Jack Graham

Continuing a consideration of ‘The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral’ by M.R. James and its BBC television adaptation by Lawrence Gordon Clark Continuing a consideration of ‘The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral’ by M.R. James and its BBC television adaptation by Lawrence Gordon Clark Links to all previou

I reconvene with George & Elliot for our belated Christmas / New Years celebration, a discussion of Roger Corman's masterpiece, 1964's The Masque of the Red Death, an adaptation of about four different Poe stories and Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal and Sade's 120 Days of Sodom. A gorgeous and spe

On Nic Roeg's 'Don't Look Now!' (1979): prophecy, tragedy, freedom, bourgeois patriarchy, and the deadly paradox of 'responsibility'... The ideas in this essay were developed in conversation with Elliot Chapman and George Daniel Lea. It is respectfully – perhaps presumptuously – dedicated to Frederi

Star Wars, America, and the politics of Republic, Empire, and Rebellion Three political categories dominate the Star Wars galaxy: Republic, Empire, and Rebellion. This is the arrangement in The Force Awakens just as much as in the original trilogy. Indeed, it is the apparent impossibility of telling

This is a slightly edited and rewritten version of something I posted at the old blog years ago. Since I'm thinking about Star Trek at the moment... * The Federation is supposedly post-capitalist, post-money, etc., yet it has many of the important hallmarks of advanced capitalist social organisation

On Star Trek: Deep Space 9, Season 1 Episode 19: 'Duet' (1993) I wrote this for the forthcoming collection of DS9 essays from ATB Publishing Outside In Can Live With It. This is D1. A version of this will appear in the finished collection but it'll probably be shorter. * In 1985, a prosperous, middl

Final part of a consideration of John Carpenter’s In The Mouth of Madness (1994). The ideas in this essay were partly developed in conversation with Elliot Chapman and George Daniel Lea. In The Mouth of Madness, H.P. Lovecraft, Alan Moore’s Providence, metafiction, the ‘fourth wall’, China Miéville’

Part 3 of a consideration of John Carpenter’s In The Mouth of Madness (1994). No more prologues. This installment gets down to business. Part 3 of a consideration of John Carpenter’s In The Mouth of Madness (1994). The ideas in this essay were partly developed in conversation with George Daniel Lea

Part 1 of a consideration of John Carpenter’s In The Mouth of Madness (1994). Part 1 of a consideration of John Carpenter’s In The Mouth of Madness (1994). Some of the ideas in this essay were partly developed in conversation with George Daniel Lea and Elliot Chapman. * John Carpenter’s late - and l

On the End of the World, the Zombie Apocalypse, and other comforting Bourgeois Fantasies Say what you like about the zombie apocalypse but at least you don’t have to go to work in the morning. Zombie movies are about how much fun the zombie apocalypse will be. Shaun of the Dead, Zombieland, Romero’s

On Possession, Property, and Haunting; on Colonialism, Alienation, and Commodity Fetishism Part 3 of a Gothic Marxist Consideration of Horror as Capitalist Cultural Production Possession is one of the key concepts in modern Horror, though Horror shares it with other genres. The genre of Horror is ge

On Horror, Women, Patriarchy, and Misogyny Part 2 of a Gothic Marxist Consideration of Horror as Capitalist Cultural Production The Conjuring movies are about good and bad women. In the first movie the central antagonist is the spirit of a dead witch who killed her own baby and then herself, and who

On Horror, Childhood, Memory, and Time Part 1 of a Gothic Marxist consideration of Horror as Capitalist Cultural Production In recent years, the mass culture industries have resurrected the 1980s as a stylistic marker, first in Horror with the first film in the two-part adaptation of Stephen King’s

“This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine” - The Tempest Adaptation, Culture, and Production Dracula, the novel, and Frankenstein, the novel, have one thing in common: they’re unfilmable. The books are unfilmable for different reasons. It boils down to this: Dracula is too bad to film, and Frankens

A section from an essay I wrote about the TV series Legion: Tzvetan Todorov’s theory of ‘the Fantastic’ sees the genre bifurcating into the ‘uncanny’ and the ‘marvelous’ according to what happens in a given story. Crudely, the former is when something fantastic is found to be ‘unreal’ within the sto