A work by Brad Logan Photo: Mark Tantrum
David Cronenberg's 1979 body horror movie The Brood teases in its trailer that it's "a film so terrifying that it will devastate you totally".
What possesses us to love horror films so?
Curator of Screams may have the answer. They are a collaboration between two contemporary art and horror film lovers, Dowse Art Museum senior curator Chelsea Nichols and City Gallery Wellington senior curator Aaron Lister.
Through their Instagram account and exhibition curation, singularly, and together they explore how art and horror film can be "born of the same dark womb".
Curator of Screams believe horror is again having a cultural moment. They have a new exhibition The Brood at the Dowse and take their title from Cronenberg's film.
In that film a mentally ill mother is said to undergo an experimental 'psychoplasmic' treatment, causing her to give birth to monstrous little 'rage babies' that wreak havoc on her behalf.
Nichols and Lister equate this to the sense sometimes for artists, that artworks might "sometimes operate like wayward, feral children left to run amok in the world."
Cassie Freeth - Manticore Photo: Mark Tantrum
The exhibition features nine new commissions from artists who they consider some of the most interesting on the scene.
"A new generation," they said, "of brooding, gothy children" There's a general gothic menace to the exhibition but there are also horror film references aplenty: from the demonic dog of Cujo (1983) to Buffalo Bill's dance from The Silence of the Lambs (1991).
Horror is a safe place for us to explore our most irrational fears, Nichols told RNZ's Culture 101.
"It's a very safe place, at the end of that movie, you turn it off, you hit rewind on your VHS, if you grew up in the '90s, and that is a place where you can then process it.
"It is not us facing the horrors of the world that we're actually exposed to on the news every day."
The film The Brood is the "embodiment of rage and frustration," said Lister.
"It's about that inside-outside, inside the body, outside the body of the world, turning one's inner monstrosities out into that public space."
A work by Tia and Ming Ranginui. Photo: Mark Tantrum
The works in the exhibition can be seen as the demonic offspring in The Brood, he said.
"We love the idea of the artworks inside the exhibition operating as kind of little hatchlings and monsters. These little demon beings being let out to do their thing."
The Brood is at the Dowse Art Museum in Lower Hutt until 22 June.
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