Image Credit: “The Substance – Official Trailer.” YouTube, uploaded by NEON, 14 February 2024, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNlrGhBpYjc. In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), as Victor Frankenstein starts building a female companion for his monstrous creature, he realizes: “…she might become ten thousand times more malignant than her mate and delight, for its own sake, in murder and wretchedness….
Tag: Horror
Demonizing Mothers: Psychodramas, Horror Movies, and Hermeneutics of Suspicion
Lauren A. Mitchell// Fair warning: this post contains some spoilers for Ari Aster’s Hereditary, but you should read it anyway. Early in Ari Aster’s 2018 Hereditary, family matriarch and film anti-heroine Annie Leigh attends a grief support meeting after the death of her mother. We learn that Annie and her mother, Ellen, had at best a conflicted…
The Theatre of Presidential Cruelty from American Psycho to The House that Jack Built
Lauren A. Mitchell // By way of a preface, I’ve spent the last couple of weeks lingering over the subject of this post about how Donald Trump has been an inspiration for a number of violent imaginary characters. When I originally put it up, it was right before news of the Pittsburgh Tree of…