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Posted on August 21, 2015

Why Sinister (2012) Is Much better Than Its Reviews Say

Dawn Keetley

Sinister 2 opens today (Friday 21, 2015) and I do not have high hopes for it—which is not a result of my less-than-positive feelings about the first film, released in 2012 and directed by Scott Derrickson. In fact, I think Sinister is a great horror film (in my top ten for 2012), and I disagree with the lukewarm response it earned from critics (only a 62% positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes). Indeed, my low expectations for Sinister 2 come precisely from my sense of how good Sinister is.

Sinister is about a true-crime writer, Ellison Oswalt (Ethan Hawke), who moves to the site of a horrendous murder—the owners and two of their three children were hung from the tree in their back-yard and their third child disappeared—in hopes of writing his next best-selling book. He discovers a case of film reels that detail other family murders spanning from the 60s to the 90s, and as he tracks down connections among the killings, he starts to experience strange things in his new house.

Posted on August 16, 2015

Horror at the Edge of the Human: AMC’s Humans

Dawn Keetley

In the late 1970s, Robin Wood offered his famous argument that the “true subject of the horror genre is the struggle for recognition of all that our civilization represses or oppresses,” and for Wood that was primarily sexuality (notably bisexuality and female sexuality) as well as women, the proletariat, and racial and ethnic groups.[i] Thinking about two of the most interesting TV series of the summer—Channel 4/AMC’s Humans and CBS’s Zoo—it occurred to me that horror may be much less driven by gender, race, sex, and class in 2015 than it was in 1978.

Posted on August 10, 2015

CBS’s Zoo: Animals Fight Back

Dawn Keetley

Based on James Patterson and Michael Ledwidge’s novel of the same name, CBS’s Zoo is my guilty pleasure of the summer. It’s a TV series firmly in the eco-horror / revenge of nature sub-genre, and its many flaws haven’t yet dispelled its power. Zoo has many of the flaws of network TV shows—some badly-written dialogue, an overly melodramatic plot, too frenetic a pace—but it’s really quite engaging, more so than other series I began hopefully after reading the novel (i.e., Under the Dome, The Strain, The Last Ship), only to abandon them after a few painful episodes.

Zoo tells the story of animals—lions in Botswana and LA, wolves in Mississippi, dogs in Slovenia, bats in Rio de Janeiro—who inexplicably abandon their habitual behavior and band together to attack the heretofore dominant species. And they aren’t killing for food or to protect themselves. Groups of animals across the globe engage in what can only be called premeditated and purposeful acts of murder. An eclectic group of “experts” is drawn together to figure out what’s happening—and why. The five main characters are likeable and the actors do a surprisingly good job given the sometimes cringe-worthy places the plot takes them.

Posted on August 3, 2015

Sacrifice and the Horror Film: The Wicker Man and The Cabin in the Woods

Dawn Keetley

Sacrifice is a central component of the horror narrative. We’re not talking about heroic self-sacrifice here (though that is sometimes on display): rather, horror films dramatize some seemingly primordial need, which runs through stories of the very earliest human cultures, to sacrifice others. Sacrifice is usually about appeasing “gods”—indeed, William Harmon has written that sacrificial killing is “inherent in the religious worldview.” The motif of blood sacrifice, though, has “frequently been disguised or attenuated” in the modern world, Harman continues. [i] And here’s where the horror film comes in, with yet another of its crucially important cultural functions. The horror film represents both the persistence of blood sacrifice and its “attenuation” or “disguise.” Sacrificial violence is indulged in, yet is displaced from the realm of the real to the realm of film (although the line separating those two realms is often much thinner than we might think).

Posted on July 13, 2015

AMC’s Humans Review: The 21st-century Stepford Wives?

Dawn Keetley

Having watched two episodes of AMC’s intriguing new series, Humans (on Sunday nights at 9), I have been struck with how eerily similar it is to the 1975 horror-thriller, The Stepford Wives (Bryan Forbes). Humans is a British-American co-production, running for eight episodes, and based on the award-winning Swedish drama, Real Humans. It is, on the one hand, obviously sci-fi, yet it also partakes of horror, I argue, in that is fundamentally about the dread of an uncertain identity and the terrifyingly tenuous boundaries of the human. Who are we? Who are those around us? Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Don Siegel, 1956) famously took up these questions—and, more recently, so did The Cabin in the Woods (Drew Goddard, 2012). As Marty (Fran Kranz) says, “We are not who we are.” The larger question horror asks is: Are we ever?