Friday 9 February 2024

Video Shop Horrors Exhibition



"Video Shop Horrors" was a multimedia exhibition held at Northumbria University's Gallery North, 26th October to 11th November 2023.

"Video Shop Horrors" captured the nascent video shop experience. In the 1980s, horror videos always seemed to be more effectively promoted than those of other genres. The artwork tended to be bombastic, awash with contorted faces, flashing blades, ghouls and gore. 

The so-called ‘video nasties’ moral panic came and went, but its legacy, the types of film it encompassed, and the promotional strategies of the first video distribution companies, live on. This exhibition captured the dynamism of this hugely significant technological moment, pooling from original archival materials, to showcase the promotional strategies employed by video companies to attract consumers and, in some cases, to whip up controversy. The significance of video to the development and enduring popularity of horror films cannot be understated. 

"Video Shop Horrors" recreated the 1980s/90s video shop experience whilst celebrating the aesthetic and the wealth of films that helped define and redefine the horror film genre.

The "Video Shop Horrors" exhibition was led by Dr Johnny Walker drawing on his extensive archive of video-related paraphernalia. The exhibition featured video and music by Dr Steve Jones. The exhibition represents the interests of staff working within the University’s new Horror Studies Research Group.

Below are some videos documenting the exhibition:


An interview with me and Johnny about the exhibition:


The soundtrack I composed for the exhibition:




Horror Studies Research Group at Northumbria


Northumbria has a long-standing international reputation as the home of horror scholarship. I am now leading our newly formalised Horror Studies Research Group.

We've been busy since we launched in October 2023. Aside from running our reading group, I set up our website, Twitter/X feed, and YouTube channel. The YouTube channel features playlists of various talks, podcasts and events our members have been involved in.

We organised a multimedia exhibition - "Video Shop Horrors" - at Northumbria University's Gallery North, 26th October to 11th November 2023. Read more about that here.

We hosted a workshop for the AHRC funded Youth and Horror Network, organised by Kate Egan (Northumbria Univeristy) and Cat Lester (Birmingham University) on 7th November. 

We also won funding to host our annual Horror Studies Now conference: more details and the Call for Papers is available here.

There are lots of developments to follow, but if you want to get in touch, contact us at horrorstudies@northumbria.ac.uk





The Metamodern Slasher Film - New Book Out Now!



My new book, The Metamodern Slasher Film is finally out! 

To find out more, click here: Metamodern Slasher Film | Dr Steve Jones

If you order through Edinburgh University Press, use the code NEW30 to get 30% off

Here is a video presentation about the book's content: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y9L3Fn6U0P4

Thursday 27 April 2023

Talk and interviews at Kurja Polt Film Festival



I recently attended Kurja Polt Film festival (Slovenia) to give a talk based on my forthcoming book The Metamodern Slasher Film (which should hopefully be out with Edinburgh University Press later this year).

My talk was titled "Subtraction and Compression in Contemporary Indie Horror" (or, as Google translate put it, "Countdown and The Thickening"). The abstract is available here. A recording of the talk is available below


While I was there, I was interviewed for RTV's Osmi Dan and for the radio programme Gremo v Kino. I was also interviewed by Ana Jurc for MMC about my broader research profile.




It was fantastic to be back in Ljubljana, to be speaking alongside Alexia Kannas again, and to meet the other guests at this year's festival


Friday 1 April 2022

Metamodern Slashers - Video and Article


Two updates to my ongoing research project on Metamodern Slasher films:

First, the video of my keynote at last year's Slasher Studies conference has been uploaded to YouTube: it is available here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJZ8bjphP_A

Second, the first article from the project has just been published in Slovenian language in Kino. Here is a link to the abstract: https://e-kino.si/clanki/od-postmodernega-k-metamodernemu-slasherju/


Wednesday 2 March 2022

New Article on Revenge and I Spit on Your Grave (2010)

My article "Appealin
g, Appalling: Morality and Revenge in I Spit on Your Grave (2010)" will be published later this year in the Quarterly Review of Film and Video. A pre-print version of the article is available here


Abstract

Despite being a prevalent theme in popular cinema, revenge has received little dedicated attention within film studies. The majority of research concerning the concept of revenge is located within moral philosophy, but that body of literature has been overlooked by film studies scholars. Philosophers routinely draw on filmic examples to illustrate their discussions of revenge, but those interpretations are commonly hindered by their authors’ inexperience with film studies’ analytical methods. This article seeks to bridge those gaps. The 2010 remake of I Spit on Your Grave is used as a case study to illustrate the benefits of an interdisciplinary engagement with revenge. Philosophical literature on the topic has routinely posited that revenge is either appealing or appalling, and that impasse has stifled conceptual understanding. The interdisciplinary approach employed here elucidates that revenge is simultaneously appealing and appalling; this dualistic nature is evident in I Spit on Your Grave since it is built into the narrative design. I conclude that an interdisciplinary approach to revenge has the potential to advance understanding of revenge-qua-concept both within films studies and philosophy.

Friday 8 October 2021

New Chapter on the Elm Street Series

I have a chapter on the Elm Street series in the new Routledge edited collection Horror Franchise Cinema (ed. Mark McKenna and William Proctor)  - the title is “If Nancy Doesn’t Wake Up Screaming: The Elm Street Series as Recurring Nightmare”. 

Here is the abstract:

Long-running horror series are reputed to yield diminishing returns (both in terms of profit and quality). At first glance, the A Nightmare on Elm Street series appears to fit that established pattern. For instance, lead antagonist Freddy supposedly ‘deteriorates’ from sinister, backlit child molester to comic-book ‘Las Vegas lounge’ stand-up act by the end of the 1980s (Schoell and Spencer 1992, 116). However, interviews from the period indicate that comedy was a central component from the outset of the series; it is not, as has been often suggested, that the series’ horror was diluted by the introduction of humour in later sequels. Such misremembrances are entrenched by the writers’, directors’ and actors’ retrospective reflections on Elm Street, which colour how the series is understood more broadly. 

This chapter will focus on one of the most common misremembrances embedded into Elm Street’s lore; that the series began with hard rules about the relationship between dream and reality, which became looser (to the point of incoherence) as the series progressed. As close textual analysis and examination of archival interviews will demonstrate, the series’ “rules” were never as clearly established as creator Wes Craven intended. Moreover, rather than complaining that the continuing story did not hold together—indeed, Craven dismissed parts 2-6 of the series on these grounds—I argue that the series ought to be taken on its own terms. The individual films may vary in aesthetic and quality for various industrial reasons, but they are nevertheless chapters in a continuing narrative, and ought to be understood as such. Given that the diegesis is based on shared experiences—secrets held by Springwood’s parents, nightmares and abilities shared by the teens—it is reductive to understand the Elm Street films as anything other than an imbricated whole. As such, this chapter will demonstrate that the series’ narrative is best understood as a recurring nightmare. Its logic is dreamlike, being constituted by events, characters and motifs that are echoed across the series. Thus, this chapter contends that to dismiss the Elm Street sequels as a product of diminishing returns is to overlook the series’ narrative richness. More broadly, this chapter makes a case for understanding sequels as valuable parts of a whole, rather than dismissing them as inferior copies of the original. 


If you would like to read it, it is available here

The collection is available here. It features many excellent chapters on horror, including one by my colleague Kate Egan. Northumbria Uni's horror research is being represented in back-to-back chapters in this collection!