Interview with Critic, Essayist, and Audio Producer Chelsea Davis

Interview with Chelsea Davis

1.    Thank you for joining me! For those who don’t know you, could you please introduce yourself?

Hi there. I’m a critic and essayist who writes about film, literature, and culture. I typically focus on horror, although I’m broadly interested in how our art and media depict violence, across genres and formats. For instance, my PhD dissertation focused on war literature, and my ongoing essay series Shrieks and Howls looks at the weird overlaps between horror and comedy, two films at a time. My work as an audio producer for the podcast Pseudopod is constantly bringing me into contact with stories that demonstrate the range of dark experiences that humans are heir to. Horror is a ghost story that never leaves the walls of a single apartment; horror is a zombie outbreak in Calcutta; horror is a shapeless dread overtaking a spaceship.

I’m also a poet and am putting the finishing touches on a chapbook about classic horror films. Some of those poems have already been published in Vastarien (on The Exorcist), The Racket (on Jaws), and elsewhere.

2.    Let’s talk a little about your research within the horror genre. I hope everyone reading this interview will take a moment and check out your powerful and insightful article “American Psycho,” “American Beauty,” “American Pie”: White Male Rage at the Turn of the Millennium.” How do we combat this “white man ire” that Hollywood loves to perpetuate?

Thank you for the kind words about that essay. I think your word “perpetuate” is a key one here. Movies like Joker aren’t responsible for creating the problem of “aggrieved entitlement” (a term that sociologist Michael Kimmel uses to describe the anger that people feel when they lose unfair privileges to which they’re accustomed). Instead, revenge fantasies in this style merely articulate undercurrents of white male rage that already exist in the real world. They also provide certain viewers with tidy narrative proof that that their own anger is valid, heroic, and has a justifiable outlet in mass shootings, murder, and sexual assault. In this way, the stories we tell ourselves (on the big screen and elsewhere) are part of the problem of white male violence.

But I think they’re only a very, very small part. For instance, the research remains inconclusive as to whether brutal movies and videogames truly make players/viewers act in more brutal ways. (If onscreen gore were one-to-one responsible for offscreen bloodshed, way more horror fans probably would have become serial killers by now.)

Unfortunately, I think the opposite is also true: film is relatively impotent in terms of its ability to heal such a highly dangerous and materially motivated cultural impulse. White men (and white women, for that matter) have a deeply vested interest in keeping power and resources to themselves, and I’m not confident that they’ll/we’ll give that up just because fewer movies focus on pissed-off white men, or because more movies feature lead characters of color. So the most honest answer to your question is that it’s infinitely more important to destroy white supremacy in meatspace than it is to do so in our fictions. That means funding expert efforts to nip white terrorism at the bud in the places where it likes to roost, and pushing for structural changes to racist policies in the realms of housing, education, and the justice system. Kimmel’s book Angry White Men is a good place to read more about all of this.

3.    You’ve written several articles about the use of color within horror stories. What is something surprising you’ve learned about your research into this topic?

It blew my mind to learn how far back color first appeared in film. Take a guess. Nope, earlier than that. We’re talking the 1890s! Granted, these films weren’t shot in color; they were colored in post, one frame at a time, by a human hand holding a tiny paint brush. But still. This means that audiences have been watching moving pictures in color nearly since the birth of the medium itself.

There are intriguing implications for our favorite genre, too. It turns out that color has had a particular relationship to horror and other SFF movies from the jump. The first colors used in film were so bright and otherwise artificial-looking that they weren’t especially well suited to the more realist genres. Very early horror, science fiction, and “faerie” or fantasy films figured this out, and exploited the surrealism of vivid color to render their dream (or nightmare) worlds all the more alien. For Gothic and sci-fi examples, check out George Méliès’s films The Haunted Castle (1897) and A Trip to the Moon (1902).

4.    Who are some of your favorite authors?

I think Carmen Maria Machado is doing some of the most formally inventive stuff that we’ve seen in horror for a long time. Paul Tremblay has a real gift for turning the screw. Thomas Ligotti’s work always makes me feel like I’ve just bitten into a maggot-filled pie (in a good way, I guess). Ottessa Moshfegh is impossible to pigeonhole into a single genre, but her amoral characters and bizarre plots are far more disturbing to me than any Eli Roth movie. And all of these shock effects I’m describing—formal innovation, disgust, surprise—is why we read, right? To ax-murder the frozen sea within us.

5.    Let’s shift a bit and talk about PseudoPod. As co-producer, what are your responsibilities for the podcast?

I’m an audio producer for Pseudopod, which means I use audio software to stitch together the individual ingredients of our episodes (narrator, host track, music, etc.) into the finished product you listen to in your podcatcher. In some cases I also get to play with the audio, warping voices and sneaking creepy soundbeds under the vocals. In the past I also served the ‘pod as a slush reader, which was crazy fun and which I hope I have time to return to in the future. 

6.    For anyone looking to get into podcasting or radio work, what tips would you give them?

Go for it! Radio is an artistically delightful medium and a relatively democratic one. Though the technology might seem intimidating, don’t let that part scare you off. There are loads of free online tutorials out there and it doesn’t cost much to create a basic audio recording setup at home.

The more important thing to consider carefully from minute one is what your niche will be. If you’re hoping to start a podcast (rather than to pitch and report one-off pieces as a freelance radio producer), think long and hard about your “angle” in terms of both format and content. There are already a million horror podcasts out there that consist of three bro-pals chatting about their favorite movies in a freeform manner and with minimal production. There’s nothing wrong with that, but are you sure you want to create the million-and-first variation on that theme? Can you find a novel focus or format to draw more listeners to your pod and give them a reason to keep coming back? For instance, I recently did a guest spot on a podcast called The Beauty of Horror, which, true to its name, examines horror movies that are beautiful or that philosophically engage with the theme of beauty. I found the show’s tight focus to be a real virtue—ironically, a narrow subject often opens into more expansive discussion than directionless riffing.

7.    What changes do you hope to see in the horror world in the next five years?

I’m most attracted to art that pushes and blurs the boundaries of genre, and in the future I hope we see more filmmakers and authors use “horror” as a jumping-off point rather than a strict set of conventions. Americans could stand to take a page out of international filmmakers’ books, in this regard. Julia Ducournau’s Titane was my favorite movie of last year because it constantly kept me off-balance: there’s body horror there, sure, but seen from another angle the film is also a tender love story, and it is also a slasher, and it is also science fiction. The Brazilian-French production Bacurau (2019) and the Swedish film Border (2018) are two more stellar examples of this kind of genre-fucking. It is aesthetic sluttiness, not safe remakes of classics, that keeps horror fresh. (Please, no more remakes or sequels that aren’t doing anything new with the subject matter or medium; there’s been such a scourge of those lately.)

More structurally speaking, but not unrelatedly, I also want people of color, women, and queer people to be given more capital to make their art. And I want that art to get more media coverage and awards consideration when it debuts. We’ve been writing books and creating visual art in the speculative genres for centuries, but we need money to sustain ourselves as we do so. This shift is already underway in horror, but it should be happening faster, and outside of the mainstream, too. It’s far more important to me that an indie feature from a first-time filmmaker gets funded than that an already-comfortable, already-famous author scores a fourteenth award.

8.    What’s next for you? Any projects you’d like to share?

In addition to the chapbook I’m wrapping up, I’m thrilled to be making a small narrative contribution to my first board game: The Zone, a horror role-playing game by Raph d’Amico. The online version already exists (you can play it here for free), but I’m working with Raph to develop some aspects of the physical iteration, which will be born sometime in the near future. The game is part Annihilation, part Event Horizon, part whatever particular nightmare keeps you up at night—you are, after all, the one telling the strange and terrible story of The Zone.

9.    Where can people find you online?

Much of my writing is posted on my website at chelseamdavis.net/writing and I’m on Twitter @UnrealCitoyenne. Let’s make something together!