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Posted on August 12, 2015

Menstruation in Popular Culture: Part 1

The spectre of menstruation in horror films has long been problematic. From the shameful and mocked first period of the titular character in Carrie (1976) to its role as the trigger that leads Ginger to sexually assault a boy in Ginger Snaps (2000), menstruation in horror is often used as a visual identifier of the threat women and their sexuality pose to society. With that in mind, I have been interested in looking at how this threat plays out on television and whether the perceived horror is any different from that found within horror films.

Posted on August 10, 2015

CBS’s Zoo: Animals Fight Back

Dawn Keetley

Based on James Patterson and Michael Ledwidge’s novel of the same name, CBS’s Zoo is my guilty pleasure of the summer. It’s a TV series firmly in the eco-horror / revenge of nature sub-genre, and its many flaws haven’t yet dispelled its power. Zoo has many of the flaws of network TV shows—some badly-written dialogue, an overly melodramatic plot, too frenetic a pace—but it’s really quite engaging, more so than other series I began hopefully after reading the novel (i.e., Under the Dome, The Strain, The Last Ship), only to abandon them after a few painful episodes.

Zoo tells the story of animals—lions in Botswana and LA, wolves in Mississippi, dogs in Slovenia, bats in Rio de Janeiro—who inexplicably abandon their habitual behavior and band together to attack the heretofore dominant species. And they aren’t killing for food or to protect themselves. Groups of animals across the globe engage in what can only be called premeditated and purposeful acts of murder. An eclectic group of “experts” is drawn together to figure out what’s happening—and why. The five main characters are likeable and the actors do a surprisingly good job given the sometimes cringe-worthy places the plot takes them.

Posted on August 7, 2015

Starve (2014) Film Review

Gwen

Synopsis of Starve: “While researching an urban legend on feral children, three friends find themselves trapped in an abandoned high school, where they are confronted with an evil more sinister than the legend itself.” (imdb.com)

Review: Starve whets the palate but never satiates the horror lover’s appetite.

Posted on August 3, 2015

Sacrifice and the Horror Film: The Wicker Man and The Cabin in the Woods

Dawn Keetley

Sacrifice is a central component of the horror narrative. We’re not talking about heroic self-sacrifice here (though that is sometimes on display): rather, horror films dramatize some seemingly primordial need, which runs through stories of the very earliest human cultures, to sacrifice others. Sacrifice is usually about appeasing “gods”—indeed, William Harmon has written that sacrificial killing is “inherent in the religious worldview.” The motif of blood sacrifice, though, has “frequently been disguised or attenuated” in the modern world, Harman continues. [i] And here’s where the horror film comes in, with yet another of its crucially important cultural functions. The horror film represents both the persistence of blood sacrifice and its “attenuation” or “disguise.” Sacrificial violence is indulged in, yet is displaced from the realm of the real to the realm of film (although the line separating those two realms is often much thinner than we might think).

Posted on August 1, 2015

Horror Rewatch: The Blair Witch Project (1999)

Elizabeth Erwin

Love it or hate it, there is no denying the impact The Blair Witch Project had upon the horror genre with its 1999 release. Not only did the marketing campaign utilized by its distributor take a page from the Hitchcock playbook in building up audience expectation, but it also reframed the horror trope of “recovered footage” as a means of accessing the horror. As the story of a group of filmmakers who embark on an ill-fated journey into the woods in an attempt to discover proof of a witch, this film is most remembered for its shaky hand-held visuals and reliance upon its audience to create a sense of horror using their own imaginations.
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