This week’s hair raising read is 2021’s That Weekend by Kara Thomas. The story of three friends who embark to a lake house only to have one return with no memory of what transpired, this story delves into issues of survivor’s guilt, the destructive power of secrets, and the unreliability of memory. On this podcast, we talk blood, guts, and spoilers so listener discretion is advised.
Wrong Turn (2021) isn’t misleading in its approach to genre filmmaking, to be certain. The brochure lets moviegoers know full well that they’ve traveled bloody byways like these before, that they’ve been terrorized by homicidal hillbillies like these before. But the destination of Wrong Turn (2021) is altogether unique in relation to what’s come before it, and it seems to suggest that the oft-reviled horror movie rehash may soon be replaced with slasher films audacious enough to have something more to say.
A ‘Wrong Turn’ remake? Wrong again!
In the film, six young adults venture into the Appalachian mountains for a weekend of hiking & adventure, only to find themselves the targets of an entire society of mountainside locals who have retreated into the wilderness where they’ve survived for over a century in an effort to divorce themselves from the cancerous history and bleak future of society. Read more
As self-aware franchises such as Scream have shown us, horror films often espouse conservative moral values, and adhering to or flouting these values are often the difference between life and death for the characters on screen. There’s even a trope for the virginal young maiden who lives to the end of the film based on her purity: the Final Girl. But what happens when a horror film doesn’t just showcase these values implicitly through the gory deaths of fornicators and hedonists, but has the villain explicitly target people to teach them these lessons?
The answer to this question is the premise of the Saw franchise, now in its ninth entry with the spinoff Spiral. Across the films, various villains place their victims in gruesome traps, for the purpose of teaching them lessons about their behavior. The victims are given a choice that typically goes as follows: voluntarily self-mutilate in order to get out of the trap and survive, or remain passive and die terribly. Read more
Much twenty-first-century young adult literature written by women and featuring teenage girls has taken up the theme of memory loss. Typically, the protagonist’s amnesia is related to some kind of trauma, an accident of some kind—anything from falling on the steps and hitting your head to a devastating car crash.
Here are some notable examples:
Gabrielle Zevin, Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac (2007)
Mary E. Pearson, The Adoration of Jenna Fox (2008)
Cat Patrick, Forgotten (2011)
Michelle Hodkin, The Unbecoming of Mara Dyer (2012)
Megan Miranda, Hysteria (2013)
Natalie Richards, Six Months Later (2013)
Shelly Crane, Wide Awake (2013)
E. Lockhart, When We Were Liars (2014)
Jennifer Armentrout, Don’t Look Back (2014)
Alexandra Sirowy, The Creeping (2015)
Eileen Cook, With Malice (2017)
Kara Thomas, That Weekend (2021)
Some bloggers have noticed this trend, and there is an extensive Goodreads list about YA novels and amnesia. Indeed, lists are plenty (see Dobrez & Rutan and Lipinski), but critical explorations are few: Alison Waller’s “Amnesia in Young Adult Fiction” (2016) is the lone exception.*
It remains one of the hardest things to accept today, knowing that we can’t avoid the latest report on hate-based violence, whether rooted in politics, race, opinions, or faith. At least for now, the 21st century is a time for hatred.
People are blinded by it, struggle to actively resist it, even cling to it like a religion, like a belief system to which they are somehow twistedly entitled.
And others cower in the presence of it, incapable of affecting it, helpless to escape its influence.
Yet Image Comics’ ‘Infidel,’ a five-issue miniseries collected in trade paperback written by Pornsak Pichetshote and illustrated by Aaron Campbell, seeks to exploit hatred in order to demonstrate through recognizable tropes of the horror genre that bigotry is a monster as capable of haunting humanity as any silver screen spirit or unstoppable slasher. Read more
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