We’re attending avidly the Slasher Studies Summer Camp – and also getting ready for our forthcoming special issue on the Neoslasher – so we thought we’d curate some of Horror Homeroom’s slasher content, because we are huge slasher fans!
Much twenty-first-century young adult literature written by women and featuring teenage girls has taken up the theme of memory loss. Typically, the protagonist’s amnesia is related to some kind of trauma, an accident of some kind—anything from falling on the steps and hitting your head to a devastating car crash.
Here are some notable examples:
Gabrielle Zevin, Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac (2007)
Mary E. Pearson, The Adoration of Jenna Fox (2008)
Cat Patrick, Forgotten (2011)
Michelle Hodkin, The Unbecoming of Mara Dyer (2012)
Megan Miranda, Hysteria (2013)
Natalie Richards, Six Months Later (2013)
Shelly Crane, Wide Awake (2013)
E. Lockhart, When We Were Liars (2014)
Jennifer Armentrout, Don’t Look Back (2014)
Alexandra Sirowy, The Creeping (2015)
Eileen Cook, With Malice (2017)
Kara Thomas, That Weekend (2021)
Some bloggers have noticed this trend, and there is an extensive Goodreads list about YA novels and amnesia. Indeed, lists are plenty (see Dobrez & Rutan and Lipinski), but critical explorations are few: Alison Waller’s “Amnesia in Young Adult Fiction” (2016) is the lone exception.*
Ben Wheatley’s new film, In the Earth, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in late January 2021, is a fascinating film—especially for fans of folk horror. Wheatley is well-known to those fans, of course, for his previous work in the sub-genre: Kill List (2010), Sightseers (2012), and A Field in England (2013).
In my view, In the Earth is one of the most important folk horror films of the last decade—up there with Wheatley’s own Kill List, although the two films could not be more different.
Synopsis: Centered on a woman who lives alone in the woods and is inexplicably terrorized, Hush distills everything to a single effect—terror.
Released on April 8, 2016, Hush is directed by Mike Flanagan and written by Flanagan and Kate Siegel. Siegel also stars in the film, playing the heroine, Maddie, alongside villain John Gallagher, Jr. (from 10 Cloverfield Lane), identified in the credits only as “The Man.”
I went into this film with virtually no expectations, watching it on the day it landed on Netflix. I was transfixed. It was terrifying from beginning to end, and the performances by Siegel and Gallagher were inspired.
The film’s plot is very simple—and that, I think, is its primary strength (and where Poe comes in, but more on that later).
Maddie (Siegel) lives alone in an isolated house in the woods. An illness at age thirteen left her deaf and mute, isolating her in a still more profound way. As she says via Facetime to her sister, who’s worried about her being alone: “Isolation happened to me. I didn’t pick it.” After a brief visit from her neighbor, Sarah (Samantha Sloyan), the film focuses almost exclusively on “The Man’s” terrorizing of Maddie. He does so, at first, from outside the house, telling her he will only come in after she’s reached the point that she wishes she were dead. The film tracks their extended battle—as he seeks to victimize Maddie and she fights back. Read more
Conversations about the Candyman franchise will undoubtedly be ongoing as we await Nia DaCosta and Jordan Peele’s “spiritual sequel.” To that end, we’ll be collecting essential reading here – so send us any further suggestions.
