American Horror Story
Max Guy
There is no cream, nor chocolat,
But jam alone, just marmalade.
The sugar it gleams
With all of its might,
It’s as good as it seems,
Just take a bite.
But jam alone, just marmalade.
The sugar it gleams
With all of its might,
It’s as good as it seems,
Just take a bite.
The Renaissance Society is painted yellow from the floor to the overwhelming, vaulted, Neo-Gothic ceiling. The floor has been carpeted to a close match of the yellow, too, and the familiar austerity of the gallery made uncanny. Upon entering, you face the back of a monolithic LED monitor and speaker setup typical of conferences and expositions. Circle the monitor, and the soundtrack becomes slightly more audible. At four minutes and forty-four seconds, Krapfen is a claustrophobic, diabolical romp that unsettles as it unravels with each loop.
On screen, an androgynous, adolescent girl, simply named “the Kid” and played by Violet Savage, is locked in an endless dance with an animated cast of characters from her closet: a pair of Gloves, Socks, a Foulard (French for “scarf”—so pinky up while reading the gallery guide, Americans), Trousers (British English for pants as it were), and a Pullover. Each article of clothing is voiced individually, singing the lyrics, floating as if worn by invisible dancers (which were, of course, removed post-production). The set is a yellow-and-white painted bedroom with mismatched furniture and domestic objects; it’s neither a child’s interior nor a parent’s space. But it’s hard at this initial point to describe. The first go-around is about keeping up with the videos’ strange mechanics and choreography. You might even shrug off the moment when it seamlessly restarts.
All images courtesy of the Renaissance Society
Installation views of Diego Marcon, Krapfen, 2025, at the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago. Photo by Bob.
It’s mesmerizing in the way something is when you really want to understand it. The second watch reveals the Kid isn’t dancing so much as being steered, coaxed toward a sweetness she never chooses. The lyrics are ambiguously perverse, the male voice of Trousers sing softly:
Between me and you
I’ve been through this too
I just think you’re scared
There’ll be cream in there
But believe me, my friend,
You’ll be glad in the end,
For there’s nothing but apricot jam.
I’ve been through this too
I just think you’re scared
There’ll be cream in there
But believe me, my friend,
You’ll be glad in the end,
For there’s nothing but apricot jam.
As the video cycles, the dance slides further toward unease, and it becomes increasingly necessary to start projecting a narrative back onto the scene. It’s maybe easiest to interpret the film as one about an adolescent with body dysmorphia. Things take a turn for the abject when you realize that Krapfen—a broadly Bavarian and Austrian-German variant for jelly donut, otherwise colloquially known in German as a Berliner—are notably absent from the film itself. Why aren’t there mirrors in this bedroom? Whose clothes are these? Whose voices speak through them? Their silhouettes don’t match the Kid’s body, the only human visible on screen. Is the Kid haunted by the ghosts that fill the clothes, or do they represent some outcome of eating krapfen? Is a body simply the jam filling of its own clothes? Before the psychic gulf between the Kid and the animated clothes closes in, they cast her out of the room and into a dark void.
Why is this happening? Why would an Italian man put an adolescent girl through this? Out of the cycles of her endless suffering, one genre emerges as the film slips into the sleek, stylish chauvinism that has always driven Giallo. Italian for “yellow.” The pulp genre peaked in the 1970s, often juggling slasher, thriller, psychological horror, sexploitation, and supernatural elements. Gialli are preoccupied with perversion, coercion, and the corruption of innocence—gestures of sweetness or care masking control, pleasure concealing threat. The soundtrack is bespoke, the colors vibrant, the characters underdeveloped, and simply lucky to have made it out alive.
Dario Argento’s cult classics Suspiria (1977) and Phenomena (1985, purchased by New Line Cinema and retitled Creepers) are notable and the most popular of the Giallo genre. In both, a young, oblivious American woman arrives at an institution of higher learning only to be ensnared in an occult conspiracy. Meanwhile, Marcon immerses us in his own perverse indoctrination ritual: his first institutional solo exhibition in the United States, tucked away within the University of Chicago campus.
And there you stand, at “the Ren” adrift in a bright, vastly empty room, where whatever “horror” that emerges comes less from the video—creepy as it is—than from the conditions of watching it. The yellow carpet intensifies the alienation, the covered windows at the entrance, the closed door, and the absence of seating. It begs the practical question of how someone could stand to be in there for too long. Here is an audience that’s an active participant in their discomfort, disillusionment, fright, and guilty pleasure. Of course, yellow also means not brave, cowardly, or socially cautious; a fitting color for tiptoeing around cultural and political landmines.
In addition to the accompanying program of screenings and talks hosted by Marcon and the Ren, two horror movies that also premiered this autumn—Bugonia by Yorgos Lanthimos and Dracula by Radu Jude—were critically elucidating. Also by European directors, and seemingly addressed directly to a United States-based audience, the two reflected an ontological horror that felt vengeful and exhausting. They confront American fantasies with explicit hostility: they are abrasive, direct, and structurally unwilling to comfort the viewer. They present, however clumsily, a set of stakes, or perhaps grievances.
Saying nothing of the two films, suffering through Jude’s four-hour, AI-powered, cinema of transgression, and Lanthimos’ “both things are true” horror about the psychopath incel conspiracy theorist vs. alien corporate girlboss—there at least remained the promise that it would end, however abruptly (or disappointingly, damn). It was different in that I was seated comfortably; the comfort that captivates a moviegoer is absent in a film loop at the Renaissance Society. A political pretense looms in these Hollywood films: the idea that the institution must end, and soon. Marcon offers no such collapse; Krapfen just goes on. What is there to make of a horror with no distinct beginning or end? Something you just walk into, willingly?