When people ask me what’s the scariest film I remember from my misspent youth, they’re always surprised when I reference Fortress (1985), a little seen Australian thriller that inexplicably became an HBO mainstay in the late 1980s. Based on a novel of the same name by Gabrielle Lord, the movie centers on a classroom of children and their young teacher, Sally Jones (Rachel Ward), who are taken hostage by a band of homicidal, mask wearing men. With moments of pronounced violence, the film is worth another look by horror fans for the way it leverages its classroom setting to instill fear.

Because horror grapples with the collective anxieties of the time, how a space is viewed by an audience is contingent largely upon the events of the day. For instance, to an audience in the 1930s watching The Lady Vanishes (1938) for the first time, the claustrophobic setting of a train car reads very differently than it does to a millennial audience who may lack a real world understanding for how it feels to travel by train. As a space, the classroom historically represents not only a place of learning, but also a place of security. While this perception has altered radically in the wake of Columbine and Sandy Hook, in the 1980s the classroom did not instantly connote a sense of fear. Read more