Horror Homeroom

Posted on June 13, 2017

Award-winning Horror Shorts from the Greenfield Youth Film Festival

Guest Post

Not many events foster the creative aspirations of the teenaged filmmaker, which makes the Upper Dublin-based Greenfield Youth Film Festival stand out. On April 27, 2017, this film festival displayed and celebrated short films from all over the state of Pennsylvania. Some of the most clever (and most awarded) films were horror films. After the event, I got the chance to talk with the filmmakers awarded for their work in the horror genre at a private screening on May 7th, or through email correspondence. Below are three films that stood out in the film festival. These expert and passionate films reflect the professionalism and talent of their respective makers.

Posted on June 11, 2017

It Comes at Night: Do You Open the Door?

Dawn Keetley

I’ve been anticipating Trey Edward Shults’s It Comes at Night since I first saw the preview, and it does not disappoint. Indeed, the film exceeded all my expectations. Shults’s second feature film (his first, Krisha, won the Grand Jury Award at South by Southwest in 2015) is a brilliant exercise in building tension: every encounter, every conversation, every shot induces anxiety and dread. The performances of all the actors are superb (especially Joel Edgerton as Paul and Kelvin Harrison, Jr. as his son Travis). Each character pulls you in, making you feel their distinctiveness, making you feel for and with each of them. It Comes at Night, moreover, is unambiguously a film of our historical moment—and it should, and will, prompt conversations about what it’s saying about immigration and borders (open or closed) in 2017.

Posted on June 7, 2017

Raw (Meat): Are We Our Bodies?

Dawn Keetley

Julia Ducournau’s first feature Raw, which she wrote as well as directed, premiered at Cannes last year (May, 2016) and has been drawing praise ever since. The film follows a young woman, Justine (brilliantly played by Garance Marillier), who seems defined mostly by the rigid vegetarianism demanded by her family (her mother in particular) and by her life in the shadow of her more flamboyant older sister Alexia (Ella Rumpf). Justine is just beginning vet school as the film opens, following in her sister’s footsteps. During a hazing ceremony, Justine is forced to eat meat (rabbit kidneys, to be exact), and she then starts undergoing a strange transformation—skin rashes, severe pain, and a craving for meat.

Posted on June 4, 2017

Unfriended: Unfairly Maligned

Guest Post

I have a confession. I love found footage horror and have an undying need to protect the often-maligned subgenre from criticism. I’m not trying to excuse the absolute tripe that sometimes passes for found footage horror, but hand on my heart, one example I feel that was dismissed a little too quickly and energetically by the horror community, is Unfriended (Levan Gabriadze, 2014).

In Unfriended, the internet is a place haunted by characters’ mistakes as much as the supernatural and the insidious potential of social media is at the heart of the film’s construction of fear. A large majority of critics received the film negatively on its release, suggesting that Unfriended was an example of found footage horror trying desperately to stay relevant by co-opting the aesthetics of social media into its repertoire after riding the surveillance-cam wave of Paranormal Activity for the past decade.

Posted on May 17, 2017

Why You Should Watch Hammer’s The Plague of the Zombies

Dawn Keetley

If you haven’t watched the 1966 Hammer film, The Plague of the Zombies (John Gilling), you should. Much of it is fairly standard Hammer fare—set in the nineteenth century, stagey dialogue, filmed on artificial sets—but it has moments of real power, and it’s an important entry in the zombie tradition.

The Plague of the Zombies is a crucial link between the zombie revolution that was about to hit the screens two years later—in George A. Romero’s 1968 classic, Night of the Living Dead—and the zombie films of the 1930s and 1940s, which drew up Haitian lore and in which zombies were mindless bodies under the control of an evil (white) man.