I have recently been exploring a sub-genre of horror that used to terrify me—the home invasion film. I created a list of some of my favorites so far (most of them on the milder side as far as violence and sadism goes), and I heard from a lot of people about other films I should watch. One that came highly recommended was The Strangers, a 2008 film directed by Bryan Bertino. I want to say thank you to those who recommended the film, because it is indeed exceptional. Read more
James Whale’s Frankenstein was released on November 21, 1931—85 years ago. The film not only began the American horror tradition but has remained enormously generative. Its influence can be seen not only in its contemporaries, like King Kong (1933), but also in films of the 1950s such as The Thing from Another World (1951) and The Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954), and in still later horror monsters such as Texas Chainsaw Massacre’s Leatherface (Tobe Hooper, 1974) and Halloween’s mute and malevolent Michael Myers (John Carpenter, 1978).
Frankenstein has also clearly had a powerful influence on the zombie film: it’s hard not to see the specter of Henry Frankenstein’s creation in the first “ghoul” of George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968), for instance. Both Frankenstein’s creature and Romero’s ghouls were born in the graveyard, born from humans doing what they should not. Read more
Stephen King’s story “The Raft,” published in Skeleton Crew in 1985 and part of the horror anthology Creepshow 2 (Michael Gornick, 1987), is deceptively straightforward. Near the end of October, four teens—Deke, Randy, LaVerne, and Rachel—have a few drinks, smoke some pot, and decide to swim out to a raft in the middle of a deserted lake. Once they’ve all reached the raft, Randy sees a strange black shape in the water: it looks like oil—an oil slick is the closest he can come to naming it—but it’s not an oil slick; it’s too perfectly formed. Randy tells his friends that the one oil slick he has seen was “just this big sticky mess all over the water. In streaks and big smears.” He insists it did not look like the shape that is lurking on the lake: “It wasn’t, you know, compact.” This strange mass, which seems to sense their movements and their vulnerabilities, is a dense blackness—and the story tells of its relentlessly oozing over the teens, one by one, dissolving their flesh, pulling it off their bones, until only Randy is left. Read more
Shortly after the 2016 presidential election, I ran across Michael Moore’s prescient article predicting Donald’s Trump’s victory. Moore described a possible “Rust Belt Brexit,” claiming that Trump would do well in four traditionally Democratic states—Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Michigan—home to many “angry, embittered working (and nonworking) people.” And indeed, against all expectations, Trump won all four of these states. There’s one sentence in Moore’s piece, as he’s describing this part of the country (as well as the Midlands of England), that resonated profoundly with me, not least because I’ve lived in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania and grew up in the industrial Midlands of England: “From Green Bay to Pittsburgh,” Moore writes, “this, my friends, is the middle of England – broken, depressed, struggling, the smokestacks strewn across the countryside with the carcass of what we use to call the Middle Class.”[i] This image, of smokestacks strewn across the landscape, seems to be front and center in the visual imagery of both Saw (James Wan, 2004) and Hostel (Eli Roth, 2005). Read more
The second episode of season 7 (“The Well”) has been much and rightly praised for its exceptional storytelling, which served as a welcome relief from the brutality of the season opener (“The Day Will Come When You Won’t Be”).
I’ve read some interesting things online about how the storyline developing between Carol (Melissa McBride) and Ezekiel (Khary Payton), with his strange insistence that she take his pomegranate, evokes the Greek myth of Persephone and Hades.
This article by Ryan Folmsbee on Comicsverse is a good example and lays out how Carol’s story tracks that of Persephone.
A crucial part of the story of Persephone, though, is that it is known as “The Rape of Persephone.” Hades sees Persephone, wandering alone, and he forcibly abducts and rapes her. So when Folmsbee refers to the “love” between Hades and Persephone, it doesn’t exactly seem an accurate description of the relationship—and, indeed, in the posts I saw about the myth, the “rape” part was not being talked about. (Folmsbee gets it more right later when he says that “Persephone was not entirely on board with the idea of spending her life with Hades.”) Read more
taking horror seriously so you don't have to
