Browsing Category

Guest Post

Family Tree comic book cover with face and flower
Posted on August 25, 2021

Image Comics’ ‘Family Tree’ remains firmly rooted in eco & body horror

Guest Post

The medium of comic books has always had an interest in highlighting fundamentally human relationships against a remarkable backdrop of spandex, super strength, and sinister villains. And over time, characters like Peter Parker, Clark Kent, and the very mortal cast of ‘The Walking Dead’ have served as the comic book conduits to define, explore, and challenge readers’ understanding of people and their relationships.

But some creators are uprooting the subject so completely by planting within their narratives stylistic and genre-defying tropes of horror, and the results can be astoundingly brutal to the senses. One of Image Comics’ latest ongoing series ‘Family Tree’ — collected in a volume of the first four issues, entitled, “Sapling,” perfectly weds elements of body and ecological horror to explore the terror faced by a family challenged by an unexplainable apocalyptic scenario of life and death. Read more

Posted on August 22, 2021

Unraveling The Green Ribbon In Horror Stories and Movies

Guest Post

Marriage and relationships have always been a major theme in horror. How much can you ever REALLY know about the person you share your life with. How long can you last until a person’s true self is revealed. Yes, marriage is a murky mess. Oftentimes there is a simple yet impactful folktale that gets to the heart of a theme like this. One such story, one that has quite the history in itself, is a tale often known as The Green Ribbon.

I made a documentary about the Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark books, and so I’ve heard many people talk about the numerous folktales and urban legends in them. So many had a profound impact for children growing up, particularly in the 1980s and 1990s. The Green Ribbon is one that isn’t technically in those books (though featured in the same author’s easy reader) but it was one that came up again and again as a story that resonated with many people as a truly scary story that one ought to read in the dark. Over time I found that The Green Ribbon has some unique themes that closely relate to other modern tales in books and film. Read more

a man and a woman stand outside in the snow
Posted on August 15, 2021

Werewolves Within’s Politics of Niceness: Good Neighbors and Feminist Killjoys

Guest Post

Werewolves Within (2021, dir. Josh Ruben), a comedy-horror whodunnit about a snowed-in small town community under attack by a werewolf, succeeded in making me laugh and in keeping me invested in the mystery throughout. In addition to fine comic performances, it engages with multiple contemporary political issues, including sexual harassment, gentrification, and the ethics of building a pipeline near a protected forest. I was excited that the central characters include Finn, a Black forest ranger (Sam Richardson); Cecily, a young woman postal worker (Milana Vayntrub); and Devon and Joaquim, a gay couple (Cheyenne Jackson and Harvey Guillén). This is more diversity than I would’ve expected for a small town in Vermont, plus great public service representation! With all of those elements present from the beginning, I had high hopes for Werewolves Within as a horror-comedy that might have something interesting – or even inspiring – to say about one or a combination of these narrative elements.

Despite enjoying Werewolves Within, however, I felt somewhat let down by it. It didn’t meet my expectations, and all of those signposts of a seemingly liberal politics, of engagement with meaningful issues, turned out to be mere surface dressing. The movie both-sides the debate about the pipeline, never once mentions Finn’s Blackness (even as he is nearly shot by a white man), and ultimately undermines the feminist critiques Cecily presents throughout the film. Read more

Posted on August 11, 2021

George A. Romero’s The Amusement Park and the Decline of West View Park

Guest Post

The twenty-first century has seen a growing interest in geriatric horror, not just perpetuation of stigmas against the elderly as grotesque and horrifying but also exposure of the act of growing old as a horror in itself. Films like Drag Me to Hell (2009), The Taking of Deborah Logan (2014), The Visit (2015), Anything for Jackson (2020), and The Relic (2020) are just a few examples that depict the financial, familial, and mental distress and confusion that come with getting old in a society that neglects rather than nurtures its elders.

As in most things, however, George A. Romero was ahead of this trend with his short PSA film, The Amusement Park, produced in 1973 and first screened in 1975. Not a traditional feature film, it was commissioned by the Lutheran Service Society of Western Pennsylvania, who were troubled by the neglect of the elderly by the political, economic, and social structures they served all their lives. To encourage young people to help the elderly, the Church hired a young filmmaker who had done commercials, segments for Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, several short films, a romantic comedy, and a few horror films. But, as Scout Tafoya writes, Romero “was never interested in subtly critiquing anyone; he went for the jugular and told you he was doing it.”[i] Working with scriptwriter Walton Cook, he made the film so disturbing that some sources say the Lutherans refused to show it, and so it was buried until 2017. Adam Charles Hart, Visiting Researcher at the University of Pittsburgh (which recently acquired Romero’s archives) speculates that local churches may have shown it, however. He claims that the film was never lost but just too weird to be shown with any regularity.[ii] The film has gotten a lot of attention this summer since it landed on Shudder. Here, I offer a personal commentary on the history of the amusement park itself, West View Park. Read more

Posted on August 6, 2021

What To Do When the Exorcist Is Absent

Guest Post

The Conjuring franchise, after that of Godzilla, is the highest box-office grossing horror film series of all time.  Although this summer’s quiet installment, The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It (2021) wasn’t received with accolades, it nevertheless follows the trajectory set from the beginning of the series—demons are here and they must be handled by the Catholic Church.  Otherwise, the resourceful are left to alternative methods, as the films in the universe repeatedly show.

There’s a good case to be made that demons, as we think of them today, rely heavily on their presentation in The Exorcist (1973).  Although demons occurred in horror cinema earlier than that, The Exorcist delineated them as terrifying monsters, based, in large part, on the premise that they really did exist.  Many movies took that premise and used it to compel both audiences to watch and demons to leave.  Enter Ed and Lorraine Warren. Read more

Back to top