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Posted on November 26, 2020

8 Gag Inducing Food Moments in Horror

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!

Posted on November 24, 2020

Black Mold, Hodgson’s “The Voice in the Night,” and Peele’s Get Out

Dawn Keetley

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 3^rd 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]

Posted on November 19, 2020

A Boy’s Best Friend: Willard’s coming out story

Guest Post

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

Posted on November 9, 2020

The Haunting of Bly Manor and Relationships Past

Guest Post

The long-awaited follow-up season to The Haunting of Hill House has finally arrived to overwhelmingly positive reviews. The Haunting of Bly Manor, although similar to its predecessor on the surface, is actually a far cry from Hill House. A young American woman named Dani (Victoria Pedretti) takes on the position of an au pair for two young orphaned children at a rural English manor. She is hired by their Uncle Henry (Henry Thomas) who reveals to Dani that the position had proven troublesome to fill because the previous au pair, Miss Jessel (Tahirah Sharif), died by suicide while on the job. When Dani arrives at the estate, she finds there was far more to the original story of Miss Jessel than she was led to believe. Her fascination with her predecessor’s life causes Dani to reflect upon her own recent loss. At Bly Manor, the ghosts of the house are not necessarily the spirits themselves; they are the individuals, both living and dead, and the relationships that consume them. The Haunting of Bly Manor explores the ways in which possessive relationships act as the catalyst for characters becoming possessed through supernatural means. Read more

Posted on October 24, 2020

“Fucking Spic Bastard”: Zombies and the Latino Threat

Guest Post

Zombies have become ubiquitous globally in film and television. This undead ghoul keeps returning and finding new ways to infect our screens. Here, I look at Cholo (John Leguizamo) from George A Romero’s Land of the Dead (2005), one of the few Latinx zombies in film, delving into what this ghoul represents.

In 1968 the zombie film forever changed with the release of George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. This black-and-white low-budget horror flick now marks the before and after of zombie films. Before Night of the Living Dead, zombie films saw a transition from the fear-inducing film White Zombie (1932) to more comedic zombie films like 1945’s Zombies on Broadway. After Night of the Living Dead, zombies not only morphed from a voodoo creation into undead ghouls of unknown origins but also moved from exotic lands, outside of the U.S., to Pittsburgh. Thus, zombies were no longer ghouls that inhabited “uncivilized” spaces where tourists, the military, and corporations were at risk but were now an integral part of the American landscape.