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Further Reading
Featured below are all of the pieces that influenced my thinking, inspired my art, or directly informed my understanding of "Death by Sex." The styles of works included here vary greatly, but are all equally worth checking out. Feel free to explore them; all were incredible resources in creating Psycho at Large.
ARTISTIC INSPIRATIONS
Released in 2021, De Campi’s work tells the story of crime scene photographer Quincy Harker and the three vampire brides of Dracula as the group realizes that Dracula is back to torment them and others. Set in 1974 Los Angeles, this graphic novel takes on the tropes and aesthetics of pulpy B-horror movies (the author having worked on Grindhouse and Bad Girls), but with a bright and warm color palette that accentuates the camp and hallucinatory/uncanny ambience the story presents. Thematically, this graphic novel sets out to explore why women in particular find themselves in harmful relationships and how cycles of domestic abuse can be broken by previous victims. Though it focuses on Quincy Harker as a protagonist, the characters actually identifying, understanding, and stopping Dracula and his new bride are the three brides from the original Dracula story. They alone understand exactly why he is able to manipulate his new bride and how best to engage with her sensibilities in order to end the madness. In terms of generic form, this graphic novel includes page designs as spreads and not pages in the traditional sense; meaning, this graphic novel includes more two-page wide art spread rather than remain limited to a very specific formatting guide and regimented panels.
Released in 2021, this comic mini-series (#1-6) was released as a part of the imprint Hill House Comics under DC Comics, curated alongside several other mini-series horror graphic comics by horror legend Joe Hill. Machado’s piece follows two young queer women, El and Octavia through a mystery in their uncanny and strange town Shudder-to-Think, Pennsylvania. In the beginning of the story, they wake up together in a movie theater as the credits roll, with no memory of how they spent their last several hours. In seeking-- or deliberately avoiding-- the answers to that question, they begin to uncover devastating truths about the women in their town and start questioning the value of truth and truly understanding trauma. In terms of style, this graphic novel plays with uncanny horror and blends ephemeral/delicate art with harsh themes to produce a chilling yet beautiful effect. Its color palette is slightly muted to give the town and characters a worn-down effect, while cross hatching and varied unkempt line art breathes a certain vitality and movement into the work. It makes use of traditional comic panel layouts, yet still utilizes the full page spread model and inserts many full page, thematically relevant cover art designs to break up the monotony and provide surrealist portraits in the midst of the action.
Released in 2018, this volume collects #1-6 of Gideon Falls, all encompassed under the title “The Black Barn.” Created by Jeff Lemire of SWEET TOOTH, this graphic novel follows two character’s stories: Norton, a young recluse who compulsively hoards and methodologically searches the city’s trash in order to find clues about a mysterious and ominous “Black Barn,” and Father Wilfred, a disillusioned Catholic priest struggling with his faith as he’s sent on an unconventional assignment to the city of Gideon Falls. In terms of theme, this graphic novel strives to question the intersections between faith, healing, evil and good, mental illness, and obsession. In a narrative filled with uncanny horror elements and constant strange, unexplainable occurrences, Gideon Falls routinely asks whether anything is to be believed, drawing lines between conspiracy and reality. On the level of style, this graphic novel leans heavily on cross hatching, rough and inconsistent (yet clean) line art, muted yet highly contrasting color palettes, and full page spreads often linked towards violence or big moments in the story.
Made into a feature length horror comedy film in 2011, this one hundred and eight page script is the work of both acclaimed screenwriter/showrunner Joss Whedon (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, FIrefly, The Avengers, Toy Story) and famous director, writer, and producer Drew Goddard (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Lost, Daredevil, Cloverfield). The film stars Kristen Connolly, Chris Hemsworth, Anna Hutchinson, Fran Kranz, Jesse Willaims, Richard Jenkins, and Bradley Whitford. Known for its self-aware humor and reliance on audience understanding of tropes, this film follows several American college students serving as slasher movie archetypes as they stay a weekend at a cabin in the woods. Each character directly represents a specific trope/archetype—“the whore,” “the athlete,” “the scholar,” “the fool,” and “the virgin”—and the narrative plays with the idea of running each character through their archetype’s standard circuit and respective concurrent horror movie tropes. As Whedon has publicly stated, The Cabin in the Woods serves as an “loving hate letter” to the genre, as a film that very openly discusses the pros and cons of a genre rife with questionable and equally comfortable/standardized tropes.
Conceptual/academic inspirtations
Published in 1992, Professor of American Film Carol J. Clover’s widely influential study of gender in horror films marked a turning point in horror film theory. Her ideas helped to legitimize the genre, partly due to the special attention she gave slashers, which were then (and somewhat still) considered “low brow” or “cheap.” Her most known and impactful theory originated from the essay entitled “Her Body, Himself,” in which she identifies and defines the “Final Girl” trope. In coining the term “Final Girl,” Clover examined numerous female protagonists from popular films like Laurie from Halloween (1978), Nancy from A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), Sally from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1973), and Stretch from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre II (1986). In her view, the “Final Girl” represents the character who, due to several characteristics unique to the Final Girl type, survives and bests the killers in slashers. Final girls tend to be smart, sexually unavailable, “watchful to the point of paranoia,” “abject terror personified,” masculine, and capable/resourceful. She argues several points, the most crucial of which involves audience identification with the female protagonists by largely male audiences in a genre that has often been criticized for gratuitous violence against women. Clover posits that by allowing the Final Girl to best the slasher villain on his terms (that is, with the “phallis” knife/chainsaw/etc), she essentially emasculates him and provides a subversive and possibly feminist narrative for male viewers to identify with.
Recently published in 2020, screenwriter and Professor of Play and Screenwriting at Duke University Neal Bell (Splatter Pattern, HBO) uses this work as a guidebook for a variety of relevant topics one might need to understand in the process of writing a horror movie script. From analyzing and deconstructing specific movies and their scripts to understand how they effectively scare, to dissecting various basic tools like dialogue, mood, and pacing, this book tackles the entirety of what makes a horror movie a competent and compelling one. Due to its recent publication, this book also has the added benefit of explaining and entering a market and rhetorical situation that is fresh, relevant, and practical. Bell uses this to his advantage in specifically addressing horror as a current, thriving genre, with a particular emphasis on recent films that encapsulate where the genre is at (Get Out (2017), [REC] (2007), Under the Shadows (2016)). Additionally, this book proves incredibly useful for its reflection on the economics of the horror movie industry, including his informed speculations about where the future of the genre lies in terms of the filmmaking world.
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