Horror Homeroom

Posted on July 22, 2021

What A Long, Strange Trip It’s Been: Wrong Turn (2021)

Guest Post

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

Posted on July 16, 2021

Jigsaw Pedagogy: The Teaching Strategies of the Saw Franchise

Guest Post

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

Posted on July 10, 2021

Amnesiac Girls: Memory Loss in Young Adult Fiction

Dawn Keetley

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.*

Posted on July 8, 2021

Xenophobia is America’s Deadly Specter in Image Comics’ ‘Infidel’

Guest Post

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

Posted on July 2, 2021

The Bloodcurdling Book Club: Return to Fear Street

Elizabeth Erwin

With genuinely scary jump scares, bloody kill sequences that leave an impression, and a pitch perfect 90s soundtrack, Fear Street: 1994, the first of three book-to-film adaptations dropping on Netflix today, more than lives up to the hype. When news broke that this beloved series was being adapted, we knew that we wanted to go back and revisit a couple of books in the series. And so, this week’s hair raising reads are 1989’s The New Girl and 1991’s Lights Out. A time capsule of questionable sexual politics, these books helped to establish a template of horror storytelling that authors still follow today. On this podcast, we talk blood, guts, and spoilers so listener discretion is advised.

Recommended Reading:

Coppell, Vicki. “The ‘Goosebumps’ in Goosebumps: Impositions and R. L. Stine.” Papers: Explorations into Children’s Literature 8.2 (1998): 5-15.

Jones, Patrick. “Nothing to Fear: R. L. Stine and Young Adult Paperback Thrillers.” Collection management 25.4 (2001): 3-23.

Lair, Mackenzie. “What’s so Scary about Fear Street? A Feminist Analysis of R. L. Stine’s Fear Street Series.” New Views on Gender 15 (2014): 11-15.

Nodelman, Perry. “Ordinary Monstrosity: The World of Goosebumps.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 22.3 (1997): 118-125.

Perry, Leslie Anne, and Rebecca P. Butler. “Are Goosebumps Books Real Literature?” Language Arts 74.6 (1997): 454-456.

Smith, Stacia Ann. The Exploration of Middle School Students’ Interests in and Attractions to the Writings of R. L. Stine. The Ohio State University, 1998.

Tanner, Nicole. “Thrills, Chills, and Controversy: The Success of R. L. Stine’s Goosebumps.” Dalhousie Journal of Interdisciplinary Management 6 (Spring 2010): 1-13.

West, Diana. “The Horror of R. L. Stine.” American Educator 19.3 (1995): 39-41.

Lights Out is very hard to find, but you can get The New Girl from Amazon (ad):