Imaginaires

Revisiting the Haunted House: Remi Weekes’s ‛His House’ (2020)

2024-11-10T06:59:47-08:00

His House (2020) is an uncommon generic hybrid that infuses horror with social realism. The film centers on a South Sudanese couple who have fled their war-torn country and are now seeking asylum in Britain. As the ghosts of their traumatic past have followed them to Europe, the couple cannot make a home of the subsidized house they have been granted, which turns into a gothicized haunted house. The unknown world outside is also a source of terror, as it is shown to be fertile soil for insidious trauma. This article reads the film as an exploration of in-betweenness whose specificity lies in the way it articulates two narratives of liminality: that of asylum seekers as “threshold” people, and that of a couple placed in the liminal state of grief. The hinge articulating the two narratives is the concept of home and the question of (not)at-homeness. Remi Weekes rewrites the Gothic topos of the haunted house by making it a house of mourning where the wish to move on is impeded by the pull of the traumatic past. Not only are the couple in the emotional limbo of grief, however: they are also in the stage of uncertainty experienced by asylum seekers who do not know whether they will stay and live or be sent back to die. Though the film gives the narrative of mourning a happy end, the refugee narrative is left ambiguously open-ended.

Contemporary trouble in America: ‛Us’, Jordan Peele, 2019

2024-11-10T06:49:55-08:00

After a tentative definition of what characterizes elevated horror, the paper examines the different layers of meaning and web of references in Jordan Peele’s Us to try to determine an agenda prolongating and deepening issues already present in his previous Get Out (2017).

Jordan Peele and the Poe canon: revisiting horror

2024-11-10T06:40:20-08:00

This article aims at pointing out how Jordan Peele’s films (Get Out, Us, and Nope) echo the Poe literature, and how American New Horror resonates quite particularly with it, more than traditional horror cinema ever did – at pointing out, also, how Peele’s New Horror stands out by the Gothic legacy it operates in and revisits.

You’d better look twice!: Annexation and De/Colonization of the Gaze in Jordan Peele’s ‛Get Out’ (2017)

2024-11-10T06:30:43-08:00

In his first two fictions (Get Out [2017] and Us [2019]) Jordan Peele invites the viewer to question the way in which the new paths of horror reinvest, through the treatment of images and bodies, the articulation and opposition between seen and unseen, seeing and knowing in a narrative economy that thwarts the expectations of the genre. Get Out renews the figures and forms of horrific discourse by revealing the internalized horror of our contemporary societies. By proposing to take hold of the representations that surround us by decentring our gaze and replace the horrific aberration with a horror indexed on the real world, Get Out manages to revitalize the horrific genre and revisit the history (notably Hollywood) of our representations. This essay will show how Get Out displays a whole range of images, in particular stereotypes and clichés—both photographic and stylistic—in order to question our gaze, which is biased by a habitus that is now only governed by unconscious mental operations. In the film, the exposure of the ideology underlying the standard expression of racism in the United States is based not only on a study of the representations of otherness, but also on the colonisation of the gaze resulting from the interdependence between the visible, the seen, vision and the lens through which we view the world.

'The Girl with all the Gifts', Colm McCarthy (2016), as Post-Horror – Post-Apocalyptic, Post-Modern and Post-Romero, Zombie Film

2024-11-10T06:18:51-08:00

David Church’s definition of post-horror as a sub-genre which is characterized by “formal minimalism” (Church, 2021: 13) and which downplays action scenes as well as explicit horror and gore, seems to exclude de facto the most corporeal and grotesque sub-genre in horror production, namely zombie fiction. However, as The Girl with all the Gifts (Colm McCarthy, 2016) shows, post-horror’s concern for “family dramas about grief, mourning and monstrous reproduction” (Church, 2021: 13), probably contributes to bridging the gap between the two sub-genres. In addition to this, the alleged explicitness and conventional narrative of zombie fiction, such as they can be noticed in McCarthy’s film, might be questioned if ever these stylistic traits are analyzed as manifestations of the grotesque. My contention is that Bakhtin’s ideation of grotesque realism and of the carnivalesque, allows the viewer to perceive the ambivalence of the sub-genre’s conventions and figures. The Girl with all the Gifts’ grotesque and carnivalesque aesthetics and discourse, that can also be related to the eco-critical approach of genre film, thereby inscribes zombie fiction and the zombie figure within the realm Church explores, that of modern, self-aware, subversive and ambivalent horror.