Horror Homeroom

Posted on October 21, 2018

A Rage-Filled Halloween for Our Time

Dawn Keetley

From what I’d read before going in to David Gordon Green’s Halloween (2018), I was expecting a portrait of the deep and lasting effects of grief and trauma. The film chooses to ignore all the sequels to John Carpenter’s 1978 original and picks up the story of Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) many years later, after two failed marriages, a daughter (now estranged), and a granddaughter. Instead of a complex study in the lingering after-effects of trauma, however, Green’s Halloween gives us simple, unalloyed rage. A fitting Halloween, perhaps, for our own anger-filled post-Trump moment.

Posted on October 15, 2018

Channel Zero: Dream Door is Dramatic, Silly, and Scary

Guest Post

The first three seasons of Syfy’s Channel Zero found clever ways to combine fears that veered closer to traditional horror film iconography with those based in the existential and emotional. Indeed, the show’s ability to do just that is certainly a part of why it is arguably the best horror show currently on television. While Channel Zero has cycled through evil puppets, monsters made of teeth, memory clones, cannibals, psychotic dwarves, and meat-men, it has also explored horror present in the everyday: the guilt of losing a loved one, fear of your own mind turning against you, the pain of lingering memories, etc. The emotional depths that Channel Zero so frequently explores are a huge part of what makes the more visceral horror elements work, investing us not only in characters’ safety but often their emotional well-being and ability to live a happy life.

And thus we open the Dream Door, the title of Channel Zero’s fourth season, directed this time by indie horror director EL Katz (Cheap Thrills, Small Crimes). While season one started with a nightmare sequence, and seasons two and three with more traditionally visceral horror sequences, this new season begins with a sex scene. And yet, the sequence feels uneasy: Katz starts with a shot of a conspicuously absent home, slowly and ominously zooming into nothing in particular. Additionally, the first sounds we hear are moans, but without seeing the individuals moaning, it’s tough to tell whether they’re sounds of pleasure or screams of pain. While the opening of Channel Zero: Dream Door departs from more traditional horror, it’s still clear that something is off here, and, to Katz’s credit, this mood never lets up; in fact, it snowballs into even greater tension as we are introduced to our cast of characters.

Posted on October 14, 2018

3 Films That Explain Apostle

Dawn Keetley

Obviously my title here is reductive. No three films can explain any other, especially when that other film is Apostle, the enormously rich new folk horror film by Gareth Evans. But this is a series we’re running (3 films that explain another)—and these three films do explain some things about Apostle, if not everything.

They are The Wicker Man (Robin Hardy, 1973) –not surprising because so far virtually everyone has compared the film to Hardy’s classic folk horror film—The Village (M. Night Shyamalan, 2004 ), and mother! (Darren Aronofsky, 2017), a film I express my loathing for here, but which is nonetheless an important film.

Posted on October 12, 2018

Burning It Down: Fire in The Walking Dead

Guest Post

AMC’s The Walking Dead is back for its 9th season. We’re going to run a series of posts about the series that are distilled versions of the arguments of chapters in our edited collection, The Politics of Race, Gender and Sexuality in The Walking Dead, recently published by McFarland. This collection is not at all the last word –and we’d like to open up more conversations about all these things in the show, especially as the issues raised in the book–and the arguments that get made–change as The Walking Dead narrative continues. To that end, we’re inviting submissions to Horror Homeroom that enter into conversation with this series of posts taken from our book. How do these arguments play out in seasons 8 and 9? If we publish your submission, we’ll send you a free copy of the book.

The second post in the series is from Catherine Pugh . . . This is what she has to say: Read more

Posted on October 6, 2018

Hereditary as Folk Horror

Guest Post

In a recent post on Ari Aster’s debut film Hereditary (2018), Brian Fanelli contends that “grief, mental illness, and the challenges of motherhood are the subconscious fears that erupt after the family suffers one loss after another.” Fanelli thus summarizes the traits passed down through the generations in the film; he also implicitly reads the text as an addition to a canon that follows what Dawn Keetley has identified as “an intriguing new trend in horror film: the horror of motherhood” and, on a larger scale, to what genre critics such as Tony Williams and Kimberly Jackson call “the family horror film.” I argue that a conjoined reading of these ideas in the context of the movie’s central horror plot—possession by a mythological demon as a result of ritualistic ceremonies—situates Hereditary within yet another new (or rather, revived) field in horror studies: folk horror.