Posted on June 17, 2024

Call for Papers — Horror Homeroom Special Issue #9: Body Horror (November/December 2024)

Call for Papers

Though the term was coined in 1986, ‘body horror’ dates back to the beginnings of Gothic literature—Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818); Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886)—and extends into contemporary fiction, film, and new media. From seminal works including David Cronenberg’s The Fly (1986) to contemporary zombie films and portrayals of the digital-corporeal connection, as in the Unfriended franchise and Jane Schoenbrun’s recent I Saw the TV Glow, embodiment remains central to the horror genre. Mirroring the porousness of the body itself, the category evades compartmentalization and definition. 

This special issue will contend with horror’s bodies in all their transgressive fluidity. We are open to essays exploring any texts that could broadly be considered ‘body horror,’ including fiction, film, and new media. We also welcome a variety of theoretical approaches and disciplinary methods. Lastly, since body horror is a global phenomenon, we hope to put together an issue that makes international connections. 

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Posted on June 15, 2024

The Outcasts (Robert Wynne-Simmons, 1982) – Newly Restored Irish Folk Horror Film

Guest Post

Bernice M. Murphy

This review contains spoilers

The current “folk horror revival” has sparked a welcome resurgence of interest in lesser-known and previously neglected creative works. One of the most intriguing – and least seen –  is the Irish film The Outcasts, which, “after a short theatrical run, a limited 1983 VHS release, and an airing on Channel 4 in 1984” went unseen until earlier this year, when the Irish Film Institute’s archival team undertook a “challenging” digital restoration project[1]. It was written and directed by Robert Wynne-Simmons, who more famously, also wrote The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971). Set in the Irish countryside in the early 1800s, The Outcasts furthers the association with rurality and agriculture which characterizes many significant folk horror narratives. It also subtly draws upon the relationship between folk horror and settler colonialism explored in the likes of Kier-La Janisse’s Woodland’s Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror (2021).

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Posted on June 11, 2024

What’s Actually the Problem with M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village?

Guest Post

JDC Burnhil

“Eventually the secret of Those, etc., is revealed. … It’s a crummy secret, about one step up the ladder of narrative originality from It Was All a Dream. It’s so witless, in fact, that when we do discover the secret, we want to rewind the film so we don’t know the secret anymore.”

(Roger Ebert, Review of The Village, 2004)

In most tellings of The Rise and Fall of M. Night Shyamalan, The Village (2004) is treated as Where It Started to Go Wrong. The cause, according to these theorists, was the great success the auteur director had had with films that incorporating a “twist,” such as The Sixth Sense (1999) and Unbreakable (2000); the effect was that he got cocky and made a film around a twist without realizing that twist was “witless.”

After studying the film and many viewers’ responses over many years, I’ve come to a different hypothesis. I believe that the dislike expressed for the “twists” (of which there are really three, not just one) is what doctors call “referred pain” – pain that is caused in one location, but felt in another. The actual cause of most viewer dissatisfaction is a set of much subtler missteps – coincidentally, also three in number.

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A man and a woman look down into a manhole to the sewer below.
Posted on June 4, 2024

Are all creature features the same?: Talking The Great Alligator (1979) and Alligator (1980)

Podcast

In today’s episode, it’s creature feature, B-movie summer horror with 1979’s The Great Alligator and 1980s’s Alligator. Despite their very different settings, both films lean into the carnage caused by their snappy, tail-spinning reptilian monsters while simultaneously suggesting that the true villains are more of the two legged variety. But do their eco-critical considerations resonate with today’s audiences? We’re breaking it all down today with spoilers, so stay tuned.

Recommended Reading:

Bould, Mark. The Cinema of John Sayles: Lone Star (Wallflower Press, 2009)

Gambin, Lee. Massacred by Mother Nature: The Natural Horror Film (Midnight Marquee Press, 2012).

Jones, Matthew. “Antagonistic Nature: The Loss of Anthropocentric Authority in Eco-Horror of the 1970s and 80s.” Supernatural Studies, vol. 7, no. 1, Spring/Summer 2021, pp. 33–47.

Mann, Craig. “America, Down the Toilet: Urban Legends, American Society and Alligator,” in Animal Horror Cinema, edited by Katarina Gregersdotter, Johan Hoglund, and Nicklas Hallen (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), pp. 110-25.

The Great Alligator has just got a 2-disc 4K UHD DVD special release from Severin Films.

Posted on May 30, 2024

Silver and Gold: The Quiet and the Storm Disturbing Hybridity in Agnieszka Smoczyńska’s The Lure

Guest Post

by

James Rose

Agnieszka Smoczyńska’s The Lure (2015) is, like its mermaid protagonists, Golden (Michalina Olszańska) and Silver (Marta Mazurek), a peculiar hybrid: part Horror, part Musical, it is an adaptation of Hans Christian Anderson’s The Little Mermaid that has been fused with biographical experiences from the director’s teenage years, all integrated into the landscape of 1980’s Poland. Combined, The Lure emerges as a coming-of-age narrative that charts Golden and Silver’s transition from teenage girls to young women through increasingly mature first experiences – the “first shot of vodka, first cigarette, first sexual disappointment and first important feeling for a boy.” It is these first attractions and sexual awakenings that form the film’s dramatic core; while Golden, the more aggressive of the two, engages in active seduction, lesbian sex, and savage assaults on men, Silver falls in love with Mietek (Jakub Gierszał), the drummer at the strip club where the mermaids have found themselves living and working. While this affection is reciprocated, the couple cannot physically consummate their love – not necessarily because of the complexities of interspecies sex but more because Silver is not fully a woman, for her body is a hybrid of a female torso and a fish’s tail. There is a further peculiarity about Silver’s body – when out of water she has human legs but between them is only a smooth curve of flesh that is, crudely, described as being “smooth as Barbie dolls.” It is only when she is in water that her human legs transform into the distinctive tail and her reproductive organs are revealed.

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