Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies 18 (2020) The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies 18 (Autumn 2020) Contents EDITORIAL p. 5 Statement re: Issue #12 (2013) p. 6 ARTICLES ‘Do you all want to die? We must throw them out!’: Class Warfare, Capitalism, and Necropolitics in Seoul Station and Train to Busan Jessica Ruth Austin p. 7 Maternal Femininity, Masquerade, and the Sacrificial Body in Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya, or The Moor Reema Barlaskar p. 30 The Thing in the Ice: The Weird in John Carpenter’s The Thing Michael Brown p. 47 Harry Clarke, the Master of the Macabre Marguerite Helmers p. 77 Gods of the Real: Lovecraftian Horror and Dialectical Materialism Sebastian Schuller p. 100 Virgins and Vampires: The Expansion of Gothic Subversion in Jean Rollin’s Female Transgressors Virginie Sélavy p. 121 BOOK REVIEWS: LITERARY AND CULTURAL CRITICISM B-Movie Gothic, ed. by Justin D. Edwards and Johan Höglund Anthony Ballas p. 146 Werewolves, Wolves, and the Gothic, ed. by Robert McKay and John Miller Rebecca Bruce p. 151 Jordan Peele’s Get Out: Political Horror, ed. by Dawn Keetley Miranda Corcoran p. 155 Rikke Schubart, Mastering Fear: Women, Emotions, and Contemporary Horror Miranda Corcoran p. 161 1 Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies 18 (2020) Posthuman Gothic, ed. by Anya Heise-von der Lippe Matthew Fogarty p. 165 Jessica Balanzategui, The Uncanny Child in Transnational Cinema: Ghosts of Futurity at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century Jessica Gildersleeve p. 168 Neo-Victorian Villains: Adaptations and Transformations in Popular Culture, ed. by Benjamin Poore Madelon Hoedt p. 172 William Hughes, Key Concepts in the Gothic Kathleen Hudson p. 176 Murray Leeder, Horror Film: A Critical Introduction Kathleen Hudson p. 179 Dracula: An International Perspective, ed. by Marius-Mircea Crişan Giorgia Hunt p. 183 Darryl Jones, Sleeping with the Lights On: The Unsettling Story of Horror Laura R. Kremmel p. 186 Kyna B. Morgan, Woke Horror: Sociopolitics, Genre, and Blackness in Get Out Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet p. 189 The Cambridge Companion to Dracula, ed. by Roger Luckhurst Christina Morin p. 192 Yael Shapira, Inventing the Gothic Corpse: The Thrill of Human Remains in the Eighteenth- Century Novel Christina Morin p. 196 Rebecca Duncan, South African Gothic: Anxiety and Creative Dissent in the Post-Apartheid Imagination and Beyond Antonio Sanna p. 199 James Machin, Weird Fiction in Britain 1880-1939 John Sears p. 202 Bryan Hall, An Ethical Guidebook to the Zombie Apocalypse: How to Keep Your Brain Without Losing Your Heart Tait C. Szabo p. 205 Howard David Ingham, We Don’t Go Back: A Watcher’s Guide to Folk Horror Richard Gough Thomas p. 208 2 Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies 18 (2020) BOOK REVIEWS: FICTION The Great God Pan and Other Horror Stories, ed. by A. Worth Erin Corderoy p. 211 William Orem, Miss Lucy; and Dacre Stoker and J. D. Barker, Dracul Ruth Doherty p. 215 Doorway to Dilemma: Bewildering Tales of Dark Fantasy, ed. by Mike Ashley Murray Leeder p. 218 The Pit and the Pendulum and Other Tales, ed. by David Van Leer Elizabeth Mannion p. 220 BOOKS RECEIVED p. 223 TELEVISION AND PODCAST REVIEWS Dark, Seasons 1-3 Taghreed Alotaibi p. 225 Forest 404 Elizabeth Parker p. 228 The Purge Thomas Sweet p. 231 Siempre Bruja/Always a Witch, Seasons 1 and 2 Rebecca Wynne-Walsh p. 236 The Order, Seasons 1 and 2 Rebecca Wynne-Walsh p. 241 FILM REVIEWS Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror Sarah Cullen p. 245 Overlord Kevin M. Flanagan p. 249 Halloween Gerard Gibson p. 252 US Gerard Gibson p. 256 3 Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies 18 (2020) Suspiria Nicole Hamilton p. 261 Midsommar Dawn Keetley p. 266 Pet Sematary Rebecca Wynne-Walsh p. 272 EVENT REVIEWS Folk Horror in the Twenty-First Century Máiréad Casey p. 276 Theorizing Zombiism Miranda Corcoran p. 287 HAuNTcon Madelon Hoedt p. 296 INTERVIEW With Aislinn Clarke Máiréad Casey p. 300 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS p. 308 Editor: Dara Downey ISSN 2009-0374 Published Dublin, 2020 4 Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies 18 (2020) EDITORIAL NOTE Welcome to Issue #18 of The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies. This issue marks the 14th anniversary of the journal, which was established in October 2006 by Elizabeth McCarthy and Bernice Murphy, with the support of what was then the M.Phil. in Popular Literature in the School of English in Trinity College Dublin. The IJGHS has seen a number of changes since then in terms of the editorial team, the online platform we use to bring you our open-access content, and the frequency of publication. The current issue marks one such change, albeit a temporary one. Due to a range of personal circumstances, we did not publish an issue in 2019, and Issue #18 is therefore even longer than usual, with six articles, covering a range of topics from eighteenth-century gothic to contemporary theories of speculative realism, and over a hundred and fifty pages of reviews, covering academic books, fiction, TV and podcasts, film, and events, capped off with an interview with Northern-Irish filmmaker Aislinn Clarke. I would like to take this opportunity to thank our many contributors for their hard work and patience over the past eighteen months, which have been unusually unpredictable, both for us personally and on a global scale. As a small, independent, self-funded journal, run mainly by precariously employed scholars and those who have left academia, we are very much at the mercy of forces larger than ourselves, a situation that any good gothic hero or heroine should recognise all too easily. We have also, however, been incredibly lucky in terms of receiving support (whether editorial, technical, and moral) from a wonderful and very generous network. I am particularly grateful for the help of Niall Gillespie, Valeria Cavalli, Indira Priyadarshini Gopalan Nair, and Jennifer Daly over the past few months, as well as the excellent work done by our reviews editors, Sarah Cullen, Ruth Doherty, Elizabeth Parker, and Leanne Waters. We will be releasing details of our new Call for Papers shortly, via our website (https://irishgothicjournal.net/), and our social-media pages on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Please email us ([email protected]) if you have any queries, and we’re always happy to receive submissions of articles and reviews on a rolling basis throughout the year. And in the meanwhile, we hope that you enjoy Issue #18, just in time for Halloween. 5 Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies 18 (2020) Statement re: Issue#12 (2013) On 5 October 2020, the editors were made aware that the article ‘Ghosted Dramaturgy: Mapping the Haunted Space in Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More’ from issue 12 (2013), by Dr. Deidre O’Leary (Manhattan College), took liberally, and in an uncredited fashion, from Dr. Alice Dailey’s published article ‘Last Night I Dreamt I Went to Sleep No More: Intertextuality and Indeterminacy at Punchdrunk’s McKittrick Hotel’ (in Borrowers and Lenders: A Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation (Winter 2012)). Dr. O’Leary’s article has been retracted due to plagiarism. 6 Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies 18 (2020) ‘Do you all want to die? We must throw them out!’: Class Warfare, Capitalism, and Necropolitics in Seoul Station and Train to Busan Jessica Ruth Austin The undead, and the notion of life beyond death, have long been important components of gothic literature, and, arguably, this is increasingly the case in modern popular culture. Carol Margaret Davison has noted that ‘many gothic works meditated on death and death practices as a signpost of civilisation’.1 This essay explores the ways in which ‘undead practices’ function as a signpost of social inequality in a society, with zombie narratives as a useful tool for theorising death and death practices. In particular, the link between zombies and necropolitics (where it is decided which people in society live and which will die) is made explicit in the South-Korean films Seoul Station and Train to Busan.2 As I argue here, in these films, zombies are culturally representative for a South-Korean audience that is viewing them, and moreover, are connected to South-Korean death practices. I argue that these films highlight important necropolitical practices in South- Korean society today, with South-Korean audiences experiencing these zombie narratives differently to models outlined in previously published work on Western consumption of zombie narratives. As Achille Mbembe has proposed, necropolitics could be described as ‘the ultimate expression of sovereignty’ when it comes to ‘the power and the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die’, a formulation that, as this essay argues, can usefully be applied to the zombie horror genre, and specifically to Seoul Station and Train to Busan.3 This essay covers the way that these films represent necropolitical practices in South Korea in terms of work and labour, and of political hierarchies that have emerged in South-Korean society because of this. This essay utilises the concept of cinesexuality and work on zombies by Patricia MacCormack, who argues that films can evoke specific, distinct responses from domestic audiences, due to the presence of symbolism specific to the films’ cultures of origin, evoking a deeper pleasurable 1 Carol Margaret Davison, ‘Trafficking in Death and (Un)dead Bodies: Necro-Politics and Poetics in the Works of Ann Radcliffe’, The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies, 14 (2015), 37-48 (p. 39). 2 Seoul Station, dir. by Yeon Sang-ho (Studio Dadashow, 2016); and Train to Busan, dir. by Yeon Sang-ho (Next Entertainment World, 2016).