Category: Critical/Cultural Studies
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Legion: Or, the Exorcism Movie that Makes Me Sad for Roddy Piper
I recently came to be interested in professional wrestling. For awhile there — as in most of my life — I thought wrestling to be beneath me, an entertainment that degrades those who do it and those who watch it. I was wrong: there are many layers to this sports entertainment, and it is quite…
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Feminist Tensions in The Last Exorcism and The Last Exorcism Part 2
At the Midwest Popular Culture Association‘s 2014 conference, Chris and I presented the first analysis from our exorcism cinema project. The presentation is titled: Feminist tensions in exorcism cinema: Case study analysis and comparison of The Last Exorcism and The Last Exorcism Part II. What follows are the notes for the presentation, which constitute an…
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Sir Anthony Hopkins Performs an Exorcism in The Rite
Sir Anthony Hopkins is one of those interesting actors. Best known as an incredible actor throughout his entire career, sometimes he will do movies that are, for lack of better words, slumming it – doing a movie for a paycheck. Freejack. Alexander. The Edge. The Wolfman. Red 2. To be fair, I cannot really blame…
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Valhalla Rising and the Demythologization of Male Violence
In a reworking of some analysis from his Master’s thesis, Christopher J. Olson presents his analysis of Nicholas Winding Refn’s existential film Valhalla Rising. In his analysis, Chris argues that Refn portrays a violent version of masculinity in order to critique globalized popular culture’s tendency to portray men in such rigid and limited ways. Read…
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An Encoding-Decoding-Recoding Model of Media Studies
This blog posts continues the dissection of my dissertation that I began by introducing the topic of gendered media engagings earlier this year. This post focuses on a model I used in my dissertation to understand the array of media studies conducted to investigate the ways in which gender is involved in how people engage…
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Blackwater Valley Exorcism: Equating Demonic Possession with Sexual Assault
When The Exorcist (1973) was first released, it spawned numerous foreign rip-offs and B-movie exploitative versions. From Şeytan (1974) in Turkey to the reworking of the Italian film ‘Lisa e il diavolo’ (1974/1975)into The House of Exorcism, foreign producers created their own takes on the story of young women being possessed, with more or less…
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An Autoethnography of Collegium – Day Five
Day 5: Wednesday, June 25th A normal academic conference might go for three, four days. A big one could be upwards of five days. Each day would have numerous panels and presentations scheduled, giving you the opportunity to go where you want, when you want, for however long you want. And if you want, they…
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The Devil Inside: The One that Pissed Off People
A good found footage movie relies on its ability to trick you into thinking, just for a second, that maybe this could have been happening. We all know it didn’t — the fact that we are seeing a “movie” is the largest proof against that idea — but we still like to trick ourselves in…
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Genre Mashing in Professional Wrestling
After the event of this weekend, where normally we are only needing to remember our veterans but must now also remember those young men and women who died at the whim of a terrorist — of a misogynist extremist — I need to take a break from discussing fractured fandom and the sexist, and misogynist,…
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A Judaic Take on Exorcism in The Possession
One of the first movies we could qualify as being exorcism cinema was not concerned with the Catholic approach to possession and exorcism. Instead, it showed us this conflict from an older religious perspective, Judaism. In 1937, a Polish movie called Der Dibuk or The Dybbuk was released as one of the first movies filmed…
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