MONSTRUM v5 n1 (June 2022)

Issue 5.1, June 2022 | ISSN 2561-5629
Editor: Kristopher Woofter
Editorial Assistant: Eva Crocker
Founding Editors: Mario DeGiglio-Bellemare & Kristopher Woofter

Editor's Introduction to MONSTRUM 5.1

MONSTRUM 5, Issue 1, presents three essays and an interview, as well as a special feature publication of the first in our "Horror Reverie" series of symposia on key horror films. In the first of our feature essays, Mikaela Bobiy takes an embodied psychoanalytical approach in discussing the importance of "unconscious communication" to David Cronenberg's The Dead Zone. With Videodrome coming out the same year, it is easy to overlook Cronenberg's masterful adaptation of Stephen King's novel, and Bobiy's analysis of the film's breakdown of conscious and unconscious realities—following from her Winter 2019 lecture on the film for the MMS course "A Year in Horror: 1983"—is an insightful take on a Cold War film that eerily prefigures the current political era in the US and abroad. Jeffery Klaehn's feature interview with Soren Narnia, author and producer of the horror podcast Knifepoint Horror, follows with an in-depth discussion of Narnia's incisive brand of transmedial supernatural horror.

Gary D. Rhodes's essay "Selling Bela Lugosi" delves into the popular-culture legacy of Lugosi's performance of Dracula, and how the advertising industry both drew upon and helped to develop that legacy. In this year's SCMS Horror Studies SIG award-winning essay, Qian Zhang compares the experiential use of repetition and duration in Jennifer Kent's popular film The Babadook (2014) to that of Chantal Ackerman's earlier film Jeanne Dielman, 23 Commerce Quay, 1080 Brussels (1975), finding in Kent's film a maternal time that alludes to and extends the earlier film's avant-garde evocation of women's time.

February 2022 marks the first time Monstrum has incorporated a video symposium as part of our regular publication. Featuring an introductory essay by horror scholar Cristina Massaccesi, "Horror Reverie 1: An Online Symposium Celebrating 100 Years of Nosferatu" is the first in a series of our online symposia on horror films that have made an impact on the horror genre, its fandom, and its scholarship. We present the symposium in video format with full transcripts available in the Appendix to the issue. Thanks to Gary D. Rhodes and Mark Jancovich for their support in this initiative.

Monstrum 5.1 also features five book reviews that we hope will inspire our readers with new scholarship on paranormal reality TV, popular vampire literature, representations of Satan and evil in the cinema, the Southeast Asian pontianak figure and cinemas of decolonization, and, finally, J. Sheridan LeFanu, the elusive author of Carmilla and other classic horror tales.

All content is available in downloadable PDFs. Scroll down below to browse the contents of this issue of Monstrum. Thank you for reading!

— Kristopher Woofter

Contributors to Monstrum 5.1: Mikaela Bobiy, Kevin Chabot, Ian Clark, Zachary Doiron, Jeannette Goon, Jeffery Klaehn, Cristina Massaccesi, Gary D. Rhodes, Anne Young, Qian Zhang, and the panelists for 'Horror Reverie 1': E. Elias Merhige, Stephen Bissette, John Edgar Browning, Steve Choe, Mario DeGiglio-Bellemare, Argyle Goolsby, Lokke Heiss, Murray Leeder, Sorcha Ní Fhlainn, and Milly Williamson.

Acknowledgments: Monstrum would like to thank Brigid Cherry, Will Dodson, Ildikó Glaser-Hille, Steven Greenwood, Adam Lowenstein, Sonia Lupher, Sydney Sheedy, Robert Singer, Will Straw, Alanna Thain, Ishita Tiwary, Erica Tortolani, Ayesha Vemuri, Johnny Walker, Rick Worland, Horror Reverie Co-organizers and co-founders Gary D. Rhodes and Mark Jancovich, and the Collective for Research on Epistemologies and Ontologies of Embodied Risk (CORÉRISC).

Cover image credit: Nosferatu (1922, directed by F.W. Murnau)

Monstrum is supported by an editorial board of respected scholars in horror and related fields. We thank our collaborators, contributors and peer reviewers.

Monstrum is published by the Montréal Monstrum Society (MMS). We are 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 & FEATURE INTERVIEW

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

THE DEAD ZONE (David Cronenberg, 1983)

Sensory Overload: Unconscious Communication
and Inter-personal Psychosis in David Cronenberg's
The Dead Zone

MIKAELA BOBIY

Talking Knifepoint Horror with Soren Narnia [Interview]

JEFFERY KLAEHN

Selling Bela Lugosi, with and without Added Sugar: Vampires
and the American Television Commercial

GARY D. RHODES

THE BABADOOK (Jennifer Kent, 2014)

It's All About Repetition: Maternal Time in Horror
from Jeanne Dielman to The Babadook

QIAN ZHANG
SCMS Horror Studies SIG Graduate Student Essay Prize-Winner

SPECIAL FEATURE
HORROR REVERIE 1: AN ONLINE SYMPOSIUM CELEBRATING 100 YEARS OF NOSFERATU

NOSFERATU (F.W. Murnau, 1922)

INTRODUCTION
Nosferatu: A Glacial Blast of Air Still Blowing
from the Beyond
CRISTINA MASSACCESI

Click the image or here for a full-text PDF of the Introduction.

Panel 1: The Legacy of Nosferatu

Speakers: E. Elias Merhige, Stephen Bissette, Argyle Goolsby
Chair Gary D. Rhodes

Panel 2: Historical and Other Contexts
Speakers: Steve Choe, Lokke Heiss, Murray Leeder, Milly Williamson
Chair: Erica Tortolani

Panel 3: Style, Theme, Politics, Aesthetics
Speakers: John Edgar Browning, Mario DeGiglio-Bellemare, Sorcha Ní Fhlainn; Chair: Robert Singer

Click here for a full transcript of Panel 1

Click here for a full transcript of Panel 2

Click here for a full transcript of Panel 3

BOOK REVIEWS

Click the book cover for a PDF of the review.

Ghost Channels: Paranormal Reality Television and the Haunting of Twenty-First Century America
by Amy Lawrence

University Press of Mississippi, 2022
US$30 (pbk)

Reviewer:
KEVIN CHABOT

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