Posted on January 9, 2025

Brats vs. Splats: Who Really Defined the 1980s Teen Film?

Guest Post

Cullen Wade

Recently, I watched Andrew McCarthy’s 2024 documentary Brats (not to be confused with Bratz which is actually worth your time), in which a 60-year-old movie star grapples with the psychic toll of someone calling him a brat four decades ago, and it got me thinking about slasher movies. Let me explain.

“The Brat Pack” refers to a loosely-delineated group of young actors who starred in popular teen movies of the 1980s, generally in the orbit of John Hughes. In McCarthy’s documentary, authorities ranging from Malcolm Gladwell to Rob Lowe repeatedly argue for the Brat Pack’s breakout as a seismic shift in the Hollywood profile of the teen movie. Gladwell calls it a “generational transition,” and, as McCarthy puts it, “Hollywood discovered the box office potential of a young audience … In the history of Hollywood, it had never been like this.”

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A bus drives off a cliff into a red pit
Posted on January 3, 2025

Set, Sodomy, and the Springwood Slasher: Queerness and the Occult in Freddy’s Revenge

Guest Post

Adam Pasen

Always a bit of a dark horse in the Nightmare on Elm Street canon, NOES 2: Freddy’s Revenge (Jack Sholder, 1985) has earned greater consideration since its release for its queer subtext. The story of Freddy coming at night to “get inside” new kid Jesse Walsh is viewed by critics such as Harry M. Benshoff as a metaphor for homosexual desire. (See this excellent article by Jordan Phillips on exactly this topic.)

To support this claim, scenes are cited such as love interest Lisa coming to help Jesse clean his room and finding him bumping and grinding to “All Night Long (Touch Me)” while a prominently displayed “Probe” game sits in the closet. Then there’s Jesse’s encounter at the BDSM bar with Coach Schneider and bare-assed gym brawl with Grady while a crowd of boys cheers “nail him!” Yet while the erotic underpinnings of Jesse and Freddy’s battle are generally acknowledged, the esoteric/magical dimensions are not.

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poster for unborn, woman looking in mirror
Posted on November 23, 2024

Ecumenical Exorcism in The Unborn

Guest Post

Steve A. Wiggins

For about three decades after The Exorcist (1973), possession movies tended to be Catholic.  It was as if demons were a distinctively Catholic problem.  Demons, in fact, are recognized worldwide in a variety of different forms, not all of them evil.  In the three major monotheistic religions they do tend to be enemies of God and should be banished whenever possible.  Historically speaking, Jews, Christians, and Muslims cooperated in exorcisms, something that is cited in The Unborn (David S. Goyer, 2009). Goyer’s movie features a Jewish exorcism involving an Episcopal priest and some nonbelievers.  As such, it stands as another example of Jewish horror, albeit hybridized.

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Posted on October 27, 2024

Rupert Russell’s The Last Sacrifice: Murder and the Occult in ‘That Green and Pleasant Land’

Dawn Keetley

Rupert Russell’s new documentary, The Last Sacrifice (2024), explores the infamous murder on February 14, 1945, of Charles Walton on Meon Hill in the village of Lower Quinton in Warwickshire, England. The Last Sacrifice is about so much more than that, however, as Russell brilliantly embeds the still-unsolved murder of Walton within the explosion of the occult, paganism, and witchcraft conspiracies in mid twentieth-century England.

The Last Sacrifice is not only about who killed Charles Walton and why, then, but about how this baffling murder case became entangled in some of the profound changes occurring in mid-century Britain. As one of the key commentators in the documentary, film historian Jonathan Rigby, puts it, the enigma of who killed Charles and Walton is also “the enigma of Britain itself.” Was Britain’s “pagan past,” he asks, “secretly alive in the present?” Check out the trailer.

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Posted on October 3, 2024

The Leech Woman: The Aging Female Body as Shock

Dawn Keetley

The essay below is drawn from an article I published in 2019 called “The Shock of Aging (Women) in Horror Film.” I’m excerpting (and adapting) part of the article here because the film it’s about, a very much undervalued film by Edward Dein from 1960 called The Leech Woman,[i] is not only a brilliant film but uncannily anticipates Coralie Fargeat’s equally brilliant film, The Substance (2024). You can see the outlines of The Substance in The Leech Woman, both in its structure and its preoccupations – and I’m surprised that more people aren’t talking about this earlier film. If this essay does nothing else, then, I hope it sends more people to The Leech Woman. But, more specifically, I think the arguments I make about The Leech Woman here are really relevant to The Substance.

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