Film Matters Magazine

Film Matters: Please tell us about your article that is being published in Film Matters.

Matthew Cohen: “Gorehounds: Reconsidering the Study of Splatter Narrativity” attempts to activate a field of splatter studies through the application of narratology to gore films. This is accomplished through an analysis of the “gorehound,” a specialized horror fan that privileges gory special effects over traditional narrative content in splatter cinema.

Sexual assault is an incredibly dark topic that many tend to avoid as much as possible. Others, however, want to bring more awareness. Fairytale (Hershko, 2019) follows the story of Verity (played by Verity East), a young girl who finds herself being treated more as an object than an actual person. She suffers from countless acts of sexual assault and abuse, and the film depicts her journey to find a place where she is safe and at peace. Eli Hershko directed, produced, edited, and wrote the film Fairytale. I was fortunate to have the opportunity to discuss the film with Hershko.

Miranda Sprouse: Tell us about your film, Fairytale.

Eli Hershko: Fairytale is a very dark, unscripted film that deals with sexual assault at its core. This film was shot with no budget ($15k) over the course of eight days in NYC and Long Island with a skeleton crew of twelve people… Now, when I say unscripted, I mean that, usually, traditional films will have a ninety-to-one-hundred-ten-page script that will have a storyline, characters, and all dialogue. The director and the production will follow the script in order to tell the story and, depending on the director, at times, he or she might deviate from the script but mostly the script is the blueprint to the movie. Fairytale did not have a script. I was seduced by the idea of shooting a totally improvised film as a way of telling a story because of the fact that I was hoping to capture a process I noticed taking place in my previous films… What do I mean by that?

I’ll try to explain: for my first feature film – Carl(a) — I wrote about a transgender love story and, in order to write this film, I researched the subject for a whole year before I sat down and wrote the ninety-five-page script. Now, in my opinion, in order for a movie to reach its audience, the viewer has to believe the characters; so, in order to achieve this layer of realism, when I completed the script, I then proceeded to sit down with each and every one of my cast and rewrite their dialogue with them in order to create a well-familiar “skin” for them, so they will be at ease and feel as natural as they can as far as dialogue goes.

Upon completing the re-writes, we spent about a month rehearsing and then went on to shoot the film. I noticed that because I was so rehearsed at times, when we got to set and the scene “DID NOT” work while shooting, which is a common thing really, I was at a loss. So I took that experience with me when I moved to my second feature film. For this one I wrote a one-hundred-ten-page script but did not rehearse at all and told the actors to prepare on their own. When we got to set, I encouraged the actors to get “off book” and try to say my lines in their own words. Now, because I allowed actors to get “off book,” a lot of “HAPPY ACCIDENTS” happened on set, where unexpected moments would develop that were not included in the script and I ended up using them in the final edit and that was the seed that was planted in my head; so when I started thinking of putting together Fairytale, I decided to shoot a feature film composed in its entirety of “HAPPY ACCIDENTS,” and the film will sort of UNFOLD in front of us.

I knew it was a very risky endeavor and that the movie can become very “artistic” in nature and “aloft” to the point it can be drifting off and not make sense; so in order to ground the story up and force it and the audience to a cohesive idea, I decided that the movie, at its core, needed to be a dark and violent movie; so I summon up the courage and decided to do a movie that deals with sexual assault, being that I am a survivor of one myself.

Film Matters: Please tell us about your article that is being published in Film Matters.

Lauren Ekene Nwenwu: My article is on how (black/white) mixed-race identity is represented in contemporary British films as existing outside the limiting, socially constructed paradigms of black and white identity: not as simply a combination of both, but with its own qualities of representational value. This is not to say that mixed-race struggles and experiences are harder or more difficult than black experiences, just that they can be different. It’s about how this concept started to change from its degrading and caricatured beginnings, coming to fruition in British films during the 1990s, using one film in particular – The Girl with Brains in Her Feet – to demonstrate this. Despite the film’s concerns with racial identity, when released in 1997 it was denied classification as a “black film” by its makers, leaving it floating in the ether of films on social struggle in British cinema. The author of the original source material expressed frustration with this decision, and how the subject matter was perhaps too ahead of its time for marketers to understand. It appears that because the film was venturing a look at a non-stereotypical third generation black British experience, it was too confusing for distributors to categorize. The Girl with Brains in Her Feet is a “British identity” film – which are very often typified as being intrinsically white narratives – as well as being a “black film,” sat between a color divide in more ways than one. When released, the film’s misinterpretation led to muted branding, and lack of consideration for a ground-breaking depiction of a neglected, marginalized experience. Consequentially it is almost unknown, and excluded from seminal lists about British films about race, limited to cursory mentions if any, in black British film archives.

Sacrifice (Maguire, 2018) captures the love story between James (Leigh Smith) and Blake (Jesse Everett) as Blake prepares for his next military assignment. When the story takes an unexpected turn, it becomes clear how even in the darkest times, we must hold on to love. I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Leigh Smith (writer, actor) and Jesse Everett (actor) about their film.

Miranda Sprouse: Tell us about your short film, Sacrifice.

Leigh Smith: Sacrifice follows the story of James Hunter and Blake Robinson, two lovers who are entering a new phase within their relationship but who also struggle to make this work within the constraints of their demanding careers. Blake, being in the military, also brings uncertainty and risk to their relationship each time he is taken away from James on duty. Sacrifice is a story of love and all that is gained and lost in its name.

Jesse Everett: Sacrifice is a beautifully written story following the lives of two characters and their struggle for lasting love. It is a journey of love, heartbreak, and, as per the title, sacrifice all from a perspective not shown in the industry, making it a uniquely profound short film.

Film Matters: Please tell us about your article that is being published in Film Matters.

Shaye Guillory: “Budget Sex: The Neglected Perspective of Youth in Contemporary Cinema” assesses the representation of youth sexual relations in films released between the 2000s and the present day. My article puts forth the notion of the millennial sexual experience as habitually distorted in contemporary film, often as a result of the budgetary and cultural implications posed by independent and Hollywood filmmaking. As a result, there exists significant neglect in the depiction of the “coming-of-age” sexual experience, propelling the societal perception of the young adult as either engaged in extreme sexual behaviors, or no sex to speak of.

Film Matters: Please tell us about your article that is being published in Film Matters.

Katelyn Terry: My article “Contorted Bodies: Women’s Representation in Japanese Horror Films” focuses on the representation of the female form in Japanese’s horror films through close textual analysis of the well-known J-Horror cult films, Ju-On and Ringu. Using the scholarship of feminist film theorists, my paper seeks to prove that the women in these films, while depicted as a monstrous other, are ultimately re-empowered as they inspire fear, wonder, and revulsion in characters within the diegesis as well as audiences, through the contorted display of their body.