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Who Makes the Hood?: The City, Community And Contemporary Folk Horror in Nia Dacosta’s Candyman
Get PDF“Who do you think makes the hood? The city cuts off a community and waits for it to die.” (Candyman)
Folk horror is traditionally located in the rural landscape or pastoral settings, where the power of nature creates a sense of isolation compounded by an individual’s exclusion from communities, initially defined by a triumvirate of British films — the “unholy trinity” of Witchfinder General (1968), The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971), and The Wicker Man (1973) and continued in a second wave of British stories typified by the woodland trilogy of Ben Wheatley’s Kill List (2011), A Field in England (2013), and In the Earth (2021), in addition to The Isle (2019) and, more recently, the village and woodland settings of Alex Garland’s Men (2022) and Ben Steiner’s Matriarch (2022). In folk horror as Adam Scovell defines it, the “folk” of the definition is the ethnographic practices of a people or community, its folklore and superstitions, where the “horror” through which these practices are depicted is “open to fluctuating meaning.” (2017, 6)
In North America, folk horror shares many of the themes with its European counterparts in that stories are often focused on a clash between the modern and the arcane, the ordinary and the uncanny, or “wyrd” – a term Diane A. Rodgers has proposed as a way of describing post-2000 folk horror revival as “eerie, hauntological media with folkloric themes” (2019). The genre is typified by the enemy within and situated in place and the hierarchies of power that govern communities. The genre is commonly located in rural environs — evident in the TV movie Crowhaven Farm (1970), and superlative cinematic releases Children of the Corn (1984) and The Blair Witch Project (1999). The religious fervor of British films, whether pagan or puritanical, often shifts focus in North American folk horror to stories that reflect the impact of slavery or colonialism. This is evident in the country’s own latest wave of films in the genre, from the early New England puritans of Robert Eggers’ The Witch (2015), the contemporary settings of Upstate New York in Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017) and coastal small town location of Us (2019), to the struggling Oregon town that features in Antlers (2021). All of this group of US folk horror films are connected by roots that sit in the black American experience or Native American folklore, rather than calling back to European traditions.
Nia DaCosta’s Candyman brings the conventions of the folk horror – a brooding fear of others and place and a sense of the past imposing on the present – within a spectral city, in a story evoked by its location connected with the past that haunts both the locale, and the central character. These themes existed in the original Candyman films (1992, 1995) and, indeed, in Clive Barker’s original novel The Forbidden (1985) – where the occupants of the Spector Street Estate, a public housing project in Liverpool, are subjects of a study by a white academic researcher. Though the action is contemporary to the book, the occupants of the project are the subjects of institutionalised poverty, a working class consigned to concrete tower blocks. In Candyman, this 1980s gothic is reimagined in the 2022 rebirth of the Cabrini-Green projects – a location haunted by the suicide
This paper considers how the film presents gentrifcation as the religious purification more typical in folk horror, and relocates the position of the poor and excluded within the inner city.
Adam Scovell describes one of the key criticisms of his “Folk Horror Chain” as the emphasis on rural landscape, presenting in a later essay a number of films situated in the urban environment which may otherwise satisfy the criteria – citing the London Underground setting of Death Line (1972) as a specific example of what he defines as “Urban Wyrd” (2015). He suggests that one of the key differences between the urban and rural landscape is how the former retracts to create its sense of isolation, while the latter expands. Nia DaCosta’s Candyman avoids this problem by the manner with which it frames its city. This urban landscape is not viewed horizontally or from above, but from below, looking up to the sky through its floating camera. The manner with which the skyscrapers of the wider Chicago tower over the two-storey rowhouses that embody the continued haunted landscape of Cabrini-Green provides a further twist; a distinctly urban alternative to the more traditional presentation of woodland that contains the threat to the ordered world in Robert Egger’s The Witch, so beautifully captured in the title of Kier-La Janisse’s superlative folk horror documentary Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched. DaCosta’ elegant aesthetic choices provides the necessary expanse within the city blocks, the impact accentuated through a film that expands the liminal spaces so central to its narrative – mirrored surfaces – to the connective tissue of the city; the transport network of roads, railroads, subways, and bridges. Folk horror reflects a lived experience and to exclude urban characters is to deny the understanding of the city as a landscape like any other, one that is capable of presenting a veritable palimpsest of meanings, of memory, of hauntology and is perhaps more powerful to the contemporary audiences that live within them.
I challenge you. Look in a mirror. Say his name five times. “Candyman, Candyman, Candyman, Candyman…
Adoption in education – 10 ways to help children feel welcome
Get PDFNever mind heartstring-pulling Christmas adverts, making adopted children feel comfortable can be more complicated than we first thought
The Day Of The Coyote
No full textA coldly efficient hitman, with a politician in his sights, finds that ACME aren’t the best company to supply sniper’s rifles.
Director Statement
I love the clash of ideas, genres, etc. and when you take the macho action film and cross it with cartoons and IKEA furniture, this is what happens.
I mainly make animated films, but when an idea should be live action (or a painting, sculpture, ceramic…), that's what I do. This film is a staff/student collaboration at Falmouth University, School of Film and TV
Extending Point-Based Deep Learning Approaches for Better Semantic Segmentation in CAD
Get PDFGeometry understanding is a core concept of computer-aided design and engineering (CAD/CAE). Deep neural networks have increasingly shown success as a method of processing complex inputs to achieve abstract tasks. This work revisits a generic and relatively simple approach to 3D deep learning - a point-based graph neural network - and develops best-practices and modifications to alleviate traditional drawbacks. It is shown that these methods should not be discounted for CAD tasks; with proper implementation, they can be competitive with more specifically designed approaches. Through an additive study, this work investigates how the boundary representation data can be fully utilised by leveraging the flexibility of point-based graph networks. The final configuration significantly improves on the predictive accuracy of a standard PointNet++ network across multiple CAD model segmentation datasets and achieves state-of-the-art performance on the MFCAD++ machining features dataset. The proposed modifications leave the core neural network unchanged and results also suggest that they can be applied to other point-based approaches
Sustainable transitions in the surfing sector. The role of risk and branding
Get PDFThis paper explores a theoretical and empirical discussion of the ability of business form a particular sector to transition towards sustainability. The paper contextualises the discussion within the theoretical framework of a ‘Risk Society’ as outlined by Ulrich Beck. In particular the paper highlights the relationship between sustainable development, and what Beck describes as the emergence of an emancipatory catastrophism. This theoretical framework is then applied to a novel approach for exploring sustainability through the process of branding ultimately highlighting an industry’s receptiveness to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.
Uniquely, this paper challenges and expands on the narrative of branding as a discursive process that moves beyond a narrow marketing framework. Using a mixed methods approach of in-depth observation, interviews and surveys, the paper focuses on a case study of the largest lifestyle retailer in the surf skate and snow sector. The empirical research is applied both within the case study company itself and over 300 brands in the surf skate and snow sector. Results point to a receptiveness to embedding the sustainable devleopment goals in business models whilst highlighting the challenges that exist from both a business operation and resourcing perspective through to external factors. Furthermore results highlight the disparity between internal business processes and the process of branding. A typology is presented that highlights the relationship between business, the sustainable development goals and theoretical debates
'Out of the Gloom Comes Salvation'
Get PDFA book review of Goth. A History, Lol Tolhurst (242pp, hbck, Quercus
dAnCing LiNes
Get PDFHow do we interpret a multi-participant choreographed performance in the public domain through digital technologies? In collaboration with data visualisation expert David Hunter from University of Colorado at Boulder, and visual artist Zach Duer from
Virginia Tech, dAnCing LiNes explores how dance can generate a
choreographic view of drawing through mediated representation.
In this respect the artwork produced for dAnCing LiNes is not
intended as a means of documentation of the live events but as a
tool for new artistic production. The intention is to rethink performative drawing beyond the gestural trace of the body in movement
through the use of data visualisations. Capturing chorographic
scores and task-based instructions through digital technologies,
the data visualisations explore how the agency of dance moves
from the performative to the visual via technological means by
using combinations of established computer vision techniques from
OpenCV [1] like Optical Flow, Blob Detection. The visualisations
not only reveal the rules of the underlying choreography in each
location but also computationally play with and exemplify those
rules on a per location basis (five in total)
A Phantom's Vibe
No full textA body of work produced as sculptural assemblages and sound exploring indentured Chinese labourers sent to work in Jamaica, how they eventually assimilated to life in the West Indies and their influence in helping shape the sound of regga
Down and Out and About
Get PDFA book review of Underworlds, Stephen Ellcock (Thames & Hudson) and Weird Walk (Watkins
Alexandra of Denmark: Fashioning the Modern Consort
No full textIn this edited volume of Queens Consort, this is a biographical summary of Queen Alexandra analysed through the lens of dress and how she fashioned both her public and private self. It considers her life through dress, both through surviving objects in different museum collections and through other historical records, paintings and memoirs.
Abstract
For so relatively recent a queen consort, Alexandra (1844–1925) is a figure whose reputation has arguably found itself built on mythologised narratives. Popular perceptions position her as the beleaguered wife of an unpredictable husband, Edward VII—whose scandals eclipsed her own experiences. It is often her enduringly youthful appearance that is most remarked upon, yet previous biographies have not explored how she came to capitalise on this. This chapter considers Alexandra’s dress practices to explore more traditional approaches to life writing. Her garments have survived in museums around the world, covering different decades of her life. Using these alongside a variety of written sources and images, it is possible to build on existing biographical works. Looking at her world through the lens of clothing reveals much about her upbringing, her life at the heart of the British establishment, and how she used dress to control public perceptions of her royal role