Hey guys, gals and non-binary pals! There must be thousands of horror film blogs out there and maybe even a good handful of feminist psychoanalytical horror ones, who knows? Well, this one is mine. Thanks for coming. So as it’s my first post I thought I’d introduce myself, my love of horror and why I like to analyse the shit out of it.
So why horror? I was always a macabre child. I loved ghost stories (Usborne Book of Ghosts anyone?). I also wonder if growing up on the Yorkshire Moors automatically gives you an appreciation of bleak spookiness? But I lay the blame squarely at my father’s (and his VHS collection’s) feet. He was a huge genre movie fan – his favourite horror was Peter Jackson’s magnificent Bad Taste. I fondly recall chuckling along to it at my father’s knee as someone’s brain fell out of the back of their head and my mother ran shrieking from the living room. As you can imagine my parents had a somewhat lax and anarchic attitude towards film censorship and at the tender age of 10 they happily allowed me and my sister to rent 18-rated movies at our local video shop (I’m clearly ageing myself here). These were the mid-90s glory days of the `5 videos, for 5 days, for £5’ offer. I spent many weekends browsing the grubby horror cover titles and managing to rent some masterpieces and some absolute shite, of which both types of films will live on in my heart forever. As a huge film fan in general I managed to keep up a pretty healthy diet of horror throughout my teens and twenties. In high school I was that friend who insisted on exposing everyone to the goriest horror films during sleepovers and then later house parties. Ah, the joy I experienced showing Braindead, Mr Vampire and Battle Royale to my friends for the first time.
However, it wasn’t until the fateful day that I saw The Descent that a more academic interest in horror started to burst forth from my chest like a H.R. Geiger creation. The Descent is actually the first film I loved so much that I went to see it in the cinema twice in the same week. I was absolutely terrified and exhilarated, and even though I knew exactly what was going to happen during the second watch I still completely shat myself. At the time I was also getting into feminist and psychoanalytical literary theory at university, so whilst watching this movie a spark was kindled. Was there some connection between this female cast, the blood, the womb-like caves, women’s experiences of their bodies? What was this movie saying? I couldn’t quite put these thoughts down, they had got me like a pick-axe to the leg. Later on I randomly picked up Barbara Creed’s legendary tome ‘The Monstrous-Feminine’ and this spark turned into a raging, prom night fire. I finally started finding satisfying answers to the questions I had about the movie and oh so much more.
So after devouring the book, I started to view horror (and cinema in general) through a feminist and psychoanalytical lens and I basically haven’t stopped – once you open that red door you can’t close it! Over the years I’ve properly nerded out on feminist and psychoanalytical film theory (which admittedly, can be perplexing) through books, podcasts, lectures and documentaries. Then why start this blog now? Well for various reasons I have a lot more time on my hands, so why not write about the things I love? I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoy writing for it.
So what’s your horror origin story? Do you like to view movies through a certain lens? Or do you think that’s just a load of old nonsense? Let me know in the comments below.
Let's Scare Lauren to Death 