0000000000244244
AUTHOR
Pauline Greenhill
Blood-Red Relations In and Out of Place : Women’s Self-Harm and Supernatural Crime in The Moth Diaries
In Canadian filmmaker Mary Harron’s The Moth Diaries (a Canadian/ American/Irish co-production), exploring adolescent girls’ friendships and self-harm in a boarding school setting, blood is out of place. It drips from the protagonist’s father’s wrist artery, willingly shed in suicide; involuntarily tarnishes her nightgown as menstrual blood; falls on the school director’s china figurines as nosebleed; and pours in the school library as a vampire-invoked rain. Moth uses blood to manifest the suicide contagion that Rebecca fears she has inherited from her artist father. Blood also signifies her resistance and recovery, enabled by her difficult relationship with her schoolmates, erstwhile best…
‘Something’s Not Right in Silverhöjd’: Nordic Supernatural and Environmental and Species Justice in Jordskott
In the Swedish/Finnish/British/Norwegian television series Jordskott (2015–17) child victims’ mysterious disappearances signal that ‘something’s not right’ in Silverhöjd, a Swedish town. Three detectives uncover a conflict between the locals who depend on a local industry and preternatural human-like but non-human forest creatures familiar from Nordic tradition and fairylore. Both humans and semi/non-humans are ambivalent, but what sets the latter apart is their implication in caring for nature, protecting it, and punishing those who harm it. We analyse this series’ instantiation of a folkloristic popular green criminology, based in the idea that popular discourses’ representations of crime…