Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts

By JFA

Contents
________________________________________

Images of Horror: Black Childhood as a Site of Resistance in Visual Media
Sara Austin

The Emotion of Dread in Cinematic Horror
Matthias De Bondt

Atomic Art and the Ecological Perspectives of David Lynch
Todd Tietchen

Han Song's Weirdly Sublime Anti-Modernity
Ron Judy

REVIEWS

Kevin J. Wetmore Jr.'s The Conjuring (Devil's Advocates)
Rev. by Zachary Doiron

Tison Pugh's Harry Potter and Beyond: On J.K. Rowling's Fantasies and Other Fictions
Rev. by Anna L?scher

Christy Williams's Mapping Fairy-Tale Space: Pastiche and Metafiction in Borderless Tales
Rev. by Alexandra Lykissas

Kyle A. Moody and Nicholas Yanes's Hannibal for Dinner: Essays on America's Favorite Cannibal on Television
Rev. by Kathleen Shaughnessy

Laurence Rickels's Critique of Fantasy, Vol 1: Between a Crypt and a Datemark, Critique of Fantasy, Vol 2: The Contest Between B-Genres, and Critique of Fantasy, Vol 3: The Block of Fame
Rev. by Brian Willems

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fiction4All
• Release date: Mar 6, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215014769

Book preview

Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts

Volume 33/ Number 1

Whole Number 113

JFA

Published by Fiction4All at Smashwords

Copyright 2023 JFA

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Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts

Volume 33/ Number 1

Whole Number 113

Supported by the

International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts.

Printed in the United States of America.

Managing Editor-in-Chief - Jude Wright

Reviews Editor-in-Chief - Mailyn Abreu Toribio

Acquisitions Editor-in-Chief - Novella Brooks de Vita

Production Editor-in-Chief - Cat Ashton

Senior Submissions and Reviews Editor - Farah Mendlesohn

GENERAL INQUIRIES

Inquiries and other editorial correspondence should be directed to [e-mail].

SUBMISSIONS

Like the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, JFA welcomes papers on all aspects of the fantastic in world literatures and media, as well as interdisciplinary approaches including African/Diaspora Studies, anthropology, area studies, critical game studies, disability studies, future studies, gender studies, history, Indigenous studies, music, philosophy, political science, postcolonial studies, psychology, queer studies, religious studies, science and technology studies, and sociology. All papers are made available in English and fully refereed.  The journal is indexed in the MLA Bibliography.

Submissions should contain a more in-depth discussion than a conference-length paper and demonstrate a grasp of current scholarship on the subject. The length of articles generally varies from 3,500-9,000 words and ranges from 15-35 pages.

All submissions are peer-reviewed in accordance with our peer review statement and the BIPOC Anti-Racist Statement on Scholarly Reviewing Practices.  If submissions are flagged at any point of the review process for the risk of promulgating potentially misrepresentative, stereotypical, ableist, or racist views, contributors will be asked to address these problems before the review process can continue.

Since the refereeing process is anonymous, the author’s name should not appear anywhere on the text file itself, including the notes. No title page is needed. However, an abstract of 100-150 words should be included with each submission.

Please ensure that all citations and the Works Cited entries are in MLA style, 9th Edition. Please enter end notes manually.

Contributors are responsible for acquiring all permissions to quote and/or use illustrations that accompany their article, and for paying (or arranging to have their institutions pay) all usage fees, including copyright.

Scholarly articles should be directed to the JFA‘s Acquisitions Editor-in-Chief, Novella Brooks de Vita at [e-mail].

BOOK REVIEWS

JFA also publishes reviews of scholarly works addressing the fantastic, broadly construed. Reviews of fiction are limited to reissues of speculative works with new introductions and scholarly apparatuses, and speculative works with the potential to impact scholarship in the genre. Books and other media received are advertised on the IAFA discussion list (which can be subscribed to through the IAFA homepage at www.iafa.org), and IAFA members are encouraged to suggest titles for review.

To mail book copies for review and for queries or reviews of English-language publications, please contact Reviews Editor-in-Chief Mailyn Abreu Toribio at [e-mail].

Contents

Images of Horror: Black Childhood as a Site of Resistance in

Visual Media

Sara Austin

The Emotion of Dread in Cinematic Horror

Matthias De Bondt

Atomic Art and the Ecological Perspectives of David Lynch

Todd Tietchen

Han Song’s Weirdly Sublime Anti-Modernity

Ron Judy

REVIEWS

Kevin J. Wetmore Jr.’s The Conjuring (Devil’s Advocates)

Rev. by Zachary Doiron

Tison Pugh’s Harry Potter and Beyond: On J.K. Rowling’s

Fantasies and Other Fictions

Rev. by Anna Lüscher

Christy Williams’s Mapping Fairy-Tale Space: Pastiche and

Metafiction in Borderless Tales

Rev. by Alexandra Lykissas

Kyle A. Moody and Nicholas Yanes’s Hannibal for Dinner: Essays

on America’s Favorite Cannibal on Television

Rev. by Kathleen Shaughnessy

Laurence Rickels’s Critique of Fantasy, Vol 1: Between a Crypt

and a Datemark, Critique of Fantasy, Vol 2: The Contest Between

B-Genres, and Critique of Fantasy, Vol 3: The Block of Fame

Rev. by Brian Willems

Abstracts

Sara Austin

Images of Horror: Black Childhood as a Site of Resistance in Visual Media

Child characters in Black horror interact with the monstrous as a means of resistance to racist violence. In this article, I examine how visual examples of Black horror, including the television series Lovecraft Country (2020), picture books Wee Winnie Witch's Skinny (2004) and Precious and the Boo Hag (2005), and the film Us (2019), re-center Black child subjectivity from images of the body in pain onto community belonging by challenging both the audience and subject divides between the child and adult. These examples acknowledge that threats to Black subjectivity are continuous, but the family remains, grows, and passes on art and love to the next generation. This bringing-together of adults, children, families, and neighbors carries a powerful message of belonging and value as its own Radical Aesthetic within Black horror.

Matthias De Bondt

The Emotion of Dread in Cinematic Horror

This article concerns itself with the cinematic emotion of dread. Within Horror Studies, cinematic dread has been theorized as a temporal emotion, mostly centered around the confrontation with the monstrous, after which dread evolves into other cinematic emotions of shock and/or horror. For this reason, the function of dread within the horror film experience is only recognized in relation to other emotions it should precede. However, this article argues that dread plays a crucial emotion in the affective workings of some horror films that fall under the term dread-full films. Through the close reading of two case studies, namely It Comes At Night and The Blackcoat’s Daughter, the article reasons that dread exists as an inseparable part of the viewing experience of these films and in doing so, argues that the emotion of dread is inherent to the overall cinematic horror experience.

Todd Tietchen

Atomic Art and the Ecological Perspectives of David Lynch

The work of David Lynch represents an essential engagement with the Anthropocene and its aesthetic forms. This is especially evident in the case of Twin Peaks, which integrates influences from multiple genres and the avant-garde into a complex mythopoeic treatment of planetary ecological crisis. Episode eight of Twin Peaks: The Return, with its Promethean title Gotta Light?, grounds Lynch’s mythopoesis in an origin story that builds upon foundational concepts regarding the Anthropocene, including its connections to the atomic age, its grounding suppositions in androcentrism, its complicity in cosmological violence, and the value of post-nature perspectives for understanding the (perhaps inescapably) precarious present.

Ron Judy

Han Song’s Weirdly Sublime Anti-Modernity

Han Song is a leading 21st-century Chinese science fiction author, but writes with great pathos about a modernity populated by monsters and perverse new social arrangements. From the aeronautical cannibalism of The Passengers and the Creator to the ghost labor of Regenerated Bricks and zombified workers of My Fatherland Does Not Dream, Han’s oeuvre repeatedly emphasizes the demented, and according to him foreign aspects of China’s passage into the globalized modernity. In this article I argue that, in the aforementioned novellas Han projects a consistent vision of a weird modernity that is at times deeply ethnocentric, localist, and reminiscent of the Old Weird authors of the early 20th-century (e.g., H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Seabury Quinn, and Clark Ashton Smith). Reading his work’s anti-modern pathos as a variant of weird fiction enables me to incorporate a Lacanian analysis of his racial others in terms of enjoyment theft borrowed from Slavoj Zizek. Han’s work is thus a gallery of unspeakable sublime objects that represent the weird potential and threat of modernity—i.e., it expresses China’s still deep-seated anxieties about opening up to an alien, non-Chinese outside world that seeks to steal, exploit, or subvert its desires.

Images of Horror: Black Childhood

as a Site of Resistance in Visual Media

Sara Austin

TOPSY IS A CURSE. She and her twin, Bopsy, twirl and caper through the corners and backgrounds of their victims' vision. Their matted hair is tied with red string. Broken teeth show behind too-wide smiles as foot-long nails reach out to slice and scar, turning the living flesh of unsuspecting children into death and desiccation. They never stop the pursuit. Their touch is inevitable. In season 1, episode 8 of Misha Green’s Lovecraft Country, Jig-A-Bobo, Seamus Lancaster (Mac Brandt), a police captain and literal wizard in a white supremacist cult, summons Topsy (Kaelynn Gobert-Harris) and Bopsy (Bianca Brewton) to kill Diana Freeman (Jada Harris) after she runs away from her friend Emmett Till’s funeral (Green Jig-A-Bobo). Lovecraft Country's use of Diana and Till act as recent examples of this essay's focus: Black horror uses visual symbols to empower children who have been subjected to the monstrosity of white violence and centers them in multigenerational narratives of community support.

Topsy originates as a racist caricature in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) where her laziness and general disregard for herself and others act as a foil to the innocent perfection of the white child, Eva. Eva’s goodness persuades Topsy to change her ways, aligning with cultural expectations for race and childhood in the 1850s. The novel describes Topsy as:

one of the blackest of her race; [. . .] Her woolly hair was braided in sundry little tails, which stuck out in every direction. The expression of her face was an odd mixture of shrewdness and cunning, over which was oddly drawn, like a kind of veil, an expression of the most doleful gravity and solemnity. She was dressed in a single filthy, ragged garment, made of bagging; and stood with her hands demurely folded before her. Altogether, there was something odd and goblin-like about her appearance[.] (Stowe 202)

As Stowe’s novel is transmuted into other cultural forms, such as plays and material culture, Topsy becomes a minstrel character. Jim O’Loughlin explains that as Stowe’s novel migrated to the stage, the sentimental aspects of Topsy’s character fell away and as laughter replaced tears, representations of Topsy began to do quite different cultural work (O’Loughlin 582). Topsy is unreformed and incorrigible in the staged versions of the novel, and so the violence done to her body is a source of amusement for white audiences, and of disgust and horror for Black audiences.

The depiction of Topsy in Lovecraft Country draws heavily on this minstrel tradition through the use of costuming, highlighting an over-large mouth with red lips that match the ribbons in her matted hair. These hints of red stand out against her skin and drab sackcloth dress, emphasizing the visual symbols of minstrelsy, and its associated violence against Black bodies as a source of horror. As Till’s death in the series draws on the audience's knowledge of real-world physical violence and intergenerational trauma, Diana’s attempts to flee Topsy and Bopsy illustrate the burden these characters, and other racist tropes like them, place onto Black children.

Black horror layers visual symbols in ways that allow for a slippage in visual media theory. Reading picture books through a film theory lens, and films through the lens of picture book theory, highlights the critical role of the Black child as a valued and agentic community member in Black horror. Though Black horror film has been discussed at length by various scholars, I read Black horror films, television, and picture books alongside one another to develop a more comprehensive theoretical framework for how visual layering works to both empower Black children within Black horror and refocus the genre from narratives of Black bodies in pain into narratives of community rebuilding and belonging. Through depictions of intergenerational families, folklore and performance, home invasion narratives, and Black horror’s relationship to the Radical Black aesthetic, the examples I discuss in this article refuse to center one perspective (either the child or adult), and instead reflect on who has the right to be afraid, who has the cultural influence to tell stories, and how those stories might act as means for examining and processing trauma.

Visual examples of Black horror, including the television series Lovecraft Country (2020); the picture books Wee Winnie Witch's Skinny (2004) by Virginia Hamilton and Barry Moser and Precious and the Boo Hag (2005) by Patricia McKissak, Onawumi Jean Moss, and Kyrsten Brooker; and the film Us (2019), recenter Black child subjectivity from images of the body in pain onto community belonging by challenging both the audience and subject divides between the child and adult. Films, television, and picture books offer experiences that are pleasurable to specific readers/viewers, but also invite families to experience media together, taking part as one interpretive community, and assigning intentions to the text (Fish 483). Visual media enmesh the reader/viewer in symbols, allowing different levels of reading and interpretation based on cultural knowledge.

Black horror makes intentional use of multi-layered visual symbolism, as Melba Boyd makes clear in her discussion of Get Out. Boyd examines the role of visual symbols such as deer heads, cotton, and tea cups, as well as parallels to Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967) and The Matrix (1999) to demonstrate that layered duality is established in the opening scenes and is ingrained throughout the film's construct (Boyd 37).¹ The layered semiotic construction of visual texts such as horror films and picture books allow for multiple accurate readings within an intended intergenerational audience.

Visual representations of children in horror reveal the politics of race, specifically what types of bodies have access to the cultural protections of childhood. Because it resists closure and violates boundaries, horror is a perfect medium to examine the breakdown of the divide between children and adults, as well as the role race plays in constructing