Jennifer Proctor

Featuring a dozen segments of spine-tingling surrealist horror, The Eyeslicer Halloween Special takes viewers on the cinematic equivalent of an acid trip down the Halloween aisle at Party City! From an X-rated Halloween party hookup to a coming of age story set on the eve of Ted Bundy’s execution; from a documentary about pumpkin carving and misogyny to a supercut about the gendered dangers of the bathtub; from a cursed stand-up comedy set to a woman ( Carrie Coon) trapped inside a Red Lobster commercial; from a John Carpenter homage (featuring a cameo by Carpenter himself) to a sequel to The Eyeslicer’s now infamous Gwilliam, The Eyeslicer Halloween Special is an experience like no other – a deranged, proudly transgressive anthology carving out a bold new space in the Midnight movie genre.

An exhaustive and illuminating deconstruction of how horror films frequently feature the bathtub as both a private sanctuary for women and, damningly, as an impromptu sarcophagus.

“This work is a textual video adaptation of Justin Remes’ essay, ‘Boundless Ontologies: Michael Snow, Wittgenstein, and the Textual Film,’ published in ‘Cinema Journal, 54.3, Spring 2015’. It was produced as part of ‘[in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film and Moving Image Studies 2.2, 2015’, a journal devoted to the form of the video essay, where I’ve also included a substantial Curator’s Note. I was honored to have been invited to create a video response to Remes’ essay, which examines the ontological status of the textual film (and film in general), and to engage so deeply with both his argument and the work of Michael Snow (namely SO IS THIS). In keeping with Snow’s playfulness, and delight in asserting durational control, this piece plays with time, language, and ambiguous authorship.” –Jennifer Proctor

A loving remake of Bruce Conner’s seminal 1958 found footage film A Movie using appropriated material from YouTube and LiveLeak. As a remake, the video provides a parallel narrative that explores the changes in historical and visual icons from 1958 to 2010 – and those images that remain surprisingly, and delightfully, the same. The work also comments on the pervasiveness of footage available for appropriation in an online world, and the way disparate threads in the YouTube and LiveLeak databases can be assembled to create “a movie.”