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Posted on November 9, 2020

The Haunting of Bly Manor and Relationships Past

Guest Post

The long-awaited follow-up season to The Haunting of Hill House has finally arrived to overwhelmingly positive reviews. The Haunting of Bly Manor, although similar to its predecessor on the surface, is actually a far cry from Hill House. A young American woman named Dani (Victoria Pedretti) takes on the position of an au pair for two young orphaned children at a rural English manor. She is hired by their Uncle Henry (Henry Thomas) who reveals to Dani that the position had proven troublesome to fill because the previous au pair, Miss Jessel (Tahirah Sharif), died by suicide while on the job. When Dani arrives at the estate, she finds there was far more to the original story of Miss Jessel than she was led to believe. Her fascination with her predecessor’s life causes Dani to reflect upon her own recent loss. At Bly Manor, the ghosts of the house are not necessarily the spirits themselves; they are the individuals, both living and dead, and the relationships that consume them. The Haunting of Bly Manor explores the ways in which possessive relationships act as the catalyst for characters becoming possessed through supernatural means. Read more

Posted on October 24, 2020

“Fucking Spic Bastard”: Zombies and the Latino Threat

Guest Post

Zombies have become ubiquitous globally in film and television. This undead ghoul keeps returning and finding new ways to infect our screens. Here, I look at Cholo (John Leguizamo) from George A Romero’s Land of the Dead (2005), one of the few Latinx zombies in film, delving into what this ghoul represents.

In 1968 the zombie film forever changed with the release of George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. This black-and-white low-budget horror flick now marks the before and after of zombie films. Before Night of the Living Dead, zombie films saw a transition from the fear-inducing film White Zombie (1932) to more comedic zombie films like 1945’s Zombies on Broadway. After Night of the Living Dead, zombies not only morphed from a voodoo creation into undead ghouls of unknown origins but also moved from exotic lands, outside of the U.S., to Pittsburgh. Thus, zombies were no longer ghouls that inhabited “uncivilized” spaces where tourists, the military, and corporations were at risk but were now an integral part of the American landscape.

Posted on October 20, 2020

Wallpaper + Horror

Guest Post

When Suzy Bannion (Jessica Harper) stumbles down a hallway in Dario Argento’s Suspiria (1977), we sense that the crimson flocked wallpaper is participating in a spell. In a blinding white flash punctuated in Goblin’s score by the word “witch,” a shard of mirror illuminates the dust that permeates the space with cognitive and respiratory menace. Suzy runs her hand along the flocked damask and clutches her chest as she struggles to breathe. In that moment, Argento’s Suspiria not only connects wallpaper to witchcraft, but also evokes, intentionally or not, the real-world pulmonary illnesses of wallpaper factory workers asphyxiated by flocking dust.[i] On screen and off, the allure of wallpaper has always been countered by disquieting side-effects. The bright colors of nineteenth-century wallpapers were made possible by arsenic, known to seep from the walls in damp weather and infuse a room with dangerous fumes. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century advice writers saw in wallpaper opportunities for the aesthetic and moral enrichment of the working class, even while fearing that the sensual impact of the wrong wallpaper might lead astray the sensitive soul. Oscar Wilde once remarked, “Why, I have seen a wallpaper which must lead a boy brought up under its influence to a career of crime”—a joke, perhaps, but one taken seriously by moralists, home decor treatises, and horror films.[ii]

Posted on September 14, 2020

Horror Homeroom Special Issue #3 – Lovecraft Country CFP

Call for Papers

Horror Homeroom, Special Issue #3: LOVECRAFT COUNTRY (Winter 2021)

****EXTENDED DEADLINE – Abstracts due Sunday November 8, 2020 ****

Lovecraft Country is a radical new intervention in the horror world. Based on the 2016 novel of the same name by Matt Ruff, the 10-episode HBO series is produced and written by Misha Green, who serves as the series showrunner. Jordan Peele and J. J. Abrams are also involved as producers, and the series showcases a diverse array of directors (including Cheryl Dunye).

The series premiered on August 16, 2020 and will end on October 18–and it’s already generating a lot of discussion around its use of horror tropes to tell the story of racism in the US. As Misha Green has said of living in the US as a Black woman, “It’s literally, you’re in a horror movie [with] monsters at every turn” (Stidhum). At least one commentator (in The Atlantic) has argued that Lovecraft Country is not well-served by “its white characters’ near-comic monstrousness” (Giorgis)–and there are already syllabi! Erica Buddington and the Langston League are putting together a syllabus for each episode. (Here’s the syllabus for episode 1.)

Posted on September 10, 2020

Us & the Horror of the Class System

Guest Post

Privilege and classism are vivid themes of Jordan Peele’s second feature, Us (2019), both working as accompaniment to the core subject of social separation: topographically, physically and ultimately, by a drastic act of metaphoric self-restriction, mentally. By re-imagining an eerie scenario nearly as old as horror cinema itself (dating back to the earliest expressionist films like 1913’s The Student of Prague), Peele exposes the concept of social advancement as a fairy tale, established to silence the conscience of the advantaged and to denounce the frustration of the disadvantaged.

Although exploitative structures are less obvious than in Peele’s astute debut Get Out (2017), the Tethered’s puppet-like subjection to their upper-world doubles indicates the underprivileged’s subordination to the actions of the prosperous. In this world of Us – or ours, as Red’s declaration “We are Americans“ emphasizes – decline comes as easy as stepping on an escalator. However, the only way up from mind-numbing deprivation is hostile acquisition. Red turns out to be the little girl who entered the hall of mirrors in the prologue and now reclaims her place from an imposter.