In the Irish folk horror film, The Devil’s Woods, four friends (Keith, Jen, Jay, and Katie) head from Dublin to a music festival in the country, with the intent of camping in the woods. On the way, they run afoul of some unfriendly locals in the wonderfully-named local pub, The Hatchet Inn, and then, once in the woods, they are inexplicably terrorized by strange figures in masks.
Here’s the trailer:
I was watching the SyFy channel last night and blissfully re-indulged in the 2012 film, The Possession. During the commercial breaks (yup, no DVR here folks) I had an average of 2-4 minutes to ponder random things. Why did Rachel Maddow show up as my college roommate in my dream last night? And, more importantly, why are there so many boxes in horror films!? Of course, when I have important things to do like write a dissertation, I suddenly found it much more imperative to test my horror knowledge and see how many horror films prominently feature boxes. Every good scientific experiment needs rules, and I decided to rule out boxes in the forms of coffins, sarcophaguses, music boxes, jack in the boxes, and other banal background boxes.
I thought to myself, people love to look at why horror features so many clowns, children, and dolls, so why not boxes and crates?[i] Whose curiosity isn’t piqued by a mystical box that holds treasures unknown? Take for instance the story of Pandora’s Box, eons of pirate treasure stories, and geeks like myself who will scour the area in hopes of finding a geocache that is probably only filled with a pencil and a button. Boxes evoke the unknown; they conceal and contain both wondrous and horrible things. And in many of these films, the boxes hold a component of weighty choice…a path not taken or a rule broken. Each container holds a picture of what we reveal, what we hide, and who we are. I hope you will join me in avoiding real work to enjoy this list with me! (Beware of some plot spoilers) Read more
Synopsis: Although Tom Hiddleston is brilliant as its shiny, empty protagonist, High-Rise is tedious, pretentious and, well, empty.
I am an avid fan of Ben Wheatley’s Kill List (2011) and so was eagerly awaiting his latest film, High-Rise, which is based on J. G. Ballard’s 1975 novel of the same name. I was sorely disappointed: High-Rise is a pretentious and pointless film. It somehow manages to be heavy-handed in its attempted allegory and empty of any actual meaning. It was boring; I hated every single character; and I found myself asking every few minutes why I was still watching.
High-Rise begins at the end, with its bloodied protagonist, Dr. Robert Laing (played very effectively by the talented Tom Hiddleston), roasting a dog on top of a high-rise apartment building in some faceless urban landscape. The film then backtracks to the months of chaos and violence that ravaged the apartment block—spurious class conflict enflamed by the perpetual confinement of the high-rise. Indeed, the best part of the film may be the towering figure of the building itself, which is all-encompassing: we only ever see fleeting and partial glimpses of the world beyond, and that exterior landscape only ever appears in the frame with the high-rise (one part of the film I did love, actually). Read more
Holidays, released in April 2016, is a horror anthology featuring eight short films (which I’ll list with directors at the end). Since I’m not a huge fan of anthologies, I was surprised at how much I enjoyed this one—and that’s in large part due to the strong narrative continuities that bind the individual films together. Collectively, they (1) illuminate the often primitive violence that still lurks beneath our holidays rituals; (2) showcase the power of body horror; and (3) make strikingly clear that a major gender transformation is not happening but has already happened in horror.
(1) Three of the films explicitly take up the rituals surrounding some of our most vaunted holidays, now more often than not papered over with Hallmark cards and polite, well-coiffed brunches in expensive restaurants. Read more
I’ve read a fair amount of young adult fiction of late, most of it with a leaning toward the horror genre (not surprisingly). The Detour by S. A. Bodeen, published in 2015, is one of the few that has really stayed with me.
After thinking about it—on and off—for several days, I realized that part of the reason the novel wasn’t letting go of me was that it featured a distinctly unlikable protagonist. The Detour also raises important questions that (even more importantly) are not resolved and perhaps don’t even have clear answers. The Detour thus stretches what can sometimes be the often rather suffocating confines of YA literature, with its firmly drawn moral boundaries and clear resolutions. Read more
taking horror seriously so you don't have to
