**DEADLINE EXTENDED** TO FEBRUARY 15, 2021
THE BLOOD ON SATAN’S CLAW (1971)
Horror Homeroom’s special issue #4 – Spring 2021
Piers Haggard’s groundbreaking The Blood on Satan’s Claw was released on April 14, 1971. To celebrate its 50th anniversary, we will be running our fourth special issue on Blood on Satan’s Claw and its profound and persistent influence.
As the only film adaptation of the Stephen King oeuvre to be anointed with Oscar gold, Rob Reiner’s Misery (1990) is quintessential psychological horror with a heaping helping of shock and awe. Fueled by a villain whose name is virtually synonymous with toxic fan culture and made memorable by one indelible sledgehammer hobbling, the film is an acknowledged classic, and yet it is not typically the first film referenced in discussions of King’s cinematic adaptations. Misery has generated memes, collectibles, and fan art that has kept it in the pop culture zeitgeist, but critical scholarship has not been quite as prolific. Our second special issue seeks to rectify that oversight.
In honor of the film’s milestone 30th anniversary, we are thrilled to present 14 original essays that explain why we are still Misery’s “number one fan.”
Consider this your Thanksgiving PSA! If your family is anything like ours, you probably spend hours cooking up a scrumptious meal for the family only to watch it be consumed in less than twenty minutes. So should you be looking for an excuse not to cook, I thought I would share 8 food moments in horror that are guaranteed to stop hunger in its tracks. Granted, you may vomit, but that’s a risk you run in viewing these disturbing and unforgettable scenes.
My selection criterion was highly scientific. If it made me gag, it made the list. Did I miss any? Shoot us a comment and let us know which food moment in horror still traumatizes you!
Black mold is spreading through contemporary popular culture: Mark Samuels’ short story, “The Black Mould” (2011), Jill Ciment’s novel, Act of God (2015), Osgood Perkins’ film I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House (2016), Ben Aaronovitch’s graphic novel from the Rivers of London series, Black Mould (2017), Jac Jemc’s novel, The Grip of It (2017), Mike Flanagan’s Netflix adaptation of The Haunting of Hill House (2018), Travis Stevens’ film, Girl on the 3rd Floor (2019), the segment “Gray Matter” in Shudder’s 2019 reboot of Creepshow (an adaptation of Stephen King’s 1973 story), and the Australian independent film, Relic (Natalie Erika James, 2020).
Spreading black mold, and death, in The Haunting of Hill House‘s “red room”
In most of these narratives, black mold seems to represent death: black mold sprouts up in the places characters have died or have been killed. Black mold doesn’t only signal individual death, however; it can also tell stories about species death, about the end of the human race. Black mold flourishes in decaying and ruined places of unabated moisture and heat, and the recent surge in stories about black mold is no doubt driven in part by contemporary anxieties about the fate of humans in a changing climate: black mold spreads where and when humans are not. Black mold flourishes in what both Alan Weisman and Eugene Thacker (from very different perspectives) have called the “world without us.”[i]
Bruce Davison’s turn as Willard Stiles, the vengeful misfit with an uncanny ability to commune with rodents in the 1971 horror-thriller Willard (Daniel Mann), bears obvious resemblance to Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates. Blonde hair and hammy delivery aside, he possesses the same beakish face and boyish shyness pierced through occasionally by a seething rage. His character is likewise defined by what seems to be an Oedipal maldevelopment and a solitary existence in a decrepit house, except hidden within the home’s cellar-as-subconscious is not the rotted corpse of his overbearing mother but an army of rats he has befriended and trained to do his bidding.
What precisely those rats represent was a question of consternation for some contemporary critics, notably Vincent Canby and Roger Ebert, who both panned the film while only ironically nudging toward a possible social critique. “A major urban problem,” suggests the former in his typically droll, conservative tone. Ebert comes down on a deep-seated need “to see Ernest Borgnine eaten alive by rats.” Given the legacy of Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960) however, and Willard’s own peculiar place within the horror canon, it seems just as likely that Willard’s rats have a thing or two to say about sexual pathology. Read more
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