Some columns for Flow written in 2013 – 2014 on Showtime’s /Dexter/, AMC’s /The Walking Dead/, and FX’s /American Horror Story
Posted on March 23, 2015
Empowerment of the Traditional in John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978)
Elizabeth ErwinReleased in 1978, John Carpenter’s Halloween not only gave Jamie Lee Curtis her definitive Scream Queen role but it also gave audiences one of the best known horror film villains of all time in Michael Meyers. On its face, the story is a simple one. On Halloween night, six-year-old Michael murders his sister and is placed in a psychiatric hospital. On the fifteenth anniversary of his incarceration, he breaks out intent on exacting revenge.
One of the reasons I keep coming back to this film is because of how effectively it uses cultural norms to elevate the horror.
Spring has officially sprung and soon many of us will begin traveling in droves toward bodies of water for some rest and relaxation. As I ponder my own escape to the rocky shores of Cape Cod, it evoked images of all the things that lurk below the surface of the water. In commemoration our looming return to nature I thought it best to remember that when you don’t respect nature, it certainly won’t respect you. Below is a diverse conglomeration of American natural horror films focused on aquatic animals.
Noël Carroll’s theory of art-horror has always seemed a particularly compelling one to me—that the genre is defined by a monster characterized by impurity, by the yoking together of contradictory categories (the living dead, for example), thus evoking fear and revulsion in the viewer.[i] His theory notoriously has difficulty, though, accounting for the very human “monsters” of some horror films.[ii] What do we make of Billy Loomis (Skeet Ulrich) in Wes Craven’s groundbreaking 1996 film, Scream? Billy is human, isn’t he? In fact he’s the very normal boyfriend of the heroine, Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell), seemingly no different from any other high-school student.
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Synopsis: Leprechaun features a malevolent leprechaun who loses his pot of gold to a stranger. He spends the next decade lying in wait for the perfect opportunity to use a combination of trickery, magic, and brute force to reclaim his spoils at any cost. (My synopsis…not IMDB for once)
Review: ‘Leprechaun’ fills the end of the rainbow with some on-screen gems.
