Horror Homeroom

Posted on April 5, 2020

Vivarium Rewrites The Twilight Zone

Dawn Keetley

Shown at festivals in 2019 and released widely in March 2020, Vivarium is the second feature by Irish director Lorcan Finnegan and writer Garret Shanley. It’s a brilliant, albeit devastatingly bleak film that also happens to echo—as so many horror films do—one of the best episodes of The Twilight Zone.

Finnegan and Shanley’s first feature, Without Name (2016), is an eerie folk horror tale about a surveyor (Alan McKenna) who travels to the woods outside Dublin in order to assess it for development. Once there, though, he meets unwelcoming locals and an equally unwelcoming forest, which seems (at first, at least) resistant to his encroachment. As I said in my review, Without Name is slow-paced and eerie, and I’ve seen few films that so expertly draw on the landscape as a real force in the drama; shot in the awe-inspiring Glendalough National Park in County Wicklow, Ireland, it is a beautiful film.

Finnegan and Shanley’s second feature, Vivarium, is completely different. It is, however, equally provocative, and it’s a film you should be equally sure to watch. Vivarium is less akin to Finnegan and Shanley’s first feature than to their earlier short film, Foxes (2012), which you can watch here, and in which a couple is trapped in a housing estate and then lured away by foxes. It’s an enigmatic film that shares Vivarium‘s setting—a soulless housing estate.

Posted on April 2, 2020

Bless This Mess: Transgressive Untidiness in The Voices

Guest Post

Home is where the horror is. Some of the most iconic horror settings are homes, whether single-family houses in movies like Halloween and Poltergeist, sprawling estates like Manderley in Rebecca or Allerdale Hall in Crimson Peak, or inhabited hotels like the Bates Motel or the Overlook. The residence of interest in Marjane Satrapi’s 2014 film The Voices is a single converted apartment in an abandoned bowling alley, where Jerry (Ryan Reynolds) lives with his dog, Bosco, and his cat, Mr. Whiskers. It’s also where he butchers and stores the women whom his pets have told him to kill. However, it isn’t the murder or dismemberment that we’re made to find horrific; it’s the mess.

Jerry has an unnamed mental illness. He hears his pets talk to him, like an angel on his shoulder that needs to go on walks and a devil on his other shoulder that needs its litter changed. For most of The Voices, we see Jerry’s apartment as he sees it – a tidy one-bedroom apartment that’s an unremarkable background for his life. But in a few specific scenes, we see that this is in fact a delusion or a fantasy. The apartment is actually cluttered and filthy. Through the editing, acting, mis-en-scène, and the contrast of fantastic and realistic, the unseemly state of Jerry’s apartment is made horrific, more than the blood and body parts.

Posted on March 28, 2020

Blacula (1972): Flawed But Important

Guest Post

Blacula (William Crain, 1972) is an interestingly complicated watch; unlike many films at the time, Blacula was the product of a black director and was born out of and into the 1970s political terrain and within the explosion of “blaxploitation” as a subgenre. Blacula is arguably a pioneer of black horror, which might be thought of as the reinvention of the genre “from the vantage point of Blackness.”[i] More particularly, Robin Means Coleman offers that “in ‘black horror’ specifically, mainstream or White monsters, such as Dracula or Frankenstein’s the Monster, were purposefully transformed into ‘agents’ of Black power.”[ii] Due to the lack of representation of blackness with the film industry at the time, one can hardly refute the impact Blacula had on the audience and the industry, setting a “gold standard,” as Means Coleman puts it.[iii] I want to argue, though, that in spite of Blacula’s attempts to interrogate racism and embody black pride, ultimately, the film articulates a very limited definition of blackness, presenting the dichotomy of an African identity that is primitive and brutish and an African American identity that is respectable and professional. Both depictions of blackness are masculine and predicated on the violent reinforcement of stereotypes and the maintenance of hierarchy.

Posted on March 26, 2020

Night of the Living Dead in the Time of Confinement and the Coronavirus

Guest Post

George A. Romero’s classic zombie trilogy, Night of the Living Dead (1968), Dawn of the Dead (1978), and Day of the Dead (1985), is the ultimate example of the zombie as a social metaphor. Countless articles have been written about each film, especially the racial undertones of the first film. In the age of the Coronavirus and confinement, Night of the Living Dead suddenly warrants a re-watch. When survivors are trapped inside a farmhouse, the social equilibrium is reset–and the film mirrors some of the worst aspects of human nature during a societal breakdown and confinement. Even the (anti)hero, Ben (Duane Jones), commits heinous acts that he most likely would not have otherwise. Yet, the film also shows a few of humanity’s bright spots.

Though shot outside of Pittsburgh, Night of the Living Dead is a film that could take place anywhere, which, again, makes it all the more relevant during this global pandemic. As of the time of writing this, COVID-19 has impacted every state and nearly every country. Cities have been hit the worst, specifically New York City, but the virus knows no boundaries and has started to spread through rural pockets of the country, more evocative of Romero’s setting. The radio and television reports that speak of the growing outbreak in the film have an eerie parallel to our current moment, as each day brings more grim news. Read more

Posted on March 22, 2020

Lady in a Cage: Early, Devastating Home Invasion Film

Dawn Keetley

Lady in a Cage (1964) is a deeply disturbing film. I was, to put it bluntly, shocked that a film this dark was made in the early 1960s. It anticipates some of the more nihilistic horror films of later decades—notably Wes Craven’s Last House on the Left (1972), Michael Haneke’s Funny Games (1997 and 2007), and Bryan Bertino’s The Strangers. Indeed, these films seem at times explicitly to reference the earlier film.

Luther Davis wrote the original screenplay for Lady in a Cage, and the film was directed by Walter Grauman. Aside from its unremitting bleakness, the film is also notable for its stars: Olivia de Havilland plays Mrs. Hilyard, the eponymous “lady in a cage,” and one of the invaders of her home, Randall Simpson O’Connell, is played by a young James Caan in his first substantial role in a feature film.