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Posted on August 26, 2020

Burnt Offerings: What’s in a Name?

Guest Post

While mostly overlooked now, the horror film Burnt Offerings, directed by Dan Curtis, won six awards in 1977, the year following its October release. The movie doesn’t rely on jump startles as much as on a pervasive mood of menace. Its pace is leisurely, fitting for its summertime setting, as it slowly builds to the real horror near the end. While it isn’t the best haunted house movie ever made, it embraces some sophisticated concepts that draw from religious tropes. The very title, borrowed from its eponymous 1973 novel by Robert Marasco, suggests as much. Making a burnt offering is, by definition, a religious act.

Needing a break from city life, the Rolf family moves to a very affordably-priced mansion available for rent during the summer. Parents Marian (Karen Black) and Ben (Oliver Reed), their son David (Lee Montgomery), and Ben’s aunt Elizabeth (played by irrepressible Bette Davis) try to settle in, but strange things start happening. Keeping in mind that The Shining was still four years away, the elements of the unstable father falling apart in isolation play throughout the background in anticipation of Jack Nicholson’s famous performance, as Ben questions his sanity. And Marian loves—really loves—the house. That’s the set-up, of course. Roz (Eileen Heckart) and Arnold Allardyce (Burgess Meredith), the apparently eccentric owners, move out in the summer so the house can repair itself. The renters must include someone who truly loves the house because, in perhaps the creepiest premise of the plot, the aged Allardyce mother never leaves it. The renters must take her food up to her, but will never see her. Small price to pay for a summer away, right?

Posted on August 22, 2020

Stranger by the Lake and Subtractive Spectatorship

Elizabeth Erwin

With its minimalistic storytelling and melancholy dissection of loneliness, Stranger by the Lake is a quiet film that sneaks up on you and wheedles its way into your psyche. I first watched Alain Guiraudie’s 2014 masterpiece at the beginning of quarantine and months later, it has yet to fully leave my subconscious. The story itself is a deceptively simple one. Franck (Pierre Deladonchamps), while frequenting a lake known to be a gay cruising site, befriends loner Henri (Patrick d’Assumçao) and falls in love with the murderous Michel (Christophe Paou). But this isn’t a film about plot. It’s a film about the horrific choices that can emerge from our extreme human need for connection.

Stranger by the Lake is marketed as an erotic film but that framing fails to celebrate how horror conventions, especially in relation to dread building, fuel the film’s atmosphere. Its deployment of Adam Lowenstein’s theory of “subtractive spectatorship,” in particular, is a fascinating reflection of how landscape can inform our readings of queer desire within the film. According to Lowenstein, “subtractive spectatorship” names “a desire to subtract or erase human beings from the landscape, to leave it empty,” and he adds that topographical camera shots of nature spur a desire in the audience to see the landscape depopulated. Lowenstein explored this paradigm in part through Mario Bava’s brilliant giallo Ecologia del delitto/A Bay of Blood (1971), and so the particular process of depopulation he described was the result of a killer systematically offing the human interlopers in clever and often aesthetically interesting ways. But that’s not the case in Stranger in the Lake. Read more

Posted on August 16, 2020

The Only Good Indians: The Bloody Marrow of Tradition

Guest Post

The Only Good Indians (2020), Stephen Graham Jones’s latest novel, often feels weighed down by a distant, but strong, tradition. For horror fans, there is a lot to like in its pages: haunted houses, breaching of cultural taboos, spectacular but rarely overdone gore, hybrid monsters, and an ever-present deniability of the supernatural. Many reviewers celebrate Jones’ style, citing his creation of likeable and realistically flawed characters as the novel’s main strength, with its horror coming in a close second. While these elements are certainly strong in The Only Good Indians, I found that the change in the novel’s structure after the first section to be the real strength of the novel. Presenting readers with a horror novel turned into hopeful allegory, Jones creates characters that battle with or ignore their indigenous traditions and identities only to have them caught, destroyed, and changed by those same traditions. By its conclusion, The Only Good Indians becomes less a tale of horror, grief, and trauma, and more one focused on acceptance and reconciliation of one’s sense of identity.

Posted on August 13, 2020

The Return of the Girl-Monster – Part 2

Sara McCartney

In his groundbreaking book on queerness and horror, Harry Benshoff looked to the star of Cat People (1942) as not only a particularly sympathetic monster but a rare example of lesbian subtext in the early horror film: “Irena’s monstrous ability to turn into a panther and kill men […] serves as an oft-cited metaphor for lesbian sexuality in the films of this era.”[1] The early girl-monster is associated with sexuality that deviates from the strict heterosexual norm, whether by vampirically seducing and draining young women as in Dracula’s Daughter (1936), or by a more complicated mix of frigidity and passion. Irena could be read as queer in her avoidance of heterosexual intimacy, or read as too attracted to men, such that she is prone to improper and violent explosions of passion. The modern girl-monster, who almost exclusively preys on men, has left behind the Countess’s predatory lesbianism for the more ambiguous waters of Irena’s fraught passions. How queer is it? That depends on the movie.

Posted on August 11, 2020

The Christian Worldview of Annabelle: Creation

Guest Post

At the start of Annabelle: Creation (David F. Sandberg, 2017), the Mullins family is introduced as a typical, Christian American family in the early 20^th Century. They live happily together, play games together, and, most notably for the film’s plot, attend church together. Their faith forms the backbone of the movie’s backstory, as the parents, Samuel (Anthony LaPaglia) and Esther (Miranda Otto), pray to see Annabelle again after her untimely death, beginning the hauntings revolving around the Annabelle doll. Ultimately, the Mullins are not the focus of the film, however; rather, it is the two orphans, Linda (Lulu Wilson) and Janice (Talitha Eliana Bateman). In being shifted to the periphery, however, the Mullins become representative of the average person in the film’s setting—one who does not have plot armor to carry them through; instead, they are caught in the cosmic struggle between Good and Evil, God and Satan.