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Posted on September 20, 2015

AMC’S FEAR THE WALKING DEAD, “The Dog”: The Sad Fate of Animals in the Zombie Apocalypse

Dawn Keetley

AMC’s Fear the Walking Dead has aired three (of six) episodes so far and I’m happy to say it’s getting better. (See my less than positive review of the pilot episode.)

Basically, the show’s improved because the characters are coming to grips with the apocalypse and, as a result, are doing much less lounging around and whining about trivial things. We’re starting to see that fundamental divide opening up between those who can handle what’s happening and those who are living in denial—the divide, in other words, between the strong and the weak, between survivors and potential zombie food. Madison (Kim Dickens) is emerging as a leader, someone who can kill a walker when she has to. As is the enigmatic Daniel Salazar (Rubén Blades), a refugee from El Salvador who projects an uncanny sense of “Been there, done that.” He gets to deliver the last, inscrutable, line of the episode. Looking out the window at the soldiers putting an X on the house across from him, he declares, for reasons that aren’t entirely clear: “It’s already too late.” Madison’s partner Travis (Cliff Curtis), on the other hand, seems unable to kill the undead (claiming they’re only sick) and, in contrast to Salazar, his last words are: “Cavalry’s arrived. It’s gonna get better now.” We know which one of them is right.

Posted on September 17, 2015

Backcountry (2014)

Dawn Keetley

Summary: In Backcountry, A couple, Jenn (Missy Peregrym) and Alex (Jeff Roop) go camping in the woods. They encounter a bear.

If you want to see a truly terrifying film, forget going to the theater to see M. Night Shyamalan’s The Visit. Spend the money on Backcountry, a 2014 Canadian film that opened in the US in March 2015 and was recently released to video on demand through services like Amazon and itunes.

I was transfixed by this film: it’s simple (deceptively so), beautifully filmed, well-written and acted, and will grip you from beginning to end.

One of the brilliant things about the film is that while it is, on the one hand, thoroughly grounded in the real world—no monsters, nothing supernatural—it is nonetheless steeped in the horror film tradition. Indeed, it brings the naturalistic world into the realm of horror so unobtrusively that you don’t realize what’s happening on first viewing—and so you don’t know exactly why you’re so uneasy when the characters go swimming, when they walk through the woods, when they hear acorns falling.

Posted on September 11, 2015

127 Hours: Geological Horror

Dawn Keetley

Animal and even plant horror are familiar categories: you can find entries for horror films featuring mammals, reptiles, amphibians, insects, birds, and plants, for instance, on Wikipedia (check out the List of Natural Horror Films). So far, however, you’ll be hard-pressed to find anything about geological horror. So where are the horror films about rocks and minerals? (That’s not a rhetorical question: if you know of any, please let me know!) My main purpose in this post is to suggest a candidate for the horror genre that features a boulder. The film is 127 Hours (2010), directed by Danny Boyle of 28 Days Later (2002) fame. It depicts the (real) ordeal of Aron Ralston (James Franco), whose arm becomes trapped by a boulder as he’s climbing in Blue John Canyon in Utah: as the title suggests, he spent 127 hours in the canyon before freeing himself by amputating his arm and stumbling across the desert to find help.

There are, of course, a multitude of films about natural disasters (tsunamis, volcanoes, earthquakes, avalanches etc.), but these films tend not to be horror films (they’re routinely classified as action)—and natural disasters are typically not exploited in the horror genre—except sometimes as plot devices to trap characters in places where they have to face other monsters. 127 Hours is a horror film. The film is not wholly horror; indeed, it swerves away from horror near the end. But in and by that swerve it demonstrates what actually makes a horror film (and what doesn’t).

Posted on August 31, 2015

Dawn’s Favorite Wes Craven Moments

Dawn Keetley

The Last House on the Left (1972)

I was scared to watch this film for literally decades, and when I watched it for the first time only last year, I was blown away. I was not in the least bit prepared for the complexity of the film, the richness of the mise-en-scène, or the humanity of the “monsters”—Krug Stillo (David Hess) and his allies, who kidnap and rape two girls. In fact, my favorite moment comes in the aftermath of their stabbing and rape of Mari (Sandra Cassel), when the camera pans around the faces of those who participated in the act and we see their shame—realize they’re not as monstrous as we might want them to be. Craven’s camera shows us first that the rapists won’t look at each other, and then it turns to their hands—where we look, where they look. In that move, the camera functions to detach their hands, conveying how Krug and Weasel (Fred Lincoln) Sadi seem to feel, momentarily, that their hands acted alone: how could those hands have just done such a horrible thing to an innocent girl? The moment forces a kind of empathy for Krug and Weasel: haven’t we all done things we couldn’t believe we’d just done, as if our body acted without us . . . ?

Posted on August 24, 2015

AMC’s Fear The Walking Dead: Teens in the Apocalypse

Dawn Keetley

AMC’s Fear the Walking Dead did not get off to an exactly auspicious start last night.

The episode did begin well. Having just re-watched the first episode of The Walking Dead, I was struck (again) with how much it resonated with its zombie predecessors (notably Dawn of the Dead [George Romero, 1978] and 28 Days Later [Danny Boyle, 2002]). Happily, FTWD began with similar evocations. Drug-addict Nick Clark (Frank Dillane) wakes up, disoriented, in a church that looks strikingly like the church Jim (Cillian Murphy) stumbles into in 28 Days Later, the place where he, like Nick, first becomes aware of what’s going on. In both church scenes, screams echo in the distance, and light streams through stained glass windows, illuminating the darkness inside only enough to see the horrors it contains. In both church scenes, too, we see Christ figures—a statue in 28 Days, a dead drug-addict in FTWD—both images suggesting that the world millions believe Christ died to redeem may now be irrevocably damned.