Horror Homeroom

Posted on November 12, 2020

“We lost her when we crossed the sea”: His House Review

Guest Post

Last year, I reviewed Beneath Us (2019) for Horror Homeroom–a film that positioned immigrants to the US in literal and figurative subterranean spaces beneath American society. Tellingly, that film took far longer to get a release in the land of its origin than it did in Europe. His House (2020) landed on Netflix recently, a film that pairs haunted house horror tropes with the plight of immigrants into Britain, and offers a useful comparison between horror films stemming from migration out of Africa into Europe and from South America into North America. As these examples attest, and sitting as they do alongside a spate of lyrical, challenging and important films that deal with racial disparity, from Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017) to Antebellum (Gerard Bush and Christopher Renz, 2020), genre filmmaking, especially horror, often has licence to address these topics in a far more nuanced and complicated manner than straight dramas, and potentially to reach far greater audiences. Read more

Posted on November 9, 2020

The Haunting of Bly Manor and Relationships Past

Guest Post

The long-awaited follow-up season to The Haunting of Hill House has finally arrived to overwhelmingly positive reviews. The Haunting of Bly Manor, although similar to its predecessor on the surface, is actually a far cry from Hill House. A young American woman named Dani (Victoria Pedretti) takes on the position of an au pair for two young orphaned children at a rural English manor. She is hired by their Uncle Henry (Henry Thomas) who reveals to Dani that the position had proven troublesome to fill because the previous au pair, Miss Jessel (Tahirah Sharif), died by suicide while on the job. When Dani arrives at the estate, she finds there was far more to the original story of Miss Jessel than she was led to believe. Her fascination with her predecessor’s life causes Dani to reflect upon her own recent loss. At Bly Manor, the ghosts of the house are not necessarily the spirits themselves; they are the individuals, both living and dead, and the relationships that consume them. The Haunting of Bly Manor explores the ways in which possessive relationships act as the catalyst for characters becoming possessed through supernatural means. Read more

Posted on November 2, 2020

CFP Nightmares Nations and Innovations, special issue of REFRACTORY

Call for Papers

This is a CFP for a special issue of ‘Refractory: A Journal of Entertainment Media’ that will be themed around Nightmares, Nations and Innovations. This edition will focus on horror outside of film/TV and will be published on Halloween 2021.

Articles (3-8k words) will explore the ways in which the horror genre functions in all its multifarious forms outside of film/TV, to explore the synergies between the horror film and popular culture. By approaching horror away from the screen, it hopes to examine the interconnections between the complex forces at work on both sides of the horror equation: the economies of modern entertainment industries and production practice, cultural and political forums, spectators and fans.

Posted on October 24, 2020

“Fucking Spic Bastard”: Zombies and the Latino Threat

Guest Post

Zombies have become ubiquitous globally in film and television. This undead ghoul keeps returning and finding new ways to infect our screens. Here, I look at Cholo (John Leguizamo) from George A Romero’s Land of the Dead (2005), one of the few Latinx zombies in film, delving into what this ghoul represents.

In 1968 the zombie film forever changed with the release of George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. This black-and-white low-budget horror flick now marks the before and after of zombie films. Before Night of the Living Dead, zombie films saw a transition from the fear-inducing film White Zombie (1932) to more comedic zombie films like 1945’s Zombies on Broadway. After Night of the Living Dead, zombies not only morphed from a voodoo creation into undead ghouls of unknown origins but also moved from exotic lands, outside of the U.S., to Pittsburgh. Thus, zombies were no longer ghouls that inhabited “uncivilized” spaces where tourists, the military, and corporations were at risk but were now an integral part of the American landscape.

Posted on October 20, 2020

Wallpaper + Horror

Guest Post

When Suzy Bannion (Jessica Harper) stumbles down a hallway in Dario Argento’s Suspiria (1977), we sense that the crimson flocked wallpaper is participating in a spell. In a blinding white flash punctuated in Goblin’s score by the word “witch,” a shard of mirror illuminates the dust that permeates the space with cognitive and respiratory menace. Suzy runs her hand along the flocked damask and clutches her chest as she struggles to breathe. In that moment, Argento’s Suspiria not only connects wallpaper to witchcraft, but also evokes, intentionally or not, the real-world pulmonary illnesses of wallpaper factory workers asphyxiated by flocking dust.[i] On screen and off, the allure of wallpaper has always been countered by disquieting side-effects. The bright colors of nineteenth-century wallpapers were made possible by arsenic, known to seep from the walls in damp weather and infuse a room with dangerous fumes. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century advice writers saw in wallpaper opportunities for the aesthetic and moral enrichment of the working class, even while fearing that the sensual impact of the wrong wallpaper might lead astray the sensitive soul. Oscar Wilde once remarked, “Why, I have seen a wallpaper which must lead a boy brought up under its influence to a career of crime”—a joke, perhaps, but one taken seriously by moralists, home decor treatises, and horror films.[ii]