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Posted on September 17, 2015

Backcountry (2014)

Dawn Keetley

Summary: In Backcountry, A couple, Jenn (Missy Peregrym) and Alex (Jeff Roop) go camping in the woods. They encounter a bear.

If you want to see a truly terrifying film, forget going to the theater to see M. Night Shyamalan’s The Visit. Spend the money on Backcountry, a 2014 Canadian film that opened in the US in March 2015 and was recently released to video on demand through services like Amazon and itunes.

I was transfixed by this film: it’s simple (deceptively so), beautifully filmed, well-written and acted, and will grip you from beginning to end.

One of the brilliant things about the film is that while it is, on the one hand, thoroughly grounded in the real world—no monsters, nothing supernatural—it is nonetheless steeped in the horror film tradition. Indeed, it brings the naturalistic world into the realm of horror so unobtrusively that you don’t realize what’s happening on first viewing—and so you don’t know exactly why you’re so uneasy when the characters go swimming, when they walk through the woods, when they hear acorns falling.

Posted on September 16, 2015

Top Ten Horrific Characters from Childhood Films

Gwen

Perhaps the reason I always loved fantasy as a child is because it teeters on horror for kids. There is adventure, danger, perseverance, and imagination. If you doubt me, consider the darkness in the original Grimm fairy tales or many old nursery rhymes. They follow a similar format and in fact are so closely representative of the genre that horror guru Noel Carroll specifically distinguished his definition of art horror from fantasy. Of course, not all fantasy is horror; however I would like to reveal to you some of the characters and films from my childhood that still send chills down my spine. I am totally giving away my age with this list, but please enjoy the momentary glimpse into my psyche and feel free to add your own.

Posted on September 15, 2015

Can a Procedural be Horror-Lite?: Considering Red John

Elizabeth Erwin

There have been some wonderful think pieces recently about the graphic nature of procedural drama and whether the violence and depravity depicted impacts viewers in the long term. Many of the arguments revolve around whether disturbing images trigger thoughts and even actions in viewers. To horror fans, those concerns are familiar ones. And so I was interested in looking at a procedural and how the images presented echoed or contradicted what we see so often in horror.

Selecting the right procedural, however, was complicated. Initially, I thought that the Law and Order franchise, with its graphic depictions of a wide variety of perverse crimes, would most easily fit the bill. However, in viewing numerous episodes, it became clear that the narratives in this franchise were almost exclusively focused on the aftermath of the crimes. The audience is neither asked to participate in the crime as a spectator nor to have an emotional reaction to the crime as it is being perpetuated. The series fails to deliver the emotional arc inherent to the horror film because there is no anticipation of the horrors to come. And so I finally settled on taking a closer look at The Mentalist (CBS, 2008-2015) a procedural that used victimology and gore in a wholly new way.

Posted on September 12, 2015

The Visit (2015) Film Review

Gwen

The Visit

PG-13 | 94 min | M. Night Shyamalan | (USA) | 2015

Review: I should have gone to see Gremlins at the midnight movies tonight.

Synopsis: A brother and sister go for a week-long vacation to visit their grandparents for the very first time. Upon getting to know their grandparents they learn that there is something greatly awry in their Pennsylvania farmhouse.

Grade: D

The only thing going for this review is that I had about four hours in the car to think about it prior to going on a massive stream of conscious rant about how disappointed I was. Frankly, the only thing scary about this movie was that immediately after the film I was attacked by my neighbor’s dog. The most humane way I can put this baby down is to argue why I was so let down by this film.

I noticed that several film sites bill this movie as horror / comedy. Spoiler alert…it was neither.

Posted on September 11, 2015

127 Hours: Geological Horror

Dawn Keetley

Animal and even plant horror are familiar categories: you can find entries for horror films featuring mammals, reptiles, amphibians, insects, birds, and plants, for instance, on Wikipedia (check out the List of Natural Horror Films). So far, however, you’ll be hard-pressed to find anything about geological horror. So where are the horror films about rocks and minerals? (That’s not a rhetorical question: if you know of any, please let me know!) My main purpose in this post is to suggest a candidate for the horror genre that features a boulder. The film is 127 Hours (2010), directed by Danny Boyle of 28 Days Later (2002) fame. It depicts the (real) ordeal of Aron Ralston (James Franco), whose arm becomes trapped by a boulder as he’s climbing in Blue John Canyon in Utah: as the title suggests, he spent 127 hours in the canyon before freeing himself by amputating his arm and stumbling across the desert to find help.

There are, of course, a multitude of films about natural disasters (tsunamis, volcanoes, earthquakes, avalanches etc.), but these films tend not to be horror films (they’re routinely classified as action)—and natural disasters are typically not exploited in the horror genre—except sometimes as plot devices to trap characters in places where they have to face other monsters. 127 Hours is a horror film. The film is not wholly horror; indeed, it swerves away from horror near the end. But in and by that swerve it demonstrates what actually makes a horror film (and what doesn’t).