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Posted on January 27, 2019

Cam – Horror and the Double

Dawn Keetley

Cam is a quite extraordinary film, taking the horror genre into relatively uncharted territory. Directed by Daniel Goldhaber and written by Isa Mazzei, Cam centers on Alice, played brilliantly by Madeline Brewer, an “erotic webcam performer” (stage name of Lola), who is determined to move up the ranks at FreeGirls.Live. In one disconcerting moment, however, her world gets upended. She turns on her laptop to discover none other than herself performing live. What follows is straight out of a nightmare as Alice tries to get the service techs at FreeGirls.Live to fix the problem and then gives up and tries to fix it herself—all the while seeing on screen an exact double of herself. Alice’s double, moreover, seems determined to prove that she can succeed vastly better at being “Lola” than Alice herself.

Posted on December 8, 2018

Await Further Instructions: New Christmas Horror

Dawn Keetley

As a fan of Christmas horror films, I’m very happy to be able to recommend Await Further Instructions (2018), written by Gavin Williams and directed by Johnny Kevorkian, director and writer of the horror feature, The Disappeared (2008). Await Further Instructions has a lot going for it, including what is essential to Christmas horror—the agonizingly tense family get together (and that’s an understatement when it comes to this film). Await Further Instructions also delivers a pretty provocative message about both violence and technology, along with some fantastic (and beautifully-shot) body horror in its culminating scenes. I’d say this is a must for your holiday viewing.

Posted on November 24, 2018

Salem’s Lot and the Nuclear Threat

Dawn Keetley

Salem’s Lot is about vampires, of course. But as I recently re-read King’s 1975 novel and watched the exceptional TV miniseries (directed by Tobe Hooper) from 1979, it occurred to me that the latter—the film, not the novel–might also be about the nuclear threat. In 1979, America was entrenched in Cold War paranoia, with the attendant heightened fears of nuclear war. Filmed in July and August 1979 and airing on CBS on November 17 and 24, 1979, Salem’s Lot was bookended by two events critical to deepening anxiety about the nuclear threat. In only four more years, ABC’s The Day After (1983) would galvanize 100 million people gathered around their TVs to watch the devastating consequences of a nuclear attack on US soil, setting a record for the highest rated television film ever. And just before Salem’s Lot began filming, Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station in central Pennsylvania was the site, on March 28, 1979, of the worst nuclear accident in the US. Anxiety about the effects of nuclear energy and nuclear war was rampant.

Posted on November 18, 2018

Five Snowy Horror Films You May Not Know About (And Should)

Dawn Keetley

Here are five horror films set in frozen landscapes that you may not have heard about—and that are all really worth watching. It’s a beyond-The- Shining-and-beyond-The-Thing list—for all those who love the harsh bleakness, the existential desolation, of those snow-blasted films.

Posted on October 21, 2018

A Rage-Filled Halloween for Our Time

Dawn Keetley

From what I’d read before going in to David Gordon Green’s Halloween (2018), I was expecting a portrait of the deep and lasting effects of grief and trauma. The film chooses to ignore all the sequels to John Carpenter’s 1978 original and picks up the story of Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) many years later, after two failed marriages, a daughter (now estranged), and a granddaughter. Instead of a complex study in the lingering after-effects of trauma, however, Green’s Halloween gives us simple, unalloyed rage. A fitting Halloween, perhaps, for our own anger-filled post-Trump moment.