Triple Bladed Sword

In honour of Pride Month, a reflection on my journey from homophobia to allyship via Star Trek: The Next Generation, Clive Barker's dark fantasy novels, and Gandalf! 

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This week, I'm talking about Gabrielle Moss's totally tubular Paperback Crush: The Totally Radical History of '80s and '90s Teen Fiction, teaching Children's fiction in University, and how looking at teenage paperbacks might lead us to learning about really important moments in the representation of marginalized voices. 

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I'm back! I needed a break, and while I was doing nothing for a while, I was reading Jenny Odell's How to Do Nothing.  It got me thinking about my days as a pastor, but also how painting fantasy minis is how I currently practice Sabbath, or the art of doing nothing. This is the first in my "Office Hours" series for 2021, shorter episodes that are meant to emulate the sorts of conversations I have with students when they visit me in my office. 

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We come to the end of our journey in the postapocalyptic wastelands of books, comics, films, and games with T.C. Boyle's short story "After the Plague" and the final part of Station Eleven.

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This week, we look at David Robert Mitchell's brilliant twist on so many conventions of earlier horror films, from the slasher to the zombie to the supernatural curse in It Follows.

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Another study of film language, this time using George Miller's high-octane masterwork, Mad Max: Fury Road. We'll see how the movie and Station Eleven share the same story while looking at how each narrative addresses the theme "Survival is Insufficient."

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Ghost stories and an adaptation of Japanese Horror this week as we hit the 2000s. Relying exclusively on film language, I analyze the way Gore Verbinski's The Ring hems in its narrative to provide the ultimate fake out ending.

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This week, we look at making the familiar unfamiliar in the seventh part of Station Eleven, bringing it into conversation with Craig Raine's riddle poem "A Martian Sends a Postcard Home" and Nathan Pyle's webcomic, Stranger Planet. 

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When I originally envisioned my 100 Years of Horror, I didn't think I'd include a film, to underscore that many see it as a low point in the history of the horror film. But by popular acclaim, friends and student wore me down with the question, "What about Scream?" The answer is finally here, and it has to do with media-savvy '90s teens, the guy who wrote Dawson's Creek, and one of the "movie brats" of the '70s reinventing himself for a new generation.

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In this episode, I get to talk about one of my favourite movies of all time, John Carpenter's The Thing. And as you might expect, I go on a little long about body horror, great edits, shooting on location, and a discussion of how the direct horror of showing the Thing results in a little suggestive horror, since seeing the Thing isn't the same thing as knowing what it is we're seeing. 

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