Mila Zuo (University of British Columbia)

As the etymology of “radical” comes from radix (roots), I contend that emancipating movements need to reckon with the root rot of fascist enjoyment. This presentation discusses contemporary horror of white western empire as some of the most unwittingly honest films made about the psychic debts of neoliberal-colonialism. Building from Robin Wood’s claims about American horror, I argue that today’s populist horror concerns repressed guilt and the mechanisms of disavowal in an age of 24/7 reality-bending. We know very well about the neo/colonial crimes committed under “defending civilization,” but all the same, our Enjoyment! depends upon disavowal—the horror genre’s apocryphal confession that these are extraordinary, even supernatural events. Extending Salar Mameni’s conceptual “Terracene,” which accounts for the global war on terror as formative to the Anthropocene, I theorize the “Horrorcene”— the horrific scene as prescriptive after Trump, the “first livestreamed genocide,” and the Epstein files. Horror, though, indicates that enjoyment comes at an ironic cost, like the MAGA farmers who vote for racist jouissance at their own material expense. W.E.B. Du Bois’ “psychological wage” reveals that the “good life” is bound to racist enjoyment. The wages of horror enable a perpetrator society to imagine itself as the victimized, the persecuted, and the exceptional. As a key to enjoyment, such willful errors lead to psychosis and what I define as an epistemic “tautologocide.” To this end, I examine popular settler horror cinema of the 21 st century, including American films Final Destination: Bloodlines (2025) and Smile 2 (2024), as well as the Israeli film Big Bad Wolves (2013). Drawing a dissonant net over film-philosophy, psychoanalytic theory, studies of fascism, feminist theory, critical race theory, Indigenous studies, and anti/ postcolonial theory, this talk suggests that radical movements should not only pursue “pleasure activism” and joy as resistance (à la adrienne maree brown). Leftist liberation in the Horrorcene also requires becoming “psychic militants” (Lara Sheehi) and antifascist killjoys.

Mila Zuo is an Associate Professor in the Department of Theatre and Film at UBC. She is the author of Vulgar Beauty: Acting Chinese in the Global Sensorium (Duke University Press, 2022), which focuses on the affective racialization of Chinese women film stars, demonstrating the ways in which vulgar, flavourful beauty disrupts Western and colonial notions of beauty. Vulgar Beauty won the 2024 Outstanding Achievement best book award in media, performance, and visual studies from the Association for Asian American Studies. Zuo is also the director of award-winning films, including Carnal Orient (2016) and Kin (2021). She is currently working on her first feature, Mongoloids, a hybrid docu-fiction project about the Chinese Cultural Revolution and its impacts across generations. This research creation work is supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council’s Insight Development Grant.

► Resgitration and information.