Horror Homeroom

Posted on February 20, 2019

A Short History of Teenage Witches

Guest Post

The history of teenage witches is tied to the uncanniness surrounding adolescence. Signifying metamorphosis, uncertainty, and an uncomfortable liminality, the teenage years are a period of intense biological and psychological tumult. Neither adult nor child, straining for independence yet perpetually fettered by the prohibitions of parental authority, teens exist in an ambiguous, in-between state. Adolescence is demarcated by a continuous struggle wherein attempts to mould an independent, authentic adult selfhood are invariably hampered as one is repeatedly drawn back to the dependent state of the child through the omnipresence of familial demands and constraints. At the same time, there is something frightening and unsettling about adolescence. After all, adolescence is perhaps the time when one feels most acutely, and most intimately, the horror of abjection.

In the loosest possible terms, the abject, as coined by theorist Julia Kristeva, refers to that which does not respect boundaries, those things which annihilate the distinction between inside and outside, self and other. Blood and other bodily fluids are archetypal manifestations of the abject; they arouse revulsion precisely because they transgress the boundaries of the body, signifying a breakdown between the protected core of interiority and the Otherness of the external world. Read more

Posted on February 14, 2019

Queering the Family in The Walking Dead

Guest Post

From the first, Rick Grimes’ role as a father has occupied a central place in The Walking Dead franchise. Initially, his quest to find his family drives both him and the narrative onward. Later, he competes violently for the status of sole patriarch of his family (a role that overlaps significantly with his role as leader of his group of survivors), forms new nuclear family units after his wife, Lori, dies, and consistently frames his decision-making as oriented towards making a future for his son, Carl. Perhaps his focus on the family does not seem surprising. Perhaps it even seems “natural.” Perhaps, however, it should not.

My essay, “‘We can’t just ignore the rules’: Queer Heterosexualities,” in the collection The Politics of Race, Gender and Sexuality in The Walking Dead, proposes that both The Walking Dead comics and television show overwhelmingly present, in their narratives, language, and visual representations, the dominance of the heteronormative nuclear family, the ideology that underlies it, and the mechanisms through which that ideology is enforced and naturalized.

Posted on February 12, 2019

Mixed Media in Velvet Buzzsaw

Guest Post

The trailer for Velvet Buzzsaw is a chimerical thing. The first half sells a delicious send-up of the art scene. The “coastal elites” that America loves to hate lean toward expensive art. They murmur terms like “mesmeric” as they nibble their Armani frames. Halfway through the clip, the trailer rears its second head, revealing the campiest of horror as the apparently possessed paintings deliver unto these moneyed elites their bloody comeuppance.

The only through line, stitching these two movies together with Dr. Frankenstein’s hand, is thumping techno. The music, transitioning from sexy electro to dread-inducing industrial, convinces us that either of these movies would be a good time. But can they work together? Velvet Buzzsaw is true to the luxurious bite of its incongruous title. Like Frankenstein’s monster, animated by who-knows-what, pieced together from who-knows-who, this thing is alive, and it’s worth a look. Read more

Posted on February 8, 2019

Horror Noire Reviewed – and 6 Essential Black Horror Films

Dawn Keetley

Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror (2019) traces nothing short of a revolution. It begins with The Birth of a Nation (1915), which perfectly illustrates one of commentator Tananarive Due’s main points, “Black history is black horror.” It ends with the blowing open of restrictions on when and how African Americans become part of the horror tradition. From the most despicable of stereotypes in 1915, we’ve arrived at a moment when African American creators and actors can finally tell the horror stories they’ve long wanted to tell. This film—and where it ends—is thoroughly inspiring.

Directed by Xavier Burgin, Horror Noire is written and produced by Ashlee Blackwell, who runs the website, Graveyard Shift Sisters, and Danielle Burrows. It’s based on Robin R. Means Coleman’s 2011 book, Horror Noire: Blacks in American Horror Films from the 1890s to Present (Routledge)—and Professor Means Coleman is one of the three principal commentators who tell the story of African American horror. The other two commentators are Ashlee Blackwell herself and Tananarive Due, writer of horror and speculative fiction.

Posted on February 6, 2019

Calibre – New Folk Horror?

Dawn Keetley

Calibre is a brilliant Scottish thriller released in 2018 and directed and written by Matt Palmer, who has previously made two short horror films, The Gas Man (2014) and Island (2007). The film features two late-twenty-something men, Vaughn (Jack Lowden) and Marcus (Martin McCann) who head from Edinburgh up into the Highlands to hunt, an activity Vaughn is less than enthusiastic about. They arrive at the Highland village of Culcarran (filmed on location in Leadhills and Beatock in South Lanarkshire) and head straight out for a raucous night at the local pub, replete with enticing local girls. Vaughn, who has a pregnant fiancée, resists temptation and only talks with Iona (Kate Bracken), but Marcus does rather more with the clearly dangerous Kara (Kitty Lovett). Despite hangovers, both men head off the next morning to hunt deer, as planned, but they’re involved in a terrible accident and almost immediately lose control of the spiraling, out-of-control consequences.