Category: Horror

Horror, Papers

Forensic and Experimental Estrangement

OJ

I have a new paper out! “Forensic and Experimental Estrangement: Investigating the Supernatural Body” is free to read in the latest issue of Supernatural Studies. It’s a special issue, devoted to one of my favourite films of all time, The Exorcist. I’ve written a paper on that film before, looking at the archaeological imagery of the film and how it relates to the presentation of medicine therein (that paper can be found in volume 7.1 of Horror Studies), and this new paper is a little related to that.

I happen to love horror films about exorcism and possessed or supernatural bodies, and I note that, in some of them at least, there’s a strong focus on medical examination of the body in question. Sometimes that examination is carried out on a living person, as it is in The Exorcist with little Regan, but sometimes the person is dead, and the examination shifts to autopsy. It almost never goes well.

In this paper, I look at four different films – The Exorcist, The Atticus Institute, The Possession of Hannah Grace, and The Autopsy of Jane Doe. I’m interested in how these films present medical science, both its practice and its efficacy… and, honestly, it’s not exactly a research hardship, sitting on my arse and watching horror films.

I’ll take any excuse for that.

Horror, Papers, SFF

A Bold Question and “Frankenstein”

OJ

I have a new chapter out! My paper “A Bold Question: Consent and the Experimental Subject in Frankenstein” is out in the book A Vindication of Monsters: Essays on Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley, edited by Claire Fitzpatrick and published by IFWG.

If you’re a science fiction writer, and I am, or a horror writer, and I’m that too, then you’re likely to have stumbled across Frankenstein at some point. And yes, Shelley wrote a lot of other things but let’s face it: this is the one that everyone knows, the one that stuck. So, unimaginative as it may be, when I saw the call for contributors I went to what I knew: Frankenstein, and science. Because let’s face it: Victor Frankenstein? Is both a very good and a very bad scientist. He’s certainly not that good a man, but let’s stick to the science here.

You can argue that scientific ethics was in its infancy when he was out robbing graveyards and cobbling together the reanimated dead, and you’d be right. You can argue that he had the financial wherewithal to avoid scrutiny and professional oversight, and you’d be right there too. In many ways, genius aside, his practice of science was… debatable. It does, however, make for a fun paper. I had a great deal of enjoyment in writing it anyway, and I hope that you enjoy reading it.

Horror, Short stories

Those Shining Things Are Out of Reach

OJ

I have a new story out! “Those Shining Things Are Out of Reach” can be found in Wilted Pages: An Anthology of Dark Academia from Shortwave Publishing.

Now, I enjoy reading dark academia but I’ve never really written any before this, so when editors Ai Jiang and Christi Nogle kindly asked if I’d be interested in contributing a story, I about fell over myself to give it a go. Especially as I was allowed to take a slightly more speculative approach… Don’t get me wrong. I haven’t gone full-on sci-fi here (tempting though the prospect was), as I wanted to still maintain a very contemporary setting. “Those Shining Things” is, however, ambiguously placed when it comes to time period. It’s near-future, mostly, though informed by historic events.

I was interested to see how far I could push ambiguity in this story; how many things I couldn’t come straight out and say. I’m not, it must be said, an especially subtle writer. When I have something to say I tend to want to hammer it, so maybe this is nowhere near as subtle, or as elliptical, as I hoped it would be, but I still enjoy the lingering sense of threat. A lot of my fiction work is influenced by the dark side of science: unethical experiments and horrific hypotheses, and I’m interested in seeing just how people can get corrupted into behaving that way. This story was a way to explore that. It’s pretty grim, but then this is dark academia.

Sometimes it’s fun to be horrific.

Horror, Papers, SFF

Transgressive Reproduction in “Évolution”

OJ

I have a new paper out! “Évolution (Lucile Hadžihalilović, 2015) – Transgressive Reproduction” can be found in The Deep, edited by Marko Teodorski and Simon Bacon. It’s one of the Genre Fiction and Film Companions series from Peter Lang, which means it’s basically an excuse for academics to do close readings on their favourite genre films. In this case, genre films connected to the ocean. Anyone who’s ever loved a sea monster will understand the desire to contribute to a book like this!

I saw Simon talking about the book a few years back on Twitter, inviting calls for papers. I do like creepy ocean stories, so I wracked my brain for one that I could pitch a chapter on. I didn’t have to wrack very hard, because I’d recently seen something very weird and very cool. It was Lucile Hadžihalilović’s film Évolution, which was about women who seemed to be part starfish, living on an isolated island with a group of young sons. These sons were adopted, and human, and being used in medical experiments so that their mothers could reproduce in other ways.

The downside was that the film was in French, and while I have schoolgirl French (propped up by daily lessons with Duolingo) it is still very schoolgirl indeed. The upside was that the script was absolutely minimal – for vast swathes of it there was no talking at all – and so I was determined to manage. Partly because the film was weird and cool and I loved it, but partly because the setting struck me as especially interesting. The women and children primarily inhabited the intertidal zone (my marine biology background was excited to be used!) and the navigation of their transgressive biologies could be mapped onto aspects of that environment.

It’s a short paper, but I had fun writing it. If you get a chance to see the film, don’t hesitate! It’s amazing.

Horror, SFF, Short stories

Lise Meitner Speaks to the Living

OJ

I have a new story out! “Lise Meitner Speaks to the Living” is out in volume 8 of Horror Library, edited by Eric J. Guignard. It’s one of my science history stories, this time about Lise Meitner, who was one of the physicists who discovered nuclear fission. She was invited to work on the atomic bomb in World War Two, but refused on moral grounds. I don’t know how much comfort that would be in the wake of something like Hiroshima and Nagasaki, though… it was still her work being used as the basis for slaughter. That must have been very hard to live with.

In many ways this is a bookend story; the second of a pair. The first of them, “Otto Hahn Speaks to the Dead,” about a chemist who worked on chemical weapons in World War One, was originally published in The Dark.

Meitner and Hahn were friends. Complicated friends, but friends for all that. When push came to shove, one of them went along and one didn’t. That, too, must have been hard to live with. A relationship built on ground seeded with landmines, I think. I wonder how much each of them resented the other, deep down. If they did. (How could they not?)

It was meant to be a two-story thing. Two and done.

I’m not sure that I am done, to be honest.