Horror Homeroom

Posted on August 7, 2022

Representations of Women in The Wretched (2019)

Gwen

Let me start this by saying that representations in film matter. The prelude to this statement was me watching the documentary series on Netflix about Woodstock ’99, Trainwreck (2022). One astute journalist pointed out that if you want to understand the collective ethos of the time, one need only look to the biggest box office hits in that historical moment. Rather than love and peace, the backdrop of Woodstock ’99 was brimming with male sexuality and angst in films such as American Pie (1999) and Fight Club (1999). Popular culture reflects what mainstream society chooses…wants and enjoys consuming. Let us temporarily peer into our collective id.

Horror films often reveal the fears of middle- to upper-class (often white) men. Which makes sense since that is mostly who writes, directs, and produces horror films. While women producers, creators, and consumers are on the rise, the major audience continues to be predominately male. With that in mind, I hand you the 2019 Pierce Brothers film, The Wretched. Read more

Posted on July 31, 2022

From the Abyss: Weird Fiction, 1907-1945, by D. K. Broster

Guest Post

From the Abyss: Weird Fiction, 1907-1945, by D. K. Broster, edited by Melissa Emdundson (Handheld Press, 2022).

There’s a strange irony in the fact that while the names of Weird authors may be known to fans of the genre for their strange and unsettling visions, many of them were also widely popular for more mainstream writing. E. F. Benson, for example, was not only the author of “spook stories” like the deeply chilling “Caterpillars,” a personal favourite of mine, but became well-known for the camp and sometimes caustic humour of his popular Mapp and Lucia series. Dorothy Kathleen Broster was no different. Although aficionados of the Weird may know her for the oft-anthologised tale of Jamesian transgression and punishment that is “Couching at the Door,” it was the Jacobite Trilogy of Scottish histories that made her, as editor Melissa Edmundson points out, “a household name” to the extent that many readers simply assumed she was herself a Scotsman. Should it be surprising that a writer works in different genres and modes? No, but it is surprising when those genres are so opposed to each other – in Broster’s case, deeply researched depictions of historical reality on one hand and, on the other, tales which delve into the world’s occasional bouts of un-reality.

Posted on July 22, 2022

Hunky Punks: on Alex Garland’s ‘Men’ (2022)

Guest Post

Certainly in the 1970s, both in Britain and America, there was a kind of movement of people leaving the cities – which had started to become polluted, overcrowded, sort of overheated – and trying to find better lives out in the countryside; and in doing so, they encounter both nature, but also the people who live with nature, and that’s very much a sort of class and cultural tension, but it’s also an environmental tension.

– Mark Pilkington, Strange Attractor Press, in Kier-La Janise’s ‘Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror’ (2021)

Perhaps the most unnerving Folk Horror to deal with these phenomena – with the ‘tension[s]’ attendant on urban flight – is ‘Baby’ (1976): the fourth episode of Nigel Kneale’s ATV series ‘Beasts’. Six months pregnant (and so middle-class that she still calls her father ‘Daddy’), Jo (Jane Wymark) has agreed to go rural with her husband, Peter (Simon MacCorkingdale) – a frustrated vet, hellbent on living out his Cottagecore fantasies. Read more

Posted on June 27, 2022

Sleeping off the Fever: The Dream Aesthetics of 28 Days Later

Guest Post

Growing up, horror was a carefully curated genre in my house. No fiction books and certainly no video games. Movies were only allowed if it was clearly a man in a monster suit. As I grew older I also grew more unsatisfied with this arrangement. Starting in middle school, I took greater and greater risks to smuggle new experiences home from the library in the form of Stephen King as well as more varied horror movies. This just so happened to also be the era of the zombie resurgence, with the slacker nerds of Shaun of the Dead and the mean punk spirit of the Dawn of the Dead remake, both movies I love for different reasons. However, it’s the 2002 outbreak that has stayed chasing after me all these years. Read more

two dolls sit on swings in the middle of a desolate town

Posted on June 19, 2022

10 Scary Small Towns in US Horror

Guest Post

The culture wars in US politics have become fixated on the rural-urban divide ever since rural voters in just the right mix of states elected Donald Trump to the Presidency in 2016, launching a thousand ethnographic think-pieces in big city news outlets about the worldview of small-town white folks who had long been overlooked by mainstream media.

But anxieties about rural America have long animated a certain corner of the US horror tradition, in stories about seemingly wholesome small towns hiding dark secrets behind their façade of normalcy. Or stories of decrepit small towns where the people and communities left behind by globalization and urbanization have turned monstrous and vengeful, at least in horror films. Read more