- Horror Movie - Horror Homeroom

Posted on August 19, 2024

Terror In the Eyes: Jaws, Godzilla Minus One and Horror

Guest Post

Kevin Cooney

Godzilla Minus One (2023) altered many fans’ perceptions of the eponymous kaiju. Gone was the childhood joy of watching a man in a rubber suit wreak havoc on meticulous scale models, now overshadowed by a new sense of awe and dread. No longer was the irradiated monster humanity’s savior. Instead, Godzilla emerged anew as a horror villain, a mindless, destructive force with a consistent, murderous, unblinking gaze. However, the human characters have often dominated the conversations about Minus One. Those trauma-laden survivors of war, who must now face the incomprehensible terror of the towering monster, usher Godzilla Minus One back to its horror roots. To understand Minus One’s horror, we need only turn to Jaws (1975) to see how fear and dread reflected in the eyes of characters elicit shock in the viewer.

Posted on July 30, 2024

Horror’s Effaced Protagonists

Guest Post

By JDC Burnhil

What qualifies a protagonist as a protagonist?

The answer may vary depending upon whom we ask, and for what purpose. At one extreme, we find a very simple set of criteria, offered for functional purposes by author Robin D. Laws: “Any figure who the viewer wants to see succeed, both because they empathize with the character and because the character appears early on and in a large number of scenes, qualifies as the protagonist.” These characters “become the focus of our hopes and fears”, making the ups and downs of those characters’ fates impactful to the audience (Laws, ch. 1).

Yet Laws himself acknowledges that others have more rigorous demands for granting “protagonist” status, that “some [sources] argue … that the protagonist is the character responsible for the instigating action that sets the story in motion” (ch. 1) This is by no means the sole or most stringent set of criteria; to give an example from the other extreme, Michael Mackenzie explains why, in one of the two subtypes of giallo film he identifies, he deliberately chooses to not refer to the main characters as protagonists: “… the protagonist is considered to be the primary active force in any dramatic work, propelling the plot forward through their actions … the spectator typically shares the point of view of the protagonist … these conventions do not apply to the main … characters of the F-giallo …” (112-113). Others make the overlapping demand that a protagonist must have agency, and if this is not the case, “Your Story Is About the Wrong Character” (Ashkenazi).

Putting all these together leads to a puzzling picture: a corpus of works that conventional wisdom suggests are written in a “wrong” fashion, about the “wrong characters,” and yet they evoke substantial audience response. After all, it’s unlikely that Mackenzie would have had two dozen F-gialli to write about (228-232), if being centered around a non-“protagonist” had been a barrier to pleasing the audience; the environment from which the giallo emerged saw relentless copying of successes, not of failures.

Posted on July 5, 2024

Considering Catholic Horror Literature

Guest Post

Gavin F. Hurley

I was a teenager when I first watched The Exorcist. It terrified me. Later, in my twenties, I read Blatty’s novel. It still terrified me. But its complexity began to seep in. While the story was entertaining and the style was easy to read, the novel was also intellectual and spiritually engaging. Energized by the horror genre, this balance intrigued me—and sparked my interest in Catholic horror literature.

As many of us know, horror fiction can motivate meaningful inquiry. We ponder imagination when reading Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho. We think about the nature of desire when reading Clive Barker’s The Hellbound Heart. We contemplate the cosmic expanse when reading H.P. Lovecraft’s The Colour Out of Space. But I realized years ago that Blatty’s novel motivates inquiry in a distinctive way. Not only is The Exorcist unapologetically Catholic, but it is also fueled by a classical approach. This is not too surprising. Catholicism has had a long partnership with the classical liberal arts tradition: one where theology reigns as regina scientiarum (queen of the sciences) with philosophy enlisted as her handmaiden. The Exorcist operates in a similar fashion. It is informed by both theology and philosophy. While it is written for popular audiences, many of its dialogues resemble Plato’s: they are fueled by Socratic Method. Moreover, both Chris MacNeil and Father Damien Karras wrestle with various tensions: between theism and atheism, religion and science, faith and reason, life and death, innocence and guilt, and hope and despair. This is the domain of the liberal arts. Meanwhile, the inciting incident—Regan MacNeil’s possession— stirs all these tensions into potent cocktail. Readers drink it down and become intoxicated by the horror of it all.

Posted on June 25, 2024

The Repair Women of Slumber Party Massacre

Guest Post

Johanna Isaacson

I first watched The Slumber Party Massacre (1982) decades ago, with too-high, too-pure expectations. As a devout horror fan and a dedicated feminist, I freaked when I learned Rita Mae Brown wrote the script. On top of that, the film was the first slasher to be directed by a woman, Amy Holden Jones. Surely, this was a feminist classic I had somehow missed.

Anyone who has studied second wave feminism or queer history will have encountered Rita Mae Brown, the author of Rubyfruit Jungle (1973), a groundbreaking queer bildungsroman. Although her politics grew tepid over time, during the seventies Brown was one of the most visible, charismatic, and defiant defenders of lesbian rights. She was known to call out homophobia in mainstream feminist organizations, such as NOW, and sexism in the nascent Gay Liberation Front. Eventually, in response to this lack of radicality and inclusivity in existent political groups, she helped form the lesbian separatist Furies Collective.

I didn’t quite know how the conventions of an eighties slasher movie could reflect these politics, but I was eager to find out. So, I was puzzled when the Slumber Party Massacre turned out to be what I would have expected from a male writer and director. The film was filled with scantily clad high school girls who are, one by one, penetrated by a sick serial killer’s unsubtle phallic weapon.

Posted on June 21, 2024

A Killer Perspective: Reconsidering the Neurodivergent Slasher Villain in In a Violent Nature

Guest Post

Cody Parish

WARNING: This essay contains plot spoilers!

The killer’s point-of-view (POV) shot is arguably the most recognizable convention of the slasher film.¹ Made famous in the opening sequence of John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978), the killer’s lurking POV shot has been reproduced in countless subsequent slasher franchises as a means to build suspense. It is noticeably absent, however, from Shudder’s new independent release, In a Violent Nature (Chris Nash, 2024), a slasher movie whose central conceit entails taking the perspective of its killer.² in her seminal monograph, Men, Women, and Chain Saws (1992, 2015), Carol J. Clover was the first to challenge gendered arguments claiming male and female viewers of the slasher film identify with the male killer and Final Girl, respectively. Instead, Clover argues that viewers identify initially with the slasher killer until more details about the Final Girl are known, at which point viewer identification, prompted by cinematography as much as by narrative development, begins to shift to the Final Girl (45). Of the killer, Clover writes, “[He] is often unseen or barely glimpsed, during the first part of the film, and what we do see, when we finally get a good look, hardly invites immediate or conscious empathy,” noting the killer is typically “masked” or “deformed” (44).

Yet, what distinguishes In a Violent Nature from previous slashers exploring the killer’s perspective, like Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon (2006), is that the film almost exclusively tracks the footsteps of its killer, Johnny (Ry Barrett), who becomes the narrative’s anti-hero as a result, while all other characters including the narrative’s Final Girl receive little backstory or development. The filmmakers strategically employ various cinematographic and narrative techniques to dehumanize and humanize Johnny as the de facto protagonist, oscillating between identificatory distance and proximity. Johnny explicitly embodies an ambivalent tension between revulsion and sympathy, one that has implicitly framed intellectually disabled slasher killers like Leatherface from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974-2022) franchise and Jason Voorhees of the Friday the 13^th (1980-2009) film series. In a Violent Nature thus challenges viewers to reconsider the dread of neurological difference connected to the killer in the slasher film.