- Horror Movie - Horror Homeroom

Posted on November 20, 2021

Lamb: A Tender Tale of Grief, Full of Hidden Horror

Guest Post

Folklore, fable and family dynamics breed a challenging chimaera of a movie the horror of which arrives with the self-evidence of fairy tales. Such are part of the inspiration for Icelandic debut-director Valdimar Jóhannsson’s captivating cinematic condensation of mythologic motifs from his home country. Its people’s close conjunction to nature – a relation revealed by seemingly incidental scenes to be far less symbiotic than the protagonist couple on their remote, yet idyllic sheep farm might believe – drives a metaphor about grief and gifts that were never ours for the taking. This image of giving and receiving is augmented by the narrative’s starting on Christmas Night.

green image of woman dressed as a nurse looking at the camera

Posted on November 8, 2021

Never seen before now: Grave Encounters and the Allure of Paranormal TV

Guest Post

Popular ghost hunting shows come in a variety of flavors with a universal appeal to cheese and camp. There’s the wildly popular roto-rooting Ghost Hunters originally airing on Sci-Fi and the bro-fest that is Ghost Adventures usually repeating every tired episode on Discovery+’s pantheon of channels. Even Ozzy, Sharon, and Jack Osbourne have joined the pseudo-scientific quest to prove what usually happens just slightly off camera. Shows like these all follow a similar formula. They are contingent on the audience’s willingness to blend our disbelief with what is manufactured on screen. By the end of the show there is still no proof of the hereafter, of residual or intelligent hauntings, or of demons who have chosen to just loiter in abandoned buildings for kicks. Viewers return from the spectacle safe from their tentative exploration into the outer limits of their knowledge. If the ghosts are not real, then at least we know the rules of our universe still hold, right? Read more

priest in a white robe on the pulpit with open arms

Posted on October 13, 2021

How Mike Flanagan’s Midnight Mass Criticizes Charismatic Christianity & Christian Nationalism

Guest Post

When Midnight Mass, Netflix’s latest horror hit series, took the horror fandom by storm on social media, I knew I was in for a treat. And I was not disappointed. Mike Flanagan has been producing solid horror projects ever since his powerful and eerie haunted house horror, Oculus (2013). His works tend to explore our relationship with trauma using horror narratives to elevate the affective responses. In his latest effort, Midnight Mass, Flanagan shifts his focus to religious beliefs as a means to explore trauma and violence. Many other writers have highlighted Flanagan’s nuanced criticism of “faith,” which sets the series apart from other less empathetic religious-horror fare. Like other mainstream discussions of religion in popular culture, these analyses and deep readings of the series offer all-encompassing conclusions using vague and often complex terms such as “faith,” “religion,” and “cult” without much critical unpacking. What sets Midnight Mass apart from other religious-horror films, such as The Exorcist (1973), Midsommar (2019), or Red State (2011), is its awareness of the devastating effects of neoliberal capitalist ideology on charismatic Christian movements.

Before analyzing Midnight Mass, let me clarify both aforementioned terms. Charismatic Christianity is a religious movement that emphasizes an individualist approach to Christianity. It highlights a personal relationship with Jesus, prophecy and biblical literalism, glossolalia, faith healings, and other “gifts” from the Holy Spirit. In essence, in charismatic Christianity, practices are understood to be less about the community and more about the individual. For example, in Charismatic Catholicism, a movement heavily inspired by its Protestant counterpart, the Eucharist, representing communal worship, becomes less important as more individualized forms of worships are put forth. Read more

Posted on October 11, 2021

The Son of Abraham and Cult Psychology

Guest Post

Our fascination with cults goes deep. It’s hard to watch crime shows, read thrillers, or horror without a cult or two popping up somewhere along the way. It’s become cliché, a trope, a predictable element of how we scare ourselves. We joke about tight-knit clubs, gyms, friend circles as being cultish, and we laugh. The psychology isn’t too hard to figure out: what is horror except a way to play out all the possible terrors that might occur before they actually do? It’s why we watch scary movies, why we devour true crime. In the back of our heads, there is a little voice that whispers over and over it can’t get you when you’ve seen its face.

But cults are not the exclusive territory of the disturbed and deviant. They consist of people much like any of us, people who walk every avenue of life, and consist of every possible combination of human attributes. That is where the scary lives: if a seemingly normal person can be lured into a cult, then how do I know who to trust? Read more

black and white line drawing of a faceless priest

Posted on October 4, 2021

Midnight Mass Takes us to the Church of Dread

Guest Post

I have done my best to write a spoiler-free piece about Midnight Mass. Light spoilers are unavoidable, but I promise I have preserved the most major of twists and turns.

Horror centered on faith and religion has percolated through the genre since its earliest days, stories sprouting from the festering fears of demons, witches, and the Devil in all his incarnations. It is a sub-genre rife for use, and one that gashes nerves, especially for the more devout audience members. I would not consider myself a religious person, but I grew up hearing about my father’s time in a Catholic seminary, a path he opted out of just before the priesthood. I like to joke that I ended up with all the guilt and none of the fun stuff like faith. As I discovered my love of horror, we talked about The Exorcist, a movie he deemed the most terrifying thing he had ever seen because of its Catholic roots. When I finally watched the film it was unsettling, although not as disturbing to me as it was to him. What did stick with me was Father Karras’s grappling with life, death, and trauma. I invoke that film, and that character because Mike Flanagan’s new limited series Midnight Mass is about as Catholic as horror can come, and through his writing and directing, Flanagan filters the hopes of horrors of humanity through the faith and traumas of Crockett Island’s small and isolated community. Read more