Why do we like to be frightened so? Art and the Horror Movie with Curator of Screams

David Cronenberg's 1979 body horror 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 lively 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." They see a new dark sensibility in recent Aotearoa art. The exhibition features nine new commissions from artists who they consider some of the most interesting on the scene. "A new generation," they write, "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). The duo Curator of Screams joined Mark Amery on Culture 101. The Brood is at the Dowse Art Museum in Lower Hutt until 22 June.

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