Horror Homeroom

Posted on April 30, 2018

Insidious The Last Key: The Demon of Abuse

Dawn Keetley

Insidious: The Last Key, directed by Adam Robitel and written by Leigh Whannell, is an iconic horror film of the #MeToo moment. While the film certainly has some failings as a horror film: it’s not terribly scary and the pacing seems a little uneven, it is eminently worth watching for two reasons: its centering of the story of Elise Rainier (Lin Shaye), whose compelling character is developed for the first time in the franchise; and its explicit rendering of men’s (sexual) abuse of women as what is truly monstrous. The Last Key puts women and women’s experience of abuse front and center, and all credit to Adam Robitel for making another horror film that features a complex older woman and that uses genre film to explore real horrors: he is the director who gave us the brilliant The Taking of Deborah Logan (2014) starring the wonderful Jill Larson as a woman struggling with both Alzheimer’s and the supernatural.

Posted on April 26, 2018

10×10 and the Trend of Women Kept Captive

Dawn Keetley

10×10 is the first feature-length film for director Suzi Ewing. Noel Clarke wrote the screenplay and it stars Kelly Reilly (Eden Lake, Britannia) and Luke Evans (mostly recently in TNT’s The Alienist). The film’s plot is simple: Lewis (Evans) stalks Cathy (Reilly), abducts her, and locks her in sound-proofed (10×10) room in his home. At first, all he asks his captive is what her name is, but as she tries to escape, he gets more violent. As 10×10 unfolds, the viewer’s assumptions about what’s going on take some dramatic turns—and one of the most effective things about this film is precisely the way it plays with viewers’ expectations.

These captured-women narratives are undoubtedly saying something about men’s anxiety in an era of diminishing power—and of the rising power of women. The 2010s kicked off with Hanna Rosin’s major article in the The Atlantic: “The End of Men,” with her book of the same title following on its heels. On the other hand, as important as that general anxiety is, the films are all saying something different in their particular kinds of captivity, the different dynamics they imagine between captor and captive. 10×10 is no exception.

Posted on April 22, 2018

Ecohorror: The Nature of Horror

Dawn Keetley

A repeated visual motif in some recent horror films (actually ecohorror films) is the landscape that engulfs characters. These moments typically involve extreme long shots in which the characters are swallowed by their surroundings. They highlight, most obviously, the insignificance of humans in the face of an overwhelming nature. But they also represent, more ominously, how nature seems to be actively encroaching on the characters, actively threatening them. What happens in these moments is, I think, a distinct variant of ecohorror.

Posted on April 20, 2018

Ghost Stories: Best Horror Film of 2018

Dawn Keetley

Ghost Stories, distributed by IFC Midnight, is directed and written by Jeremy Dyson and Andy Nyman and adapted from their stage play which opened in Liverpool in 2010. The play was notable for its warning that no one under 15 should attend and also for its asking the audience to keep its “secrets.” Like the play, the film definitely deserves to have its secrets kept, and this review is without spoilers. I do know, though, that I’ll undoubtedly write about Ghost Stories in the future because it’s a film with an ending that needs to be talked about. And it’s brilliant. It’s the best horror film I’ve watched in 2018. (While Ghost Stories premiered at the London Film Festival in late 2017, so technically it’s a 2017 film, it didn’t arrive in the US until 2018.)

Ghost Stories centers on Professor Phillip Goodman (Andy Nyman), a profound skeptic who devotes his life to debunking what he sees as the superstitious and destructive delusions of believers. A short home video that plays near the opening of the film explains Goodman’s zeal. As he says, “My father’s religious beliefs destroyed our family.” To Goodman, religious faith, or any faith in the supernatural, is a product of humans’ having to confront mortality and death; it’s a way of dealing with “existential terror.” And he believes it’s a self-deceptive way of dealing with that terror. Goodman lives his life believing one must confront the terror of existence and death, not evade it through lies. His entire life is built on the bedrock of “material evidence” –of apprehending the reality in front of your eyes. The film, not surprisingly, challenges that view.

Posted on April 14, 2018

Watership Down & Eden Lake

Dawn Keetley

Martin Rosen’s famous 1978 adaptation of Richard Adams’ 1972 Watership Down turns 40 this year, and no doubt there will be numerous tributes to the brilliant film that traumatized a generation of children. Indeed, there is a conference planned in November 2018 at the University of Warwick, The Legacy of Watership Down, organized by Dr. Catherine Lester (@CineFeline; @watershipdown40).

I’m very interested, specifically, in Watership Down’s legacy within the horror tradition, and this post just points out one small connection between Rosen’s film and a later important British horror film, Eden Lake (James Watkins, 2008).