Horror Homeroom

Posted on December 1, 2021

Poor Monsters and Monstrous Poverty in Antlers

Guest Post

The moments when Scott Cooper’s ambitious foray into the horror genre–Antlers–comes closest to being truly terrifying instead of just jump-scary are those featuring a far more insidious evil than the CGI creature shedding the titular antlers. The connection between these two is one of the more interesting, if ambiguous, aspects of a monster movie which ultimately fails to overcome the latent bias of its sketchy source story. Nick Antosca’s “The Quiet Boy,” the source story for Antlers, looks at its cold, derelict white trash setting with a distanced disdain compromising its teacher protagonist Julia’s (Keri Russell) concern for her alarmingly withdrawn pupil Lucas (Jeremy T. Thomas). Read more

Posted on November 27, 2021

Paranormal Activity: Next of Kin – Folk Horror

Dawn Keetley

As numerous mainstream outlets have very recently declared, folk horror is definitely having a moment. On October 29, 2021, both No Film School and The New York Times described a folk horror “renaissance.” Tellingly, both of these articles center two newly-released high-art / international films—Scott Cooper’s Antlers (produced by Guillermo del Toro) and Valdimar Jóhannsson’s Lamb, the latest horror installment from A24. Both films promise to be, dare I say it, “elevated folk horror,” and, indeed, both articles mention—as recent examples of folk horror—films that have definitely been central to the “elevated horror” movement (e.g., The Witch, Midsommar, The Lighthouse, It Comes at Night, and The Wailing). What these articles fail to mention, though, is folk horror’s recent incursion into films that fall very much on the low end of the prestige spectrum.

Both Mike Nelson’s Wrong Turn (2021) and William Eubank’s Paranormal Activity: Next of Kin (2021) exploit the recent resurgence of folk horror. Both depict a cosmopolitan, urban, and diverse group of young people traveling way out of their comfort zone only to discover an archaic, rural community bound together by old laws and rites and, specifically, by forms of human sacrifice.[i]

Posted on November 20, 2021

Lamb: A Tender Tale of Grief, Full of Hidden Horror

Guest Post

Folklore, fable and family dynamics breed a challenging chimaera of a movie the horror of which arrives with the self-evidence of fairy tales. Such are part of the inspiration for Icelandic debut-director Valdimar Jóhannsson’s captivating cinematic condensation of mythologic motifs from his home country. Its people’s close conjunction to nature – a relation revealed by seemingly incidental scenes to be far less symbiotic than the protagonist couple on their remote, yet idyllic sheep farm might believe – drives a metaphor about grief and gifts that were never ours for the taking. This image of giving and receiving is augmented by the narrative’s starting on Christmas Night.

green image of woman dressed as a nurse looking at the camera

Posted on November 8, 2021

Never seen before now: Grave Encounters and the Allure of Paranormal TV

Guest Post

Popular ghost hunting shows come in a variety of flavors with a universal appeal to cheese and camp. There’s the wildly popular roto-rooting Ghost Hunters originally airing on Sci-Fi and the bro-fest that is Ghost Adventures usually repeating every tired episode on Discovery+’s pantheon of channels. Even Ozzy, Sharon, and Jack Osbourne have joined the pseudo-scientific quest to prove what usually happens just slightly off camera. Shows like these all follow a similar formula. They are contingent on the audience’s willingness to blend our disbelief with what is manufactured on screen. By the end of the show there is still no proof of the hereafter, of residual or intelligent hauntings, or of demons who have chosen to just loiter in abandoned buildings for kicks. Viewers return from the spectacle safe from their tentative exploration into the outer limits of their knowledge. If the ghosts are not real, then at least we know the rules of our universe still hold, right? Read more

Posted on October 30, 2021

The Neo-Slasher

Special Issue #5

SPECIAL ISSUE #5

When Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert famously launched their offensive against what they labeled as “Women in Danger films” in 1980, they effectively positioned slasher films as anti-feminist, exploitative, and lacking all artistic merit. But in the intervening years, this once much maligned sub-genre has enjoyed increasing acclaim for its subversive potential and reflection of cultural norms.

In the midst of a new explosion of slasher films (Halloween, Freaky, There’s Someone Inside My House, and the upcoming new Scream), this special issue asks what the slasher has become in the 21st century–in the “Neo-slasher” that has evolved from the classic slashers of the 1970s and 80s and the post-modern slashers of the 1990s. Read on to hear about new trends, landmark films, and explorations of new slasher media (including novels).

We have essays by Kelly Gredner, Jerry J. Sampson, Julia Aloi, Elizabeth Erwin, Vince A. Liaguno, Gwyneth Peaty, Dawn Keetley, Brian Fanelli, Nick Redfern, Alex Svensson, Paul A.J. Lewis, Douglas Rasmussen, Conner McAleese, Taylor Cole, Colby D. Johnson, Emma Kostopolus, Rebecca Gibson, Destiny Bonilla, and Melissa C. Macero.