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Posted on February 7, 2016

Deliverance (1972) and The Horror Film

Dawn Keetley

The frame above is from the end of John Boorman’s Deliverance (1972). Having made it home from his weekend trek into the terrifying “backwoods” of Georgia, where he faced the rape of his friend Bobby (Ned Beatty), the prospect of his own rape, and the death of his friend—where he saw a man killed and then himself killed a man, Ed (John Voigt) struggles to return to familiar domesticity. The film concludes with Ed jolting awake in terror from a dream in which a hand rises out of the water—the same water into which had disappeared the body of his friend as well as those of the two “hillbillies” he and Lewis (Burt Reynolds) killed.

A recent Twitter poll I conducted suggested that fans of Deliverance narrowly consider the film horror (53% to 47% out of 40 votes). I don’t think it’s quite so unclear. And the ending of the film is one of the principal reasons why I believe that Deliverance deserves an unambiguous place in the horror canon. For Ed, there is no closure, no safe return to normalcy. The ending suggests that he is permanently traumatized by his sojourn in the wilderness—that the horrors he saw, the horrors he perpetrated, will forever inhabit him.

Posted on February 2, 2016

Short Cut: Carrie’s Final Girl and the Precariousness of Survival

Dawn Keetley

Carrie (Brian De Palma, 1976) is the quintessential horror film, opening with a scene that showcases one of its central themes: what is repressed inevitably gets unleashed.

The opening famously features Carrie (Sissy Spacek) getting her first period in the shower at gym (yes, we’re in the terrain of real horror here!). The other girls (of course) mock her, throwing pads and tampons and screaming at her to “Plug it up.” Carrie does “plug it up”—in all kinds of ways—and what she plugs up gets spectacularly released in blood and death on prom night.

The most compassionate of Carrie’s high school acquaintances, Sue (Amy Irving), survives the blood bath, however (perhaps because of her kindness)—becoming one of the first Final Girls of horror (arguably preceded only by Lila from Psycho [1960], Sally from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre [1974], and Jess from Black Christmas [1974]).

Posted on January 31, 2016

The Final Girl, Part 1

Dawn Keetley

Horror Homeroom is running a series on the “Final Girl” for Women in Horror Month. We’ll be tweeting Final Girls daily and offering posts throughout the month about how people have conceptualized the Final Girl and how she’s evolved in horror film from about 1960 until now.

For this first post, I simply want to lay out how Carol J. Clover, the critic who coined the term, described the Final Girl, and to point out (very briefly) what came before—and thus how revolutionary the Final Girl was when she burst onto the scene.

At the risk of being reductive, prior to about 1960, women in the horror film were either powerful and (then) dead, or they survived only because they were rescued by men.

My favorite classic horror films, Thirteen Woman (David Archainbaud, 1932), Dracula’s Daughter (Lambert Hillyer, 1936), and Cat People (Jacques Tourneur, 1942), all feature powerful, hypnotic women who have few qualms about leaving a trail of bodies in their wake—and who all wield their gaze (always a mark of power in film) with devastating effect.

Posted on January 30, 2016

Everest and Frozen: Exploring the Edges of Horror

Dawn Keetley

I watched Everest (Baltasar Kormákur, 2015) last night, and it got me thinking (again) about the boundaries of the horror genre. What makes a horror film? Why is Everest not considered a horror film? It’s called “adventure,” “biography,” “drama,” “disaster,” “survival,” “thriller”—but not horror.

The plot of Everest, which is based on the disastrous expeditions of 1996, certainly sounds like the plot of a horror film: a group of people treks off into an isolated and forbidding place and is beset by dangers, by a force that imperils all their lives. One by one, they succumb to horrible deaths, or struggle and barely survive, maimed and traumatized.

Watching Everest, I certainly experienced the emotions of horror—the fear and dread that Brigid Cherry has argued is so crucial to the genre: “The function of horror,” she writes, is “to scare, shock, revolt or otherwise horrify the viewer.”[i] I felt not only fear but revulsion, something Noël Carroll has (like Cherry) proclaimed as central to horror. Late in the film, one of the climbers, Beck (Josh Brolin), is forced to spend the night on the mountain and wakes up with his hands ungloved, frozen and bloody, black and red—not really his hands at all anymore, although they are still attached to his body. (He later has to have them amputated.) This scene was so painful, it was almost unbearable for me to re-watch it in order to get the screenshot below.

Posted on January 27, 2016

Goodnight Mommy: Who are we?

Dawn Keetley

Goodnight Mommy is a 2014 Austrian film directed by Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz and released in the US in 2015. This film blew me away: it is so agonizingly disturbing, so beautiful, and so thought-provoking. I haven’t reviewed it because it would be almost impossible to do so adequately without dropping some major plot spoilers. And I think everyone should watch the film and experience its surprises. Part of the pleasure of watching the film is how unsettling it is, how unsure you become of what’s real and what’s not.

So, in this Short Cut, I just want to point out one of the many fascinating issues Goodnight Mommy raises, and, happily, I can do so without giving anything important away.