Horror Homeroom

Posted on September 17, 2024

The Provocative Choices of Zoë Kravitz’s Blink Twice

Guest Post

By Harry Gay

*Spoilers*

Conversations around sexual assault and gaslighting have become high visibility topics in the past few years with several high-profile cases of domestic and systemic abuse. It is within a post-#MeToo climate that films like Zoë Kravitz’s directorial debut, Blink Twice, dip their toes into the miasma of various court cases, legal decisions, celebrity accusations and arguments over memory, consent and power clinging to the air in the last decade. The film attempts to waft its way through, sometimes successfully and other times not.

Blink Twice follows Frida (Naomi Ackie) and Jess (Alia Shawcat), two working-class women invited to tech CEO Slater King’s (Channing Tatum) private island for a seemingly endless summer of debauchery and hedonism. What begins as frivolity soon turns to nightmare as the women on the island discover that they have been violently abused by their male comrades and made to forget these encounters through an amnesiac fluid hidden in their perfume. It is only through violent revenge that they are able to free themselves from their abusers’ clutches, but Frida’s decision to keep King alive as her slave in Blink Twice‘s denouement complicates what is a fairly tight revenge thriller.

Posted on September 10, 2024

Liquid Visions: Salt, Saliva, Sperm and Sweat by Philip Brophy

Guest Post

by Patrick Zaia

Salt, Saliva, Sperm and Sweat was the debut featurette of Australian polymath Philip Brophy. Released in 1988, the film is an experimental and essayistic exploration of the body, specifically the physiological reality of the body as a messy soup of urges, sensations and emissions – “a soft machine” as William Burroughs famously described. When the film premiered at the Sydney Film Festival it proved to be incredibly divisive, with some critics dismissing it as boring and juvenile while others praised Brophy’s project as audacious and fascinating. One of the film’s most notable defenders was the revered critic David Stratton, who vividly described it in the press as “ a film with balls!” Because of its provocative content and polarising character, combined with the film’s relative obscurity, Salt, Saliva, Sperm and Sweat has garnered a thrilling aura of mystique and intrigue in certain circles of underground film and art culture. This alluring spell of anonymity, however, was ruptured roughly a year ago when a copy of the film suddenly surfaced from the tumultuous depths of the internet, appearing (of all places) on the popular video-sharing site YouTube. Finally, Brophy’s fluidic vision of the body is available for public consumption.

Posted on September 7, 2024

Fate in Film: A Deterministic Approach to Cinema, by Thomas M. Puhr

Guest Post

Below are the opening pages of a fascinating 2022 book by Thomas Puhr, Fate in Film, about determinism in film–much of which is horror, including Under the Skin, Hereditary, Midsommar, Us, Gus Van Sant’s Psycho, and Michael Haneke’s American Funny Games. We highly recommend.

INTRODUCTION

“You’ve Always Been the Caretaker”

When introducing compatibilism, my undergraduate philosophy professor drew a crude maze on the blackboard with a stick figure at its entrance. She traced the figure’s possible paths with diverging sets of arrows and explained how it had, say, a choice between left or right at a given T-junction (free will), but was prohibited from continuing straight (determinism). As this simple exercise illustrates, compatibilism’s deliciously ambiguous response to whether or not we have free will can be boiled down to: “Well, sort of yes, sort of no.”

Posted on August 25, 2024

Oz Perkins’ Longlegs as Folk Horror

Dawn Keetley

Oz Perkins’ 2024 film, Longlegs, is at first glance a serial killer film, with references abounding to Jonathan Demme’s Silence of the Lambs (1991) and, to a lesser extent, David Fincher’s Seven (1995). Perkins has been quite explicit in interviews, however, that he lures viewers in with this promise and then gives them something else. That something else is an occult horror film: some critics have pointed to the influence of The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973), but I see more pronounced echoes of Rosemary’s Baby (Roman Polanski, 1968) and The Omen (Richard Donner, 1976). The “Hail Satan!” refrain—which serves not least as the last line of the film—definitively evokes Rosemary’s Baby.

Longlegs is, though, also folk horror—and I will be developing this perhaps not-so-obvious claim at greater length in an article I’m working on. Thus far, no one has identified the film as folk horror, except for one brief post that compares it to Texas Chain Saw Massacre. (An interesting comparison!)

An undead entity that looks grotesque and is dressed in an old fashioned style tuxedo stands next to a girl in a red wedding dress.

Posted on August 22, 2024

A Living Death?: Talking Beetlejuice (1988)

Elizabeth Erwin

In today’s episode, it’s Tim Burton’s fever dream masterpiece Beetlejuice—a horror-comedy classic with shades of surrealism that’s as colorfully bizarre as its namesake character! The film follows Barbara and Adam Maitland, a recently deceased couple, intent on scaring off the new living occupants of their home, the Deetz family. When their best ghostly efforts prove futile, they decide to enlist the services of Betelgeuse, a freelance bio-exorcist more interested in causing havoc than in helping. With its long awaited sequel set to hit theaters September 6, we’re taking a look back at Burton’s first commercial success so stay tuned.

Recommended Reading:

Fowkes, Katherine A. “Tim Burton and the creative trickster: A case study of three films.” The Works of Tim Burton: Margins to Mainstream. Ed. Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock. Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, pp. 231-244.

Middlemost, R. “”My whole life is a dark room”: Nostalgia and domesticity in Beetlejuice and Edward Scissorhands.” A Critical Companion to Tim Burton. Ed. A. Barkman & A. Sanna. Lexington Books, 2017, pp.207-220.

van Elferen, Isabella. “Dannv Elfman’s Musical Fantasyland. Or, Listening to a Snowglobe.” The Works of Tim Burton: Margins to Mainstream. Ed. Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock. Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, pp. 231-244.