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Session 1: Monstrous Movies
Chair: Sorcha Ni Fhlainn

Quatermass and the Canon: A Critical Re-Appraisal of the 1950’s Hammer Quatermass Films
Christopher Auld
Manchester, United Kingdom

The proposed paper addresses the 1950s Quatermass films (The Quatermass Xperiment (1955), Quatermass 2 (1957) and their television counterparts. Despite the assertion that Hammer horror productions were “initiated by the enormous commercial success” (Hutchings, 1993: 25) of the Quatermass films, they have not been afforded the critical recognition they merit. Their legacy can be seen in the fortunes of British cinema throughout the 1960s, and the development of screen science fiction in Britain. The paper reassesses the cultural importance of the Quatermass phenomenon.
The recent study British Horror Cinema, (Chibnall and Petley eds. 2002), refers to a resurgence of interest in British horror, which, while welcome, still focuses on a perceived canon. Though hitherto neglected films have been re-discovered, the Quatermass films have not enjoyed comparable critical space. The literature focuses on Hammer and Gothic films (Pirie, [1973], Hutchings [1993]), or genre studies of horror within national cinema (Street [1997], Murphy, [1997]). Rather than meriting their own study, the Quatermass films are considered as the development towards Hammer’s more familiar output. My study re-examines the Quatermass films and their cultural significance in prompting the later, more lauded canon, and questions their critical neglect.
The hybridity of the films, containing both science fiction and horror elements, are considered as possible factors contributing to their critical neglect. Issues of television to film adaptation are similarly explored, particularly the possibility that the non-literary origin of the Quatermass films may have contributed to their neglect. The paper therefore addresses issues of canon formation and value judgement toward television in the 1950s. Textual analyses will read the films and their aesthetics for specific themes, principally the uncanny through post-war/post-colonial anxiety. Finally, the legacy of the films will be considered, their lasting influence and impact on British horror/science fiction and subsequent re-makes.

They’re Not Even Sure It Is a Baby Yet: Body Horror In Eraserhead
Ils Huygens
Department of Theory, Jan Van Eyck Academy, Maastricht, Netherlands

Although cinema throughout its history has incorporated most literary or folkloric monsters into one, or more likely, a whole bunch of movies there is one little monster that has hardly been touched upon: the monstrous baby. Next to some movies where it appears as a side-theme, or as pure parody, like It’s Alive, there is one film that deals extensively with the idea of the monstrous birth and it is a particularly interesting one too: Eraserhead, the first feature film to spring from the dark and gloomy brain of David Lynch.
In a deeply dreading and uncomfortable atmosphere we are introduced to the strange looking and socially unadjusted character Henry who has to take care alone of his diseased early-born child. The baby/foetus is quite a hideous and engrossing thing to look at. Since its body is not fully developed yet, its organs have to be kept together in bandages; the head looks glazy as if it didn’t grow any skin yet. The baby simply carries its insides, outside.
The dissolvement of this inside/outside boundary is a typical aspect of some horror films that came out in the late seventies, the so-called body horror genre, including Cronenberg’s Rabid or The Fly but also the Alien series, the two last ones also dealing with the idea of monstrous births. In all these films the monstrous always comes from within the body, grows in it, becomes with it. These films are also particularly gross and disgusting because of their extensive use of images of blood and organs. They call on immediate bodily effects in the viewer, filling his guts and throat with feelings of disgust and loathing. At the same time elements of psychological horror film are used to create an eerie uncanny atmosphere that adds to the nauseating effect of the film. In this paper I’d like to take a deeper look again at Eraserhead not in terms of a typical psychoanalytical Freudian reading but rather looking at it as particularly successful example of the body horror genre, of which the monster baby may perhaps turn out to be the ultimate paradigmatic narrative. 

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Monstrous Nationalism: Wolf Creek and The UnAustralian
Anthony Gardner
Department of Art History, Cinema, Classics and Archaeology, University of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia and Centre for Contemporary Art and Politics, The University of New South Wales, Sydney

Critics of the Australian horror film WolfCreek (dir. Greg McLean, 2005) have primarily analysed its fidelity to conventions of horror cinema. This paper argues, however, that its importance lies elsewhere: at the intersection of two previously distinct representations of monstrosity, namely the serial killer and the ‘outback’. In Australian visual culture – from the nineteenth-century paintings of Tom Roberts to films by Peter Weir – the ‘outback’ is usually presented as an abstract, sublime and unknowable space, within which non-Indigenous protagonists become irrevocably and fatally lost. Rarely is this monstrosity of Australia’s so-called ‘dead heart’ personified, as it is in the figure of Wolf Creek’s Mick Taylor, the torturer and serial killer of ‘feral tourists’ who literally dissolves into the ‘outback’ at the film’s close.
This paper examines the particularisation of the monstrous ‘outback’ in relation to Mick Taylor’s other pivotal referent: tropes of 1950s-era Australian masculinity. While Mick presents the eclipse of certain iconic figures of ‘Australia’ – most notably Mick Dundee from the Crocodile Dundee film series – he also reframes contemporary political and nationalist rhetoric of the ‘Australian’ and the ‘UnAustralian’. This currently-dominant rhetoric, championed by the present Australian government among others, relies on tropes of 1950s’ ‘Australian values’ and masculinity, and of defending one’s ‘territory’ from foreign entities (asylum seekers, terrorists and so on) who may threaten those ‘values’. By parodying these tropes (through Mick Taylor’s gendered brutality and his ‘eradication’ of urban tourists from the ‘outback’), Wolf Creek provides a critical frame – a ‘politics of discomfort’ – through which to reconsider both the aesthetic histories and the contemporary politics of monstrous nationalism.

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