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Posted on July 8, 2024

Independent Filmmaker Graham Burrell and Horror Short, Grampy

Dawn Keetley

In 2017, we ran a feature by Roman Smith on a local (eastern Pennsylvania) film festival – the Upper Dublin-based Greenfield Youth Film Festival which, on April 27, 2017, celebrated short films by teen filmmakers from all over the state of Pennsylvania. As the writer noted at the time, “Some of the most clever (and most awarded) films were horror films.”

One of those films – Perception – was directed by young filmmaker Graham Burrell, who won an award for Professional Film achievement. Seven years later, I noticed that a short film by Burrell was featuring in our local Southside Film Festival (in Bethlehem, PA). Burrell has graduated from Muhlenberg College and is a video producer and filmmaker based in the Philadelphia area, and he shared his entry and most recent film, Grampy, with us. We’re excited to offer a review of that film, as well as our interview with Burrell.

Posted on July 2, 2024

Under Paris: Sharks Adapting to Ecological Damage

Dawn Keetley

In a recent Horror Homeroom Conversations podcast, we were discussing two ecohorror films – The Great Alligator (Sergio Martino, 1979) and Alligator (Lewis Teague, 1980) – and came to two conclusions. First, that Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975) casts an enormous shadow over the natural horror films that followed. And, second, that there is a formulaic plot structuring such films, one so incredibly common as to seem fixed, inevitable. As we described this plot in the podcast: 1) humans tamper with the natural environment; 2) as a result, a creature launches a rampaging attack on said humans; and 3) the besieged humans fight back – almost always winning. Given our discussion in this podcast, and my recent immersion in natural horror films, I was very excited when Xavier Gens’ new genre film, Under Paris (Sous la Seine) arrived on Netflix. And I was right to be excited: Under Paris is a great natural horror film and now resides among my top 5 shark horror films (I’ll give the whole top 5 at the end!)

Posted on March 8, 2024

Children of the Corn: Where Fritz Kiersch’s 1984 Adaptation Gets It Right – and Wrong

Dawn Keetley

Fritz Kiersch’s adaptation of Stephen King’s 1977 short story, “Children of the Corn,” was released in the US on March 9, 1984. It’s one of my favorite Stephen King adaptations (somewhere in the top ten) – and its many strengths notably include an early starring role for the amazing Linda Hamilton, seven months before she appeared in the career-shaping The Terminator. It’s also a critical entry in the US folk horror tradition, defining (along with Mary Lambert’s 1989 Pet Semetary) what American folk horror looked like in the 1980s. On the film’s 40^th anniversary, here’s an assessment of some of the ways Kiersch’s Children of the Corn effectively interpreted and adapted King’s story – and a couple of the film’s missteps.

Posted on February 21, 2024

The Reproductive Imperative of Folk Horror: Robin Redbreast and Alex Garland’s Men

Dawn Keetley

In an early classic of folk horror, the 1970 BBC Play for Today episode, “Robin Redbreast” (written by John Bowen and directed by James MacTaggart), a middle-class professional woman, Norah Palmer (Anna Cropper), whose long-time boyfriend just ended their relationship, moves rather reluctantly to a remote cottage she acquired during the break-up. After discovering that she has mice, Norah sets off to look for a man named Rob (Andrew Bradford), who lives in the woods and can apparently take care of her mouse problem for her. As Norah walks through the woods, the camera isolates her and also marks her enjoyment of the scenery. She is jolted from this enjoyment by the sight of a man who is virtually naked; indeed, she will call him ‘naked’ when she recounts her experience to her housekeeper, Mrs. Vigo (Freda Bamford), later. Norah stares and, when he sees her – when he looks back – she turns and hastens away, unnerved, back to her house.

Posted on December 4, 2023

The Lord of Misrule – Paint-by-Numbers Folk Horror

Dawn Keetley

The Lord of Misrule is the latest horror film from William Brent Bell, who has previously directed 2016’s The Boy and Orphan: First Kill (2022), among others. The Lord of Misrule is firmly in the folk horror tradition and, as a huge folk horror fan, I had been excitedly anticipating its release. Unfortunately, I was disappointed. That isn’t to say there aren’t things to like, but while it delivers on pretty much every folk horror convention, it adds little; it plays out a rote folk horror narrative across its admittedly beautiful surface, but it’s flat, lifeless, bereft of underlying meaning. It doesn’t add anything new, as the best recent folk horror films – Kill List (Ben Wheatley, 2011), Without Name (Lorcan Finnegan, 2016), Midsommar (Ari Aster, 2019), In the Earth (Ben Wheatley, 2021), The Feast (Lee Haven Jones, 2021), Enys Men (Mark Jenkins, 2022), and Men (Alex Garland, 2022) – have done.