Johan Höglund

Introduction: Transnational and Postcolonial Vampires

When Jonathan Harker, deep in the Transylvanian mountains, embarks on the final stage of his journey towards Count Dracula’s residence, he overhears the frightened natives whispering ‘Denn die Todten reiten Schnell’ — ‘for the dead travel fast’. Dracula, in the disguise of Harker’s driver, flashes a gleaming smile in the speaker’s direction causing great consternation and much crossing. The vampire then drives Harker into an unholy night full of howling wolves and strange omens, taking the hapless Englishman the final few miles to the castle that, in many ways, marks the border between East and West or between the imagined self of Europe and the Oriental Other.

Can the Subaltern Speak Under Duress? : Voice, Agency, and Corporal Discipline in Zero Dark Thirty

Can the Subaltern Speak Under Duress? : Voice, Agency, and Corporal Discipline in Zero Dark Thirty

A history of animal horror cinema

In 1887, French sculptor Emmanuel Fremiet’s Gorille enlevant une femme (Gorilla carrying off a woman) was awarded the prestigious Medal of Honor when it was first exhibited in Paris. The life-sized bronze sculpture shows a gorilla clutching a naked, struggling woman to his right side. The gorilla stares in front of him and carries a large stone in his left hand, perhaps confronting a group of humans out to rescue the woman. The scene references Giabologna’s famous The Rape of the Sabine Women, but replaces the Roman citizens of the original with the ferocious ape. Fremiet had tried his hand at such a composition before. In 1859 his sculpture Gorille enlevant une negresse (Gorilla carrying off a Negress) had been banished from the Paris Salon of that year. The complaints were very straightforward. The poet Charles Baudelaire asked in a review of the Salon: Why are we not given a crocodile, a tiger, or any other wild animal that might eat a woman? Because this is not about eating, but rape! It is the ape alone, this gigantic ape at once so much more and less than a man, which has at times shown a human appetite for women. (Baudelaire, quoted by Gott)

Simian Horror in Rise and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

As discussed in the Introduction to this collection, animal horror films often involve the invasion of one species into the territory of another. This boundary violation then triggers a conflict where, ultimately, one species shows itself dominant. In Alligator (1980), Sharknado (2013) or Spiders (2013) the animal constitutes the invader, as dangerous predators enter the human urban landscape and begin attacking and eating the people who live there. The city becomes a site of sudden, visceral and extreme horror that climaxes in a Darwinian struggle for survival. Modernity in the form of chainsaws and shotguns, readily available in the city, is used to counter the threat of the invasive species. The alternative to the animal invasion model is when humans enter the animal domain. In films such as Grizzly (1976), Congo (1995), Anaconda (1997), Rogue (2007) and The Grey (2011) the human is the invasive species. As Dawn Keetly shows above in her discussion of The Grey, the struggle that ensues is sometimes fought without the arsenal of modernity available in the city, pitting one naked species against another. What both types of film have in common is the notion that the border that separates the animal from the human world is dangerously porous and that when violated it must quickly be re-erected. Predatory animals and humans cannot exist alongside each other.

Parables for the paranoid: affect and the war gothic

This paper discusses a series of horror war films set during the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq with the help of the concept of affect as outlined by Eve Sedgwick and Brian Massumi. The films studied in this paper combine the zombie genre with the military invasion story so that monstrous affect is always produced against what is referred to as a super-political landscape. In analysing these films, the paper abandons the a priori expectation that the use of affect will produce a set of sane (non-paranoid), fostering and liberating possibilities. The general argument of the paper is instead that these films simultaneously induce interpretative paranoia and present the spectator with the possibility that the foundation for this paranoia is inherently unstable. Thus, the paper ultimately explores the usefulness of affect on material that appears to lend itself to the traditional deconstructive endeavour and discerns points of commonality between deconstruction and affect studies.This paper discusses a series of horror war films set during the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq with the help of the concept of affect as outlined by Eve Sedgwick and Brian Massumi. The films studied in this paper combine the zombie genre with the military invasion story so that monstrous affect is always produced against what is referred to as a super-political landscape. In analysing these films, the paper abandons the a priori expectation that the use of affect will produce a set of sane (non-paranoid), fostering and liberating possibilities. The general argument of the paper is instead that these films simultaneously induce interpretative paranoia and present the spectator with the possibility that the foundation for this paranoia is inherently unstable. Thus, the paper ultimately explores the usefulness of affect on material that appears to lend itself to the traditional deconstructive endeavour and discerns points of commonality between deconstruction and affect studies.