- Horror Movie - Horror Homeroom

Posted on May 23, 2023

Women and Water Monsters

Guest Post

Now that spring’s in the air, the thoughts of horror fans turn to summer. Jaws might put us in the mood for the beach, but perhaps the most disturbing part of the movie is that women serve primarily as victims. Shark bait. Men solve the problem and men wrote, directed, and produced the movie. Why can’t women get a break with water monsters?

Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water (2017) challenged many conventions, making a woman the hero (and “Christ figure” as the resurrected redemptrix), but to get a sense of why it took so long for this to happen we have to cast our eyes back to what is generally considered the nadir of American horror—the black-and-white 1950s. This was the era of irradiated monsters that were often clearly men in rubber suits, wreaking havoc on civilization, or at least beachfront property. There are a couple of unsung women behind the scenes in at least two of these films, beginning with one of the classics from that era, The Creature from the Black Lagoon (Jack Arnold, 1954).

A disheveled man wearing pajamas looks concerned

Posted on May 17, 2023

Beau Is Afraid, Mother Is Guilty: Ari Aster’s Maternal-Horror Nightmare

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Beau Is Afraid seems like something other than a horror movie. It’s nightmare-ish at times but simultaneously absurd and rarely (if ever) scary. It includes some bodily destruction or exaggeration, but these moments are brief or bizarrely humorous rather than straightforwardly horrific. And the movie is mostly described by critics as black comedy or bleak humor, surrealist or absurdist – not as horror.

Its plot doesn’t sound much like a horror movie, either. Beau (Joaquin Phoenix), who has some serious issues with anxiety, is going to visit his mother, but a series of bizarre difficulties prevents him from doing so. As he tries to get home, he discovers that she has died, and then he is hit by a car before he can act on that information. This is merely the opening of the movie, after which he is taken in by (held captive by) a creepily friendly family, adventures through the forest and meets a theater troupe of orphans, and eventually makes it home, where there are still more twists and turns. This sounds weird, but not horrific.

This is a horror movie, though. Read more

Posted on May 8, 2023

Queers to the Front: On Creating Queer Horror Communities, a Conversation with Dani Bethea, Kay Lynch, and Andrea Subissati

Guest Post

Within the pop cultural imagination horror is often positioned as a low-brow, counter-cultural genre that screams in the face of bourgeois tastes. Yet even though the genre may define itself against mainstream or normative aesthetics, its typical fan communities nevertheless replicate the very restrictive structures the genre espouses to critique. Seemingly dominated by cis- heteronormative, white men who consider themselves gatekeepers of generic knowledge, fan communities – at least on the surface – carve out little space to actually challenge normative social values, including those that organize acceptable expressions of gender and sexuality.

Of course, the risk of normalizing this characterization of horror fandoms in the public sphere is that it erases all others who may participate and indeed help to build these communities. Additionally, the assumed alignment between horror and a very privileged fan community creates conditions whereby more marginalized participants feel the need to justify their engagement. Queer or trans fans who take pleasure in remediating horror characters or media may be confronted with backlash from others who are outwardly hostile toward their interpretations and their need to ‘politicize’ horror via their identities (see Vena and Burgess, 2022). As a result, queer and trans fans are left to defend not only their engagements with horror but their very existence in fandoms and society at large.

Although some may consider the above description to be a generalization, it is arguably the perception of who is involved in horror fan communities that is important rather than the anthropological descriptions of actual fan identities. The damage is already done if queer or trans fans perceive horror communities to be hostile and invalidating. This was my own perception of physical and online fan spaces as a trans-queer graduate student completing his doctoral work on the genre, and it gravely prohibited me from reaching out to others to share my insights and research. However, this attitude began to change when I encountered the homegrown Canadian magazine, Rue Morgue and their allied Faculty of Horror Podcast, both of which blend generic criticism with political commentary. Read more

Posted on April 1, 2023

“Talk About Ni’Jah, Get Stung”: Unpacking Swarm, a Sweet Take on Slashers

Guest Post

The horror genre is currently experiencing an interesting slasher renaissance. Our favorite masked killers such as Leatherface, Ghostface, and Michael Myers have all seen reboots, sequels, and even requels in the last few years. However, not all slasher fans have been satisfied with these remakes and have been itching for a new take on the slasher that isn’t just a gorier remake of the original. Janine Nabers and Donald Glover’s new series Swarm is a fresh take on the classic subgenre that gives us all of the gore without the killer hiding behind a mask. Rather, our slasher is a Black person who kills whenever they must to protect their goddess, pop star Ni’Jah.

Played by Dominique Fishback, Andrea Green, “Dre,” is a part of a larger group of Ni’Jah fans called the swarm. If this group sounds familiar, you’re not mistaken as this group is meant to represent the Beyonce stans’ BeyHive. What Naber and Glover seem to be homing in on is the toxic nature of fandom, exploring how far a fan will go to meet their favorite artist. However, what I find most salient in this series is the subversion of the slasher subgenre and the exploration of what happens to a Black Queer child who is left unprotected by their community. Dre’s character tells us that when everyone and everything casts you out of society, the only place left to run to is a Ni’Jah concert. Read more

Posted on March 21, 2023

Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey – The Representational Dangers of “Fun” Horror

Guest Post

Horror films provide paradoxical feelings of fear and fun, offering ways of navigating societal darkness while simultaneously giving us humorous delight. In the case of, Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey (Rhys Frake-Waterfield, 2023), it punches up toward Disney IP and punches down on marginalized audiences. However, the film ultimately spends far more time doing the latter, with its violence and aggression squarely trained on women. Any attempt to speak back to larger forms of power—like Disney’s draconian use and expansion of intellectual property law to protect its economic interests to the detriment of creativity and play—ultimately becomes a fig leaf for what this film really wants to do: dehumanize, sexualize, and punish women.