Engineered Criticism

This article originally appeared in The Tech, issue 18 volume 138. It may be freely distributed electronically as long as it includes this notice but cannot be reprinted without the express written permission of The Tech. Write to archive@tech.mit.edu for additional details. An interview with Jeff Annison, president and co-founder of Legion M. Mandy Directed by Panos Cosmatos Screenplay by Panos Cosmatos, Aaron Stewart-Ahn Starring Nicolas Cage, Andrea Riseborough, Linus Roache, Bill Duke, Richard Brake Not Rated Playing Sept. 14, 2018 I noticed in your background that you were involved in the “New York Rock Exchange,” and I couldn’t tell at first whether that part of your music interests or had to do with your mechanical engineering background! Yeah! Well, actually I graduated in ’95, and my first job was designing the amusement park rides at Universal Studios, and then I was a toy designer for a while… then I got into music, and then I got into, you know, movies and...

1. A House Falling Upon You I tend to take general horror criticism with a grain of salt. The horror genre at large seems to be treated with disdain, a lower form of art, a genre meant to titillate rather than educate, enlighten, etc. So every once in a while, there will be a movie released which is hailed as A Great Horror Film. It Follows certainly had a number of people calling it “refreshing” and saying it was maybe the best horror films in recent history. Do I believe this? Not at all. I think – and this isn’t a particularly uncommon thought, from what I’ve read and heard – that part of the reason horror is looked down upon is because it is what is called a “body genre,” meaning that it plays on our visceral reactions rather than our thoughts and brains. It feels like there’s an almost puritanical drive against horror. In the same way that sex is regarded as “sinful” or “impure,” so too, we are to believe, is horror. It, too, is a passionate and emotional g...

I’d like to say something along the lines of, abuse – the nature of abuse, the experience of abuse, the trauma of abuse, etc. – has been on my mind a lot lately, but the truth is I never exactly stopped thinking about it. I suffered from emotional abuse for the better part of two years. It began the same way I hear many people describe it: it seems like love at first. Someone who seems to know you at your core. Someone who promises to help you be the best version of yourself, to paraphrase a line from yet another of the great movies about abuse, Lady Bird . It just doesn’t take too long for I can help you be your best self to become you’re no good as you are, you’re worthless, and you’re lucky to have even me. I was talking recently with a friend of mine about the nature of abuse and abusers, and out of this conversation came an insight about abuse that I had never considered before – abusers are, in fact, highly empathetic people. It’s this empathy that allows them t...

The family sits at the center of much of human society as one of its most fundamental social institutions. The form and shape of families varies from culture to culture and over time – from the traditional large, multigenerational family, to the “nuclear family” which bonds much of the modern social fabric, to our current plethora of vaguely defined and diverse types of families that can include distant relatives, partners, or others that live and care for each other. All of these family types come with a shared experience, a shared life, and, more often than not, shared trauma, trauma that runs down the family tree. Alcoholics beget alcoholics. Abusers beget abusers. Each person carries the weight of decades and centuries of damage from people they may never have known. Horror and the fantastic reflect this trauma in different ways. Things horrifying, fantastical, or abject can either be the product of, or an escape from, families that are oppressive. As we see in movies like Raw...