When folk horror goes beautiful: You Won鈥檛 Be Alone (2022) This is a folk horror witch film about severe, abject child abuse. And as we鈥檒l also see, it鈥檚 about resistance to that kind of abuse, and the desire to find meaning and beauty in life, even with the knowledge that horrific, monstrous evil exists.Read More
Bones and All (2022), or, When Horror Goes Beautiful II Something must have been in the air in 2022. In the same year that You Won鈥檛 be Alone聽came keening gloriously out of Macedonia, Bones and All聽loped its achingly beautiful way out of Hollywood. Film essay by Eleanor Johnson, whose book Monstrous Bitch...Read More
Succubus (2024): Female monstrosity in the age of AI Recently, I watched Succubus (2024); I decided to watch it because, historically, the succubus tradition has some tangency with the tradition of female monstrosity that animates my forthcoming book, Monstrous Bitch, which is the tradition of the Lami...Read More
Drag Me to Hell (2009) Not all of the 鈥渆levated鈥� horror coming out right now is doing right by us, nor even by cultural history. Drag Me to Hell (2009) is a film animated by exactly the wrong amount of research.Read More
Hereditary (2018): The monstrous bitch bites back It would be difficult to find a 21st century horror film that was more critically acclaimed and more genuinely terrifying than Hereditary. The underlying reason, I think, is that the film does something extraordinary in its thinking about women in re...Read More
