Horror Homeroom

Posted on September 5, 2018

Teeth: A, Sort of, Superhero Movie

Guest Post

When released in 2007 Teeth seemed to be a very misunderstood film, most particularly by its distributors who marketed it as a sexed-up up body-horror/monster movie. This was summed up by the UK DVD which features on its reverse a coquettish picture of lead character Dawn (Jess Weixler) with various blood splatters around the text. It contrasts heavily with director Mitchell Lichtenstein’s preferred marketing image in which Dawn, dressed in a “Sex Changes Everything” T-shirt stares confused at the viewer. Released on DVD through the Dimension Extreme label (familiar to fans of Torture Porn), Teeth’s very nature as a horror-comedy, and specifically a satire on American sexual values, was obscured.

Posted on August 31, 2018

Creepy CliffsNotes: August Edition

Elizabeth Erwin

Gather ‘round horror fiends because we’re about to unleash some tasty morsels for you to feast upon!

The way we see it, the only downside to everyone talking about the horror genre is that there’s never enough time to read everything. So we’ve decided to whip up a new monthly feature called Creepy Cliff Notes where we give you a heads up on some think pieces or news items you may have missed. Think of it as syllabus reading you’ll actually want to do.

We’re Gremlins getting fed after midnight levels of excited!

Posted on August 30, 2018

Summer of 84 and Cinematic Nostalgia

Elizabeth Erwin

If you’ve heard anything about Sundance’s much buzzed about Summer of 84, it likely revolves around its soul crushing ending. And while the last act of the movie does deliver a gut punch you won’t be able to stop thinking about, its impact ultimately stems from its very subtle but highly effective deconstruction of cinematic nostalgia. Directed by the trio RKSS (François Simard, Anouk Whissell and Yoann-Karl Whissell), Summer of 84 is, on the surface, a coming of age movie about a quartet of boys who become convinced that their neighbor Wayne Mackey (Rich Sommer), a local cop, is a serial killer. Most reviews have drawn parallels with Neflix’s Stranger Things and given the movie’s focus on adolescent friendships, it’s an apt comparison. But I suspect that the filmmakers are actually referencing- very specifically- another rite of passage movie: Rob Reiner’s 1986 classic Stand by Me. Read more

Posted on August 29, 2018

The Gifts of Deafness in Horror

Guest Post

There remains debate as to whether deafness and hearing-impairments should be classified as disabilities. Many, including those within the deaf community and their allies, affirm that deafness is a culture rather than a disability. Still, others affirm that having a hearing impairment imposes disadvantages on an individual. We can think of many ways that being deaf brings challenges in common daily life activities- the ringing of a doorbell, the answering the telephone, the knock of a door. In horror media, deafness may mean missing the screams of loved ones, or not perceiving an audible threat, until the threat is close enough to sense by other means.

Horror characters rely on specific strengths to get through the terror they are experiencing and/ or to survive. In some examples of television and film, deaf characters utilize their hearing impairments as a gift to fend off the horrors while the hearing characters around them remain vulnerable. In these instances, we see a paradigm shift from one in which deaf persons suffer incapacities to one in which their deafness relates to a tenacity in the face of terror, even as they maintain their human vulnerability.

Posted on August 21, 2018

The Foaming Node: A mutant cult and television

Guest Post

Those seeking to replicate the random strangeness of Television by ‘googling’ bizarre keywords may be afflicted by a sense of emptiness. This is because excess brings eternal hunger rather than satiation where there is always something darker, more obscene and twisted waiting for the right hashtag to emerge. One may eventually realize that even though the media junkyard of the Internet certainly supersedes Television in terms of perversity, it is missing the uncertainty that made the latter a special source of weirdness. Let us remember that unlike the sinister infinity of the online (nether) world, morbidities were promised but never guaranteed by the preprogrammed broadcast of the TV. This absence of choice imbued viewing experiences of the weird kind with a unique sense of awe; as one could equally stumble upon the bizarre—ranging from exposes on outlandish cults to psychosexual documentaries on alien abductions—or the oppressing normality of John Travolta in Look Who’s Talking Too (1990). The Foaming Node (65min, 2018) by Ian Haig, which recently screened at the Revelation Film Festival in Perth, seems to borrow from Television’s dark sense of marvel to deliver a story about a freakish cult.