More Than Just Blood: Bloodchild by Octavia E. Butler

Angie Spoto

Edited by Maria Elena Carpintero Torres-Quevedo

Illustration by Iara Silva https: https://www.instagram.com/iiaraz_/

I hadn’t felt my baby move yet and wasn’t sure I wanted to. I confessed this to a friend in a café, who, bringing his hands together in front of his chest and clawing his fingers, said, ‘Yeah, it might feel, you know, like Alien.’ And his hands exploded outward, raining imaginary blood across our lattes.

My friend touched on a fear of mine: that having a baby would be like hosting an alien creature in my body. A fear no doubt inspired by my consumption of science fiction. Immediately, the prospect of pregnancy makes me think of the 1979 movie Alien, which undeniably plays out humanity’s pregnancy fears in the form of chest-ripping, murderous alien children. There’s also the ‘mystical pregnancy trope’: women in science fiction media are regularly forcibly or accidentally impregnated by aliens (Sarkeesian). This trope appears in Stargate SG-1, the X-Files, and Torchwood among other television shows and films.

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Rift – a film by Erlingur Thoroddsen

Queering the void: how Erlingur Thoroddsen’s Rift transforms horror cinema

Miranda Wilkie

Edited by Abigail Eardley

Art by Raj Dhunna http://rajdhunna.co.uk/

TW: Sexual Violence

Horror cinema is a genre that, with its subversive and confrontational intentions, is arguably ripe for queer filmmaking: yet as a queer horror fan it is rare I find myself represented on screen. In many horror films, academic readings of character’s queerness are often reduced to subtext. While queer characters are admittedly not totally absent from horror cinema, their sexuality often forms the basis of the horror itself. Depictions of canonically queer characters tend to form two extremes: ironically mannered villainy or predatory perversity. A Nightmare On Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge (1985) became a cult film with queer audiences due to its fairly explicit homoeroticism, including a high-camp portrayal of leather-clad ‘daddies’ in a gay bar. More recently, however, queer representation has shifted markedly. While visibility of queer communities within mass media increased at the turn of the century, the subsequent backlash from religious and conservative groups reignited the spectre of the sex-crazed, corrupting queer figure that first originated during the AIDS epidemic (Bronski, 99). Several New French Extremist horror films, such as Haute Tension (2003) and Irreversible (2002) exploited this undercurrent of fear, featuring characters whose same-sex desire is voracious and violent to the point of explicit homophobia.

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The Bird’s Nest by Shirley Jackson

Vicki Madden

Edited by Veronica Vivi

Art by Arta Ajeti https://www.instagram.com/artawork/

Shirley Jackson is probably best remembered as the author of “The Lottery” (1948), a short story so controversial that, upon its initial publication in The New Yorker, readers cancelled their subscriptions to the magazine and sent Jackson copious amounts of hate mail. While today, “The Lottery” is often hailed as a seminal piece of American fiction, however, Jackson’s other works have been criminally overlooked, especially when it comes to university curricula. In particular, Jackson’s novel The Bird’s Nest, which details a young woman’s struggle with dissociative identity disorder (formerly known as multiple personality disorder), has received very little academic attention despite its historical significance.

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