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Posted on December 28, 2015

Formless Horrors: John Carpenter’s The Fog (1980)

Dawn Keetley

John Carpenter’s first three horror films—Halloween (1978), The Fog (1980), and The Thing (1982)—are not only exceptional films, but, taken together, they constitute a kind of trilogy in their similar exploitation of the horror of formlessness.

Halloween may be the film least self-evidently about formlessness (its monster is “human,” after all), but I would suggest that Michael Myers actually stands in defiance of all categories. He is called the “bogeyman” more than once, including at the climax of the film, when a traumatized Laurie (Jamie Lee Curtis) stammers out to Dr. Sam Loomis (Donald Pleasence)—“It was the bogeyman.” Kendall Phillips has astutely pointed out that the bogeyman occupies a position “at the boundaries of notions of cultural normalcy”—and that he “embodies the chaos that exists on the other side of these cultural boundaries.”[i] True to form (or, rather, true to formlessness), Michael-as-bogeyman is often portrayed at boundaries—at intersections, on the other side of a road, in doorways, at windows.

Posted on December 21, 2015

Contamination with a look at Paralysis: Psychological Horror

Dawn Keetley

20 min | 2013 | (USA) | R. Shanea Williams

Contamination is a short film written and directed by R. Shanea Williams, available on Vimeo. It is a strikingly powerful depiction of what it feels like to suffer from Obsessive Compulsive Disorder—and it indicates the preoccupation of Williams with psychological horror, with the horrors of the world, both real and imagined.

Williams is currently making another short film, more explicitly within the horror tradition, called Paralysis, about a woman suffering from a sleep disorder. In an interview with Graveyard Shift Sisters about her latest film, Williams recounts that one of her professors at NYU told her to “Write what you’re afraid of.” Williams adds, “I ALWAYS start there.”

Posted on December 19, 2015

The Walking Dead (1936): Revenge and Zombies

Dawn Keetley

In 1936, Warner Brothers released a (now) little-known film directed by Michael Curtiz and starring Boris Karloff, the title of which is nonetheless very well-known: The Walking Dead. I watched it recently because . . . well, because of the title! It turned out to be pretty interesting—and actually quite relevant to fans of AMC’s The Walking Dead and zombie fans in general.

Karloff plays John Ellman, a man who is framed by a group of corrupt city leaders for the murder of a judge. Two witnesses of the murder come forward to clear Ellman in the minutes before his scheduled execution—but, they’re too late. It turns out, however, that they work for a man, Dr. Evan Beaumont (Edward Gwenn), who just happens to be able to reanimate the dead, and who is desperate to find out what secrets lie beyond the grave. Beaumont brings Ellman back to life in a process that involves the standard test tubes and jolts of electricity. Although apparently alive, Ellman has virtually no memory—indeed little consciousness at all. But he does seem uncannily able to recognize the men who framed him. He sets out on a course of revenge.

Posted on December 16, 2015

Eden Lake (2008): Folk Horror For A Disenchanted World

Dawn Keetley

Eden Lake, released in 2008 and directed by James Watkins, has been generally classified as “hoodie horror”—a British sub-genre that exploits middle-class fear of hoodie-wearing, underclass youth.[i] Mark Featherstone aptly describes the way in which “feral youth” become stand-ins for the “poor or underclass,” forming the central “evil other” of “hoodie horror.”[ii] While there is no doubt that Eden Lake is indeed hoodie horror, the film also borrows liberally from folk horror.[iii]

The film follows Jenny (Kelly Reilly) and Steve (Michael Fassbender) as they travel to Eden Lake, a beautiful natural space that Steve frequented as a child but which is about to be converted, as the billboard tells us, to “a secure gated community of fifty superior New England homes.” Jenny and Steve have a couple of encounters with young hooligans on bikes, who then appear almost uncannily right beside them on Eden Lake’s beach. One thing leads to another and soon Jenny and Steve, trapped in the woods, are being hunted by the increasingly menacing children.

Adam Scovell has laid out the principal elements of folk horror on his website, Celluloid Wicker Man—and Eden Lake unambiguously exemplifies three of the four characteristics he identifies. It is set in a lush natural landscape; Jenny and Steve become isolated, removed from their familiar urban environment; and they soon realize with horror that they are beset by characters whose moral beliefs are at best bewilderingly skewed, at worst entirely absent.

Posted on December 12, 2015

Nightmare Code (2014): Coding Humans?

Dawn Keetley

Synopsis: Nightmare Code follows a programmer with legal and financial problems, Brett Desmond (Andrew J. West), who goes to work at OPTDEX, a company trying to develop sophisticated behavior recognition software (R.O.P.E.R). Brett is pinch-hitting, as it were, for another programmer, Foster Cotton (Googy Gress), who went “Columbine” (as someone puts it) and shot several of the company’s managers and then himself. As Brett gets drawn deeper into the “code,” he realizes that it may be about more than mere behavior recognition—and that the code may not be confined to the computer.

Nightmare Code is sci-fi horror directed and written by Mark Netter (M. J. Rotondi also co-wrote). It is a cerebral film that exploits the increasingly blurred line between the online/computer world and the “real” world, a murkiness that’s been the subject of other horror films of late (Unfriended and #Horror being two recent examples).

I highly recommend this film: it is expertly directed; the dialogue is believable and thought-provoking (without being heavy-handed); and actors Andrew J. West (Gareth from AMC’s The Walking Dead) and Mei Melançon (who plays Nora Huntsman) deliver stand-out performances. The film is worth watching, above all, for its concept and for the unique way in which it visually renders that concept. I would fault the film mainly on the grounds of its predictability and consequent lack of suspense: I had an idea pretty early on about where it might be going, and I wasn’t surprised.