The Black Museum
The Black Museum is a series of horror lectures, screenings and events based out of Toronto, Canada. Co-founded by Rue Morgue Magazine‘s Executive Editor, Andrea Subissati, and Canuxploitation‘s Paul Corupe, the series typically hosts events at the Royal Cinema in Toronto’s West end. I joined the ranks as Curator in late 2018, and occasionally add posts on the blog.
Grim Magazine
Grim is a digital and print magazine that showcases the voices of women and LGBTQ+ writers and creators through essays, reviews, analyses, interviews, and short fiction.
Grim No. 7 – Teenage Wasteland featuring ‘Click Me If You Dare: Creepypasta as a Symbol of Chaotic Power’.
Download a digital issue or pick up your own print copy here.
Grim No. 5 – Living Dead Girls featuring ‘It’s Only Natural: Ecofeminism and the Modern Zombie Cine(myth)’.
Download a digital issue or pick up your own print copy here.
Grim No. 4 – Our Bodies, Our Hells featuring ‘ Something’s Not Right With This House’.
Download a digital issue or pick up your own print copy here.
Grim No. 3 – Ghost Worlds featuring ‘Ghost Storytelling in the Digital Age’.
Download a digital issue or pick up your own print copy here.
Cinema of Pain: On Quebec’s Nostalgic Screen
Since the defeat of the pro-sovereigntists in the 1995 Quebec referendum, the loss of a cohesive nationalistic vision in the province has led many Québécois to use their ancestral origins to inject meaning into their everyday lives. A Cinema of Pain argues that this phenomenon is observable in a pervasive sense of nostalgia in Quebec culture and is especially present in the province’s vibrant but deeply wistful cinema. In Québécois cinema, nostalgia not only denotes a sentimental longing for the bucolic pleasures of bygone French-Canadian traditions, but, as this edited collection suggests, it evokes the etymological sense of the term, which underscores the element of pain (algos) associated with the longing for a return home (nostos).
Whether it is in grandiloquent historical melodramas such as Séraphin: un homme et son péché (Binamé 2002), intimate realist dramas like Tout ce que tu possèdes (Émond 2012), charming art films like C. R.A. Z.Y. (Vallée 2005), or even gory horror movies like Sur le Seuil(Tessier 2003), the contemporary Québécois screen projects an image of shared suffering that unites the nation through a melancholy search for home.
Includes the essay: ‘The Dys-comforts of Home in Québec Gothic Horror Cinema’ / Gina Freitag
Available for purchase online.
Anatomy of a Scream
Anatomy of a Scream is a female-run, queer-positive horror entertainment and lifestyle site offering news, reviews, analyses, and humour with a feminist perspective.
Follow on twitter @aoas_xx! Here are my contributions:
- Revelations: An Interview with SAINT MAUD Filmmaker Rose Glass
- Review: Swallowing Despair in ‘Black Pill’ (2020)
- Fantasia: The Shadow of Death in The Dark and the Wicked (2020)
- Fantasia: The Gritty Reality of Unearth (2020)
- Fantasia: The Arresting Visuals of Detention (2019)
- Squad Talk: Pride Edition (Part I)
- Squad Talk: Empty Spaces, Dangerous Dinners and Elizabeth Moss in ‘The Invisible Man’
- Squad Talk: Misogyny, Messaging and Subtlety in ‘Black Christmas’ (2019)
- Top Horror Films of 2019
- Fantasia 2019: Life and death in ‘Ode to Nothing’ (2018)
- Fantasia 2019: The madness of ‘Jade’s Asylum’ (2019)
- Fantasia 2019: Fear for safety in ‘Door Lock’ (2018)
- Squad Talk: Midsommar, Folk Horror and Controversial Endings
- The Dog Days of Summer: “Hounds of Love” (2016)
- Red is the Colour of My Love (For Horror)
- Squad Talk: Favourite Horror “Love” Story
- Squad Talk: Most Anticipated Horror of 2019
- Squad Talk: “Remaking” A Classic – Suspiria
- Heat Waves Make Creatures of Us All
- Junesploitation: On Horror, Sci-Fi & the Transgeneric Performance of ‘Human’
- Squad Talk: Hereditary’s Harrowing Family Drama
Fright School Lectures
June 2019 | Discussing John Fawcett’s Ginger Snaps (2000), the film’s feminist and coming-of-age narrative, where it ranks in the werewolf subgenre and Katharine Isabelle’s iconic titular performance.
January 2019 | Discussing transformation and coming-of-age narratives in horror films, with a special screening of Vincenzo Natali’s Splice (2009).
Frightmare in the Falls, October 2018
Presentation: Cult Escapism in Horror Cinema – a mini-lecture on the recent spate of horror films involving cults, including The Ritual, The Invitation, The Void, and The Endless among others. A closer look at narrative elements, mesmerizing aesthetics, and a compromised sense of reality!
FPA Voices
Carleton University’s Faculty of Public Affairs publishes a digital journal to give voice to its community members: staff, faculty, students and alumni. Each issue includes articles, interviews, and book reviews.
Book Review | Iain Reid’s I’m Thinking of Ending Things
Issue – November/December, 2016: 12
Monster Pool: Chapter Two
1h 37min | Horror | 2016 | Canada
A feature-length horror anthology film, featuring “Time of Need”, directed by James Campbell (and written by yours truly). This is the third instalment. For more information, visit the film’s home site or IMDB page.
The Canadian Horror Film: Terror of the Soul
Featuring chapters on Pontypool, Ginger Snaps, 1970s slasher films, Quebec horror, and the work of David Cronenberg, among many others, The Canadian Horror Film unearths the terrors hidden in the recesses of the Canadian psyche. It examines the highlights of more than a century of Canadian horror filmmaking and includes an extensive filmography to guide both scholars and enthusiasts alike through this treacherous terrain. Available for purchase online.
Cellar Door Film Festival (CDFF)
A former 3-day grass-roots independent film festival that showcased the strange and unusual: horror, sci-fi, fantasy, and beyond.
“Tales of Terror in Québec Popular Cinema: The Rise of the French Language Horror Film since 2000”
Before the 2000s, the horror film was virtually non-existent in Canada’s Francophone film industry. Over the past decade, however, the situation has changed drastically. The recent emergence of a crop of successful French-language horror films, including Éric Tessier’s Sur le seuil (2003) and 5150 Rue des Ormes (2009), Philippe Gagnon’s Le Poil de la bête (2010), Daniel Roby’s La Peau blanche (2004), Daniel Grou-Podz’s Les 7 jours du talion (2010), Robin Aubert’s Saints- Martyrs-des-Damnés (2005), Pascal Laugier’s Martyrs (2008) and Jean Beaudin’s Le Collectionneur (2002), manifests a multiplicity of important transformations in Québec cinema in particular, and Québec society in general. This article suggests that the Québec horror film bears witness simultaneously to: (1) the productive diversification of the industry in the province; (2) the rise of filmic adaptations of popular literature as a viable practice; (3) the development of a critical perspective towards the traditional themes of Québec culture; and (4) the creative potential of co-production. These aspects position the cinematic tale of terror as one of the most informative objects of analysis in contemporary Québec film studies.
Popular Culture Association / American Culture Association Conference – Lectures
- Horror Area (April 2011; San Antonio, TX ) – “I’m Not Your Fucking Mommy!”: The Ontological Horror of ‘Women’ and Women in Jaume Collet-Serra’s Orphan (2009)
- Horror Area (April 2012; Boston, MA) – “Did You Hear That? Affecting a Relationship of Uncertainty and The Foregrounding of Sound Peculiarities in Horror Cinema”
Unleashing the Furious Feminine: The Violence of Gender Discourse in Canadian Horror Cinema
Recent horror film theory largely perpetuates the rigidly structured gendered readings popularized by psychoanalysis. Such ideas no longer compliment a genre whose self-awareness often challenges patriarchal expectations. This analysis of Canadian horror cinema illustrates alternative approaches to gendered readings by focusing on the Canadian imagination: wildness, horror and chaos not only break into an enclosed community, but burst forth from it. Bruce McDonald’s Pontypool (2008) illustrates the way in which not all horror films operate along strictly “gendered” lines. Jaume Collet-Serra’s Orphan (2009) indicates that even those horror films which do operate along “gendered” lines are not always structured around a “heterosexual divide”. Paul Fox’s The Dark Hours (2005) suggests those “gendered” horror films that are structured around the “heterosexual divide” can re-imagine viewership as both masochistic and sadistic. Ultimately, this study of female representations and female viewership endeavours to demonstrate the complexity and frequent misrepresentation of these issues.
Small Dark Things 
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