Horror Homeroom

cover photo showing book cover of a girl carrying roller skates. Design is 80s inspired with lots of neon and graphics.

Posted on February 8, 2023

Time to Start Running: Talking Cirque Berzerk

Podcast

Horror friends! We’ve heard you loud and clear and will now be combining both our book and movie podcasts under the Horror Homeroom Conservations umbrella!

Speaking of which, we recently delved into 2020’s CIRQUE BERZERK by Jessica Guess. Part of the ‘Rewind or Die’ series, the story takes place 30 years after a group of kids went on a killing spree at a local carnival; a massacre that left a dozen people dead. Decades after the tragedy, a group of students, including best friends Sam and Rochelle, decide to visit the theme park for one last hurrah. But sometimes, the past refuses to stay dead. Did this slasher live up to expectations? Find out in our latest episode available wherever you get your favorite podcasts.

And if horror books are your jam, don’t forget these episodes of the late, great Bloodcurdling Book Club. A handy, dandy playlist is below for your listening pleasure.

Posted on February 4, 2023

Rewilding – A Thoughtful, Beautiful Folk Horror Anthology

Dawn Keetley

Rewilding is a folk horror anthology written and directed by Ric Rawlins. It includes three short films, “Stone Mothers,” “The Family Tree,” and “The Writer’s Enquiry” that all harken back to the stories of M. R. James and to their adaptation in the 1970s’ BBC’s A Ghost Story for Christmas series. The influence of James is especially strong in the first two, with “Stone Mothers” evoking “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad” and “A Warning to the Curious,” while “The Family Tree” recalls “The Ash Tree.” The third installment, “The Writer’s Enquiry,” which has a brilliant ending, most definitely manifests the influence of Robin Hardy’s 1973 The Wicker Man – and is also akin to the recent “Mr. King” episode of Inside No. 9 (2022).

Any film that was so aware of tracing the influences of the tradition from which it emerged would be of interest to me – but that is by no means the only reason I highly recommend Rewilding. It is essential viewing for anyone interested in folk horror – or in slow-burn, thoughtful horror more generally. Each of the three short films is extremely well-written and directed; the settings are gorgeous, beautifully shot, and, in true folk horror fashion, contribute demonstrably to the meaning of the film; and the actors are all great. Rawlins obviously assembled a dedicated group for this project, and their investment in what they’re doing is palpable.

Posted on January 25, 2023

Reclaiming Jewish Monsters in The Offering

Guest Post

J-horror is often used as shorthand for Japanese horror, but that “J” is a bit limiting. It’s also required for Jewish horror, a subgenre that’s coming into its own. In 2012 the Jewish possession movie titled, well, The Possession presented the world with a Hasidic exorcist. Directed by Ole Bornedal, the film had a substantial budget and wide theatrical release. Played by the famed Hasidic rapper Matisyahu, the sympathetic exorcist has to assist a goy family who bought their way into trouble at a yard sale. Em (Natasha Calis), a young girl from a broken family, asks her father to buy her an ornate box which, unbeknownst to them, contains a dybbuk. A dybbuk is essentially the ghost of a wicked person—a very powerful entity that, according to the movie, is capable of possession. It turns out that this is actually the demon Abyzou.

Six years later, the famous Jewish monster, the golem, made an appearance in the Israeli horror film, Doron and Yoav Paz’s The Golem. Set during a pogrom in seventeenth-century Lituania, it follows previous films that share both the monster and title. It does this in unique fashion, however, by making the golem a little boy in the shape of a grieving mother’s dead son. Hannah (Hani Furstenberg), the mother, creates the golem to protect the shtetl against hostile Christians. Golems do what golems do, and it saves the community but then turns violent on the Jews. Read more

Book cover versions of Bernard Taylor's The Reaping. One cover shows a baby carriage with waves emitting from it. The second cover shows a fetus in utero with devil horns. The third cover shows a group of nuns walking to a house.

Posted on January 16, 2023

Prophetic Dread in Bernard Taylor’s THE REAPING (1980)

Podcast

With its languid storytelling and inversion of Gothic tropes, Bernard Taylor’s THE REAPING is an exercise in patience with a supremely satisfying payoff. In this episode, we discuss folk horror, the rejection of the maternal, and the importance of a good book cover. On this podcast we talk blood, guts, and spoilers so listener discretion is advised.

You can order Taylor’s novel from Valancourt’s Paperbacks from Hell site.

Listen Here:

Posted on January 5, 2023

Troll and Ecological Folk Horror in the ‘Sacrifice Zone’

Dawn Keetley

Roar Uthaug is a master of genre film. His first directorial feature was the excellent slasher, Cold Prey (2006), and he then helmed Norway’s first disaster film, The Wave, in 20015. His latest is a monster movie – also an action adventure film, a disaster film, and a Norwegian kaiju movie. Released by Netflix in 2022, Troll is about an ancient being awakened by an explosion detonated in the mountains of Norway. The film is fairly self-conscious about its genre origins: one character, early on, suggests that the creature emerging from the mountain is “King Kong” – and in a later montage of “Breaking News” reports, a Japanese journalist asks, “Could this be a Norwegian Godzilla?”

Troll resembles no film, perhaps, so much as The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (Eugène Lourié, 1953), in which a long-buried dinosaur is awakened from the ice of the Arctic by an atomic blast test. (I’ve written about the politics of that film here.) Indeed, the protagonist of Troll, Professor Nora Tidemann (Ine Marie Wilmann) is, like the protagonists of Beast, a paleontologist, interrupted in her search for dinosaur fossils by the troll’s awakening – and the Norwegian government’s consequent summoning of her as expert. It turns out, moreover, that the troll, just like the rhedosaurus in Beast, is heading toward its “home,” which just happens, in both cases, to be one of the most populated of urban areas: Manhattan in Beast and Oslo in Troll.[i] The film’s respective monsters do some rampaging, of course, on their way home.

As fascinating as Troll is as a monster movie, however, I want to suggest that it also overlaps to some degree with folk horror.