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Posted on November 20, 2016

Stephen King’s “The Raft” and the Stickiness of Objects

Dawn Keetley

Stephen King’s story “The Raft,” published in Skeleton Crew in 1985 and part of the horror anthology Creepshow 2 (Michael Gornick, 1987), is deceptively straightforward. Near the end of October, four teens—Deke, Randy, LaVerne, and Rachel—have a few drinks, smoke some pot, and decide to swim out to a raft in the middle of a deserted lake. Once they’ve all reached the raft, Randy sees a strange black shape in the water: it looks like oil—an oil slick is the closest he can come to naming it—but it’s not an oil slick; it’s too perfectly formed. Randy tells his friends that the one oil slick he has seen was “just this big sticky mess all over the water. In streaks and big smears.” He insists it did not look like the shape that is lurking on the lake: “It wasn’t, you know, compact.” This strange mass, which seems to sense their movements and their vulnerabilities, is a dense blackness—and the story tells of its relentlessly oozing over the teens, one by one, dissolving their flesh, pulling it off their bones, until only Randy is left. Read more

Posted on November 15, 2016

Saw, Hostel, and the Death of Manufacturing

Dawn Keetley

Shortly after the 2016 presidential election, I ran across Michael Moore’s prescient article predicting Donald’s Trump’s victory. Moore described a possible “Rust Belt Brexit,” claiming that Trump would do well in four traditionally Democratic states—Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Michigan—home to many “angry, embittered working (and nonworking) people.” And indeed, against all expectations, Trump won all four of these states. There’s one sentence in Moore’s piece, as he’s describing this part of the country (as well as the Midlands of England), that resonated profoundly with me, not least because I’ve lived in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania and grew up in the industrial Midlands of England: “From Green Bay to Pittsburgh,” Moore writes, “this, my friends, is the middle of England – broken, depressed, struggling, the smokestacks strewn across the countryside with the carcass of what we use to call the Middle Class.”[i] This image, of smokestacks strewn across the landscape, seems to be front and center in the visual imagery of both Saw (James Wan, 2004) and Hostel (Eli Roth, 2005). Read more

Posted on November 6, 2016

Who is Ezekiel?: Hades and Androcles in The Walking Dead

Dawn Keetley

The second episode of season 7 (“The Well”) has been much and rightly praised for its exceptional storytelling, which served as a welcome relief from the brutality of the season opener (“The Day Will Come When You Won’t Be”).

I’ve read some interesting things online about how the storyline developing between Carol (Melissa McBride) and Ezekiel (Khary Payton), with his strange insistence that she take his pomegranate, evokes the Greek myth of Persephone and Hades.

This article by Ryan Folmsbee on Comicsverse is a good example and lays out how Carol’s story tracks that of Persephone.

A crucial part of the story of Persephone, though, is that it is known as “The Rape of Persephone.” Hades sees Persephone, wandering alone, and he forcibly abducts and rapes her. So when Folmsbee refers to the “love” between Hades and Persephone, it doesn’t exactly seem an accurate description of the relationship—and, indeed, in the posts I saw about the myth, the “rape” part was not being talked about. (Folmsbee gets it more right later when he says that “Persephone was not entirely on board with the idea of spending her life with Hades.”) Read more

Posted on November 4, 2016

7 Thought-Provoking Home Invasion Films You Can Stream Now

Dawn Keetley

Home invasion horror films announce their plot right up front—and you can be pretty sure of what you’re getting: strangers break into a home and terrorize the inhabitants, typically for no other reason than the sadistic pleasure of torturing and killing. There are some great films out there that hew closely to this plot, delivering a terror predicated on the sadism of the stalker/s and the inexplicability of their actions. Funny Games, both the US (2007) and original Austrian (1997) incarnations, directed by Michael Heneke, and the more recent Hush (2016), directed by Michael Flanagan, are noteworthy examples.

I’m interested, though, in films that change the home invasion narrative in order to suggest some sort of closer threat—a threat that breaks down, in one way or another, the line dividing inside and outside, us and them, home and beyond, friend/family member and stranger, even self and other. All of the films below do this in different but always thought-provoking ways. They ask us to consider who the “strangers” in our lives really are, where they are—and what they are capable of doing.

You’ll notice all the screenshots of windows below: windows loom large in all these films, serving to question the boundary line between inside and outside that they also erect, even if only falsely and fleetingly. There are also a lot of masks, although while some masks can clearly be seen, others can’t. Read more

Posted on October 19, 2016

Without Name: Nature’s Power

Dawn Keetley

Irish folk horror film Without Name saw its US premiere on Saturday October 15, 2016, at the first Brooklyn Horror Film Festival—and it was without doubt one of the best films to play at the festival. Indeed, it just won awards for best feature, best director (Lorcan Finnegan), best cinematography (Piers McGrail), and best editing (Tony Cranstoun). I also want to single out Garret Shanley for a masterful screenplay and the three leads (Alan McKenna, Niamh Algar, and James Browne) for great performances.

Here’s the trailer: