it's accurate and authentic representation of the celebration of Day of the Dead. In this essay, I argue that despite its generic framing, Coco mobilizes many elements of horror in its account of Miguel's trespassing into the forbidden space of the dead and his transformation into a liminal figure, both dead and alive. Specifically, with its horror so deftly deployed through tropes and images of borders, whether between life and death or the United States and Mexico, Coco falls within a new genre, the border horror film.

A Study on the works of Elizabeth Cook-Lynn with reference to Indian Genocide

IJOHMN ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 3 (6) ◽  
pp. 31-43
Author(s):  
V. Padmanaban
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Native American Studies ◽  
American Government ◽  
White American ◽  
Political Status ◽  
The People ◽  
Indigenous Lands ◽  
Westward Movement ◽  
Wounded Knee

This work is a study on the works of Elizabeth Cook-Lynn who is proficient scholar and hails from South Dakotas and Sioux nations and their turmoil, anguish and lamentation to retrieve their lands and preserve their culture and race. Many a aboriginals were killed in the post colonization. Elizabeth Cook-Lynn grieves and her lamentation for the people of Dakotas yields sympathy towards the survived at Wounded Knee massacre and the great exploitation of the livelihood of the indigenous people and the cruelty of American Federal government. Treaty conserved indigenous lands had been lost due to the title of Sioux Nation and many Dakotas and Dakotas had been forced off from their homelands due to the anti-Indian legislation, poverty and federal Indian – white American policy. The whites had no more regard for or perceiving the native’s peoples’ culture and political status as considered by Jefferson’s epoch. And to collect bones and Indian words, delayed justice all these issues tempt her to write. The authors accuses that America was in ignorance and racism and imperialism which was prevalent in the westward movement. The natives want to recall their struggles, and their futures filled with uncertainty by the reality and losses by the white and Indian life in America which had undergone deliberate diminishment by the American government sparks the writer to back for the indigenous peoples. This multifaceted study links American study with Native American studies. This research brings to highlight the unchangeable scenario of the Native American who is in the bonds of as American further this research scrutinizes Elizabeth’s diplomacy and legalized decolonization theory which reflects in her literature career and her works but defies to her own doctrines.

Troubling Figures

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Logan Natalie O'Laughlin
Keyword(s):  
Critical Discourse Analysis ◽  
Science Studies ◽  
Critical Discourse ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Careful Examination ◽  
Environmental Toxicants ◽  
Environmental Racism ◽  
Feminist Science Studies ◽  
Feminist Science ◽  
Do So

This essay examines the figure of the pesticide-exposed intersex frog, a canary in the coal mine for public endocrinological health. Through feminist science studies and critical discourse analysis, I explore the fields that bring this figure into being (endocrinology, toxicology, and pest science) and the colonial and racial logics that shape these fields. In so doing, I attend to the multiple nonhuman actors shaping this figure, including the pesky weeds and insects who prompt pesticides’ very existence, “male” frogs who function as test subjects, and systemic environmental racism that disproportionately exposes people of color to environmental toxicants. I encourage careful examination of galvanizing environmental figures like this toxic intersex frog and I offer a method to do so.

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