I'm going to use this site to explore and clarify some thoughts about horror movies...
I'm hoping also to use this blog as a way to get through some difficult theory material in regards to horror and movies... It will oftentimes be quite fragmentary... with unanswered questions.
In this way, the blog is generally for myself.
I started about 7 years ago and took a long "pause" I guess: http://blog2.photokwang.com
I think "The Conjuring" can speak to issues related to my first posts in the aforementioned link.
There's a repressed tradition of empowered women in many horror movies. I have two general thoughts that I need to develop and perhaps "map out" in terms of lists.
One has to do with the geography of the houses. There's often a "basement" in horror movies and I wonder where and how this connects to a kind of "geography" of the female body. The house becomes a kind of metaphor of possession of the female body. In The Conjuring, the possession seems to involve two factions: 1) the contemporary space of the domestic mother/wife and 2) the past tradition of empowered - but cast-out - sorceresses/witches.
So, my second thought is simply that the tradition of the female sorceress implies a different interpretation of the heteronormative domestic space. In fact, reproduction in a sense becomes demonic possession. How else to continue a tradition in a non-biological way. But there is a kind of problem in the sense that such a tradition becomes largely a parasitic one -- it depends on normative identities and cultural power that are justified/reified/made manifest due to biological necessity.
There's an implied question here about how the sorceress or witch tradition challenges the hegemonic structure of heteronormative space. I feel like it's a topic that might come up when thinking of all-female communities.
An interesting complication of my point above in regards to The Conjuring is that the witch that once lived in the house was acting out a religious drama as a kind of gesture of faith to a demon/devil which implies a male master. I'd have to go back and watch the movie to get more specific detail here. But I think there's an interesting problem already.
One potential survey I should do: Map out all kinds of "possessions". For example: the transference of bodily fluids -- in the Conjuring the witch "throws up" in the mother's mouth during a nap; another example might be the bite in the zombie or vampire movie; still another might be through sex.
