Abstract
My artworks are inspired by stories from horror films. I avoid extreme violence and gore in favor of stripped down narratives and familiar archetypes like ghosts and zombies. This chapter outlines several projects in which horror fans and others perform live or on camera. Urban and rural locations, populated by local actors, are sites for conversation about monstrous, environmental, and social transformation.
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Notes
- 1.
Jensen (1999, 2001), p. 9.
- 2.
Boon (2011), pp. 5–6.
- 3.
CBC News, June 28, 2012. www.cbc.ca/news2/interactives/before-after/toronto-condos/
- 4.
Lauro (2011), p. 208.
- 5.
Statistic from www.scotiabanknuitblanche.ca/about/event-history.html
- 6.
Each actor who walked into the Malmö rehearsals already self-identified as vampire or zombie; those who weren’t sure were cast as victims. After 6 weeks of meticulous rehearsals, the actors, even those with no prior acting experience, wholly inhabited the spirits of those terrible monsters and bloodcurdling victims.
- 7.
The two separate mythologies of vampires and zombies are squarely seated in the pop cultural canon. The folklore occasionally shifts, but the deeper monstrosities remain unchanged: shuffling zombie swarms in Night of the Living Dead (1968) are dead ringers for the infected who race through 28 Days Later (2002), and the crooked Count Orlok of F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922) is fundamentally the same as Twilight’s (2008) glamorous vampire clan, the Cullen family. If zombies are the metaphorical stand-in for the lowly consumer and disenfranchised everyman, vampires represent the powerful, aristocratic, or boorish CEOs. Zombies are perfect savages, and fans that identify with them recognize they represent the monstrous side of themselves and their worst fears. Zombies lack individualism and are rotting, soulless, unconscious, unfeeling, unattractive beings, though not inhuman. Vampires are the movie star victims of celebrity culture, trapped and bored in immortality, sometimes-androgynous soul suckers, bitingly cruel, and hopelessly alone. Post-humans might be thought of as capable of existing in an apocalyptic condition, evolving and adapting to radical environmental changes, and synthesizing human and nonhuman perceptions and responses. Vampires and zombies, despite their radical departures from humanity, both retain some degree of human sensitivities.
- 8.
Lauro (2008).
- 9.
- 10.
It was made possible with funding from the Jerome Foundation. www.turbulence.org/Works/fromthevalleyofthedeer
- 11.
Comaroff and Ker-Shing (2013), p. 30.
References
Boon K (2011) And the dead shall rise. In: Christie D, Lauro SJ (eds) Better off dead, the evolution of the zombie as post-human. Fordham Press, New York
Comaroff J, Ker-Shing O (2013) Horror in architecture. ORO editions, China
Jensen J (1999, 2001) Fandom as pathology: the consequences of characterization. In: Lewis L (ed) The adoring audience: fan culture and popular media. Routledge, London
Lauro SJ (2008) A zombie manifesto: the non-human condition in the era of advanced capitalism. Boundary 2 35(1):85–108
Lauro SJ (2011) Playing dead: zombies invade performance art… and your neighborhood. In: Christie D, Lauro SJ (eds) Better off dead, the evolution of the zombie as post-human. Fordham Press, New York
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McDonald, J. (2015). Alone Together in the Dark: Horror-Based Artworks and Fan Participation in Urban and Extra-Urban Space. In: Marchese, F.T. (eds) Media Art and the Urban Environment. Future City, vol 5. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-15153-3_5
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