Horror Homeroom

Posted on July 15, 2016

Top Ten Reasons Camping Just Isn’t For Me

Gwen

I should preface this by stating that I was traumatized by Girl Scout camp long before I saw any of these films. I was an awkwardly shy kid away from home for the first time in the middle of nowhere with only one friend. The food sucked, the lake was icky (reminded me of “The Raft” segment from Creepshow 2 [1987]), and I swear I pulled latrine duty every time. Frankly, I might take a night at Camp Bloodbath before I would go back to Girl Scout camp. By no means do I shudder from the great outdoors, but let’s just say I would take my chances in an urban jungle long before I would canoe down the Cahulawassee River looking to play Dueling Banjos with the locals. From a horror film stand point, I just feel as if things work out better for folks in the city than in the woods. Whether it is a vacation getaway in the woods, a week at summer camp, or some time to hone your cheerleading skills, these films offer little respite for the weary. As we embark on the summer of 2016, maybe some of these films will help you decide whether you would rather camp along the Appalachian Trail or book a room at the Hyatt this year.

Posted on July 11, 2016

And Then There Were None: The Agatha Christie Revival

Dawn Keetley

We live in an era in which it seems every horror is caught on video tape. Presumably that renders those horrors clear and unambiguous. Pictures don’t lie, right? Except it seems that every picture, every scene of footage that makes its way onto a news broadcast or social media, has a thousand interpretations. On the night of July 7, when five police officers were fatally shot in Dallas during a night of peaceful protest, Fox News was showing live feed of the demonstrations and happened to catch bodies clad in uniform lying on the ground, before anyone knew what was going on. The anchor, Megyn Kelly, clearly not sure what to make of the footage, said uncertainly, “We don’t know what we’re seeing here.” And, in truth, it seems we never know what we’re seeing when some newly videotaped horror makes it into the public domain. Or, we do (think we) know what we’re seeing but our neighbor sees something entirely different. The hope of transparency, of the unmediated “real” –especially the truth of a sin or a crime—always eludes us. In fact, now everything is caught on tape, it seems especially to elude us. And that’s where Agatha Christie comes in. In every detective novel she ever wrote, all of which begin with a crime (usually murder), Christie offers us “the truth.” We know exactly what happened, we know how, and we know why—usually laid out for us by the incomparable Hercule Poirot or Miss Marple. The new BBC adaptation of And Then There Were None is no exception. Read more

Posted on July 7, 2016

Road Trip: Lizzie Borden House Tour

Gwen

Grade: A+

Review: A Superb Tour for the History Buff, Horror Fan, or the Adventurous!

I go to Massachusetts regularly and I kept meaning to get to the Lizzie Borden house but it just never happened. On this date, the stars aligned as my biannual Seabird & Whale Tales Trip with the New England Coastal Wildlife Alliance (NECWA) was cancelled and I had all the time in the world to run down to Fall River today. So I packed up my stuff and headed out. What followed was that I was excited, entertained, and educated by our excellent tour guide, Danielle (who is definitely “one of us” judging by her acute sense of humor, her Robert Englund tattoo, and her knowledge of the CON circuit).

Let me begin by saying that my tour guide was stellar and really made the experience special. Her wealth of knowledge and personal interjections were both informative and often hysterical. The tour guide never tells you with any certainty what happened in the house, they are careful to stick to the facts and let you come up with your own judgment. The inside of the home is fashioned with period pieces (which was a living replica of my grandmother’s house…down to the caned chairs and abundant doilies). The furniture is not original (thank goodness, as that would be gross) but there are sprinklings of original woodwork and belongings throughout. Read more

Posted on July 4, 2016

The Purge: Election Year: Do Progressive Politics Make Good Horror?

Dawn Keetley

The Purge: Election Year is the third film in James DeMonaco’s franchise and continues on the trajectory set in motion by its two predecessors: it represents a broader political scope with proportionally less dread. Indeed, if the Purge franchise has had only a marginal grasp on the horror genre, Election Year may represent its letting go (though it is still labeled “horror” in IMDb—albeit secondarily to “action”).

In Election Year, the seeds of the resistance to Purge Night that were growing in The Purge: Anarchy (2014) have come to some sort of blossoming in the form of Senator Charlene (Charlie) Roan, played by Elizabeth Mitchell (also currently starring in Freeform’s new summer horror series, Dead of Summer). Charlie witnessed the slaughter of her entire family on Purge Night eighteen years earlier (indeed, her mother had to choose which of her family members would survive). Charlie is not only, unsurprisingly, deeply opposed to the Purge, but also to violence in any form. She intends to defeat the NFFA (The New Founding Fathers of America) and their Purge platform at the voting booth. Ballots not bullets. Read more

Posted on June 30, 2016

Blake Lively Doesn’t Need a Bigger Boat in The Shallows

Dawn Keetley

Synopsis of The Shallows: After her mother dies of cancer, Nancy Adams (Blake Lively) drops out of med school and heads to a secret beach in Mexico, one her mother used to visit. Surfing alone, she is attacked by a large shark and stranded on a small rock about 200 yards from shore.

One of the handful of big theatrical horror releases of the summer of 2016 (produced by Columbia Pictures), The Shallows is expertly directed by Jaume Collet-Serra, who is no stranger to horror. Collet-Serra has helmed House of Wax (2005) and Orphan (2009), as well as directing the first two episodes of ABC’s interesting but finally foundering supernatural found-footage horror series, The River (2012).

The Shallows has inevitably been compared to Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975), which both is and is not an accurate comparison. On the one hand nothing like Jaws, The Shallows does, toward the end in particular, make numerous covert references to it—offering an explicit and interesting re-writing. Read more