Horror Films for 2023

29Oct23

This was the first year in some time that was a struggle. Given that so many of the best horror films of 2023 list films actually from 2022 (like La Huerta the Bone Woman or M3gan).

There was a shift towards comedy horror that seemed prevalent the previous year but with less success. There were some attempts to follow in Peele’s footsteps but also with mixed success (Angry Black Girl with Her Monster, and especially The Blackening). Several attempts to redo the monster film (Boogeyman, Cobweb, Perpetrator didn’t really work for me). Also El Conde is not listed here as it is a dark comedy and not a horror film.

1-Sick

The best film to directly address COVID since Host (2020). Plays well with the seeming randomness of the crazy slasher and the indiscriminateness of virus contagion. Very well paced and the characters are neither too sympathetic nor disposable.

2-No One Will Save You

Mostly makes it because of its lead character though is a fairly nice take on the alien abduction theme (following distantly in the footstes of Signs). Shifts from being a home invasion theme to one of haunting (being rag-dolled by tractor beams rather than demonic forces). Loses its steam a bit in the third act.

3-It Lives Inside

With definite It Follows vibes the film is a slick and nicely paced possession film. It may fall too easily in the reassertion of traditional beliefs to combat the demon though the film gets a lot of credit for being patient with its topic.

4-Enys Men

Somewhere between Dont Look Now, Skinamarink, and The Wicker Man, Enys Men tries to build a feeling of dread more than one of scares, gore, or fright. It becomes somewhat too disjointed and it is too thin on plot to make the later horrors hit their mark though the experimental aspect is much appreciated.

5-Talk to Me

One of my favorite of the year simply because it changes the formalism of demonic possession and makes possession less a metaphor of disease and more akin to teens huffing paint for fun. Sophie Wilde does an incredible job pulling the narrative thread through to the end.

6-Brooklyn 45

A decent attempt to do a locked room mystery with a ghost story. While many claim this is one of the best horror films 2023 I think it doesn’t have enough steam to make it through the third act.

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Horror Films for 2022

16Oct22

I have made this list previously here and here if you’re looking for further/older recommendations.

Brief note: Trend wise two things seem more common this year than the last few years in general in horror film (besides more ‘artsy’ A24 films and generally retro moves) and that is more comedy horror films (Bodies, Bodies, Bodies, My Best Friend’s Exorcism, Barbarian, Sissy, Dayshift, Studio 666) and quite a few more cosmic/psychadelic horror films (Glorious, Hellbender, ).

Also Nope is not on the list – I liked it but it is really not a horror film.

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Every scheme, all at once, forever

23Nov21

This past weekend was the memorial service for Jan Ritsema: director, performer, publisher, and social engineer extraordinaire who founded PAF (performing arts forum) – a convent turned art residency that is now collectively cared for nestled in the French countryside. Jan often talked about PAF like self imposed exposure therapy: ‘I don’t like people, or nature, or work, but I did this to myself!’

It is often difficult to convince others of why PAF is worth the trip or at least worth going to without sounding like an evangelist or an outdated hippy. It is tricky to explain why a building, filled with semi-tumultuous groups of people, can feel like something radical on its own.

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Horror films for Halloween

30Oct21

Previously I made a list of some of my favorite horror films (with some of them being less known). Below are a few of the best horror films from the last two years.

Probably my favorite horror film which is not really scary but creepy and unsettling – it is about a group of women dealing with aging and house that seems to change the deeper go inside it.

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Formal Extremities

01Feb21

Remembering Alina

Roberto Matta ‘The Unthinkable’

In August of 2015 Alina Poppa and myself along with several others present at PAF (the Performing Arts Forum) toyed with the idea of a film and text series that would emphasize the mind altering and horrific aspects of mathematics. We created an incomplete list, watching the first film Triangle, and then the idea was set on a shelf and half-forgotten. At the time, I do not think that I realized that the idea was not a mere curiosity for us, but that, especially for Alina and myself, that it was in fact a core concept for us both, namely, that there was something radically alien about the formal and the ways in which it bridged the domains of thought and body, especially in terms of navigation, horizon, and understanding thought in its radically minimalist dimension.

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What did Darwin do?

29Jan21

The image of Charles Darwin is buried under tons of both saint-making and vilification. In addition the peculiarities of his life, the massive shifts within his profession, and the vastly different interpretations of his work immediately after and long after the publication of The Origin in 1859.

Darwin was an unofficial naturalist when he set out on the Beagle and returned and worked for almost a decade before publishing his most famous book. The Origin was in his own view a bit of a rush job as he wanted to take more time on his ‘big species book’ but news of Alfred Russell Wallace’s similar theory of evolution prompted him to speed up matters.

The method of presentation of Darwin’s book is at odds with the textbook picture of him as having a eureka moment in the Galapagos islands and ‘discovering’ evolution. Nor can Darwin be easily folded into the ranks of either empiricism, mechanism, or materialism (understanding that those terms were starting to have a particular meaning in biology at the time. Darwin was a naturalist who became a theory-laden empiricist in part by hijacking the rhetorical modes of natural theology and analogical comparisons within common knowledge (especially animal breeding and training).

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Colonial Ends/Ends of Life (pt2)

30Nov20

Branching off from last time here the idea is to discuss the human animal relation and how it relates to the question of race. As Zakiyyah Iman Jackson discusses in the introduction to her book Becoming Human many materialist and post-humanities defenses of the human relies upon raising animals up to the level of generic humanness without questioning whether this generic or universal human is simply a repetition of the western european male of neo-liberalist discourse. But it isn’t about repeating this critique but wondering about what grounds could serve as even the beginnings of a replacement.

As Jackson points out the placing of humans and animals on an ontological continuity does nothing to stop the hierarchy of the purported capacities of the races on the earth. Furthermore the common mode of anti-anthrocentrism in contemporary theory has limited stakes other than as a form of self-sacrifice in the name of future species…to ‘let nature heal itself, and let something else evolve.’

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Colonial Ends/Ends of Life (pt 1)

16Nov20

Recently I did two overlapping talks (one in Brussels one online) on the question of the ends of life (genocide, apocalypse, extinction) and how this relates to the philosophy and history of biology (thinking about ends in terms of goals or thinking life teleologically in the overarching sense in that life is defined by having either local or future-oriented goals). Looking at the past few entries on Sylvia Wynter’s work the connection to the history of colonialism should be relatively straight-forward – namely the question of the definition of the human (especially if it is a narrow definition that thinks it is a universal definition) is central to the various disasters of European expansion.

We have a tangle of problems concerning how, and whether to, define the human vis a vis the history of biology and its theological and colonial inheritances both implicit and explicit:

-life as fundamentally intentional/goal oriented and whether this is founded about spirit or reason (as defined according to the Judeo-Christian tradition)

-human life as radically or not radically different from animal life (esp leading up to and immediately after Darwin’s On the Origin of Species) and how this in turn plays into race

-the question of whether the human is better defined as a historical or technological being over and above relying on a particular form of life or particular biological form.

-the question of recasting human animal comparisons in light of anthropogenic climate change and planetary extinction and the ‘we’ of the human that causes/faces extinction

Filed under: Hegel, history, ontology, politics, race, trauma, Uncategorized   |  2 Comments
Tags: afropessimism, animality, Chakrabarty, sylvia wynter, Thomas Moynihan

Sociogeny and Biology (pt 2)

12Nov20

Wynter’s various essays (often touching on Fanon and Cesaire among others) makes a case that the stage of human life that we still have not properly understood is that of the human as narrative and as a narrative making being. This follows from Cesaire’s science of the word. She concludes her essay on the sociogenic principle via Cesaire:

“It is such a new science that Fanon’s fellow Martinican, the
Negritude poet, essayist, and political activist, Aime Cesaire, coming
from the same lived experience of being both Man and its liminal
Other, had called for in 1946. In a conference paper, delivered that
year entitled Poetry and Knowledge, Cesaire, after pointing out that
the natural sciences, for all their triumphs with respect to the kind of
knowledge able to make the natural worlds predictable, had
nevertheless remained “half-starved” because of their inability to
make our human worlds intelligible, then proposed that, in the same
way as the “new Cartesian algebra had permitted the construction of
theoretical physics,” so too “the word promises to be an algebraic
equation that makes the world intelligible,” one able to provide us
with the basis of a new “theoretical and heedless science that poetry
could already give an approximate notion of.” A science, therefore,
in which the “study of words” would come to condition “the study
of nature” (Cesaire, 1946/1990: xxix).

And yet after immediately after this paragraph Wynter discusses Cesaire’s work in relation to the theoretical dreams of thinkers such as Chalmer’s search for psychophysical laws and Nagel’s objective phenomenology (both are also quoted alongside Fanon at the opening of the essay). All three thinkers as Wynter places them are interested in generalizing conscious experience in a mix of scientific, historical, and philosophical claims. But it is not clear in Wynter’s text which of these take the lead or forms the ground of her human as narrative being or human being as praxis. Wynter seems interested in the co-implication of epistemology and history in terms of certain groups being overrepresented as universal.

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The Sociogenic and Decolonial Biology (pt 1)

03Nov20

Jumping off from last time here I am going to make some notes about the history of biology as it concerns the relation of Darwin and Lamarck and how this applies to the social or theoretical uptake of evolutionary theory.

Sylvia Wynter’s “Towards the Sociogenic Principle: Fanon, The Puzzle of Conscious Experience, of “Identity” What it’s Like to be “Black” takes a comment from Fanon’s Black Skin White Masks in which he describes sociogeny as beyond onto- and phylogenesis.

Here Fanon is riffing of off Freud’s rather extensive reliance upon the biogenetic law associated most strongly with Ernst Haeckle and Lamarck but existing in numerous older forms – also called the Meckle-Serres law and with roots in Lorenz Oken and other romantic scientists and naturphilosophen. In its most basic form it is stated as the development of the individual member of the species exhibiting all the stages of its whole history of development as a species (ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny).

Filed under: cognitive science, Freud, Lacan, nature, politics, trauma   |  1 Comment
Tags: eugenics, Fanon, Ferenczi, recapitulation, sylvia wynter