{"id":617,"date":"2022-09-01T08:15:14","date_gmt":"2022-09-01T12:15:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/ampersandjournal\/?p=617"},"modified":"2022-09-01T17:48:44","modified_gmt":"2022-09-01T21:48:44","slug":"whitney-s-may","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/ampersandjournal\/2022\/09\/01\/whitney-s-may\/","title":{"rendered":"Whitney S. May"},"content":{"rendered":"

Whitney S. May<\/b>, M.A., is a doctoral candidate in the American Studies program at the University of Texas and a lecturer for the Department of English at Texas State University. Her primary research interests include the Gothic and nineteenth-century horror literature, as well as the history of capitalism and its carnivalesque representations in horror fiction and popular culture. Her recent, related work appears in <\/span>Gothic Studies<\/span><\/i> and <\/span>Supernatural Studies<\/span><\/i>, as well as in <\/span>Humanity in a Black Mirror: Essays on Posthuman Fantasies in a Technological Near Future<\/span><\/i> (McFarland, 2022) and R<\/span>eligion, Culture, and the Monstrous: Of Gods and Monsters<\/span><\/i> (Lexington Books, 2021). Her edited volume <\/span>Encountering Pennywise: Critical Perspectives on Stephen King’s IT<\/span><\/a> will appear with the University Press of Mississippi later this fall.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Bearing the Palls of Shopping Malls:\u00a0Necropsying (Dead) Mall Nostalgia in Netflix\u2019s Fear Street<\/i> Trilogy<\/strong><\/p>\n

In 1997, it was none other than that most treasured and trenchant of cultural critics Daria Morgendorffer who proclaimed the shopping mall \u201cthat repository of human greed and debasement.\u201d[1]<\/sup><\/a> Her arch pronouncement occurred during Daria<\/em>\u2019s late entry into a strange but nonetheless recognizable subgenre of long-90s American television, the mall episode, or \u201cmallpisode.\u201d From Roseanne<\/em> to Saved By the Bell<\/em>, from Seinfeld <\/em>and Designing Women<\/em> to Daria<\/em>, at least one quintessential mallpisode ritually brought the characters of these and many more various popular TV series of the 1980s and 1990s to the nearest shopping mall to transport them, despite their different fictional worlds, into a shared wonderland space of material excess\u2026 and prompted them to question the accessibility of its promise, with varying degrees of dedication to the project.<\/p>\n

Given that the \u201880s and \u201890s were the heyday of the mall as a cultural symbol, it\u2019s no surprise that such expressions of mall fervor threaded through the period\u2019s media. But it\u2019s striking that it\u2019s doing so in ours<\/em>\u2014albeit to a much darker degree. As dead mall \u201ca e s t h e t i c\u201d reigns supreme in contemporary mall imagery (exacerbated no doubt by the increasing availability of both dead malls and the capacity to distribute images of them) and as the music microgenre vaporwave gives rise to a more focused micro-microgenre mallsoft[2]<\/sup><\/a>, we\u2019re also experiencing a distinct, more critical revisitation of mall nostalgia in, curiously, our contemporary horror. Certainly, the time seems right for the wistful, coupled flourishes vaporwave and mall nostalgia. Indeed, Stuart Lindsay (2021) views vaporwave as an expression of \u201ccapitalist melancholia,\u201d whose \u201chaunting spectrality is derived from its projection of frictionless consumption, aspiration, and wealth\u2014the dream, as it were, that capital has failed to achieve, as evinced by its widening gaps of inequality and creation of new traumatized populations through debt, job redundancy, and food banks.\u201d[3]<\/sup><\/a> It\u2019s no surprise that such postmillennial capitalist melancholia finds itself represented similarly\u2014albeit more visually and more dreadfully\u2014in horror media that employs the dead and dying shopping mall as a crucial analytical lens through which to consider the anxieties of both scarcity and excess.<\/p>\n

Textually grounded in Netflix\u2019s Fear Street<\/em> (2021) adaptation trilogy of R. L. Stein\u2019s young adult novels (1989-1999; 2005; 2014-2017), this article considers the ways in which horror\u2014a mode uniquely concerned with and reliant upon designations of space to achieve its broadest desired affects\u2014responds to and problematizes the distinctive resonance of shopping malls as competitively anxious and nostalgic landscapes. In particular, it prods at the fraught intersection of our contemporary dead mall aesthetic and mall nostalgia\u2014what I call dead mall nostalgia\u2014by considering the ways in which our current media, steeped as it is in our dying-mall moment, autopsies the mall fervor not yet fully decomposed, indeed, still cooling on the slab of our cultural commentaries. Through the temporally expansive narrative lens of Fear Street<\/em>\u2019s three films, which bear entries in their titular years of 1994, 1978, and 1666, respectively, and whose central conflict across all three films manages to occur, in a sense, at a dying shopping mall, this article offers a postmortem of the dead mall as both (non)place and space to understand the outlines of its nostalgic ghosts.<\/p>\n

At every stage of their design and construction, shopping malls have followed rigid and yet robust rubrics of space-making that are, at their core, always already a matter of space-taking, as well. Beginning in the mid-1950s alongside the post-war economic boom, the most successful enclosed-space malls appeared along the veins of highways that stitched together the American landscape. The size of each mall itself was determined by the surrounding area\u2019s population size, which situated the construction plans along the scale from strip mall to regional mall and all the way to international tourist attraction, all based on the algorithms of demand threshold. This careful strategy hinges upon American values of land \u201cuse,\u201d which constitutes the most profitable organizations of a given set of acres. James Farrell, in his study One Nation Under Goods: Malls and the Seductions of American Shopping<\/em> (2003), designates malls as \u201cadaptations to place, but the place is defined demographically and economically, not aesthetically and environmentally.\u201d[4]<\/sup><\/a> The result, he determines, is that \u201cin this calculus, the primary value of land [for malls] is its market value. Realty becomes reality.\u201d[5]<\/sup><\/a> This consumptive gaze, even as it merely preemptively surveyed land for<\/em> these potential spaces of consumption, has obvious environmental consequences when it comes to the transformations of natural space into commercial space. Economically, too, the appearance of malls at the height of our frenzy of mall construction had a nasty habit of chewing up the local infrastructures upon which they were built. In his ethnographic study of malls and their cultural relevance The Call of the Mall <\/em>(2004), Paco Underhill notes that the rapid appearance of malls in the 1970s and 80s left \u201caging cities and towns quak[ing] with terror every time a new one broke ground, and with good reason, for all it took was a couple of suburban shopping centers to devastate a traditional retail district.\u201d He concludes, rather vibrantly, that \u201cmalls were the Godzillas of shopping.\u201d[6]<\/sup><\/a> Finally, James B. Twitchell raises an excellent point in Lead Us Into Temptation: The Triumph of American Materialism<\/em> (1999) when he notes:<\/p>\n

Almost without fail the mall is named for what it has destroyed. Think about Meadowbrook, Longacre Farm, Twin Oakes, Rosedale, Old Orchard, Northbrook Court, Woodfield, Briarwood, Woodland, Twelve Oaks, and [his] favorite, Crabtree Valley. It is not that we murder to dissect, or that we kill what we love most. Rather, it is that we insist on memorializing what we destroy with the invocation of what can be no more.[7]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

In these ways, breaking ground for a mall has always been, additionally, a matter of consciously consuming what came before\u2014a ritual of sacrifice and a surety of consumption for consumption\u2019s sake, a barter of one space for another whose true price can never be fully realized until it\u2019s examined in the shadow of its own gravesite. The shopping mall\u2019s monstrousness\u2014the mindless consumption and Godzilla-like capacity to devour noted by Underhill\u2014thrums beneath the framing narrative of all three Fear Street <\/em>films.<\/p>\n

The first film begins, and the last one ends, at the Shadyside Mall in 1994. The very first scene for the trilogy constitutes a smooth transformation of mallspace\u2014commercial, deliberate, and necessarily profitable by day into its emptied, hushed, nighttime counterpart. Fear Street: 1994<\/em> begins as the teenaged Heather Watkins (Maya Hawke), a cashier in the Shadyside Mall\u2019s B. Dalton\u2019s bookshop, is belittled by a customer for recommending \u201clow-brow horror.\u201d (This is a cheeky nod to Mr. Stein, whose books are the recipients of the customer\u2019s contempt.) As the customer exits the store with her maligned purchase, the mall closing announcement is delivered over the tinny intercom and Heather, although chirping saccharine pleasantries to the woman\u2019s receding back, also rebelliously flips her off at the same time. Time and the transformations of space are demarcated in this moment by the announcement, which signals the close of market time and the marketplace, but Heather\u2019s crude hand gesture ruptures this division more viscerally as a performance of all four markers at once. The wider rituals of transformation begin in this moment: The scene cuts to a time-lapsed longshot of the sun setting over the mall\u2019s empty parking lot. Once it\u2019s set fully, a rich dolly shot slithers along the main thoroughfare of the closed mall. The fluorescents have been doused, which leaves the cavernous central space backlit instead by deep blues and red \u201cExit\u201d signs that blur noticeably into ranges of bruised purple. This distinctive lighting will be of use to our heroes in the final film. The typical canned mall music\u2014these days the backbone of our current mallsoft music genre\u2014gives way to Nine Inch Nails\u2019s \u201cCloser.\u201d Relinquished from the market time that drives its operative logics, the mall becomes a desolate husk instead, peopled thinly by employees swaying to industrial rock as they restock cases and displays, no customers to charm or solicit and no corporate scripts to regurgitate in the interest of moving products from the shelves they absently reset.<\/p>\n

In this closed mallspace, reminiscent of a contemporary dying or dead mall, our first of several killers appears wearing a cloak and skull mask and stalks Heather through various empty stores. Unluckily for Heather, his guise is a Halloween costume from the final store into which she darts, which is how he is able to conceal himself near the display and then leap forward to briefly catch and wound her. She fights back, though, seizing a quintessentially-90s spinning Disco lamp from a shelf and hitting him over the head with it.<\/p>\n

When Heather flees, her escape route inherently also follows the cartographic logics of mall design, which send her sprinting toward, not the mall\u2019s exits, but through deliberate catchment zones into its center: through the empty food court which lies in the shadow of the large tree that marks the mall\u2019s core, or its \u201cfocal attraction\u201d to use mall-architectural lingo, or its \u201cwienie\u201d to use Walt Disney\u2019s term for the thing that draws aimless wanderers and often converts them into receptive consumers. It\u2019s beneath this tree that she is finally caught and stabbed and where Sheriff Goode (Ashley Zukerman) appears and shoots her killer\u2014posthumously dubbed both the Skull Mask Killer and the Mall Killer.<\/p>\n

The trifold significance of this tree\u2014a landmark at the center of the trilogy\u2019s three maps and the lodestar for its three conflicts\u2014is gestured to throughout the first film\u2019s expository title sequence into which it slides after Heather\u2019s murder. The title sequence reveals an impressive array of historical details in reverse that are pertinent to the narrative, as well as a consideration of the mallspace at the heart of all three films: Shadyside and its cheery, suburban counterpart Sunnyvale, it turns out, are twin towns linked at their heart\u2014at the Shadyside Mall. However, whereas news footage of Heather\u2019s murder notes that Shadyside has earned the nickname Killer Capital, USA, Sunnyvale has entered its 30th year with no violent crime. Leaping backward in time, an interviewee muses from a fuzzy news piece on the Camp Nightwing Massacre\u2014the focus of the second film in 1978\u2014that\u00a0 \u201cShadysiders seem to have no desire to better themselves.\u201d Footage from the 60s trumpets that Sunnyvale is \u201cvoted most beautiful place to live,\u201d while Shadysiders \u201chunker down\u201d in the wake of another threat. Snippets of a Levittown-esque ad urge potential buyers to come find their dream homes in Sunnyvale \u201cwhere the sun always shines, even when it\u2019s cloudy\u201d as photos of Shadyside\u2019s \u201cMilkman Killer\u201d of 1953 leer beneath the remnants of its audio. A radio newscast warns that the Great Depression has hit Shadyside hard while \u201cthe economy in Sunnyvale continues to climb.\u201d And on and on it goes, highlighting the strikingly inverse relationship of the two towns that goes back to the community\u2019s founding in 1666, the timeframe at the center of the third Fear Street<\/em> film.<\/p>\n

This rich local history, replete with its socioeconomic dichotomies, is in keeping with Twitchell\u2019s assessment about the ways in which mallspace at once destroys and memorializes that which it destroys: The Shadyside Mall\u2014and all that\u2019s anchored in its geography\u2014continuously cannibalizes Shadyside and forecloses upon the opportunities of its inhabitants, not merely sparing Sunnyvale and its citizens at every turn, but bolstering their individual successes by seeming to subsidize its abundance.<\/p>\n

The second film Fear Street: 1978<\/em> explores this subsidy more deliberately in various attempts to reconcile the Shadyside Mall\u2019s time and space\u2014sealed, naturally, by a curse. In this film set nearly two decades before the first, the ill-fated Shadysider counselors of Camp Nightwing rush to try and break the curse that they identify as the secret to why Sunnyvale seems to systematically benefit from Shadyside\u2019s poverty. In order to do this, they must navigate an ancient map of Union, the terrain divided centuries before into Shadyside and Sunnyvale, to find an alleged witch\u2019s dismembered hand. They are quick to note that the features outlined on the parchment match their own cognitive maps of the campgrounds: After one of their own is magically transformed into the Axe Murderer, layering the maps against and onto one another enables the remaining few to determine where the Union map\u2019s \u201cWitch Mark\u201d is and find the corpse hand located there, the reunion of which with the rest of accused witch Sarah Fier\u2019s corpse allegedly at the Hanging Tree\u2014located at the center of camp\u2014will break the curse over Shadyside. The end of the second film adds an additional layer to the elevated map when it is dramatically revealed that the Hanging Tree at the center of Camp Nightwing in 1978 is not only the very same at the heart of Union in 1666, but also the focal attraction at the Shadyside Mall in 1994.<\/p>\n

Axe murderers and Witch Marks aside, the shopping mall\u2019s unique preoccupations with time and space\u2014with folding both into attractive, stimulating patterns\u2014are part and parcel of its commercial function. Margaret Crawford\u2019s essay \u201cThe World in a Shopping Mall\u201d (1992) explores the science of \u201cmalling,\u201d or shopping malls\u2019 mercantile worldbuilding practices, as quintessentially transformational, necessarily enmeshed in the blurring of reality and fantasy and time<\/em> into the boundless space of the mall. She writes that \u201cConfusion proliferates at every level; past and future collapse meaninglessly into the present; barriers between real and fake, near and far, dissolve as history, nature, technology are indifferently processed by the mall\u2019s fantasy machine.\u201d[8]<\/sup><\/a> The Shadyside Mall manages this spatiotemporally throughout all three Fear Street<\/em> films, occupying multiple places and times at once, in this case narratively by leaning into the mall as linked to respective sites, hauntologically, by way of a curse\u2014the price paid by the first Goode (also Zukerman) in 1666 in exchange for eternal prosperity for his descendants\u2014the deal made at the Witch Mark in a cavern below the Hanging Tree. Goode\u2019s covenant in 1666 haunts the landscape forevermore, encompassing not just the Hanging Tree of 1666, Camp Nightwing\u2019s heart in 1978, and the Shadyside Mall\u2019s focal point in 1994, but everything in between and beyond, blurring the boundaries of space and<\/em> time in order to maintain an eternal parasitic relationship between Shadyside and Sunnyvale.<\/p>\n

So much of the architectural logic of shopping malls operates under meticulous considerations of space and the unyielding, disembodied control it takes to move shoppers\u2019 bodies, discreetly and unbeknownst even to themselves, from place to place within the center. This format is sophisticated enough to compel shoppers to move themselves in predetermined, lucrative patterns between catchment areas. Take, for example, entrances and escalators limited to the very ends of the mall space and the central location of the food court. Benches and \u201cYou Are Here\u201d signs help the shopper navigate the consumer terrain, but their choices are anticipated and exploited in the interest of converting them from browsers to consumers in serial \u201crest\u201d areas. In the trilogy\u2019s climax in Fear Street<\/em>\u2019s third installment, 1666 <\/em>(the concluding scenes that link the 1666 narrative back to the 1994 one),<\/em> the physical and commercial space of the Shadyside Mall is transformed to suit the needs of the protagonists as they lay their trap for Sheriff Goode, and the mall\u2019s operative logics are similarly reconfigured. The band of heroes splashes over the ordinarily inscrutable maps of the walls and floors in black-light paint complemented by the red, blue, and purple hues of the mall at night. Scrawled arrows and messages like \u201cThis way!\u201d and \u201cSuck it, Nick Goode!\u201d are meant to lead Sheriff Goode\u2014interpellated as an individual in the wider reaches of the mallspace\u2014to their trap at the center of the mall beneath the Hanging Tree. Not only do the painted messages glaringly and gleefully coopt the discreet navigational patterns of shopping-mall architecture, but they also subvert them: They keep Sheriff Goode following a clear, direct path to the center of the mall as well as distract him from looking at the shops, lest he notice the centuries\u2019 worth of contained, cursed killers soon to be set upon him.<\/p>\n

The protagonists of each of the trilogy\u2019s timeframes are drawn inexorably toward this very point and through the various tunnels beneath the Hanging Tree toward the Witch Mark. In 1666, Sarah Fier (Kiana Madeira) flees through the tunnels to escape Solomon Goode after learning that he\u2019s made a deal with the devil that\u2019s brought the curse on half of Union (the half that would become Shadyside), and for which she has been blamed as an accused witch. Goode\u2019s success relies upon Sarah\u2019s silence, and so he ensures her perceived guilt and hanging, thereby assigning any suspicion about a curse to her \u201cwitchcraft.\u201d In 1978, the Camp Nightwing counsellors use the map of Union to locate the hand Sarah lost at the Witch Mark in her fight with Goode. And finally, in 1994, armed at last with the truth of the curse, Deena (Madeira) reverses the 1666 chase by pursuing Sheriff Goode into the cavern to kill him and prevent him from passing along the terms of the deal to his own son. The final blow, delivered by Sarah Fier\u2019s ghost but through Deena, dramatizes the hauntological reach enabled by the commercial logics of the shopping mall. While the Hanging Tree predates the mall, the curse in 1666 collapses the terrain forward while the Shadyside Mall\u2019s operative logics collapse it backward, providing Sarah\u2019s spirit access to reach through time and finally take her revenge on the Goode line.<\/p>\n

In Fear Street<\/em>, the triangulation of the three places beneath and alongside the mallspace allows for a totalizing view of the entirety of the American mallspace\u2014and the view is not pleasant. This is hazily confirmed when Deena and Sam (Olivia Scott Welch) escape the underground tunnels to emerge in Sheriff Goode\u2019s mansion. Not unlike the overwhelming barrage of visual stimuli we\u2019d see in a mall, Goode\u2019s home is a plushly-decorated assemblage of discreet, yet pointed visual cues: Against white scrollwork and an excess of taxidermied animals, lush white carpet and Grecian-style nude statues, an ugly poster bearing the word \u201cCOURAGE\u201d in all-caps over soldiers\u2019 helmets clashes strangely.\u00a0Over the mantle hangs a meticulously-catalogued Goode family tree; the volume of its entries on its unfurling branches is a subtle reminder that there are many, many Goodes. Deena and Sam may creep past the tree without noticing it, but the audience is brought in close as the camera temporarily relinquishes its focus on the girls leaving muddy footprints on the blindingly white carpet to zoom into it. Most compelling of all, observant viewers will note another ugly, framed poster in Goode\u2019s den: A bald eagle soars over the message: \u201cFLY BOLD, FLY HIGH.\u201d This poster is placed directly over the entrance to both the mall and the room in which the Goodes have been making trades with the Devil for three centuries.<\/p>\n

It’s a denouement that tracks astoundingly well with our dead mall aesthetic, flexing this and mall nostalgia cleanly in its claws, mixing their blood in intriguing ways. Compare this to vaporwave, which blends, among other genres, lounge music of the \u201880s and \u201890s. This in turn has flowered distinctly into mallsoft, which hardens more perceptibly around recreating commercial soundscapes. If, as Paul Ballam-Cross concludes (2021), \u201cBy engaging with the imagery of [vaporwave and mallsoft] (either in the cover art of the release or in similar media), users construct a collective \u2018memory\u2019 of times and places that have never (or will never) exist,\u201d[9]<\/sup><\/a> then the kitschy Americana posters in the Goodes\u2019 home invoke a certain flavor of boisterous American jeremiad deeply pervasive to our political moment. Visually locating the bald eagle imagery and injunction to \u201cFLY HIGH\u201d and ascend to power by way of the tunnel\u2014which locates the transactions of ritual sacrifice in commercial space\u2014the final film discreetly recalls certain calls to American \u201cgreatness\u201d by linking them to a consumer power that never existed as a collective reality. And what\u2019s more, it discreetly calls attention to that very fact.<\/p>\n

In the first (and to my knowledge only) academic book on vaporwave appropriately titled Babbling Corpse: Vaporwave and the Commodification of Ghosts<\/em> (2016), Grafton Tanner writes of malls as adjacent to and implicated in vaporwave\u2019s core tenets where consumer despondency is concerned. Vaporwave and its offshoot mallsoft offer \u201cmusic of \u2018non-times\u2019 and \u2018non-places\u2019 because [they are] skeptical of what consumer culture has done to time and space.\u201d[10]<\/sup><\/a> Writing officially on vaporwave and malls, but more accurately on mallsoft in \u201cFailed Futures: Vaporwave, Capitalism, and Dan Bell\u2019s Dead Mall <\/em>Series\u201d (2020), Declan Cochran determines that both constitute assemblages made up of the trappings of various analogue cultures which place them into context for the present. Cochran points out that the allure of each relies on accepting their ruptures with linear time. He concludes: \u201cThey don\u2019t belong in the present, and they should have ceased to be. Indeed, vaporwave and the mall\u2019s impact is largely contingent on an awareness of their outdated and anachronistic nature; to put it another way, the only true appreciation of vaporwave\/malls must be derived from an awareness of how its constitutive elements are no longer \u2018enjoyable\u2019 (relevant).\u201d[11]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

Compare this to producer and director Dan Bell\u2019s Dead Mall<\/em> YouTube series, which has run since 2014. Approaching 4 million views, the 61 videos for this channel feature Bell gaining entry to dying, dead, and abandoned American malls and capturing their most unsettling imagery, usually overlaid with an evocative mallsoft track. Bell\u2019s camera eye delights in emptiness; it is drawn consistently to cavernous atriums and given to overhead shots that emphasize absence, at once haunted and tantalized by stillness in spaces designed to deliver the opposite. Bell, however, is not the only witness to this particular aesthetic, nor the only documentarian enchanted by the dead mall as a graveyard for a unique brand of consumer culture: Although all three platforms obscure the numbers of returns on searches, inquiries for \u201cdead mall\u201d on YouTube, as well as TikTok videos and tweets under the \u201cdeadmall\u201d hashtag indicate that dead mall explorers\u2014in a somber spin on the \u201870s-\u201890s culture, and the \u201880s-\u201890s media <\/em>culture of the mall, almost always young people\u2014are active, attentive, and above all, curious about these monuments to all but bygone performances of transaction. Cochran concludes that vaporwave (and by extension, mallsoft) \u201conly exists by being here when it shouldn\u2019t be. It is an exhumed corpse that has had sunglasses placed on its shrunken head, being wheeled around, fooling nobody. And in the same way that vaporwave \u2018exhumes corpses,\u2019 Dan Bell does the same with the malls that he films; the act of filming them is the act of exhumation, cinema as graverobber, camera as embalmer, retro-future-fitted Gothicism for a generation raised on ghosts in the machine.\u201d[12]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

Dead mall nostalgia slots neatly into this framework: The sentimental attachments to shopping malls animates the nostalgia for what they were in their heyday\u2014whether this was experienced firsthand or this nostalgia is characterized by a Jamesonian nostalgia for the present\u2014while their hauntological grip on our imaginations keeps us chilled by their apparent undead presence, even if only in glorious decay. Phillip E. Wegner, in Life Between Two Deaths, 1989-2001: U.S. Culture in the Long Nineties<\/em> (2009), echoes Jameson\u2019s caution about the dangers of periodization, particularly regarding the era under his own examination. Applying this caution to a remarkably expansive analysis of long-90s popular media, Wegner notes that periodization not only runs the risk of a \u201cvision of historical movement close off any possibility of real change\u2014what Badiou terms the eventual break\u2014it effectively takes human agency out of the historical picture, portraying such pendulum swings as an irrevocable law.\u201d[13]<\/sup><\/a> Fear Street<\/em>, tapping in tandem as it does into shopping malls\u2019 universalizing aesthetic and dead-mall nostalgia\u2019s totalizing temporality, enables the possibility of liberatory futures imagined outside the bounds of capitalistic systems that subject the many to sacrificing their bodies in the interest of sustaining the few. Or so it seems as the credits begin to roll. Caught as we are in this dying-mall present, worried as we are about the implications of the dead-mall future, we are nevertheless bewitched by the promise of the living mall in our nostalgic imaginaries. All at once, we are suspended, waiting, holding a mirror to the nostrils of this corpse and deliciously terrified that we\u2019ll see a film of condensation mist the glass\u2026 or, perhaps, that we won\u2019t.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s precisely that exquisite dread, combined with the universalized mall aesthetic, that drives home the significant post-credit scene of the final Fear Street <\/em>film: Oblivious shoppers cross a section of the Shadyside Mall while the camera drifts along the grate-entrance to the tunnel and closer and closer to the spot where Sheriff Goode was killed by Sarah Fier\u2019s ghost. The Widow\u2019s Grimoire and the map it contains lies surrounded by forgotten evidence markers and police tape before a pair of hands suddenly snatches it out of view of the camera. The ubiquity of the mall aesthetic at the beginning of this scene, combined with careful costume choices that obscure the time period, makes it so that the viewer cannot be certain of when the grimoire is taken; it could be 1994, or it could be any time thereafter. Although the curse has been lifted, the operative logics of the mall leave time suspended, its contexts relentlessly unlocatable. It takes dead mall nostalgia to shake it loose\u2014to want<\/em> to shake it loose. The question we must ask ourselves is into what new world it will be unleashed?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

End Notes\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

[1]<\/sup><\/a> Daria<\/em>, season 1 episode 5, \u201cMalled,\u201d written by Glenn Eichler, aired March 31, 1997, on MTV.<\/p>\n

[2]<\/sup><\/a> Vaporwave is a microgenre of heavily-layered and re-pitched samples of 1980s\/1990s lounge Muzak. Mallsoft, a more recent incarnation of the vaporwave style, leans deliberately into remixes of the canned music associated with commercial spaces of this period.<\/p>\n

[3]<\/sup><\/a> Stuart Lindsay, \u201cDisaster Theory: Vaporwave Music as a Hauntological Expression of Sociopolitical Trauma,\u201d English Language Notes<\/em> 59, no. 2 (2021): 113.<\/p>\n

[4]<\/sup><\/a> James L.\u00a0 Farrell, One Nation Under Goods: Malls and the Seductions of American Shopping<\/em> (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Books, 2003): 23.<\/p>\n

[5]<\/sup><\/a> Ibid.<\/p>\n

[6]<\/sup><\/a> Paco Underhill, Call of the Mall<\/em> (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004): 202.<\/p>\n

[7]<\/sup><\/a> James B. Twitchell, Lead Us Into Temptation: The Triumph of American Materialism <\/em>(New York: Columbia University Press, 1999): 259.<\/p>\n

[8]<\/sup><\/a> Margaret Crawford, \u201cThe World in a Shopping Mall,\u201d in Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the End of Public Space,<\/em> ed. Michael Sorkin (New York: Hill & Wang, 1992): 4.<\/p>\n

[9]<\/sup><\/a> Paul Ballam-Cross, \u201cReconstructed Nostalgia: Aesthetic Commonalities and Self-Soothing in Chillwave, Synthwave, and Vaporwave,\u201d Journal of Popular Music Studies <\/em>33, no. 1 (2021): 90-1.<\/p>\n

[10]<\/sup><\/a> Tanner Grafton, Babbling Corpse: Vaporwave and the Commodification of Ghosts<\/em> (Portland: Zero Books, 2016): 39.<\/p>\n

[11]<\/sup><\/a> Declan Cochran, \u201cFailed Futures: Vaporwave, Capitalism, and Dan Bell\u2019s Dead Malls<\/em> Series,\u201d The Appreciation Index: Dispatches From the Information-Action Radio<\/em>, 2020, https:\/\/theappreciationindex.com\/2020\/04\/16\/failed-futures-vaporwave-capitalism-and-dan-bells-dead-mall-series\/.<\/p>\n

[12]<\/sup><\/a> Ibid.<\/p>\n

[13]<\/sup><\/a> Phillip E. Wegner, Life Between Two Deaths, 1989-2001: U.S. Culture in the Long Nineties<\/em> (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009): 41.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Whitney S. May, M.A., is a doctoral candidate in the American Studies program at the University of Texas and a lecturer for the Department of English at Texas State University. Her primary research interests include the Gothic and nineteenth-century horror literature, as well as the history of capitalism and its carnivalesque representations in horror fiction […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":20371,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[15],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/ampersandjournal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/617"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/ampersandjournal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/ampersandjournal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/ampersandjournal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/20371"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/ampersandjournal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=617"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/ampersandjournal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/617\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":679,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/ampersandjournal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/617\/revisions\/679"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/ampersandjournal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=617"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/ampersandjournal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=617"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/ampersandjournal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=617"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}