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Posted on June 7, 2016

Male Rape and Victimology in The Killing Kind (1973)

Curtis Harrington’s The Killing Kind (1973) is quite simply a fascinating study of the politics of rape.

When it comes to the depiction of female rape in American horror, the line between violence and sex has been especially blurred. Whether the rape is part of a revenge narrative (American Mary, Girls Against Boys), a mode to distinguish otherness (Cannibal Holocaust, The Last House on the Left) or a means to convey a political point (The Entity, Deadgirl), the usage of sexualized violence against women in horror narratives is so pervasive so as to become an acknowledged trope of the genre. These scenes, while often explicitly violent, also tend to incorporate close-up shots of naked breasts and writhing bodies and function to make the moment expressly and uncomfortably linked to sexuality.

Conversely, the specter of male rape in American popular culture is relatively uncommon. Often linked to a specific setting such as a prison (The Glass House, Fortune and Men’s Eyes), problematically associated to homosexuality (The Mudge Boy) or immediately and uncomfortably repressed by the other characters (Deliverance), male rape is typically portrayed-when it’s portrayed (it’s telling that I needed to go outside the horror genre to locate films)-as expressly violent without the added sexual subtext. Even in those cases where rape is tied to queer identity, the act itself is shown as being specifically about dominance.

Given that frame of reference, it was with great interest that I recently watched Curtis Harrington’s excellent The Killing Kind. The film opens with the brutal gang rape of a young woman, Tina (Susan Bernard), on a beach. Terry (John Savage) looks on but does nothing to participate in OR to prevent the violence happening in front of him. He is then grabbed by the rapists, stripped, and thrust upon the woman being violated. Terry’s forced penetration of Tina means that in that moment he is both rapist and victim. Read more

Posted on June 4, 2016

Hannah Macpherson’s Sickhouse: Snapchat Meets Found-Footage

Dawn Keetley

Sometimes I forget that Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez’s The Blair Witch Project (1999) is coming up on its twentieth anniversary. I shouldn’t, though, because I regularly teach the film in my Introduction to Horror class and I’ve increasingly found students are just bored by it. There have been films that have attempted to “update” The Blair Witch Project (I thought Bob Goldthwait’s 2013 film Willow Creek was particularly good), but, in many ways, and with all its flaws, Hannah Macpherson’s Sickhouse may be the real heir to The Blair Witch Project. It’s Blair Witch for millennials, for those born not too long before the turn into the twenty-first century and who have lived intimately with social media for their entire lives.

You should watch Sickhouse, I think, for the stark generational differences it points out between teens today and those of us who saw Blair Witch in the theater. Also, for its moments of genuine raw power, as well as the undeniable innovation of telling its story entirely through Snapchat. And, lastly, if you haven’t yet heard of Sickhouse’s director, Hannah Macpherson, well, you need to. Read more

Posted on June 3, 2016

Outcast: “These things are all around us”

Dawn Keetley

Airing on Cinemax on Friday June 3, the first episode of Outcast promises a thoroughly compelling new television series, the most compelling I’ve seen in a while.

Based on the comic of the same name written by Robert Kirkman (and in this opening episode, at least, the series is quite faithful to the comic), Outcast is not unlike Kirkman’s better-known epic, The Walking Dead—although the bleakness of Outcast seems more unrelieved, the characters and landscape more monochrome. Even though the world as we know it is not actually over yet in Outcast, the desolation seems more palpable—perhaps because the world is ending in a way that cuts a bit closer to home than the zombie apocalypse. Despite that difference, Outcast and The Walking Dead are similar in that each takes a violent and easily sensationalized horror subgenre (exorcism, zombies) and weaves it into the fabric of everyday life, creating a horror narrative that relies on realism to induce dread.

At the center of Outcast is Kyle Barnes (played brilliantly by Patrick Fugit). Kyle is the titular “outcast,” although the first episode ends without shedding light on what exactly that means. Kyle has returned to Rome, West Virginia, and is living alone in his childhood home on the outskirts of the dying town. Read more

Posted on May 31, 2016

Southbound (2015) Review

Guest Post

A lonely stretch of desert highway in the American Southwest, offers five stories of terror in the horror anthology Southbound.

Synopsis: On a desolate stretch of desert highway, weary travelers – two men on the run from their past, a band on their way to the next gig, a man struggling to get home, a brother in search of his long-lost sister and a family on vacation – are forced to confront their worst fears and darkest secrets in a series of interwoven tales of terror and remorse on the open road.

Directed by Roxanne Benjamin (producer, V/H/S 1-3), David Bruckner (V/H/S), Patrick Horvath (Entrance) and the film collective known as Radio Silence (V/H/S), the movie stars Kate Beahan (TV’s “Mistresses,” The Wicker Man), Matt Bettinelli-Olpin (V/H/S), and Mather Zickel (TV’s “Masters of Sex,” Hail, Caesar!).

Horror anthologies. I love and respect them for what they are and what they aren’t. For me, it all started with Creepshow then Tales From The Crypt TV series came along and before I knew it, I was building a top ten list of favorites including Tales from The Darkside The Movie, Body Bags, V/H/S/, The ABC’s Of Death, Tales Of Halloween and A Christmas Horror Story. Now I’ve added Southbound to the list. Read more

Posted on May 29, 2016

The Other Side of the Door (2016) and Wake Wood (2009): Folk Horror and Grief

Dawn Keetley

DEFYING DEATH IN THE HORROR FILM: Since at least Pet Sematary (1989), we’ve known it’s not a good idea to try to bring loved ones back from the dead. Indeed, this theme goes back still further. What was Frankenstein (1931), in the end, if not a warning about what happens when you raise the dead? But if horror is at bottom about the inevitability of death, it’s also about our efforts to defy that inevitability—efforts that are at the same time heroic and dangerously hubristic. Both The Other Side of the Door and Wake Wood demonstrate this in terrifying fashion.

The release last week of The Other Side of the Door (2016), directed by Johannes Roberts, written by Roberts and Ernest Riera, and starring Sarah Wayne Callies (The Walking Dead, Colony) and Jeremy Sista (Six Feet Under, The Returned), is a dramatic manifestation of the fact that we’ll never get over (or around) the implacability of death.

Indeed, we can see the persistence of the human desire to overcome death in the fact that The Other Side of the Door is strikingly similar to another relatively recent Irish folk horror film—Wake Wood (2009), which was directed by Arthur Keating and stars Aidan Gillen (Game of Thrones), Eva Birthistle (The Children), and Timothy Spall (Harry Potter, Mr. Turner). Both films are worth watching, both in and of themselves and also because of what their similarities say about an enduring theme of horror. Read more