MONSTRUM v2 (2019)

A peer-reviewed journal of studies in horror and related areas.

Volume 2 | June 2019 | ISSN 2561-5629
Editor-in-Chief: Kristopher Woofter
Founding Editors: Mario DeGiglio-Bellemare & Kristopher Woofter

Editor's Introduction to MONSTRUM 2

Welcome to the second issue of MONSTRUM, a forum for scholars of the macabre, the monstrous, the sensational, exploitation, dark speculation, and all sorts of other critical subversions of reality as we know and accept it. Published in Montréal by a scholarly community called the Montréal Monstrum Society (MMS), MONSTRUM is an open-access, blind peer-reviewed, ISSN-listed publication. We are proud to provide a forum for established and developing scholars, as well as undergraduate and college-level students in our "Student Forum."

All content is available in downloadable PDFs. Scroll down to browse the contents of MONSTRUM 2.

MONSTRUM 2 presents six feature essays, four in English, one in Italian, and one in French. Based on her Master’s thesis and a three-week course for the Montreal Monstrum Society (MMS) in the fall of 2018, Alexandra Dagenais' French-language essay addresses the motif of the possessed woman in the demonic possession subgenre as a manifestation of female sexuality repressed under the constraints imposed by the patriarchal order. Combining a psychoanalytic theoretical framework, from Robin Wood's notion of the return of the repressed, with Julia Kristeva's notion of abjection, as well as other feminist horror theorists, Dagenais explores how the spectacle of exorcism demonizes female sexuality. Ellen N. Freeman's essay extends from the research she did for the three-week course she conducted for MMS in the winter of 2018; it argues that Tom Six's controversial, excessive first two Human Centipede films offer a critical grotesque realism that can be traced to the Bakhtinian carnivalesque. In Freeman's analysis, The Human Centipede, First Sequence (2009) and Full Sequence (2011), are savvy reflections of spectatorial desire and horror's attractions-style presentation. Erin Giannini's study of the hit TV series iZombie takes on the series' repurposing of the traditional association of zombies with consumption to investigate the sociopolitical and ethical dimensions of food sourcing and production. Significantly, Giannini points to the series' investment in class dynamics in the United States as a key factor in its important critical project. As Will Dodson's memorial preface explains, we lost friend and colleague Jeff Jeske in January 2017. Jeske's essay, written in 2010, is presented here posthumously in honour of a friend who left us too soon. In it, Jeske highlights the mythical elements of Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and the stripping of such qualities of cosmic dread in the stylistically self-conscious, but ultimately more thematically hollow, 2004 remake by Marcus Nispel. Jeske tracks the later film's failure as a postmodern retrospective reimagining of gender dynamics, stripped of the productive nihilism of Hooper's original, independent vision. Valentina Mazzilli's Italian-language essay argues that in his writings as a poet and theoretician, Pier Paolo Pasolini deployed a critique of booming consumer capitalism in the Italy of 50s and 60s through a championing of the pre-industrial and archaic. She demonstrates that this theme is at the heart of his 60s cinema in Comizi d’amore (1964), Teorema (1968), and Porcile (1969). And Papagena Robbins looks at the proto-feminist call for personal redemption and critique of patriarchal forces in the voice recordings of a 1960s wife and mother in the experimental Gothic documentary Must Read After My Death. Robbins situates Dews' film's critical power within the Gothic mode's willingness to expose the "key epistemological impasses around the auto/biographical, female agency, and the evidentiary mediums themselves."

Critical reviews of Gary D. Rhodes's The Birth of the American Horror Film (2018), Ruth Franklin's Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life (2016), and Abel Ferrara's 2014 film Pasolini (which is receiving a long-awaited North American release this year) follow. And, as part of MONSTRUM's continuing commitment to developing scholars, the issue ends with Arielle Corriveau's discussion of the Soska Sisters' film American Mary as a work of feminist Grand-Guignol cinema.

MONSTRUM is supported by an editorial board of respected scholars in horror and related fields. We thank our collaborators, instructors, contributors and peer reviewers for making MONSTRUM possible.

Contributors: Arielle Corriveau, Alexandra Dagenais, Mario DeGiglio-Bellemare, Will Dodson, E.N. Freeman, Erin Giannini, Anne Golden, Jeff Jeske, Valentina Mazzilli, Papagena Robbins, Kristopher Woofter.

Acknowledgments: The editors would like to thank Steven Woloshen for providing the cover image, and to thank Shiloh Carroll, Chelsea Korynta, and Annaëlle Winand for editorial assistance on MONSTRUM 2. Thanks also to our peer reviewers.

MONSTRUM 2 is dedicated to our departed friend and colleague Jeff Jeske.

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Feature Essays
(presented in alphabetical order by author)