Horror Homeroom

Posted on April 3, 2025

A Haunting in Alola – Ghost Narratives in the Pokémon Franchise

Guest Post

The Pokémon franchise is full of ghosts and spirits even outside of their Ghost-type Pokémon, and the appearance of such paranormal activity dates back to the first title. In Red/Blue, a young girl NPC in Lavender Town asks the player about an unseen white hand on their shoulder after inquiring whether they believe in ghosts (Figure 1). In the battle with the Ghost-type specialist Phoebe in Omega Ruby/Alpha Sapphire (2014), a ghost girl appears behind her in a chair – the camera then tracks towards the player character as if sharing the ghost’s point of view. In one of the franchise’s most famous and unexplained mysteries, in X/Y, a ghost appears behind the player in a lift in Lumiose City, freezing the game to state ‘no, you’re not the one’ before floating away.

A woman clutches her steering wheel while she screams in her car.

Posted on March 25, 2025

The Man Downstairs: Talking Longlegs (2024)

Podcast

On today’s episode, it is Nicolas Cage unleashed to somewhat questionable results in Osgood Perkins’ Longlegs. In the film, FBI agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe), a woman with possible clairvoyant abilities, is drawn into a series of murder-suicides spanning decades. A Lynchian crime procedural that leans into a fusion of supernatural and religious horror, Longlegs is a highly stylized descent into darkness that has left audiences divided. We’re breaking it all down today with spoilers so stay tuned.

Posted on March 23, 2025

Capitalism Hates You – by Joshua Gooch

Guest Post

Capitalism hates us. We needn’t look far for proof. Firestorms, hurricanes, floods, derechos—capitalism is inimical to the continued existence of life on Earth. Twenty-first century investment banks may trumpet their commitments to climate policy, but the people who run so-called responsible investing units show how little they care about this destruction. In a 2022 conference presentation, the head of responsible investing for HSBC’s asset management unit said: “Climate change is not a financial risk that we need to worry about. . . . Who cares if Miami is six meters underwater in 100 years? Amsterdam’s been six meters underwater for ages, and that’s a really nice place. We will cope with it.” It is precisely this lack of concern that we see in the Trump administration’s assault on the regulatory state, in billionaires constructing apocalypse hideaways, and in the global rise of fascism. Capitalism encourages those with resources to assume that they’ll be able to cope, while the rest of us burn, drown, or starve.

screenshot of a website that is black, white and red and depicts various women screaming.

Posted on March 20, 2025

When the Woman Screams: A Public Humanities Dissertation

Elizabeth Erwin

Popular thinking is that women scream in horror films because it is an inherently misogynistic media genre – that women are screaming because they are being terrorized. But this reading de-politicizes an inherently political act. While women do scream because they are afraid, they also scream in anger, grief, or simply to be heard. A component of my public humanities dissertation, this video essay looks at what these screams – most notably silent screams – have to tell us about cultural misogyny and the importance of performance.

The dissertation itself — Lehigh University’s first of its kind — examines how the female scream in horror film operates as an oppositional act of defiance against cultural norms that seek to silence and render women invisible. By expanding the historical record through the lens of film, my hope is to recover an intersectional array of stories that mark significant socio-political shifts for women within the United States, thus collapsing the borders that exist between academia and public scholarship.

When the Woman Screams is not a dissertation about women being victimized. It is a dissertation about women surviving. I hope you’ll scream with me.

Posted on March 14, 2025

In the Twilight Zone: The After Hours in Severance

Dawn Keetley

In Severance’s latest episode, “The After Hours” (season 2, ep. 9), the show makes its most direct reference yet to another television series. Could it be more appropriate that it’s The Twilight Zone? Specifically, the thirty-fourth episode in season one, “The After Hours,” which aired on June 10, 1960. For those of us who like to look for hidden references, this one isn’t much of a challenge (“The After Hours” = “The After Hours”). The directness of the reference continues near the end of Severance’s episode when Harmony Cobel and Devon are smuggling Mark into the Damona Birthing Retreat, and Harmony seems to be giving some kind of password to the guard: “Marsha White. Ninth floor,” she says, adding “Specialty Department. I’m looking for a gold thimble.” The Twilight Zone’s “The After Hours” begins with Marsha White taking the elevator to the ninth floor – the Specialities Department – looking for a gold thimble.

Now that Severance has directly evoked The Twilight Zone’s “The After Hours,” the similarities are striking and many. The ninth floor of the department store to which Marsha White is whisked does not – as far as the “normal” world is concerned – actually exist. We see multiple shops of the elevator indicator going up only to the eighth floor and then the roof. As several characters say to a bewildered Marsha White who leaves the ninth floor and then tries to get back to it, “There is no ninth floor.”