Published in 2024
228 pages
Anna Bogutskaya is a critic, author, film programmer and podcaster. As a writer she has contributed to BBC Culture, The Guardian, Little White Lies, MUBI, New Statesman, The Face, LA Review of Books, TimeOut, Sight & Sound, amongst others, and publishes the film newsletter Admit One on Substack. In 2024 she was shortlisted for the Anthony Burgess/Observer Prize for Arts Criticism. She has programmed films and events for the BFI, Edinburgh International Film Festival and Fantastic Fest. In the past, she worked at El Deseo, was the Festival Director of Underwire Festival and the Film and Events Programmer at the BFI, where she curated many seasons and created the Woman With A Movie Camera Summit. She produces and hosts the horror film podcast The Final Girls, co-produces and co-hosts Peak TV, created the horror anthology podcast Eerie and has produced podcasts for Paramount, Studiocanal, BFI and Vertigo Releasing, as well as contributing to many others. She has written two non-fiction books, Unlikeable Female Characters: The Women Pop Culture Wants You to Hate (2023) and Feeding the Monster (2024), and is working on her third.
What is this book about?
Zombies want brains. Vampires want blood. Cannibals want human flesh. All monsters need feeding.
Horror has been embraced by mainstream pop culture more than ever before, with horror characters and aesthetics infecting TV, music videos and even TikTok trends. Yet even with the commercial and critical success of The Babadook, Hereditary, Get Out, The Haunting of Hill House, Yellowjackets and countless other horror films and TV series over the last few years, loving the genre still prompts the question: what’s wrong with you? Implying, of course, that there is something not quite right about the people who make and consume it. In Feeding the Monster, Anna Bogutskaya dispels this notion once and for all by examining how horror responds to and fuels our feelings of fear, anxiety, pain, hunger and power.
