Horror Homeroom

Posted on July 21, 2019

Styx and the ‘Monstrous-Migrant’

Dawn Keetley

Styx (2018) is a taut psychological drama from Austrian director Wolfgang Fischer that turns to horror near its end, offering something of a commentary on horror as it does so. Indeed, Styx is part of an emerging sub-genre of horror that I’m calling the ‘monstrous-migrant’, after Barbara Creed’s ‘monstrous-feminine’.

The film follows a German doctor, Rike (Susanne Wolff), who lives and works in Gibraltar. The first scenes of the film, which show her at work as a trauma physician, are almost entirely silent and dark and strongly suggest the deadening nature of her work. One morning, however, she packs her sailing boat the Asa Gray (named after US botanist and friend of Charles Darwin) with plentiful supplies and sets off to sail down the coast of Africa to Ascension Island in the South Atlantic Ocean.

Posted on July 16, 2019

Crawl: This Summer’s Must-See Naturalistic Creature Feature

Guest Post

For anyone who wished that last year’s shark movie The Meg had an R rating instead of a PG-13 rating, then Crawl won’t disappoint. Director Alexandre Aja’s alligator flick is a fun and gory romp, a nail-biting thriller with naturalistic undertones. While the film may not have as much to unpack as other horror hits this summer, namely Ari Aster’s Midsommar, it’s a wild ride that should titillate horror fans and make for a fun time at the movie theater.

The plot of Crawl, which is expertly written by Michael Rasmussen and Shawn Rasmussen, is straightforward. College swim star Haley (Kaya Scodelario) returns to her childhood home in Florida to locate her father, Dave (Barry Pepper), a recent divorcee who went missing after he was attacked by a gator while trying to fix a pipe in the basement, amidst a Category Five hurricane. It’s probably best not to question why he didn’t just evacuate instead of worrying about home repairs. The film includes some family drama and internal demons, but generally, the plot is straightforward without much subtext. Read more

Posted on July 14, 2019

Stranger Things Season 3 Provides More Gore, More Queer, and More Female Fierceness

Guest Post

Season three of the Duffer brothers’ mega-hit Stranger Things has the fizzy pop feel of a high school rom-com seasoned with heavy dashes of cold war paranoia and splatter-gore grossness of 80s era films. Bowl cuts, bi-levels, and rainbow bright attire are set amidst a sinister Russian operation housed beneath Hawkins’ flashy new Starcourt mall. Extending the series’ admixture of horror and sci-fi elements, the new season regales viewers with exploding rats, human bodies turned into melted piles of blood-tinged gloop, and a gigantic excrement-hued monster.

The season, like the previous two, nods extensively towards iconic horror and sci-fi films. This intertextual aspect of the series, which includes enough Easter Eggs to make even the most avid egg-hunter happy, is most extensively informed by works from Steven Spielberg, Stephen King, and James Cameron. Yes, that’s right, all dudes.

Posted on July 4, 2019

Natalia Leite’s M.F.A. and Survival, Eastwood Style

Guest Post

In Natalia Leite’s 2017 M.F.A., a timid third-year Fine Arts student Noelle (Francesca Eastwood) voices the riposte, “I guess that depends on what law you break” to a women’s student group as its leader condescends to her frustration at Southern California’s exclusive Balboa (actually Chapman University) campus’s complicit rape tolerance policy by warning her that, “If you break the law, there will be consequences.”

This administration-friendly group endorses Rohypnol-sensitive nail polish and keeps busy raising funds to support a woman in Rio de Janeiro who was gang-raped by thirty-three men (the number of assailants and the distant crime site inspires them to name their initiative, ‘Heroes for Rio’): here, Noelle’s protest situates the logic of a truly feminist rape-revenge horror film: patriarchal systems of law force rape victims to take the law into our own hands in order to survive. Read more

Posted on June 26, 2019

We Have Always Lived in the Castle: Novel to Film

Dawn Keetley

In many ways, Stacie Passon’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle (2018) is a remarkably faithful adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s 1962 novel. Indeed, it is perhaps the most faithful Jackson adaptation to date –certainly more faithful than the three principal versions of The Haunting of Hill House, for instance (Robert Wise’s 1963 film, Jan de Bont’s 1999 film, and Mike Flanagan’s 2018 serial Netflix adaptation). In an interview, Taissa Farmiga (who plays Merricat Blackwood) explains “Part of the desire of everybody attached—the director, the producers and actors—was to stick as close as possible to the novel. And when we couldn’t, because things don’t always translate to the screen, we wanted to at least stay close to the essence of what the book is about.

The seemingly small ways in which Passon’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle diverges from Jackson’s novel, however, make a significant difference. Indeed, they shift the terrain of the narrative entirely from the enigmatic and even weird to the profoundly familiar. Passon’s film is still a very good film in its own right, but it simply doesn’t challenge and baffle its viewers the way that Jackson’s novel does.