black kiss Witchcraft, cinema and pop culture
Elisa McCausland and Diego Salgado
As every fan of the forbidden arts knows, the’infamous kiss or kiss the devil's anus, the his other mouth, seals the surrender of a human being to the spells of evil. Black kiss: Witchcraft, cinema and pop culture picks up this image from its title to evoke dark light on a phenomenon that has not ceased to manifest itself in one way or another in popular culture since the beginning of the Age of Reason: witchcraft.
After an introduction in which the impact of this on the cultural and artistic sphere of the last two centuries is reviewed as a manifestation of a buried discontent towards the values of Modernity, the essay goes on to contrast in two well-defined sections the characters of the wizard and the witch, omnipresent in audiovisual fiction. The wizard and the witch are complementary figures, but also antagonistic, if we pay attention to the means and ends they pursue when subverting dominant values.
Black kiss: Witchcraft, cinema and pop culture analyzes the strategies of both to transform reality through a journey that has its epicenter in cinema, but does not forget the small screen, comics and other visual and audiovisual expressions in which wizards and witches have struggled to materialize another way of being and being in the world. From Dion Fortune (1890-1946) and Häxan: Witchcraft through the ages (1922) until The witch (2015) and the necromancers of TikTok, a journey in which everything seems to have been said and in which everything is yet to be invoked.
The book will be published with the’Hermenaute Editorial.
Authors: Elisa McCausland and Diego Salgado
Elisa McCausland, journalist, critic and researcher, and Diego Salgado, film critic and cultural communicator, have been reflecting for more than fifteen years on the meanings, contexts and potentials of popular culture and its manifestations, with special emphasis on cinema and comics. They currently share the microphone at Trenches of Pop Culture and they write criticism and studies about audiovisuals in specialized publications Directed By, Rockdelux, SoFilm i Solaris.
They are promoters and collaborators of the ECC-UAH Chair in Comics Research and Culture and they have written the essays Supernovas: A feminist history of audiovisual science fiction (errata naturae, 2019) and Dreams and fables: History of Vertigo (ECC, 2022). In addition, Elisa is the solo author of Wonder Woman: Feminism as a superpower (2019).