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Posted on February 27, 2016

PREVIEW – Rainy Season: When it rains . . . they pour

Dawn Keetley

As a fan of Stephen King and of indie horror film, I was excited to hear about a project underway to turn King’s story “Rainy Season” into a film. First published in Midnight Graffiti in 1989, “Rainy Season” also appears in King’s third collection of short fiction, Nightmares and Dreamscapes (Pocket Books, 1993).

The story is a kind of surreal piece of American Gothic. Evocative of the earlier “Children of the Corn” (1977), and yet much more uncanny, it follows a couple (John and Elise Graham) who have driven across the country to spend the summer in the small town of Willow, Maine. Arriving at the strangely deserted town center, they are warned away by two residents because for one night every seven years, it pours toads in Willow. Needless to say, John and Elise don’t heed the locals’ warning, and the story follows them on their first eventful night in the town.

Posted on February 24, 2016

Origins of the Final Girl: Ann Radcliffe and American Mary

Guest Post

Laura Kremmel

In Ann Radcliffe’s 1794 four-volume Gothic novel, The Mysteries of Udolpho, the heroine Emily is incarcerated in the castle of Udolpho after her father’s death and the subsequent guardianship of her aunt and new husband, Montoni. Montoni brings her to Udolpho in order to coerce her to marry his friend, Morano, threatening her virginity, and her life until she agrees to do so. Emily, in other words, is in a position of subordination, instability, and danger typical of eighteenth-century Gothic literature: we see it in Walpole’s Castle of Otranto, Lee’s The Recess, Lewis’s The Monk, and the list goes on. Some version of female incarceration happens in nearly all of Radcliffe’s novels, though Udolpho is her most iconic.

Though Radcliffe’s heroines may not be as obviously strong and independent as the horror film women discussed during Women in Horror Month, I want to argue for them as precursors to Carol Clover’s “Final Girls”: women who, through their own ingenuity, survive the men (or monsters) who threaten them with violence and/or sexual assault.

Udolpho is well-known for exhibiting Radcliffe’s characteristic “explained supernatural”: Suggestions of a supernatural force throughout the text are revealed to be the misinterpretation of natural and easily-explained occurrences by the heroine. However, the “natural” threat to her life and person is still very real. The men who fill the castle and stalk the hallways of Udolpho make murder and rape more terrifying than any supernatural element. But what makes Udolpho noteworthy in the context of Women in Horror Month is that, despite the images of death and horror that Emily encounters around every corner of her new prison/home, she refuses to be intimidated into a marriage with a man she despises, and she eventually escapes with the help of her sympathetic servant and a mysterious stranger.

Posted on February 21, 2016

The Witch: Dread-Soaked Wilderness

Dawn Keetley

With The Witch, Robert Eggers has written and directed one of those rare horror films that will, without a doubt, enter the canon of important and enduring horror films. It will be loved by all kinds of fans for all kinds of reasons; and it will be talked about for years and taught in film classes. In case that puts you off, don’t let it! The Witch is also beautiful, viscerally disturbing, and downright scary. The acting is brilliant—especially Ralph Ineson as the father, William, and the luminescent Anya Taylor-Joy as his eldest daughter Thomasin. Try taking your eyes off her when she’s on the screen.

Posted on February 21, 2016

The Final Girl, Pt. 4: The Hostel Films and Paxton as “Final Girl”

Dawn Keetley

In my third post on the Final Girl, I argued that Halloween H20 (1998) and Halloween: Resurrection (2002) signaled the end of the traditional Final Girl of the slasher plot—and that things were about to change as we entered the twenty-first century.

Eli Roth’s Hostel (2005) marks that change—a change that Roth makes clear by having the ending of Hostel and the beginning of Hostel, Part 2 (2007) echo the iconic Friday the 13^th (Sean S. Cunningham, 1980) and Friday the 13^th, Part 2 (Steve Miner, 1981), but with a crucial difference.[i]

Friday the 13^th famously ends with the Final Girl, Alice (Adrienne King), decapitating Pamela Vorhees (Betsy Palmer). Although she survives the first round of carnage at “Camp Blood,” Alice’s luck runs out as Friday the 13^th, Part 2 begins. Still traumatized, she lives only long enough to see the worst of her nightmares realized: while making tea and feeding her cat, Alice is attacked and killed by Jason Vorhees, bent on avenging his mother.

Posted on February 19, 2016

The Final Girl, Part 3: The End?

Dawn Keetley

By the end of the 1990s, the Final Girl trope had arguably run its course, at least within a conventional slasher narrative. One reason for this, I think, is because of the self-reflexivity of horror in the 1990s. The persistent reflection of one character by another, on TV screens and in mirrors, started to disclose how characters were trapped in a mirror of reflections that was preventing radical transformation.

The Halloween and Scream franchises are deeply reflective of each other. And while one of the things the Scream franchise was known for was its self-reflexivity—its internal explicit references to other films—the Halloween franchise (beginning twenty years earlier) was actually the first to build into its narrative meaningful references to other horror films.

Halloween (John Carpenter, 1978) famously weaves Christian Nyby’s 1951 sci-fi horror film The Thing from Another World into its plot. Lindsey and Tommy are watching the film throughout the fateful Halloween evening—and it’s not just a throwaway reference. In the earlier film, the “Thing,” an alien from another planet, is called a “boogeyman on ice”—and is an utterly inhuman, emotionless killing machine. Michael Myers, called “The Shape” in the credits, is also, of course, an inhuman, emotionless killing machine, and the last exchange of the film is Laurie (Jamie Lees Curtis) saying to Dr. Loomis (Donald Pleasence), “It was the boogeyman.”