From LUX’s website:

All are superimposed on each other with the projectors aimed from different angles. The superimpositions create a continually changing colour light mix. I interrupt the beam with a series of formal actions creating a complex set of coloured shadows. The final section involves focusing a pair of skeleton hands onto the screen in relationship to my own hands. The intention with this as with my other shadow pieces, is to build a complex visual experience out of simple and readily available aspects of the projection situation. M.L.G. from ‘Real Time/Space’, Art and Artists Dec 1972.

“One of his most simple, most classical, and also most ecstatic pieces”. Jonas Mekas, Village Voice, Oct 11th 1973.

More recent versions of Horror Film 1 have been performed without the final section containing the skeleton hands and with the use of three projectors.

Malcolm Le Grice
Horror Film 1 (1971)
14mins Colour
Performance with slide projector, two film projectors

Last month I attended Raed Yassin’s performance and video Horror is Universal (The End), part of the Beirut Art Center’s Museum as Hub at the New Museum. A visual and sonic mash-up of 1970-80s Egyptian B-movie and Arabic music, Horror is Universal (The End) did not so much show the horrific as it did imply that the framework in which we associate horror (tension, camp, atmosphere) can still be constructed with references outside of mainstream U.S. and Europe.

For the last eight years, Raed Yassin has been undergoing a lifelong project of deconstructing Arab popular culture by sampling audio and visual material from TV, radio, pop songs, and feature films. “Horror is Universal” (The End) is considered a milestone in his evolving oeuvre: a multimedia saga performed live by the artist, it involves mixing and rearranging video extracts from dozens of ’80s Egyptian B-movies on screen, while spinning vintage LPs of popular Arabic music and incorporating electronic instrumentation and singing, to create a unique yet disturbing soundtrack progressing towards a chilling finale. It is, in essence, an attempt at fabricating a non-existent genre in twentieth-century Egyptian cinema—horror—by splicing together the viewers’ collective memory of those all too familiar ‘scary moments’ reenacted by the cheap cinematic production of yesteryear.

Witchcraft is alive and thriving in the small town of Whitewood in which the atmospheric 1960 film Horror Hotel or City of the Dead (John Llewellyn Moxey) is set. From prosecuting women as witches to exploiting traditional gender roles prescribed to women in the early 1960s (sister, girlfriend, caretaker), Horror Hotel begins in the 17th century with the rather gruesome burning of condemned head-witch Elizabeth Selwyn. This opening scenic depiction of a witch and her relationship with the devil is strikingly similar to Mario Bava’s Mask of Satan/Black Sunday (1960), however this story is deeply rooted within the Puritanical history of the United States and, in particular, the terrifying witch trials that targeted young women in Salem, Massachusetts in 1692. Like Black Sunday but unlike the Salem witch trails, the witches in Horror Hotel are all too real and their devotion to Satan means trouble that spans the centuries.

Obsessed with researching the history of witchcraft in New England for her term paper, college student Nan Barlow (Venetia Stephenson) ventures off to Whitewood per the suggestion of her stoic professor Alan Driscoll (played by the scene-stealing Christopher Lee). Stubborn and strong willed, Nan dismiss the concerns of both her boyfriend and brother on the quest to discover something about Satanic worship that has never been known before. Combined with her somewhat condescending approach to the small town, this pretentious ambition to be a scholarly researcher is the core of her naiveté. Nan’s lack of common sense and the inability to gauge her surroundings ultimately leads her to a bloody sacrificial demise on the infamous Candlemas Eve.

Nan’s journey within Horror Hotel parallels, in some ways, that of Marion Crane (Janet Lee) in Alfred Hitchcock’s seminal thriller, Psycho, that was also released in the 1960. Both narratives exploit gender roles and feature a determined blonde who thinks she knows better than everyone else, striking out on her own, and who ultimately winds up paying for this bull-headedness with her life. Similarly, the audience main identification is with Nan for half of the film – her journey is our journey – as it is with Marion Crane. When each character is brutally killed (both young women are stabbed), the directors make it clear that anyone is fair game for the slaughter.

READ THE REST HERE ON NETWORK AWESOME

To me, bad taste is what entertainment is all about…but one must remember that there is such a thing as good bad taste and bad bad taste…To understand bad taste one must have very good taste. Good bad taste can be creatively nauseating but must, at the same time, appeal to the especially twisted sense of humor, which is anything but universal. – John Waters, Shock Value

Based on John Waters’ definition of “good” versus “bad” bad taste, it would be fair to say that the 1972 ludicrous quasi-morality tale on consumption (drugs, the bible, turkey, women) Blood Freak (Brad F. Grinter and Steve Hawks) falls into the latter category of bad, really bad, taste. Not that it’s exceptionally gory or gratuitous or offensive but just that it is horribly produced, horrendously acted, and has appalling dialogue. Yet still (!), Blood Freak is damn entertaining. Most likely this is because it fulfills a nostalgic desire to watch one of the worst movies ever made and to gleefully relish in its kitsch factor. Or perhaps the classic tale of a muscle-man-turned-drug-addicted-killer-turkey-man is a story for the ages.

To be completely honest, Blood Freak is a nearly indescribable film that truly must be watched to believe. But before you do, here’s a little breakdown…READ THE REST OF IT ON NETWORK AWESOME

It is profoundly seductive to believe that photography can be an evidentiary medium of a realm beyond our mortal coil. Even more provocative is the idea of photography, and subsequently film, as a tool to facilitate our voyeuristic desire to see the invisible (fleeting moments, ghostly visions, and even intense fear). In his series Messages from the Darkroom, Alexander Nicolas Gehring taps into photography’s psychological strangeness by positioning its construct and production as spectral sites. This depiction of the camera as an object to channel, capture, and visualize deathly moments, as well as its function in fulfilling our desires to bear witness, was explicitly explored in Michael Powell’s controversial, and equally luscious film, Peeping Tom (1960).

What interests me is Gehring and Powell’s shared urge to confront the past via photographic means and how their work comments on what Martin Scorsese declared [in a 2010 interview with Mark Kermode celebrating the 50th anniversary of Peeping Tom] as our “morbid urge to gaze”. This cultural gaze has evolved in the decades since the release of Peeping Tom, with its nearly prophetic social commentary, into something that is at once more familiar and disturbing in our contemporary world. With this “morbid urge to gaze” in mind, Messages from the Darkroom and Peeping Tom fundamentally comment on the attempt to visualize and record the ultimate gaze: that of death. The very foundation of the photographic medium aims to preserve aspects of memory, life, and experience in relation (and perhaps in reaction) to this very personal and profound moment we will all experience. Channeled through the lens of the camera, and re-born in the haunted space of the darkroom, the spirits contained and preserved within these images have been called forth by the artist/photographer/filmmaker/mad scientist.

Based on the historical usage of photography by scientists and occult practitioners to capture the presence of ghosts in “spirit photography”, Alexander Nicolas Gehring’s Messages from the Darkroom brings to light how space, specifically the room where film is processed, functions as a site for the spectral. This series conflates the notion of “medium” in photography in that the camera produces a physical medium (a photographic image) and acts as a spiritual medium (a channel between the living and non-living). Here the camera is medium in literal form, producing a representation of what some believe to be objective documentation of ghosts, becoming a bridge between the corporeal and spiritual worlds. Still, what is most interesting about Gehring’s photographs is not the evoked image itself but the concept of a spectral site, a place where the dead are re-born and re-placed back into the land of the living.

Now revered as a British new wave classic, Michael Powell’s career-ending Peeping Tom treads similar waters in its fetishization of camera objects, the haunted space of the darkroom, voyeuristic eye, and the distinct presence of the dead. The film shows how the torturous childhood of Mark Lewis continuously haunts his adult state of mind, compelling him to use his camera as a recording device and lethal weapon. In glorious Eastman colour, the aesthetic of Peeping Tom – the visualization of the darkroom as two-toned, red and black, dark and shadowy, warm and clinical – is most noticeable in Gehring’s photographs Medium and Light Phenomenon. The camera in these works is captured as a self-contained medium and as a sculptural object. As Powell suggests by alternating viewpoints between Mark’s “special” camera with the another “outside” lens, Gehring’s confrontational camera is also shown through the unrepresented lens (an autonomous camera that functions as the audience point-of-view).

In the cellar, darkness prevails both day and night, and even when we are carrying a lighted candle, we see shadows dancing on the dark walls. Gaston Bachelard – The Poetics of Space

The darkroom (connoting the laboratory, dungeon, cellar, etc.) is a space of process and discovery. Gehring’s darkroom becomes the place of the séance. Referencing the photographic documentation of paranormal activity by notable early twentieth century German psychic researcher, Albert Freiherr von Schrenck-Notzing, Messages from the Darkroom focuses on the dead returning and co-mingling with the living via photographic representation. This darkroom references an arena of scientific research where new technology is used to capture the unseen, in this case ghosts, in an attempt to be in closer contact with an extension of human existence. The darkroom and cinematic space in Peeping Tom acts as a dual place of sanctuary and fear. In this room, Mark returns to the site of his own psychological abuse by processing and consuming the films he makes by murdering women. With each repetitive viewing, these victims are repeatedly brought back to life, made to watch their own death, and be killed again.

Of course, this is the very nature of the filmic/photographic medium itself, a sensitized form capturing a specified series of events in time that can be replayed in perpetuity. As time and space collapse, that which is depicted onscreen never truly fades; always existing as it was at that very moment it was captured, frozen forever on celluloid. Furthermore, our current moment is one where the medium of film is in the process of becoming obsolete. In the wake of the quality, ease, and accessibility of digital technology, there appears to be little use for analog outside the realm of nostalgia. A near living object itself (film curator Henri Langlois firmly believed that nitrate film had to be used/exercised in order to stay alive), film now finds itself in a ghostly space within the digital realm.

Alexander Nicolas Gehring and Michael Powell are seduced by the psychic camera as evidence but wary of its ability to produce accurate visual records. Gehring engages in an obsession to document the afterlife while Powell challenges the perversity of documenting all aspects of our lives. They contest the “all knowing” camera eye because they also consider what happens outside of the frame; photographic representation inherently lays on the liminal boundary between fact and fiction. The foundation of the darkroom is what grounds these layers of suggested ghostly presence within the photographic “medium”. Itself in danger of becoming a thing of the past, this dark room provides the spectral space in which we can conjure up the unseen and indulge, repeatedly, in our collective and cultural morbid desire to gaze.

Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead II (1987) is a cinematic resurrection of the director’s earlier film Evil Dead(1981). It can be dangerous territory when an artist is given license to go back and adapt their own work but in re-appropriating his own film, Raimi, much more Georges Méliès than John Carpenter, reclaims an originality within the genre during a time of over-used horror movie conventions.

And that’s just the beginning! Click on the link above to read the whole thing including musings on architecture, Gaston Bachelard, and the video nasty.

Incognitum Hactenus is a new quarterly journal featuring writing on art, horror, and philosophy. Conceived as an ongoing investigation into each sphere and its crossovers, the journal publishes new work by leading international scholars, artists, filmmakers, curators, musicians, and designers. With a focused interest in that which finds an affiliation with horrific contemporaneity and the exposure to radical thought, Incognitum Hactenum reveals the twisting of contingency (that which comes from outside) as it produces new monstrosities. We aim to tear asunder the fleshy belly of the established and expected.

Volume 1.1 “Real Horror” of Incognitum Hactenum includes texts and artwork by Amanda Beech, Simon Clark, Carl Neville, Ben Rivers, Steven Shaviro, and Ben Woodard that were produced in conjunction with The Real Horror Symposium last October in London.

Please visit the website to download the first issue and to learn about the journal.

We hope that you enjoy and participate in these new strains of discussion as we celebrate the present, past, and future of art, horror, and philosophy!

Life is an obscure hobo bumming a ride on the omnibus of art – Maxwell H. Brock

My first essay for Network Awesome Magazine went up this week. It’s a re-do on a little ditty about Roger Corman’s A Bucket of Blood where I discuss sculpture, failure, the art world, murder, humor, and Deleuze. You know, the usual.

Read: Who Says the Art World Isn’t Scary: Roger Corman’s Classic A Bucket of Blood

Because I’m always thinking about “why horror?” for a generation of artists, filmmakers, and cultural production, I often ask myself, why horror? I mean, how did I get into this mess in the first place? While there are many layers in answering that question, amongst them being the magical lure many of these films have, actually pinpointing my obsession with horror aesthetics and narratives has come down to this…The Cure’s video for Lullaby.

Twenty-two years after its release, The Cure’s Disintegration (released May 1989) is not only one of the best albums of the late 20th century but also a formative influence in my life. I vividly remember watching The Cure’s music videos, ranging from the earlier and silly Love Cats to the love lorn Love Song to the powerful Fascination Street featured on Disintegration, on MTV with such intensity. Their goth allure appealed greatly (and still does) to my inner depressive and most likely also cemented my enduring love for England and black eyeliner. After recently re-watching The Cure’s Lullaby video, directed by Tim Pope, a flood of memories rushed back and I realized that even before my first horror film scared the pants off me (Halloween 5),  Lullaby was where it all began.

Of course now I recognize the filmic references within the video that escaped me at the time. Now I can’t look at it without thinking of German Expressionists Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) and F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922) or even many years later Werner Herzog’s stunning Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979). The dark-rimmed eyes, creeping human-like figure, foreboding death, being repeatedly consumed, and the fear of sleep are all at play with these films and culminate, with all its British goth pop glory, into Lullaby.

On candystripe legs the spiderman comes / Softly through the shadow of the evening sun/ Stealing past the windows of the blissfully dead / Looking for the victim shivering in bed / Searching out fear in the gathering gloom and / Suddenly! / A movement in the corner of the room!

And there is nothing I can do / When I realise with fright / That the spiderman is having me for dinner tonight!

Quietly he laughs and shaking his head / Creeps closer now / Closer to the foot of the bed / And softer than shadow and quicker than flies / His arms are all around me and his tongue in my eyes / ”Be still be calm be quiet now my precious boy / Don’t struggle like that or I will only love you more / For it’s much too late to get away or turn on the light / The spiderman is having you for dinner tonight”

And I feel like I’m being eaten / By a thousand million shivering furry holes / And I know that in the morning I will wake up / In the shivering cold / The spiderman is always hungry…

Two essays of mine have landed on the fabulous Network Awesome

What Makes a Man Start Fires: 1980s American Culture and The Burning
Through the lens of a campfire horror tale, Tony Maylam’s slasher classic The Burning (1981) begins with a prank gone wrong and ends with a series of revengeful murders. Gleaning from a culturally volatile period in America history, The Burning visually manifests displaced youth in the most gratuitous manner. It perpetuates, capitalizes, and exploits the fear that the unknown can happen to any one…read the rest and watch the film here.

Who Says the Art World Isn’t Scary?: Roger Corman’s Classic, A Bucket of Blood
If there’s a better satirical film on the art world than A Bucket of Blood (1959) then I certainly haven’t seen it (note: John Waters’ Pecker comes close). This playful jab at the beatnik artist types of the 1950s easily translates into the ridiculousness of contemporary art. Reportedly made by “King of the B-movies” Roger Corman for a mere $50k, A Bucket of Blood is a thoughtful and provoking look at the beginning of modern art as cultural phenomenon. It has a lot in common with the 1953 version of House of Wax (André De Toth) in its representation of the frustrated and revengeful artist, however, it moves beyond the artist as “individual” to cleverly mimic — and mock — the capriciousness of the art world as a whole…read the rest and watch the movie here.