Review: 'Feeding the Monster' by Anna Bogutskaya

★★★☆☆

I fear I am slightly out of my depth for this review as I am, by no means, an authority on what is and what is not good essay writing.

Let me start by saying that the genre and style were not my cup of tea. This book took me a month to read (which is not surprising given my penchant for workaholism) and much of that time was spent looking forward to all of the unread fiction sitting in wait on my bookshelf. I struggled from the beginning with the back-to-back regurgitations of movie plots and the not-so-subtle millennial voice of Bogutskaya (the overly casual footnotes made my skin crawl). I often felt myself giving her mental feedback, as if she were one of my students:

"Where is your structure?"

"Does any of this contribute to your overall argument?"

"Why—oh God why—are there footnotes?"

None of this is to degrade Bogutskaya or take away from her clearly extensive knowledge on the subject—she stunned me with her insights into both the horror genre as a whole and some of the seminal films that make it tick. She unpacked what once seemed to be second-rate haunted house films and showed them to be allegories of the generational struggle to break into and survive in the housing market; she unmasked the movie monsters of the modern age and showed witches to be a stand-in for our fear of growing older and losing control over our bodies and vampires to be a metaphor for queerness and our inability to accept our 'preternatural' appetites. This is all to say make no mistake, Bogutskaya is an expert in her field—arguably an unparalleled one at that.

That is why it breaks my heart that I found so much of it so paint-dryingly boring. It is not that she does not know her stuff, it is that she does not know how to plate it up in a way that entices the appetite. If there were more of an established structure, a greater focus on unpacking films instead of summarising them, and far less quirky and zany footnotes, I think I would have liked this book very much. But as it stands, this book wowed and moved me about half as much as it pitted me in a tiresome fight against sleep. That being said, I did have some transcendental midday naps while I fought through it, so at least there was that.

After-note: I realised after I finished writing this review that I forgot to mention one of the parts of this book that I did really enjoy, which was the breaking down of the term 'elevated horror'. I have always taken issue with this term myself, seeing it as a way for critics and film snobs to wash their hands clean and justify liking a (gasp) horror film, so it was refreshing to see Bogutskaya act as a sounding board and repeat so many of these same begrudges back to me. Horror is horror, in the same way that romance is romance and drama is drama—like all genres, there are some horror films that deserve Academy Awards and some that look like they were shot on a Nokia, but all of them are still unapologetically horror.