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Posted on October 11, 2015

THE INHABITANTS (2015)

Dawn Keetley

I’ve been watching a fair number of low-budget, independent horror films of late, and the vast majority of them never make it to this site: either I stop watching or they’re too bad to review. The Inhabitants is an exception and I definitely recommend you rent it when it’s released on October 13.

It’s written and directed by Michael and Shawn Rasmussen, whose previous credits include Dark Feed (2013), which they wrote and directed, and The Ward (2010), a John Carpenter film for which they wrote the screenplay.

One of the great things about The Inhabitants, aside from its undeniable creepiness, is its simplicity. It focuses unrelentingly on a couple, Jess (Elise Couture) and Dan (Michael Reed), who buy the March Carriage Bed and Breakfast Inn, intending to live out Jess’s dream of running a B&B. The attention of the film stays on the couple, resisting distractions, as stranger and stranger things start happening, and as the film drives toward a gruesome and chilling ending.

Posted on October 10, 2015

Top 10 Zombie Films: Food for Thought

Dawn Keetley

It’s the premiere of season 6 of AMC’s The Walking Dead this weekend (October 11, 2015), and I have to start by saying that the series is, hands-down, in my humble opinion, the best zombie narrative in every way ever. But . . . when you’re not watching The Walking Dead, you have plenty of great films to sate the appetite for quality zombie fare.

There are also lots of lists out there detailing the best zombie films. (I found Zomboy’s Top 10 Zombie Movies on Bloody Disgusting to be one of the best, covering everything from the classics to the parodies.)[i]

I want to put a slightly different spin on things, offering you what I think are the ten most provocative zombie films. They’re great films—and they’ll also make you think.

Posted on October 9, 2015

The Walking Dead and the Return to the Forest

Dawn Keetley

With the upcoming release, in early 2016, of Jason Zada’s The Forest, with its retelling of Japanese myths of people going to the Aokigahara Forest to die, I’ve been thinking about the return, as it were, of plants, trees, forests in recent horror film and TV. Not least in AMC’s The Walking Dead.

The Walking Dead is, of course, shot (and mostly set) in the beautiful lush landscapes of Georgia—and I definitely felt the absence of the richly enveloping, even devouring, vegetation as I was watching Fear the Walking Dead’s LA landscapes.

The vegetation of The Walking Dead is much more than background, though. There is a resonant connection between the vegetation and the walkers. Not least walkers often lurk in and stagger through fields and forests, blending in more and more as they decay.

Posted on October 6, 2015

No, Conservatives Can’t Have The Walking Dead!

Dawn Keetley

In his recent article in The National Review, “In the Zombie World, Only the Conservatives Survive,” David French argues that zombie fiction (notably AMC’s The Walking Dead) “may be the most conservative fiction of all.”[i] I disagree.

French predicates his case on three claims: (1) in zombie fiction, the government is incompetent and almost immediately collapses; (2) you’ll only survive if you have a gun and know how to use it; and (3) people end up being the most dangerous animals of all in the post-apocalyptic world.

First of all, the points French makes certainly have some truth to them, but they offer only a partial view. First of all, conservatives can be as enamored of the government as any liberal—to the extent, of course, that government embodies conservative values. (Kim Davis, the Kentucky country clerk who’s refusing to sign marriage licenses for gays and lesbians comes to mind here.) Liberals and conservatives each love their own particular incarnations of the government. If anyone’s going to be dancing when the government inevitably collapses, it’ll be the libertarians.

Secondly, yes, you need a gun (or a katana or a cross-bow) in the zombie apocalypse. But, as the NRA loves to remind us, guns don’t kill people, people kill people—and having a gun, and surviving with it, always depends on who you are and who you’re with. As The Walking Dead and every single zombie fiction repeatedly shows us, there is strength in numbers: you survive only with a group. Yes, humans may be dangerous (French’s third point), but humans are also their own salvation, and the people you choose to ally yourself with are the single most important predictor of survival. More important than guns, in short, is community.

Posted on September 28, 2015

White God (2014): Dogs Fight Back

Dawn Keetley

Summary of White God: Thirteen-year old Lili (Zsófia Psotta) moves in with her father who proves unwilling to pay the fees incumbent on the owners of mongrel dogs. He thus forces Lili to abandon her beloved Hagen on the streets of Budapest. The film follows the dual paths of Lili and Hagen as they, finally, find their way back to each other.

I loved White God (I’ll get that out up front), which premiered at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival and recently become widely available in the US (on DVD and streaming on Netflix). White God is a particularly interesting intervention in the horror genre in that it is the only film I can think of in which the animal (Hagen) becomes the protagonist rather than the antagonist. In all the other natural horror films I’ve seen recently, animals (wolves, sharks, crocodiles, bears) threaten more-or-less sympathetic humans. White God stands alone in showing how profoundly humans threaten animals.