Horror Homeroom

Posted on July 16, 2024

Exploring a Filming Location: Alan Garner’s Red Shift – St Mary the Virgin

Dawn Keetley

Alan Garner’s writing is famously bound to the land. One of his best-known novels, Red Shift (1973) is set in Cheshire, Garner’s native county in north west England. Indeed, the novel features specific places and events in Cheshire: Mow Cop Castle, a folly built in 1754 in the village of Mow Cop, split between the counties of Cheshire and Staffordshire, and St. Bertoline’s Church in Barthomley, Cheshire, the site of a Royalist massacre of twelve suspected Parliamentarian supporters in 1643. When the novel was adapted (by Garner himself) for television for the BBC’s Play for Today series, directed by John Mackenzie and airing on January 17, 1978, the adaptation was filmed on Mow Cop, with the folly featuring prominently.

Even though St. Bertoline’s in Barthomley also features in the novel and the adaptation, it did not appear in the film. Instead, the crew traveled 140 miles north and east to film the church scenes in North Yorkshire. I discovered this fact after listening to a brief interview that accompanied the BFI’s DVD release of Red Shift in 2014, in which assistant director Bob Jacobs describes his search for the perfect church – and that he found it in the “North Ridings of Yorkshire.”

Posted on July 8, 2024

Independent Filmmaker Graham Burrell and Horror Short, Grampy

Dawn Keetley

In 2017, we ran a feature by Roman Smith on a local (eastern Pennsylvania) film festival – the Upper Dublin-based Greenfield Youth Film Festival which, on April 27, 2017, celebrated short films by teen filmmakers from all over the state of Pennsylvania. As the writer noted at the time, “Some of the most clever (and most awarded) films were horror films.”

One of those films – Perception – was directed by young filmmaker Graham Burrell, who won an award for Professional Film achievement. Seven years later, I noticed that a short film by Burrell was featuring in our local Southside Film Festival (in Bethlehem, PA). Burrell has graduated from Muhlenberg College and is a video producer and filmmaker based in the Philadelphia area, and he shared his entry and most recent film, Grampy, with us. We’re excited to offer a review of that film, as well as our interview with Burrell.

Posted on July 5, 2024

Considering Catholic Horror Literature

Guest Post

Gavin F. Hurley

I was a teenager when I first watched The Exorcist. It terrified me. Later, in my twenties, I read Blatty’s novel. It still terrified me. But its complexity began to seep in. While the story was entertaining and the style was easy to read, the novel was also intellectual and spiritually engaging. Energized by the horror genre, this balance intrigued me—and sparked my interest in Catholic horror literature.

As many of us know, horror fiction can motivate meaningful inquiry. We ponder imagination when reading Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho. We think about the nature of desire when reading Clive Barker’s The Hellbound Heart. We contemplate the cosmic expanse when reading H.P. Lovecraft’s The Colour Out of Space. But I realized years ago that Blatty’s novel motivates inquiry in a distinctive way. Not only is The Exorcist unapologetically Catholic, but it is also fueled by a classical approach. This is not too surprising. Catholicism has had a long partnership with the classical liberal arts tradition: one where theology reigns as regina scientiarum (queen of the sciences) with philosophy enlisted as her handmaiden. The Exorcist operates in a similar fashion. It is informed by both theology and philosophy. While it is written for popular audiences, many of its dialogues resemble Plato’s: they are fueled by Socratic Method. Moreover, both Chris MacNeil and Father Damien Karras wrestle with various tensions: between theism and atheism, religion and science, faith and reason, life and death, innocence and guilt, and hope and despair. This is the domain of the liberal arts. Meanwhile, the inciting incident—Regan MacNeil’s possession— stirs all these tensions into potent cocktail. Readers drink it down and become intoxicated by the horror of it all.

Posted on July 2, 2024

Under Paris: Sharks Adapting to Ecological Damage

Dawn Keetley

In a recent Horror Homeroom Conversations podcast, we were discussing two ecohorror films – The Great Alligator (Sergio Martino, 1979) and Alligator (Lewis Teague, 1980) – and came to two conclusions. First, that Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975) casts an enormous shadow over the natural horror films that followed. And, second, that there is a formulaic plot structuring such films, one so incredibly common as to seem fixed, inevitable. As we described this plot in the podcast: 1) humans tamper with the natural environment; 2) as a result, a creature launches a rampaging attack on said humans; and 3) the besieged humans fight back – almost always winning. Given our discussion in this podcast, and my recent immersion in natural horror films, I was very excited when Xavier Gens’ new genre film, Under Paris (Sous la Seine) arrived on Netflix. And I was right to be excited: Under Paris is a great natural horror film and now resides among my top 5 shark horror films (I’ll give the whole top 5 at the end!)

Posted on June 25, 2024

The Repair Women of Slumber Party Massacre

Guest Post

Johanna Isaacson

I first watched The Slumber Party Massacre (1982) decades ago, with too-high, too-pure expectations. As a devout horror fan and a dedicated feminist, I freaked when I learned Rita Mae Brown wrote the script. On top of that, the film was the first slasher to be directed by a woman, Amy Holden Jones. Surely, this was a feminist classic I had somehow missed.

Anyone who has studied second wave feminism or queer history will have encountered Rita Mae Brown, the author of Rubyfruit Jungle (1973), a groundbreaking queer bildungsroman. Although her politics grew tepid over time, during the seventies Brown was one of the most visible, charismatic, and defiant defenders of lesbian rights. She was known to call out homophobia in mainstream feminist organizations, such as NOW, and sexism in the nascent Gay Liberation Front. Eventually, in response to this lack of radicality and inclusivity in existent political groups, she helped form the lesbian separatist Furies Collective.

I didn’t quite know how the conventions of an eighties slasher movie could reflect these politics, but I was eager to find out. So, I was puzzled when the Slumber Party Massacre turned out to be what I would have expected from a male writer and director. The film was filled with scantily clad high school girls who are, one by one, penetrated by a sick serial killer’s unsubtle phallic weapon.