- Horror Movie - Horror Homeroom

Posted on December 25, 2021

Midnight Mass and Spiritual Abuse

Guest Post

Content Warning: This article discusses heavy spoilers for Midnight Mass, manipulation, and emotional and spiritual abuse.

Horror holds a mirror up to your psyche and dares you to look at your own risk: it’s a realization of your worst fears. Mike Flanagan’s Midnight Mass (streaming on Netflix) is no different. And for me, a devoutly religious person (Protestant, if you’re curious), the image within the dark mirror of my psyche is the specter of a trauma I’ve survived: spiritual abuse.

Most dedicated horror fans are well aware that abuse can be perpetrated through psychological and emotional means.[i] Spiritual abuse is a similar beast. WebMD defines spiritual abuse as: “Any attempt to exert power and control over someone using religion, faith, or beliefs.”[ii] And Midnight Mass is a veritable hit parade of red flags for spiritual abuse. This post aims to compare every bullet point within WebMD’s guide to spiritual abuse against what the residents of Crockett experience in Midnight Mass.[ii] Read more

Posted on December 19, 2021

Krampusnacht in Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania

Dawn Keetley

Krampus events are springing up around the US – raising the question of why? What draws Americans to this figure indigenous to the Alpine regions of Austria, Bavaria, and southern Germany?

The answer lies most obviously in the human need for ritual – that is, events organized on a calendrical or ‘natural’ rhythm that thus bypass the increasingly insistent presence of holidays controlled (and often created) by corporate interests. While not created by corporations, Christmas certainly seems to have been hijacked by them. In his book about the Krampus as an integral part of “the old, dark Christmas,” Al Ridenour points out that this commercialism may be a particular problem for those Americans “who came of age in the rebellious punk-rock era.” For this generation, the ‘savage’ Krampus “seems to express the requisite countercultural contempt for the Coca-Cola guzzling, bloated patriarch of all that is consumerist and parental.”[i] Krampus represents a darker seam of US culture, one that seeks a form of ‘authenticity’ in the face of a stultifying consumerism—a dark counterpoint to artificial light.

red, black, and white graphic image of two women and a man

Posted on December 13, 2021

Cut by Cut: Parallel Editing in The Hunger (1983)

Guest Post

The phrase “directed by Tony Scott” likely brings to mind images of slickly constructed action movies populated by A-list talent. Before his death in 2012, Scott directed a murderer’s row of stand-out blockbusters that include Top Gun (1986), Beverly Hills Cop II (1987), Enemy of the State (1998), and my personal favorite, Unstoppable (2010). Therefore, discovering The Hunger (1983), Scott’s second feature-length directorial effort, was a tantalizing surprise. The Hunger is an erotic arthouse vampire thriller starring David Bowie, Catherine Deneuve, and Susan Sarandon, components resulting in a film that is equal parts baroque surrealism and morality play. It also features the first prominent feature example of a filmmaking technique that would go on to define Scott’s action filmmaking in subsequent decades: parallel editing.

Parallel editing, the term for cutting together two or more scenes happening at the same time, is responsible for any number of memorable sequences. It is the backbone of The Godfather’s (1972) “Baptism Sequence” just as it is the foundation of the adrenaline-pumping fake-out that is the FBI arriving at the wrong house and leaving Clarice Starling on her own near the end of The Silence of the Lambs (1991). When deployed well, parallel editing can do anything from heightening suspense to drawing thematic parallels between characters all through editing. In The Hunger, Scott, and editor Pamela Power utilize parallel editing at various points to comment on the character’s vampirism and underscore the moral and philosophical aspects of what it means to be a near-immortal figure who violently feasts on human blood. Read more

Posted on December 1, 2021

Poor Monsters and Monstrous Poverty in Antlers

Guest Post

The moments when Scott Cooper’s ambitious foray into the horror genre–Antlers–comes closest to being truly terrifying instead of just jump-scary are those featuring a far more insidious evil than the CGI creature shedding the titular antlers. The connection between these two is one of the more interesting, if ambiguous, aspects of a monster movie which ultimately fails to overcome the latent bias of its sketchy source story. Nick Antosca’s “The Quiet Boy,” the source story for Antlers, looks at its cold, derelict white trash setting with a distanced disdain compromising its teacher protagonist Julia’s (Keri Russell) concern for her alarmingly withdrawn pupil Lucas (Jeremy T. Thomas). Read more

Posted on November 27, 2021

Paranormal Activity: Next of Kin – Folk Horror

Dawn Keetley

As numerous mainstream outlets have very recently declared, folk horror is definitely having a moment. On October 29, 2021, both No Film School and The New York Times described a folk horror “renaissance.” Tellingly, both of these articles center two newly-released high-art / international films—Scott Cooper’s Antlers (produced by Guillermo del Toro) and Valdimar Jóhannsson’s Lamb, the latest horror installment from A24. Both films promise to be, dare I say it, “elevated folk horror,” and, indeed, both articles mention—as recent examples of folk horror—films that have definitely been central to the “elevated horror” movement (e.g., The Witch, Midsommar, The Lighthouse, It Comes at Night, and The Wailing). What these articles fail to mention, though, is folk horror’s recent incursion into films that fall very much on the low end of the prestige spectrum.

Both Mike Nelson’s Wrong Turn (2021) and William Eubank’s Paranormal Activity: Next of Kin (2021) exploit the recent resurgence of folk horror. Both depict a cosmopolitan, urban, and diverse group of young people traveling way out of their comfort zone only to discover an archaic, rural community bound together by old laws and rites and, specifically, by forms of human sacrifice.[i]