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Posted on May 1, 2016

Monstrosity, Creation, and Feminism in Penny Dreadful

Guest Post

Guest Author: Cayla McNally

Both seasons of Penny Dreadful have similar themes: guilt, repression, creation, monstrosity, and the confluence of the sacred and the profane. A huge part of the thematic narrative is duality, a secret self that is harbored away, repressed. As monstrosity is repressed, as the secret self is repressed, the power the characters have over themselves weakens. Ethan represses his lupine nature, which causes him to erupt violently when he does transform. Vanessa represses her natural sexuality, which then leaves her vulnerable to possession. Victor represses Lily’s history, which helps her realize she is immortal.

Monstrosity exists in all of the characters, in two different categories:

-Dorian, Lily, John/Caliban, and Ethan are monstrous in a supernatural way. Control and consent become overarching themes as well, existing at the crossroad of creation and monstrosity. The creatures who see themselves as monsters (Ethan, John/Caliban, Lily) had no control in their creation; rather, they can only control what they choose to do with their monstrosity. Read more

Posted on April 28, 2016

Everything You Need to Know about Penny Dreadful Before Sunday

Guest Post

Guest Author: Cayla McNally

Popular Gothic TV show Penny Dreadful is making its return to Showtime this weekend, and I am beyond excited! Named after a popular form of 19^th century pulp novel, the show is a twisted tale of the dark and supernatural goings-on in Victorian London. The first two seasons have been a beautiful and harrowing ride, and I am curious to see where show creator John Logan will take it next. It can be hard to remember everything that happened in the eighteen episodes of this complex and detailed show, so below you will find season recaps to bring us up to speed for season three. Caution, spoilers abound.

Season 1

Season one begins with, of course, a grisly murder of a woman and her young child, plucked out of their home in the dead of night. The killer remains mysterious and on the loose, though many fear that Jack the Ripper has returned. Meanwhile, Vanessa Ives (Eva Green) approaches American sharpshooter Ethan Chandler (Josh Hartnett); she offers to pay Ethan handsomely for his skills on some “night work.” Intrigued, Ethan agrees to join Vanessa and Sir Malcolm Murray (Timothy Dalton), and promptly follows them- unawares- into a vampire den. It is revealed that Sir Malcolm’s daughter- and Vanessa’s best friend- Mina (Olivia Llewellyn) was captured by one of the creatures. They are attacked, and manage to kill one of the nest’s main vampires; they take the body to Dr. Victor Frankenstein (Harry Treadaway), who discovers that there are glyphs written under the creature’s skin. Egyptologist Ferdinand Lyle (Simon Russel Beale) later discerns that the glyphs are from the Egyptian Book of the Dead and foretell the end of the world. He also believes that the vampires are using Mina as bait, and really want Vanessa. Read more

Posted on April 27, 2016

Shutter Island, Invasion of The Body Snatchers, and H.P. Lovecraft

Dawn Keetley

The central point of debate about Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island (2010), as well as the 2003 novel by Dennis Lehane, is whether the main character (played by Leonardo Di Caprio) is insane or not. Is he Teddy Daniels, a US Marshal who has uncovered a terrifying conspiracy involving experiments on patients at Ashecliffe Hospital? Or is he Andrew Laeddis, a man suffering from a profound delusion that he is a US Marshal because he is unable to confront the truth that two years ago he murdered his wife after she drowned their three children?

I think you can make a convincing argument for both interpretations—part of the brilliance of both novel and film. Here, I just want to point out one specific moment in the film, one that resonates with a classic horror film and that may (or may not) help tip the scales.

Two-thirds of the way through Shutter Island, Teddy Daniels/Andrew Laeddis is in Ward C, where the most violent prisoners are kept, and he hears someone call out “Laeddis.” Moving toward the voice, he repeatedly lights matches in the darkness, trying desperately to “see” (in all kinds of ways). In the frame above, he has arrived at the cell of George Noyce (Jackie Earle Haley)—a man at the very heart of either Andrew Laeddis’s delusion or Teddy Daniels’s conspiracy. We have a shot of Teddy/Andrew’s face, match lit, looking, and then we have the shot below of Noyce, curled up, features indistinguishable. As the two men talk, we’re not sure what Teddy/Andrew learns. Does he learn that the conspiracy exists (that Noyce has been drugged and experimented on by the doctors at Shutter Island)? Or does he find evidence that he (Andrew) has brutally beaten Noyce for confronting him with the truth that he murdered his wife? The frail flame of the match, the darkness, Teddy/Andrew’s confused and horrified expression, Noyce’s indistinct features, and the ambiguity of their words all render the scene fundamentally indeterminate. Read more

Posted on April 22, 2016

Day of the Animals (1977): EcoHorror for Earth Day

Dawn Keetley

Day of the Animals (William Girdler, 1977) is a bad (dare I say, so bad it’s good) disaster / revenge-of-nature ecohorror film that screams seventies. Its plot is simple: a group of assorted characters, who shouldn’t be hiking in the best of circumstances, head up into the mountains just as animals start massing and trying to kill all humans—a phenomenon apparently caused by the thinning ozone layer.

There’s bad acting and plot holes as big as those in the ozone layer (not least, after a violent confrontation, one group chooses to continue up the mountain, yet is thereafter shown trekking down, while the other group, which chose to go down the mountain, is subsequently shown hiking up). There’s utterly horrible dialogue and baffling character development—and more than a few offensive comments thrown at the one Native American character. (I won’t even go into how the women are portrayed!)

The incomparable Leslie Nielsen (yes, one reason to see the film) plays a character who starts out as a straightforward obnoxious advertising executive, yet before long he mutates into a bare-chested survivalist, screaming into the rain, declaring allegiance to “Melville’s God,” shoving a mother and her child violently onto the ground, trying to rape a young woman (after telling her, “You belong to me. I own you”), stabbing a man through the abdomen with a walking stick, and then grappling (willingly) with a very large grizzly bear. The only possible excuse for this startling series of events might be that he is the lone person affected by the depleted-ozone-layer-induced madness that otherwise affects only nonhuman animals. You have to make that leap yourself, though, because the film doesn’t. Read more

Posted on April 20, 2016

13 Cameras Review (2015)

Dawn Keetley

13 Cameras is a creepy horror film that invokes a very real threat: surveillance—the fear we are being watched without our knowledge. It happens more often than we might think.

According to one 2009 report, “There are an estimated 30 million surveillance cameras now deployed in the United States shooting 4 billion hours of footage a week. Americans are being watched, all of us, almost everywhere.”[i]

Playing on anxieties that have only escalated in the post-9/11 years, 13 Cameras suggests that we’re watched not only in grocery stores, at work, and on the street, but also at home. Indeed, the film is at its best when it shows exactly how permeable the home is. Read more