Links

Dusty Covers (my Instagram)
Camera Obscure (my photography)

Check out the work and various writing projects of these friends, allies and kindred spirits...

Alexandra Heller-Nicholas

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Random Creepy Scene #487: Quiet As A Nun

Image
Armchair Thriller was a British television series, broadcast on ITV by Thames in 1978 and 1980. It was essentially a horror/supernatural orientated anthology series that specialised in adapting various spooky novels and stories. It consisted of two weekly 25 minute episodes, usually screened at 8pm on a Tuesday and Thursday evening. I’m too young to remember it, but a recent conversation with several ( ever so slightly) older friends alerted me to one particular episode of the series entitled Quiet as a Nun … Adapted from the 1977 novel of the same name by Antonia Fraser, Quiet as a Nun was a six part dramatisation revolving around Fraser's regular sleuth Jemima Shore, who revisits the convent where she was schooled following the mysterious death of one of the nuns. The nun, Sister Miriam, was a former friend of Jemima’s and she apparently starved herself to death in a ruined tower in the grounds of the convent. Jemima soon learns from the girls at the convent about a myste
Read more

Tenebrae

Image
1982 Dir. Dario Argento After a detour into witchy Gothic horror with Suspiria  (1977) and Inferno (1980),  Tenebrae  marked director Dario Argento's return to the gialli which he helped popularise in the early Seventies. Based on the filmmaker’s own experiences of an unhinged fan obsessed with his work, Tenebrae  is generally regarded as one of his finest films. It follows the story of American mystery-thriller novelist Peter Neal, whose arrival in Rome to promote his latest title coincides with a series of violent murders – the perpetrator of which claims to have been inspired by Neal’s latest book. When the author himself begins to receive death threats from the killer he must use his literary know-how to snare the slasher before he becomes the next victim. Unfolding as a cunningly reflexive critique of the Italian giallo, violence in cinema, and indeed Dario Argento’s own distinct body of work, Tenebrae directly addresses the misogyny he has often been accused of through
Read more

Ginger Snaps

Image
2000 Dir. John Fawcett When film critic and writer Laura Mulvey posited that (in horror cinema) ‘Monstrosity is explicitly associated with menstruation and female sexuality... woman’s monstrous nature is inextricably bound up with her difference as man’s sexual other', ( Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema ) it's like she was specifically referring to Ginger Snaps . Written by Karen Walton, Ginger Snaps tells of a young woman who is attacked by a werewolf on the night she begins to menstruate and begins to transform into a monster. Links between the menstrual cycle and lycanthropy cunningly swirl together to form a twisted tale of monstrous pubescence filtered through a chilling body-horror narrative. The result is a dark, savagely funny and haunting film that staggers blinking and bloodied into the unkind light of day as the most significant ‘menstrual horror’ since Carrie (1976) . In classic horror cinema, the figure of the werewolf is used to signify a collapse of
Read more