Nicol > Recent Status Updates

”these six works of domestic horror urge us toward a vertiginous realization. That realization, time and again, is that domestic abuse and the regulation of women’s bodies and rights is horror . . . the point of origin of the horror, in all of them, is the abuse and dehumanization of women.”

”Domestic horror in the 2020s is a call to speak out, a call to protest, and a reminder that we’ve been at this moment in history before and that the consequences of failing to resist are extremely high now . . . Is also hell-bent on reminding us that the danger becomes infinitely graver if we allow ourselves to be silenced.”

”Friedkin took Alfred Hitchcock’s oft-quoted dictum to heart: ‘‘Torture the women!’ The trouble today is that we don’t torture women enough.’ Friedkin tortured the women plenty. When we watch and feel horror at Chris’s battery, we are simultaneously watching the actual physical battery of the body of Ellen Burstyn.”

“When I watched Duvall’s performance, I find myself thinking about the horrific Edvard Munch painting The Scream-like that painting, Duvall’s performance is an embodiment of absolute fear.”

“Duvall has gone on record many times saying that Stanley Kubrick himself terrorized and tormented her, to elicit the most shattered and horrified performance from her that he could.”

“Abuse victims need advocates that can hear them and who will listen. And that’s exactly what Hallorann does.”

“Half of the directors of the original films (Polanski, Friedman, Kubrick) were abusers of women themselves, students of how much strain and agony the female body and mind could take before crumbling.”

“The Shining is not just a supernatural horror story about a ghost ridden hotel; it is first and foremost an allegory for sustained domestic violence, inflicted and justified by a man who honestly believes his wife and children owe him their lives.”

”with each case she witness how police detectives gaslighted, humiliated, and bullied victims. ‘It’s a very ugly world, she said. ‘The police accuse the victims of not being able to provide evidence,’ even when they had plenty of it.”

”When we talk about rape, we’re almost always talking about space- who owns it, who feels safe in it, who doesn’t. At the very least, we need survivors to be able to design and control the spaces where people come for refuge after they’ve been assaulted.”

“‘If you’ve seen the police hurting African American people who’ve done nothing wrong, why you go to the police and tell that you’ve been raped?’”

“Sometime around 2020, a group of researchers decided to find out how many nonwhite professionals were working as forensic scientists. They discovered that no one had bothered to collect statistics on racial and gender bias in the field.”

”Less than 1/4 of all survivors chose to report their assaults.Some had been told by police detectives that it was pointless to file an evidence kit because SA was a crime that couldn’t be proved.Sexual assault was the least reported violent crime in the US, and the dismal statistics suggested that as many as 80% of survivors felt that this system had not been built for them. They had no desire to engage with it.”

“For decades, it was generally believed that serial predators were rare. Now, however, it’s becoming clear that serial rapists only seem to be rare because police departments so often fail to catch them, bungling cases and ignoring survivors. ‘Our findings emphasize that serial sex offending is quite common’”

””Chillingly, two-thirds of serial rapists had never been arrested for sexual assault before the backlogged evidence was tested, even though some of them had been active for years. That ‘is an indicator as to just how much undetected sexual offending there is,’ Lovell told a reporter in 2020. It was also an indication of just how little police departments had to prevent it.”

”During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, almost all of the patentable ideas generated by African American and female originators could be appropriated by a small group of wealthy white men, so the U.S. patent system became one of the prime tools of extractive capitalism.”

”It seemed logical, then, that the most effective inventor of a sexual-assault forensics system would be a woman. And it also seemed cruelly inevitable that a man would be the one to receive the credit.”

”In other words, sexual-assault forensics began as a system for men to decide whether a woman deserved to be considered a victim at all. It had little to do with identifying a perpetrator or establishing the truth.”

”We girls were put on notice that stairwells, laundry rooms, parking garages, running trails in parks, and the entire world after midnight were made by and for men. We were allowed to share these places, so long as we didn’t get too comfortable in them. The warnings of sexual assault carried inside them an even more demoralizing and insidious message: this world is not for you.”

”Thinking about my legacy-my books. They’re like messages in bottles that I cast into a sea of humanity. There’s no guarantee that they will ever be found and read by people able to make use of them. They are, if anything, beginning places. They might foster study in areas new to finders. They might give the finders something to react against, and thus find new paths for thought and/or action.”

”Black women’s genius is so rarely recognized, much less understood. And when it is recognized and celebrated, it is often too late. Our Black women artists, poets, novelists, and intellectuals live in a world where they are faced with multiple jeopardy of misogynoir, classism, ableism, and other daunting systems of power…It is perhaps no wonder that Octavia was woefully misunderstood for much of her life.”

“And experienced a type of domestic support that Octavia simply did not have. None of her science fiction peers lived with her circumstances, and none produced writing quite like hers.”

”Still, it is a bit unfair to compare Octavia’s output with that of another writer...It took Octavia years to be published, much less get the recognition she deserved…Octavia died at only age fifty eight after protracted illness, She spent much of her twenties doing odd jobs to support her writing career and remained single throughout her life, while many of her peers were partnered for much of their careers.”

But the truth is that, as N.K. Jemisin reminds us, the world has ended many times for many people.Doesn’t the world end for people who are taken from their villages, captured, sold and traded like strings of cowrie shells or goats, then stashed in the hull of a stinking ship and taken to a strange new land, with strange people, speaking a strange tongue?Isn’t that a type of apocalypse?Isn’t it the end of their world?

”Octavia’s work is, however, uniquely situated to speak to the terrors of dystopian America. Using historical examples while also imagining possible future scenarios, Octavia’s novels pay close attention to the workings of white supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism to spin a horrifying near future about America’s possible demise and redemption.”