Horror Homeroom

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Posted on November 17, 2022

Call for Papers – Special Issue #8: Horror Literature

Our featured image, which includes Grady Hendrix and Will Errickson’s popular Paperbacks from Hell series, evidences horror literature’s resurgence in recent years. There has been not only a reclaiming and reissuing of critically dismissed titles of the past but also a proliferation of new and diverse horror fictions. Whether disdained as pulpy trash or ignored for appealing to youth demographics, a large swathe of pre-2000s horror literature has frequently been deemed unworthy of critical analysis. But with developments that include Paperbacks from Hell, Valancourt Books’ new translations of horror novels, increasing numbers of film adaptations of horror youth literature, and decreasing rigidity between what constitutes high and low culture, titles that have long skirted the horror literature canon are increasingly being taken seriously as cultural documents speaking to societal norms and taboos as well as significant artistic works in their own right.

For this special issue on horror fiction, we invite submissions that critically reassess historically disregarded horror literature titles or that take up the works of new horror writers. We want to distinguish horror fiction from its more highbrow cousin, the gothic – and we are interested in horror. We do welcome, though, essays that self-consciously take up the critical difference between horror and the gothic.

Posted on November 10, 2022

Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke (2022) by Eric LaRocca

Guest Post

First published last year in the US by Weirdpunk Books, Eric LaRocca’s Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke (2022) has made its way to the UK and found a home with Titan Books. Somewhere along its journey across the pond, it picked up a new cover and two more short stories – ‘The Enchantment’ and ‘You’ll Find it’s Like That All Over’ – transforming the book from a novella into a short story collection.

The collection still retains an echo of its original form as most of its pages are taken up by the titular story ‘Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke’- a post-internet take on the epistolary form which comprises emails and instant messenger transcripts between Agnes Petrella and Zoe Cross. Read more

Posted on November 6, 2022

Jordan Peele’s Nope, Spectacle, and Surveillance

Guest Post

Film is a medium for conveying a director’s message. In the last five years, Jordan Peele has directed three horror films – Get Out (2017), Us (2019), and Nope (2022) – that are each infused with a message (indeed, many messages). Get Out was a commentary on casual racism in the contemporary US; the film Us focused on social class and the “underground’ existence of the oppressed, but what does Jordan Peele say in Nope? Nope is many things – and one of them is a comment on modern surveillance culture in America.

Nope takes place between 1998 and the early 2000s on a horse ranch just north of Los Angeles, California. There are four main characters in the film, Emerald Haywood (Keke Palmer), OJ Haywood (Daniel Kaluuya), Ricky “Jupe” Park (Steven Yeun), and a giant UFO. The plot centers on the characters’ efforts to get footage of the UFO to prove its existence to an inevitably skeptical public. It is this intended exploitation of the UFO, central to the film, that symbolizes surveillance culture in the United States.

Posted on October 29, 2022

Don’t Throw Away The Baby or the Bathwater

Guest Post

There are few sights so satisfying in horror film as the truly evil young. In a culture that revolves around the sacrosanct child, now even going so far as to prioritize not-yet-children’s lives over that of their vessel/mothers, it is cathartic to see horror films and TV series acknowledging that children are not always innocent and sweet. In fact, at times they can be little monsters.

Whether it is Regan pissing and vomiting in The Exorcist (1973), the bright-eyed children from hell in Village of the Damned (1960), or the fanged newborn in It’s Alive (1974), the evil child points to both the hellish expectations that can accompany parenthood and our own desires to flee conventions. Through horror films we can vicariously become what Andrew Scahill calls “the revolting child,” an embodiment of our desire for anti-heteronormative liberation. Read more

Posted on October 23, 2022

Inheritor of Charismatic Spiritualism- Tangina Barrons in Poltergeist

Guest Post

In Poltergeist (1982), director Tobe Hooper and writer Steven Spielberg created a haunted house that ditched cobwebs in favor of wall-to-wall carpeting, central air conditioning, and a family television set turned scrying mirror. A panoply of characters fill Poltergeist, but no one outshines spirit guide Tangina Barrons. Actor Zelda Rubinstein’s magnetism poured from her 4’3″ frame, evoking the nineteenth-century Spiritualism movement’s tradition of empowered and charismatic mediums communing with the spirit realm.

Poltergeist centers on a suburban California family, the Freelings, and the supernatural abduction of the youngest daughter, Carol Anne (Heather O’Rourke). Diane Freeling (Jo Beth Williams) is a counter-culture figure who emotionally connects the viewer to the otherworldly kidnapping, emphasizing the metaphysical bond between a birth mother and child. Diane’s spouse, Steven (Craig T. Nelson,) is a loving father but absent from most of the family’s daily life, establishing skepticism and confusion. While the hustle of the modern world frays the Freelings, they remain a bound and loving family. Gnawing at that unity is the paranormal kidnapping of their youngest child. That child, lost within the newly-built dream domicile, can only be wrestled from the clutches of a tortured soul, The Beast, with the help of another. Read more