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Posted on May 6, 2016

S. A. Bodeen’s The Detour—Including Thoughts from the Author

Dawn Keetley

I’ve read a fair amount of young adult fiction of late, most of it with a leaning toward the horror genre (not surprisingly). The Detour by S. A. Bodeen, published in 2015, is one of the few that has really stayed with me.

After thinking about it—on and off—for several days, I realized that part of the reason the novel wasn’t letting go of me was that it featured a distinctly unlikable protagonist. The Detour also raises important questions that (even more importantly) are not resolved and perhaps don’t even have clear answers. The Detour thus stretches what can sometimes be the often rather suffocating confines of YA literature, with its firmly drawn moral boundaries and clear resolutions. Read more

Posted on April 27, 2016

Shutter Island, Invasion of The Body Snatchers, and H.P. Lovecraft

Dawn Keetley

The central point of debate about Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island (2010), as well as the 2003 novel by Dennis Lehane, is whether the main character (played by Leonardo Di Caprio) is insane or not. Is he Teddy Daniels, a US Marshal who has uncovered a terrifying conspiracy involving experiments on patients at Ashecliffe Hospital? Or is he Andrew Laeddis, a man suffering from a profound delusion that he is a US Marshal because he is unable to confront the truth that two years ago he murdered his wife after she drowned their three children?

I think you can make a convincing argument for both interpretations—part of the brilliance of both novel and film. Here, I just want to point out one specific moment in the film, one that resonates with a classic horror film and that may (or may not) help tip the scales.

Two-thirds of the way through Shutter Island, Teddy Daniels/Andrew Laeddis is in Ward C, where the most violent prisoners are kept, and he hears someone call out “Laeddis.” Moving toward the voice, he repeatedly lights matches in the darkness, trying desperately to “see” (in all kinds of ways). In the frame above, he has arrived at the cell of George Noyce (Jackie Earle Haley)—a man at the very heart of either Andrew Laeddis’s delusion or Teddy Daniels’s conspiracy. We have a shot of Teddy/Andrew’s face, match lit, looking, and then we have the shot below of Noyce, curled up, features indistinguishable. As the two men talk, we’re not sure what Teddy/Andrew learns. Does he learn that the conspiracy exists (that Noyce has been drugged and experimented on by the doctors at Shutter Island)? Or does he find evidence that he (Andrew) has brutally beaten Noyce for confronting him with the truth that he murdered his wife? The frail flame of the match, the darkness, Teddy/Andrew’s confused and horrified expression, Noyce’s indistinct features, and the ambiguity of their words all render the scene fundamentally indeterminate. Read more

Posted on April 22, 2016

Day of the Animals (1977): EcoHorror for Earth Day

Dawn Keetley

Day of the Animals (William Girdler, 1977) is a bad (dare I say, so bad it’s good) disaster / revenge-of-nature ecohorror film that screams seventies. Its plot is simple: a group of assorted characters, who shouldn’t be hiking in the best of circumstances, head up into the mountains just as animals start massing and trying to kill all humans—a phenomenon apparently caused by the thinning ozone layer.

There’s bad acting and plot holes as big as those in the ozone layer (not least, after a violent confrontation, one group chooses to continue up the mountain, yet is thereafter shown trekking down, while the other group, which chose to go down the mountain, is subsequently shown hiking up). There’s utterly horrible dialogue and baffling character development—and more than a few offensive comments thrown at the one Native American character. (I won’t even go into how the women are portrayed!)

The incomparable Leslie Nielsen (yes, one reason to see the film) plays a character who starts out as a straightforward obnoxious advertising executive, yet before long he mutates into a bare-chested survivalist, screaming into the rain, declaring allegiance to “Melville’s God,” shoving a mother and her child violently onto the ground, trying to rape a young woman (after telling her, “You belong to me. I own you”), stabbing a man through the abdomen with a walking stick, and then grappling (willingly) with a very large grizzly bear. The only possible excuse for this startling series of events might be that he is the lone person affected by the depleted-ozone-layer-induced madness that otherwise affects only nonhuman animals. You have to make that leap yourself, though, because the film doesn’t. Read more

Posted on April 20, 2016

13 Cameras Review (2015)

Dawn Keetley

13 Cameras is a creepy horror film that invokes a very real threat: surveillance—the fear we are being watched without our knowledge. It happens more often than we might think.

According to one 2009 report, “There are an estimated 30 million surveillance cameras now deployed in the United States shooting 4 billion hours of footage a week. Americans are being watched, all of us, almost everywhere.”[i]

Playing on anxieties that have only escalated in the post-9/11 years, 13 Cameras suggests that we’re watched not only in grocery stores, at work, and on the street, but also at home. Indeed, the film is at its best when it shows exactly how permeable the home is. Read more

Posted on April 8, 2016

Karyn Kusama’s The Invitation

Dawn Keetley

I saw Karyn Kusama’s latest film, The Invitation, last November at the Ithaca International Fantastic Film Festival, and it was easily the best film I saw there (and there were some good films!) It’s also head-and-shoulders above Kusama’s earlier foray into horror, Jennifer’s Body (2009).

Michael Gingold of Fangoria introduced The Invitation, saying he thought it was one of the best horror films of the last couple of years. I agree (though I still think the standout horror film of 2014 is David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows).

You can find the trailer here. It conveys the thoroughly unnerving nature of the film:

Gingold also said that the less you know about The Invitation going into it, the better—and I wholeheartedly agree with that too. I (purposefully) hadn’t read any reviews of the film ahead of time, and so I got to experience the disconcerting and disorienting events just as the protagonist does. It’s very difficult to write anything about the film without giving too much away and thus spoiling it, so I guess the two principal things I want to convey here are: (a) see the film; and (b) don’t read any reviews of it before you do—except this one, of course: I promise I won’t slip in any spoilers. Read more