MONSTRUM v4 (2021)

Monstrum 4, October 2021 | ISSN 2561-5629
Editor-in-Chief: Kristopher Woofter
Editorial Assistant: Eva Crocker
Founding Editors: Mario DeGiglio-Bellemare & Kristopher Woofter

Editor's Introduction to MONSTRUM 4

Welcome to the fourth iteration 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 college-level students in our "Student Forum."

All content is available in downloadable PDFs. Scroll down below the Editor's Introduction to browse the contents of Monstrum 4.

Monstrum 4 presents four feature essays, a feature interview, and an original English translation. The issue features three essays focused on industry realities. Peter Arne Johnson looks at the influence and interaction between the US and UK production histories that informed the Hammer strategy and style. Selma Purac looks at the innovative ways the original script and marketing for A Quiet Place reveals the way horror cinema sustains and continues to engage with the aesthetics of the silent and early sound eras. And Anne Young looks at the creative contributions of Daria Nicolodi to the work of Dario Argento, in an industry that diminishes such contributions to uphold a myth of women creators as muses for male artists. Focusing on Nicolodi's own comments in interviews and later reflexive screenwriting, Young's essay is a call for serious reevaluation and recovery of Nicolodi's collaborative role in films like Suspiria and Inferno.

In our first feature interview, Jeffrey Klaehn talks to game writer-developer Mark Yohalem and conceptual artist Victor Pflug about the influences on, and aesthetics and philosophy of, their horror game Strangeland. In an essay about a different kind of staging of horror spectacle, "To Abort, Vomit, or Faint" is the first English translation of Agnès Pierron's 1998 essay "Avorter, vomir, ou s’évanouir," originally published in 1998 in Revue Europe (835-36, Paris, pp. 101-7). Translated by Charlie Ellbé, Pierron's essay is essential to understanding the impact of a Grand-Guignol aesthetic in horror traditions.

Selected by a jury of SCMS-SIG scholars and the Monstrum founding editors, this year's SCMS Horror Studies SIG Graduate Student Essay Prize essay by PhD candidate Max Bledstein, focuses on the intersections of horror discourse, the "overt artifice" of arthouse cinema, and self-reflexivity of the traditional mourning play (ta'ziyeh), in the Iranian film Fish and Cat. Monstrum is pleased to collaborate with the Horror Studies Scholarly Interest Group (SIG), part of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS), in the selection and publication of their annual prize-winning graduate student essay.

The Book Review section features reviews of of Craig Ian Mann's Phases of the Moon: A Cultural History of the Werewolf Film (Edinburgh UP, 2021) by Bruna Foletto Lucas; Mike Thorn's novel Shelter for the Damned (JournalStone, 2021) by Anne Golden, and a double-review covering Quentin Tarantino's novelization of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (Harper 2021), and Brian DePalma and Susan Lehman's Are Snakes Necessary? (Hard Case, 2020) by Clayton Dillard.

Monstrum's Student Forum rounds out the issue with an essay by Liliane Poulin-Dubé, a student from John Abbott College in Quebec's CEGEP (preparatory college) system. Poulin-Dubé's essay explores Deleuzian Time-Image duration and becoming in Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver. If you are a CEGEP student and would like to submit an essay of 2,500 -5,000 words on any horror-related topic to Monstrum, please see the instructions for formatting and submission on the Submissions page.

— Kristopher Woofter

Contributors to Monstrum 4: Max Bledstein, Clayton Dillard, Charlie Ellbé, Bruna Foletto Lucas, Anne Golden, Peter Arne Johnson, Jeffrey Klaehn, Victor Pflug, Agnés Pierron, Liliane Poulin-Dubé, Selma Purac, Mark Yohalem, Anne Young.

Acknowledgments: Monstrum would like to welcome and to thank our Editorial Intern Eva Crocker for peerless editorial support. Special thanks to the long-running journal Revue Europe, founded in 1923, for permission to publish a translation of Agnès Pierron's essay, originally published in 1998 (issue 835-36, Paris, pp. 101-7). Cover image credit: Blood moon, stock image.

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.

Monstrum is grateful for the generous support of the Fonds de recherche du Québec - Société et culture (FRQSC). / Monstrum est reconnaissant du généreux soutien du Fonds de recherche du Québec - Société et culture (FRQSC).

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FEATURE ESSAYS & INTERVIEW

Click the titles or images for a full-text PDF of the individual essays.

Demystifying Hammer: The Influence of Transnational Hollywood Financing

PETER ARNE JOHNSON

The Hybrid Influences of Strangeland
Talking horror, mythology, game design and aesthetics
with writer and game developer
Mark Yohalem and artist Victor Pflug
[Interview]

JEFFREY KLAEHN