Milking time for NZ’s top breeders

Philip Matthews asks if horror is back or if it was just hiding somewhere.

MEET the All Blacks of bovine insemination.

An elite squad of 36 ‘‘fine young men’’ are all tagged and numbered – ready to keep our dairy industry in stock.

In fact, 4.6 million inseminations are expected nationally through this breeding programme, which generates roughly $350 million in milk production a year.

New Zealand would likely be in a state of emergency without them, and Auckland folks would miss out on their lattes, artificial breeding manager David Hale says.

Breeding season is already ramping up with more than 1300 seasonal staff scattered across the country, busy inseminating cows.

Hale, recently appointed national breeding manager for the Livestock Improvement Corporation (LIC) is accountable to 10,500 shareholders – Kiwi dairy farmers – and says the job relies on a stack of science, a DNA map which stretches back more than 100 years, and a sense of humour.

‘‘We have to have a sense of humour; we talk about sperm cells and semen in everyday conversation.’’

LIC has New Zealand herd records, digital and hard copy, which go back more than 100 years, Hale says. It helps combat inbreeding.

‘‘Technicians have data on hand, and each cow has a unique ID with information that goes back three generations.

‘‘The software will indicate whether there is any inbreeding. We don’t have any stock with two heads,’’ he jokes.

From September until December 24, about 100,000 straws of bull sperm are dispatched and delivered each day, Hale says.

And the programme is expanding, he says.

‘‘It’s pretty much tailor-made for New Zealand based on a grass-fed system.

‘‘We export to other countries who are trying to emulate our system, including Argentina, Brazil and Chile.

‘‘We are establishing closer links with those countries and have Kiwis who own and run dairy operations in those countries.’’

Hale, from a sheep and beef background, says he sees no negative impacts from dairying in New Zealand.

‘‘We can always do things better as the world changes and technology grows.’’ THE world has gone mad for horror movie It.

The scary clown-in-the-sewers movie has dethroned The Exorcist to become the all-time highest-grossing R-rated film in the United States, where it pulled in more than US$314 million (NZ$440m) in only five weeks and even in New Zealand It has scared more than NZ$3m out of movie-goers.

It is not alone. The two Conjuring films, slick and genuinely scary haunted-house throwbacks overseen by Saw mastermind James Wan, took NZ$1.7m and $NZ2.2m, according to the Box Office Mojo website. And then there is television where the likes of American Horror Story and The Walking Dead are binged on – or should that be feasted upon?

But is Bill Skarsgard’s dancing clown Pennywise anywhere near as creepy as Tim Curry’s from 1990? Arguments rage along generational lines. As a kid, Christchurch lecturer Erin Harrington loved the TV movie and Stephen King’s book, which is ‘‘a perfect distillation of his interests in teens, sex, horror and terror’’. But the new one? ‘‘Boring.’’

Harrington is not only a horror fan, but a horror expert. The lecturer in English and Cultural Studies’ research deals with post-1960s horror and her sixth floor office on the University of Canterbury campus is suitably decorated with a lifesize model of a skeleton she bought on Trade Me (the previous owner named it Hamilton) and a really fantastic Japanese Conan the Barbarian poster.

There is also a copy of her new book somewhere too. An expansion of her PhD thesis, Women, Monstrosity and Horror Film deals specifically with ‘‘gynaehorror", a word Harrington coined to describe films concerned with ‘‘aspects of female reproductive horror, from reproductive and sexual organs, to virginity, pregnancy, birth, motherhood and menopause’’. Examples range from Rosemary’s Baby and Aliens to The Witch and The Babadook. Darren Aronofsky’s mother! would also be a minefield for this kind of thing. (‘‘The woman next to me kept screaming,’’ Harrington reports.)

So what is so attractive about the terrifying, the bloody, the shocking?

‘‘It’s a question that’s under everything,’’ Harrington says. ‘‘Every time I go and talk to the public about horror stuff, someone sticks their hand up and goes, ‘What’s with this sick filth?’

‘‘There are lots of theories about why horror appeals and a lot of them are to do with emotion, suspense and release, but also the aesthetics of horror. Things looking beautiful. Or certain stories might appeal because they have an account of good eventually triumphing over evil. Or it’s fun to watch in a group. There are a few women here [on campus] who would get together quite regularly, drink lots, eat lots and watch something and heckle and throw stuff at the screen.’’

Stress the word ‘‘business’’ in the phrase movie business and you find one of the reasons for ‘‘horror’s present heat,’’ as local film producer Ant Timpson puts it. There is simply ‘‘a very attractive bottom line’’. Horrors are often the best performing titles on many studios’ return on investment indexes, he says, because of tight budgets and that potential for films to break out.

‘‘This ‘renaissance’ some say we’re having actually happened a couple of years ago when films like The Witch, It Follows, The Babadook became bona fide