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Posted on August 23, 2016

Short Cut: You’re Next (2011)

Dawn Keetley

Director Adam Wingard’s most high-profile project to date, Blair Witch, the sequel to Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez’s 1999 The Blair Witch Project, is due to arrive in theaters on September 16—and so I wanted to take a closer look at Wingard’s earlier films. He is, I think, a director to watch, and horror fans aren’t the only ones who should be watching. You’re Next, released in August 2011, is a wonderful foray into the home invasion film, with a little slasher plus Home Alone thrown into the mix. Everything works in this film—the direction, the cinematography, the screenplay by Simon Barrett, the pacing, the acting (especially Sharni Vinson, who is brilliant as the surprising Erin).

What’s great about You’re Next, in fact, is that it is consistently surprising. I’m not going to give it away entirely but I do want to make the point that the invaders are not who and what you might think they are. You’re Next offers us what seem like conventional bad guys, clearly demarcated by the masks they wear. The preview plays up the film’s structuring dichotomy between the perfect family within the luxurious home and the masked marauders prowling outside, attacking from beyond the mansion’s sheltering walls. Here’s the preview if you haven’t seen it: Read more

Posted on August 19, 2016

Nerve (2016): The Most Dangerous Game

Dawn Keetley

The more horror I read and watch, the more I realize that certain stories are repeatedly told over the decades. Different generations will create different variations, but the story will fundamentally be the same. This is by no means a bad thing: we create our world by telling stories, and some stories are just so crucial to the human condition, so much about who we are, that they need—they demand—to be re-told. One extremely important story in the horror tradition is the story of the dangerous game. It originated (in modern form, anyway) in the 1924 short story by Richard Connell called (not surprisingly) “The Most Dangerous Game.” It’s been made into several films over the decades (e.g., RKO’s faithful 1932 adaptation, The Most Dangerous Game, starring Joel McCrea, 1961’s Bloodlust!, 1994’s Surviving the Game, with Rutger Hauer and Ice-T, and 2004’s The Eliminator). The most recent incarnation of the dangerous game story, I would argue, is Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman’s Nerve (2016). Read more

Posted on August 12, 2016

Thirteen Women (1932): The Slasher that Started it All

Dawn Keetley

If you love horror films, you’ll want to watch the classic Thirteen Women (David Archainbaud, 1932). It’s a little-known film that, four decades before The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), Black Christmas (1974), and Halloween (1978), mapped out the contours of the slasher plot.

Myself and Gwen have recently written an article about the film: “Thirteen Women (1932): An Unacknowledged Horror Classic,” published in the Journal of Film and Video 68, no. 1 (Spring 2016). I’m just hitting a couple of the highlights here, so if you want more analysis, that’s the place to go.

We didn’t conjure our idea up out of thin air. Some film critics had already nodded to Thirteen Women’s anticipation of the slasher sub-genre. For instance, in his review of the DVD, which was released as part of the Warner Archive Collection in 2012, John Beifuss notes that Thirteen Women is “not exactly a horror film,” yet he goes on to map numerous of its “horror themes,” drawing a line to both Friday the 13^th (1980) and the Final Destination franchise (2000-2011). [i] We disagree with Beifuss’s hedging: Thirteen Women is in fact a horror film. Read more

Posted on August 5, 2016

Dinosaurs and the Horror Film, Part 2: Carnosaur

Dawn Keetley

Dinosaur movies are typically categorized as horror films, but not all of them are—and so I thought I’d use two intriguing-in-their-own-right dinosaur films as part of my ongoing exploration of what makes a horror film. In [part 1 of this discussion], I argued that Disney / Pixar’s The Good Dinosaur (2015) is not only not horror but represents an explicitly anti-horror project. Carnosaur, on the other hand, a low-budget Roger Corman production, is unequivocally a horror film. Carnosaur was released on May 21, 1993, just four weeks before Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park—and it bears some resemblance to its big-budget competitor. While not as good a film as Jurassic Park, Carnosaur is vastly more interesting, especially for horror fans.

Carnosaur is a crazy film—and while it’s currently not easy to find, it’s worth the effort to try to get your hands on it. Diane Ladd plays Dr. Jane Tiptree, a woman whom one male character calls “the fairy godmother of military biotech.” Tiptree has been sequestered away, working to create a hybrid race of dinosaurs to whose eggs women give birth right before they die. Tiptree’s plan, it turns out, is to wipe out the human race for their sins, creating a new and more worthy species (genetically-modified dinosaurs) to continue life on earth. You might be forgiven for thinking that some of the finer points of Tiptree’s scheme are a little illogical—and my advice would be, well, to enjoy and not overthink it! Read more

Posted on July 27, 2016

Dinosaurs and the Horror Film, Part 1: The Good Dinosaur

Dawn Keetley

Sometimes you watch a film that helps clarify what a horror film is by not being a horror film. Disney / Pixar’s The Good Dinosaur (2015) is that film—and it set me thinking about the contested place of dinosaurs in the horror genre. Films with rampaging dinosaurs are often categorized as horror films. But should they be?

This will be the first of two posts that explore what makes a horror film by looking at two films about dinosaurs, identifying what is explicitly not horror (The Good Dinosaur) and what unequivocally is horror (Carnosaur, 1993).

To start with what is not horror: Disney / Pixar’s The Good Dinosaur. While it is not a horror film, The Good Dinosaur, like many Disney films, contains horror, the appearance and containment of which seems necessary to the film’s construction as something other than a horror film. Read more