C.3.1 Decolonial Horror in Stan Douglas's Le Détroit

Miriam Jordan-Haladyn, OCAD University

The social conditions that underlie urban decay are the focus of Stan Douglas' 2001 black and white film installation Le Détroit and the accompanying 25 colour C-print photographs that make up this project. In the synchronized two-track looped film installation, the character Eleanoree, like a spectre, endlessly breaks into an abandoned house in Detroit's notorious Black ghetto Herman Gardens and searches through the decaying detritus. Douglas makes reference to two horror novels in this work: Shirley Jackson's 1959 The Haunting of Hill House and Marie Hamlin's 1883 Legends of Le Détroit. Douglas' photographs are completely devoid of people and document the aftermath of the flight of Detroit's white middle class to the suburbs, while unveiling the trauma of the 1943 race riots and the 1967 Detroit riot. This paper examines the role of horror in Douglas' Le Détroit, specifically by exploring the horror tropes of the return of the repressed in relation to questions of race and class.

C.3.2 Marisol's Babies, Nuclear Giants, and Other Monsters

Delia Solomons, Drexel University

In the early 1960s, hot on the heels of a boom of horror and sci-fi films about nuclear giants and brainwashing invaders, Marisol created two sculptures of colossal, eerie toddlers. The 7-foot-tall Baby Boy (1962–63) and Baby Girl (1963) appear to be some monstrous progeny of The Amazing Colossal Man (1957) or the betrayed lead in Attack of the 50-ft Woman (1958), with the creepy stasis and posture of the children in Village of the Damned (1960). Marisol taps into recent horror and sci-fi to convey certain realities of a life with children. Her baby Gargantua reflects the enormity of childcare, which consumes extraordinary time, labour, and mental/emotional space. Each sculpture grasps a Marisol-headed doll — a diminutive version of their mother/creator — reflecting the relinquishment of independence and agency that midcentury motherhood seemed to demand. Marisol never had children and in these sculptures expresses specific anxieties about that prospect.

Marisol considers how not only domestic but also political monsters inflict brainwashing, possession, and petrification. Marisol twice referred to Baby Boy as symbolizing "America, this huge baby monster taking over." The Paris-born Venezuelan-American reveals how seemingly innocent US patriotism — the boy wears his red, white, and blue Sunday — permits its sinister cousin nationalistic Cold War imperialism to wreak havoc. Baby Boy behaves like King Kong, grasping Marisol and indeed the world in his nuclear-armed clutches. Ever the caricaturist, Marisol offers no cathartic protest or possible solution to the monsters of maternity and imperialism, but rather presents the viewer as helplessly micrified before these uncanny incarnations.

C.3.3 The Colonial Curse of "Egyptomania" and the Postcolonial Pharaonic

Gillian McIver, University for the Creative Arts

European fascination with Ancient Egypt was popularized by colonialism. As Egyptology became the exclusive preserve of Europeans, largely excluding Egyptians from the discipline, occultists claimed ownership of Egyptian magic and visual motifs. This soon found its way into the horror genre, in novels and the new art form of cinema. In the 20th century, Egyptians responded by largely eschewing pharaonic motifs in art and by avoiding the horror genre altogether. Egyptians are reclaiming the Postcolonial Pharaonic, both in visual art and, finally, even in horror films. This paper looks at contemporary artists Alaa Awad, Nazir Tanbouli, and Khaled Hafez and the production of the Netflix series Paranormal (2020).

C.3.4 Surrealism and Horror

Julian Jason Haladyn, OCAD University

In the infamous opening scene of Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí's 1929 Un chien andalou, we witness the slashing of an eyeball, a scene of horror that locates this Surrealist film within the larger genre of horror cinema. Yet this is not an isolated manifestation of violence within practices of Surrealism but rather part of a larger exploration of unconscious impulses and imaginings, of violence and fantasies, of confrontations with "otherness." Much of the existing scholarship on Surrealism and horror focuses on film. However, questions of horror permeate virtually all aspects of the Surrealist project, from Hans Bellmer's grotesque images of dolls to Maya Deren's uncanny doubles, from Mayo's bent and broken bodies to, in the words of Aime Cesaire, "the original terror and fervour" of Wifredo Lam's abstracted bodily forms — an approach that Lam himself referred to as "an act of decolonization." This paper discusses the role of horror in Surrealist art, understood in an extended sense of the movement and spirit of Surrealism. Specifically, I will examine ways in which images and ideas of horror are used by a series of Surrealist artists to explore what is a vital terrain of the Surreal, which is grounded in questions of the unconscious and of "otherness" as a means of challenging and expanding notions of the "real."