The last Saturday of the York Literature Festival was lovely, despite the promise of rain that day. It lightly drizzled and didn’t detract from the Literary Walk or the Feeding the Monster talk.
Literary Walk
The Literary Walk with David Holt started at 11am meeting outside the Museum Gardens. The tour lasted just over 2 hrs and David’s experience, as a history teacher and tour guide, made for a very engaging tour. As a decent-sized group, we made our way around York and semi-circled ourselves around David as he explained the links of York to Shakespeare, W.H. Auden, Anne Lister and more historical literary figures. Despite the light drizzle partway through, the tour was lovely. My only comment may be that there needed to be some beacon to keep an eye on as we moved through the crowded city on a Saturday. Maybe a brightly coloured umbrella perhaps, so we don’t lose members of the crowd.
Feeding the Monster: Why Horror Has a Hold On Us
Next was the talk at the Crescent, where the author of Feeding the Monster, Anna Bogutskaya, was interviewed by Dr Lauren Stephenson, a Senior Film and Media lecturer whose research interests include Horror. Dr Stephenson’s work can be found on her staff profile at York St John University’s website. Bogutskaya’s previous work can be found on her website, and you can listen to her podcast The Final Girls where she discusses the intersections between horror and feminism.
Stephenson kicked off the interview by asking a pertinent question: “What’s your favourite scary movie?” And like anyone with a comprehensive understanding of a genre, Bogutskaya replied “It depends on the day”. She explains she’s “always daring a film to scare [her]”. While she is not as interested in zombie or slasher movies, she does love body horror. Although she said her favourite is subject to change, her horror origin story (or gateway horror) was A Nightmare on Elm Street. Elm Street meant that no space is safe – not your home, not your bed. This is where Bogutskaya begins to show the links between horror and the exploration of emotions – a theme that shapes the chapters of her second book Feeding the Monster.
Horror is about learning about yourself and confronting your fears, which is why Monster includes biographical examples in her latest work. Previously her first book Unlikeable Female Character had been suggested to take the form of a memoir, but she wanted the book to focus on film criticism and theory and not her personal story. These admissions of part biography are due to the nature of horror being a personal response. This leads to an interesting way to define horror as a genre because this means that horror movies are different things for different people. On her website, for example, is a review of the 2021 film Spencer – which is described as a historical psychological drama or a biographical drama.
Feeding the Monster is split into 5 sections based on 5 emotions; fear, hunger, anxiety, pain, and power. Bogutskaya talked a lot about the structure of her book as a natural way to split it as feelings keep resurfacing when discussing horror. She also wanted to challenge herself and write longer chapters, rather than split into discussing specific subgenres of horror – “It is not meant to be an exhaustive list of horror subgenres.” Bogutskaya wanted the book to be engaging and seems to also want to eliminate elitism. She stated that she is not into “writers, critics or commentators giving their opinions as gospel” and that we all experience feelings – uncomfortable feelings. Horror, being a self-identifying space for the exploration of personal fears and views, is for everyone. Similarly, Stephenson identified that Feeding the Monster is giving the reader permission to watch horror and to be a horror nerd.
Specifically, it seems from the talk that it is giving women to be horror nerds. With comments about how ‘blokey’ the space was before the ‘elevated horror’ movement seemed to coincide with the way spaces for women in horror seemed to “mushroom up”, as Bogutskaya puts it, there was an emphasis on feminism and horror. This was interesting to hear about since Bogutskaya pointed out the cyclical nature of horror films advertising to women every 30 years or so. Dracula in the 1930s was advertised to women and again in the 1950s, 1970s and the 1990s. It seems that somehow women in the horror audience become invisible.
At the end, there was space for audience questions.
“Introduction films for horror novices?” Bogutskaya consulted her own book here – the list (mentioned at the end of Feeding the Monster) may possibly be added to her website and made live so it can be updated. She included the films The Silence of the Lambs and Jennifer’s Body, amongst others.
“Will the current horrors in the world affect horror?” The answer was an emphatic yes, but it’s not seen yet, as horror is deeply political – Texas Chainsaw Massacre is entrenched in 1980s USA political background. We have yet to see the effects of the pandemic on horror.
“What horror movies destroyed the career or lives of their makers?” There was a discussion of Andrej Zulwaski and The Devil which got him exiled from his home country Poland and the burning of costumes and burial of film reels. His other film Possession had, potentially, a rather harrowing emotional effect on its actress, Isabella Adjani.
“What about horror and the TV peak era intersecting?” Bogutskaya pointed to the TV series Yellowjackets and the benefits of the long-form medium of TV giving creators the space to explore horror ideas that didn’t work in film. “Where Abigail failed, Penny Dreadful succeeds.”
There were so many books, films and ideas discussed that there is not enough room in one article to talk about them all in any depth. It was a fantastic event that has led to both Bogutskaya’s books being on my TBR list and I have started the first episodes of her podcast ‘The Final Girls’ where she and guest Ione Gamble discuss the film ‘The Craft’. If Bogutskaya is at another York Literature Festival next year, I’m definitely attending again – possibly with a pile of her books for her to sign. What other events am I going to hear “Bella Lugosi – He was a hunk. Let’s find another Hungarian!” or, when asked about the combination of internet and horror, begins a response with “I rarely post anymore, but I am always lurking.”