Horror Homeroom

Posted on September 16, 2022

Call for Papers — Special Issue #7: Found Footage Horror

In today’s media landscape, questions of authenticity, truth, and manipulation of fact are more pertinent than ever. While journalists herald the dawning of a ‘post-truth’ era, and deepfakes bring to a boiling point the anxiety of online communication and documentation, the subgenre of found footage horror seems to encapsulate a terror that is both commonplace and elusive.

From the Unfriended films (2016, 2018) to Host (2020), recent years have heralded an uptick in digital iterations of the medium as an outlet for articulating our fraught relationship with new media technologies. But the concept isn’t new. If we consider Benjamin Christensen’s 1922 film, Häxan—with its integration of truth claims and archived materials—as one of the earliest found footage horror films, then the legacy of the subgenre is approaching just over 100 years. Nor are the impulses of the medium confined to the screen. Foundational horror works like Frankenstein (1818) and Dracula (1897), or found testimonies like Cotton Mather’s records of the Salem Witch trials (1693), all serve as precursors to ongoing experiments with the found footage subgenre.

Posted on September 8, 2022

Special Issue #6: Classic Horror

Dawn Keetley/ Elizabeth Erwin/ Special Issue #6

2022 is the 90th anniversary of the many amazing classic horror films that were released in 1932, among them Freaks, Island of Lost Souls, The Most Dangerous Game, The Old Dark House, The Mummy, and White Zombie. To mark this anniversary, Horror Homeroom’s sixth special issue takes up classic horror, which we’re defining as any film released prior to Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 film, Psycho – the film that saw the birth of ‘modern’ horror.

We have an array of fabulous essays that explore witchcraft and rise of documentary horror in Benjamin Christensen’s Swedish silent film Häxan (1922); the difference of James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931) – as well as the later Bride of Frankenstein (1935) and Son of Frankenstein (1939) – from Mary Shelley’s novel; Frankenstein as a film about autism; imperialism and the continuing struggle over artifacts in The Mummy (1932); the resonances of Tod Browning’s Freaks (1932) in American Horror Story: Freak Show; representations of mental illness in Bedlam (1946); the 3-D film craze that took off in the 1950s; nuclear holocaust and vaccination fallout in The Werewolf (1956); and representations of colonialism in Hammer’s Dracula (1958).

Our authors are: Erin Harrington, Alissa Burger, Margaret Yankovich, Jessica Parant (of Spinsters of Horror), Aíne Norris, Josh Grant-Young, Katherine Cottle, Zack Kruse, Justin Wigard, and Joseph Hsin-shun Chang. Our cover illustration is by Andrew Foley.

We want to thank them for their brilliant and thoughtful work.

Posted on September 2, 2022

Return of the Zombie Salesman: A Review of Stubbs the Zombie in Rebel Without a Pulse

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Picture this: you are playing a video game about a zombie outbreak. Perhaps your avatar is struggling to survive as undead enemies hunt them in claustrophobia-inducing environments, like Chris Redfield and Jill Valentine in Resident Evil (1996). Then again, maybe your avatar is the one doing the hunting, slaughtering hordes of zombies with relative ease as Frank West and Juliet Starling can in Dead Rising (2006) and Lollipop Chainsaw (2012), respectively. Either way, you are likely imagining the following scenario for your hypothetical video game: a zombie outbreak has occurred, and the living must escape from, or do battle with, the undead to survive.

Stubbs the Zombie in Rebel Without a Pulse, which originally released for the Xbox in 2005 and was re-released on the Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and Nintendo Switch in 2021, is a zombie video game. Yet, in a subversion of the above-mentioned scenario, Stubbs the Zombie has players take on the role of a zombie: an undead salesman by the name of Edward “Stubbs” Stubblefield to be precise. In Stubbs the Zombie, the goal of the playable character is a wholesome one; Stubbs must find a way of reuniting with his love interest, a Marilyn Monroe lookalike named Maggie Monday. Yet, despite his wholesome quest, as an undead monstrosity Stubbs is a harbinger of death.

Posted on August 26, 2022

The Top 10 Horror Moments in the Batman Cinematic Universe

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While director Matt Reeves may have described the most recent Batman movie, The Batman (2022), as “almost a horror film,” horror as an aesthetic mood or idiom pervades representations of the character and his world across cinematic history. The stylistically and tonally diverse cinematic projects of Tim Burton, Joel Schumacher, and Christopher Nolan and now, Matt Reeves, have deployed some quintessential tropes of horror filmmaking in the course of envisioning the caped crusader and his adventures. Batman has served as a convenient and uniquely ingenious cultural device that allowed directors to crystallize the social and political horrors of their times on the cinematic scape. This list consists of the Top 10 Horror moments in the cinematic history of Batman. The scenes are ranked in order of least to most horrifying, with no. 10 being a semi-comical scene that draws on horror aesthetics, and no. 1 being an out-and-out jump-scare moment.

menacing video game character set against a red backdrop

Posted on August 16, 2022

Bloodwash Review: A Giallo-Inspired Horror Video Game Awash with Gore

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Bloodwash is the latest video game to be published by Torture Star Video, a publishing label launched by Puppet Combo, the developer behind notable instances of playable nightmare fuel such as Babysitter Bloodbath (2013), Nun Massacre (2018), and Murder House (2020). Like these games, Bloodwash has a distinctive low-poly style reminiscent of video games from the PS1 era, as well as a story straight out of an old school slasher film.

As pointed out in publicity material for the game, Bloodwash is “giallo-inspired.” In a broad sense, the Italian term Giallo “has become synonymous … with mysteries and thrillers” (Koven, 2013: 204). More specifically, the term has come to describe “the Italian style of psycho-killer movies, which dominated much of Italian vernacular film-making in the 1970s, and, in many respects, were the precursors to the ‘slasher’ films from Canada and the US in the late 1970s and early 1980s” (ibid.) Tropes of Giallo cinema include stylised murder scenes, mysterious killers, and tormented women – three components that feature prominently in the video game, Bloodwash. Read more