As the sun sinks beneath the horizon and night descends upon the world, humanity huddles around the collective light to fend off the threats within the darkness. In ancient times, this was often equated with the fear of predators, red in tooth and claw, but as humans abandoned their caves and huts for more cosmopolitan climes, the dangers began to take on a more familiar appearance. Senseless crimes such as murder would often be attributed to strange, supernatural beings -- after all, in the eyes of early man, no human could possibly do something so heinous to their kin. As such, tales of blood-sucking demons such as the draugr of Scandinavia , vrykolakas of Greece, and vetālas of India began to rise in prominence all over the world. Though the word “vampire” would not be coined for many centuries, all of these legends speak to a baser human fear of those who would prey upon their own kind. In the 19th Century, the Vampire sudd...
Many among the Humanities often preoccupy themselves with the study of the ideology of mass art. Is art, particularly commercial, or mass art, merely a means of propagating a dominant culture’s ideology? Or, barring that, is it a matter of subverting that culture’s ideology? Must the study of rhetoric fall into one of those two categories -- either wholesale proselytization, or condemnation? The duality of such a standpoint is often a pitfall for many academics, as the reliance upon cultural ideology can be used as a crutch to avoid a true critical analysis. Such a shortcut, however, is capable of backfiring on the scholar -- for if their critique of a subject centers purely upon the ideological, then by default, their criticism is too far steeped within their own ideology as to be considered a truly neutral analysis. Whether epistemic (a viewpoint based upon the logic of said ideology), or dominant (an ideology shared b...
This year, I was fortunate enough to sample two impressive, yet wholly distinct forms of animation. The two shorts I had seen were the films Meeting MacGuffin and The World of Tomorrow 1&2. Meeting MacGuffin: An Ecological Thriller was a bizarre yet charming take upon a dystopian future where humanity is all but extinct -- and the ascendant surviving species (typical woodland creatures) have taken to creating humanlike proxies known as "homies," constructed from the discarded bodyparts that are all that remain from humanity, itself. Utilizing stop motion animation with figures constructed from dolls and other such crafting materials, the film gives a charming feeling of a dark and macabre fairy tale -- paired with the gentle voiceover performances, yet all together unsettling aesthetic, I don't know if I would necessarily classify this film as a "thriller," as there were really no moments of suspense found within. It would be my own assumption that the ...
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