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Posted on May 18, 2015

James Wan’s The Conjuring and Abortion

Dawn Keetley

One of the best of the current spate of occult films is James Wan’s The Conjuring (2013), which opened to critical acclaim and the distinction of being rated “R” simply for its terrifying sequences (on which promise, in my view, it certainly delivered).

One notable characteristic of occult horror is its seeming resistance to socio-political meanings. After all, it translates its principal conflict to the afterworld: human characters are beset by ghosts, demons and poltergeists—often forces of uncomplicated “Evil”—not by more recognizable and more complicated “evils” of this world. The “dark entity” in The Conjuring, for instance, simply wants the unoffending Perron family dead. Articulating what seems true of occult films in general, Douglas Kellner writes of Poltergeist that it “deflect[s] people’s legitimate fears onto irrational forces.”[i]

Posted on May 13, 2015

Review of Maggie (Henry Hobson, 2015): Teenage Wasteland

Dawn Keetley

Maggie is a post-apocalyptic film set in a recognizable albeit devastated world. Humans have survived; the “zombies”—that is, people suffering from the “necroambulist virus”—are mostly under control. Centering on a single family, the film opens with Wade (Arnold Schwarzenegger) bringing his daughter Maggie (Abigail Breslin) back to their farm in the Midwest after she left for a reason we don’t learn. While she was in the city she was bitten, and the film is about her slow death on the dying family farm. The elegiac tone of Maggie suffuses everything—the slowness of the film’s movement, its music, the sepia tone, the thunder that rumbles continuously in the background, the storm that threatens. Death always looms, but in this film it’s gotten significantly closer, more imminent. It’s palpable.

Posted on May 8, 2015

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014) Review

Dawn Keetley

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night was written and directed by Iranian-American Ana Lily Amirpour and is based on her graphic novel of the same name. Filmed in California but set in a surreal, industrial Iranian town called “Bad City,” it follows a vampire (Sheila Vand) who wanders the streets looking for . . . .well, it’s never quite clear what she’s looking for, or what she wants, or what she’s doing.

Posted on May 4, 2015

Violence and The Purge Franchise

Dawn Keetley

As someone who writes about horror, I was interested in the eruption of The Purge into the news this week after Freddie Gray died in police custody. As a story on CNN.com put it: “In a sobering example of life imitating art, the chaos sweeping the streets of Baltimore may have been partly inspired by a series of action-horror movies.” Some high-school kids apparently circulated plans about a “purge” on social media on Monday afternoon (April 27). ‘Baltimore going purge,” read one tweet.[i] And the riots themselves, later that night, were compared to The Purge: “The purge is happening in Baltimore,” tweeted at least one observer.[ii]

Posted on April 29, 2015

The Pyramid (2014) Film Review

Dawn Keetley

If you were at all tempted to spend money on The Pyramid, now available on video on demand (and coming out on DVD on May 5, 2015), don’t! Directed by Grégory Levasseur (who directed the 2006 re-make of The Hills Have Eyes), written by Daniel Meersand and Nick Simon, and produced by Alexandre Aja, The Pyramid is valuable mostly as an exercise in how not to make a horror film. The writing is bad; the plot is utterly predictable, the acting is shocking flat; and the film is, quite simply, tedious.