Monstrous, bloodied, and box-dyed

Before I moved towns for university, I dyed my hair black. Ostensibly it was for a dare, but really I wanted, needed a change. My hair had been the same—natural brown, short back and sides—for five years, in accordance with my all boys high school’s traditional approach to personal presentation. I bought a box of semi-permanent hair dye on break from my shift at the supermarket and went to my friend’s house to make it happen (I was, and probably still am, much too meek to do these kinds of things by myself). We made a day of it, took photos and everything. I was not entirely convinced I had made a good decision. I felt like a character in a bad teen movie, pouting into mirrors, incessantly checking my roots, not feeling quite myself. At the same time, to feel out of character, I decided, was not an entirely bad thing. It was something I could grow from.

In The Brood, Curator of Screams (an ongoing collaboration between curators Chelsea Nichols and Aaron Lister) offer ten artists—Theo Macdonald, Grace Crothall, Iann An, Nathan Taare, Wesley John Fourie, Cassie Freeth, Harry Culy, Brad Logan Heappey, and Tia and Ming Ranguinui—a most generous gift: a box of black hair dye. Under dimmed lights and blood red flashes at The Dowse Art Museum, each of these artists’ practices are parsed through the lens of horror cinema and, indeed, dyed the deepest, darkest black. The curators-cum-directors pair each suite of work with a complementary horror film, allowing the artists-cum-movie-stars to explore their darker inclinations and vulnerabilities and to push their practices to their most monstrous outer limits.

The exhibition is a kind of departure for the Curator of Screams project. Since 2022, Chelsea Nichols of The Dowse and Aaron Lister of City Gallery Wellington Te Whare Toi have delivered four exhibitions at their respective institutions, which run the gamut from the human-stripped collages of classic films by contemporary US artist Josh Azzarella (Triple Feature, City Gallery Wellington, 2022), past the folk horror installations of local legend Don Driver and contemporary Australian artist Julia Morrison (Eerie Pagentry, City Gallery Wellington, 2024), to the witch archetypes that flourish in the work A. Lois White, Rosaleen Norton, and Jen Alexandra (Sisterly, The Dowse Art Museum, 2023). The Brood sits apart from these exhibitions not only on the basis of its more ambitious scale, but also because it marks a decisive shift to focus solely on the contemporary, a shift that allows the project to lean in further than ever before into the metaphoric world of horror. As its crawl-like entry foretells, the exhibition is metaphorically rendered a film all its own, in which Nichols and Lister have cast a "new mutant strain of the [New Zealand Gothic] tradition."⁽¹⁾

Like any good haunted house, The Brood is patrolled by a demonic guard dog. That dog is Theo Macdonald’s, whose looping and lurid Cujo 2 (2024) beckons from the other side of the archway that bids entry into the exhibition. In Cujo 2’s Super 8 haze, everything is mutant and melting. A car spins again and again, the camera riding on the roof with the eponymous dog, whose head, slathered in mucus and blood, droops in sickly exhaustion. Alternating shots cram us inside the car, where we watch the windshield wipers do their worst against ever more blood in nightmarish flow. Soundtracking this ceaseless scene is an equally relentless and low-fidelity bulldozing of The Stooges’ 'I Wanna Be Your Dog', cut through with a scream of chilling artifice. That scream jolts us from the nightmare, turns that big dog into a human in a dog suit. Once past the point of exasperation, we begin to note the slippages and mutations. We begin to form questions, to ask why.

For instance, why reference Lewis Teague’s Cujo (1983), a lesser-known Stephen King film adaptation centred around a mother and son trapped in a hot car by a rabid dog? One answer might lie in other recent examples of Macdonald’s work, where the artist has developed strategies for "counter-imaging" military imperialism in Aotearoa by fusing, with black-and-white gothic glue, the aesthetics of documentary cinema and the disquieting camerawork of horror classics.⁽²⁾ Cujo 2 could well be framed as a sequel to another Macdonald video work: The Shining (2023), which, as its title suggests, borrows the visual hallmarks of Stanley Kubrick’s iconic adaptation of Stephen King’s novel, looping gathered film footage to nail the disorienting and disaffecting experience of public participation in government process.

A cursory read of the work’s wall text primes Cujo 2 as a continuation of this strand of Macdonald’s practice, by way of its oblique commentary on Aotearoa’s border politics. On Macdonald’s return from Canada in 2020, his dog, Jerry, could not enter the country for ten months due to Aotearoa’s intensive rabies-free status. But here equally is where Cujo 2 differs from a work like The Shining, and indeed bears the curatorial mark of The Brood: in its layered enfolding of the personal and political with the monstrous. Cujo 2 mines Cujo because both are films about a family dog perceived to be, and thereby treated as, rabid. In Teague’s adaptation of Cujo, the potential danger of the titular dog drives the film, but the real, more tangible danger is heatstroke.⁽³⁾ In Cujo 2, the person-in-a-dog-suit is equally a constructed monster—our government’s imagining of Macdonald’s Jerry as rabid—that entraps the real Jerry, who sits (barely visible) in the driver’s lap in the car, stuck in an endless, physically exhaustive bureaucratic loop. Situated at the border of The Brood and the rest of the museum, it is this loop that wears us down with its scale, saturation, and loudness (its monstrosity), and sets the tone for what else is to come.

While Macdonald is no stranger to borrowing imagery from the cinema of unease, for Wesley John Fourie, the transition from latent to referential horror was a development seemingly spurred by The Brood. In earlier instalments of Fourie’s HYPERBALLAD performance-to-camera video series, the artist pined unabashedly for a former lover, serenading the dissolution of their relationship with karaoke covers of love-wrought pop songs, aided by prop microphones gathered from the floor of their messy studio.⁽⁴⁾ Any discomfort felt by viewers seemed less an objective of the series than a by-product of us playing accidental voyeur to Fourie’s determined and uncompromising queer performance of pain, an unease rooted less in a sense of fear and dread than of miscomprehension.⁽⁵⁾

The Brood’s iteration of HYPERBALLAD draws together all these emotions into one murky realm of ambivalent feeling. Three performance videos, two old and one newly commissioned, cycle on loop, projecting Fourie’s image continually onto an enlarged phone-like panel in the corner of the gallery, aurally accessible by headphones. In the new video, Fourie re-enacts serial killer Buffalo Bill’s infamous performance of Q Lazzarus’ 'Goodbye Horses' as it appears in The Silence of the Lambs (1991, dir. Jonathan Demme), albeit with wildly varying degrees of commitment. Fourie does not channel Buffalo Bill so much as they consume him, incorporating him as yet another object or tool to assert and complicate their queer selfhood.⁽⁶⁾ Just as Buffalo Bill fashioned what protagonist Clarice Starling calls a "woman-suit" from the skin of his victims, Fourie has fashioned a 'Bill-suit', donning not only Bill’s signature robes, but altering their body to have the same nipple piercing and even three permanent rib tattoos as the killer. These permanent alterations fuse the body of the artist with their body of work, setting the stakes for re-enactment inordinately higher than the lovesick karaoke of prior entries.

Yet, Fourie is no Buffalo Bill. Their performance is marked by intrusions of the real; they falter, pause and let out nervous shrieks of laughter throughout, the scales of authenticity and artifice swinging like a twisted seesaw. By the end of the act, as Fourie bids us an unceremonious "BYE," it becomes clear that Fourie is as ill at ease in this role as we are watching them. Perhaps Fourie has been reading Jack Halberstam, the queer theorist who reframed Buffalo Bill’s conflation of skin and gender as an analogue for heterosexist culture’s fetishistic conflation of outward appearance and gender.⁽⁷⁾ As Halberstam would have it, Fourie is not failing to commit, they are committing to failure. Read this way, Fourie’s permanent embrace of monstrous signifiers and careful swerving of monstrosity remind us, rather pertinently in this time of rising transphobia, that perceived monstrosity and genuine monstrosity are not mutually inclusive. Lister, Nichols, and Fourie may have pushed the HYPERBALLAD project into the realm of horror, but they have only doubled down on its affirmation of queer expression.

Interestingly, Fourie and Macdonald are the only artists in the exhibition to incorporate specific material from the films the Curator of Screams have paired them with. Elsewhere, the duo place the commissioned artists’ work in conversation with films that share thematic affinities, in order to aid the viewer in meeting the monster of meaning. Such is the case for Tia (Ngāti Hine Oneone) and Ming (Te Ati Haunui-a-Pāpārangi) Ranginui’s Minimum Wage (2025), notably the first collaborative moving image work by the mother-daughter duo. Nichols and Lister pair Minimum Wage with Jordan Peele’s Nope (2022), as both the former work and latter film gesture at the backwards ideologies that pervade their Western ranch settings, which time and decency seem to have left behind. The comparison does not go much further; Minimum Wage unfolds in a stuttering frenzy of flashing lights, disorienting drum loops and low synth stabs, as drunken wind-up dolls roam the Melonsfolly Ranch, a reproduction frontier town in Ruatiti Valley, near Ohakune, presumably under the directions of its wealthy owners that know little and care less about what the land they 'own' might have meant to its indigenous people.

Still, the experience of Minimum Wage does benefit from its horror surrounds. In one of the work’s few moments of stillness, a wind-up doll with four rows of eyelashes holds aloft a pitchfork with candlelit prongs and gazes offscreen. Following her gaze, we see that the same pitchfork hangs on the wall, activating the primordial fear we bring with us to every horror film: that what we see onscreen might spill out into the world and do us real harm. That fear is not without substance. In the curatorial scheme of The Brood, Melonsfolly Ranch may sit harmlessly on a screen, but outside the gallery walls, the ranch—and all that troublesome, longing-for-the-old-world sentiment that it represents—is real, rotting at the centre of Te Ika-a-Māui.

The Brood is arguably at its best in moments like these: when its artists take an axe to the doors that separate art, horror, and life. Often, this is enabled by spatial gestures made in tactful collaboration between the curators and artists. Nathan Taare and Iann An, for example, are given scope to totally occupy their respective spaces and thereby transport viewers by totally enveloping their olfactory and tactile senses respectively. More understated and effective is Grace Crothall’s installation DREAMS! (2025). To see this work, we, like the missionary protagonist of Heretic (2024, dir. Scott Beck and Brian Woods), are given a false choice between two entries—a banal stage and railing dividing what is ultimately the same room into two lopsided halves. This simple act is enough to cast an air of discomfort and suspicion over the room. On one side, we roam awkwardly between the stage and an empty wall. On the other side, we are pressed right up against Crothall’s tableaux of hyperreal pastel drawings of childhood spent in a Pentecostal sect. Taken on their own, Crothall’s drawings are eerie enough. Here, experienced either suffocatingly close or at the disconcerting remove of the stage, they persist relentlessly at the surface of the mind, gripping with the kind of present tense acuity of a long buried memory coming unstuck. Visceral, almost antagonistic experiences like this are what make The Brood so exciting.

As laudable as The Brood’s maximalist, carnivalesque, horror show ethos is for pushing its concept (and artists) to the outermost limits, taken together, the results can be cacophonous. Depending on where you stand in the exhibition, you can hear up to six different sources of noise clashing at once—Cujo 2’s fuzzy wall of guitars and screams, the thunderous drums and searching, reverb-laden vocals of Minimum Wage, the clinks and clanks issuing from the video documentation of Cassie Freeth’s Manticore (2023-) performance-installation breaking and scraping against ground, leaks of crooning from Fourie’s headphones (if you’re listening closely), and the bellowing drone of Thomas Lambert’s soundtrack to Nathan Taare’s scent-based installation Olfactory Ghost (2025)—often at the cost of fully being able to absorb each.

There is an argument to be made, however, that this cacophony is actually to the betterment of the show, enriching its chaotic, unruly atmosphere. Just as the gothic creeps across borders and channels its constituents into amorphous, dark forces, the bleeding noise of The Brood could be read as a force that gathers and binds its works into a kind of live and fleshy circulatory system.⁽⁸⁾ This is, after all, a show premised on recasting artworks as the demonic children of their creators; what demon child would keep their room neat and tidy? Whether you embrace the mess is up to you. As Jack Halberstam notes, "horror depends upon energy directed at the screen, not just energy directed at the viewer; you are only scared if you want to be."⁽⁹⁾

The Brood was on view at The Dowse Art Museum in Te Awa Kairangi ki Tai Lower Hutt from 15 February to 22 June 2025.

Matthew Whiteman is a writer based in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington.