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Posted on July 20, 2020

Helen Oyeyemi’s The Icarus Girl: A Bildungsroman for the Monstrous Child

The Icarus Girl, Helen Oyeyemi’s 2005 debut novel, lives at the intersection of three contemporaneous trends. Most scholarly attention locates it among Nigerian diasporic literature, which experienced a boom in American and English publishing at the start of the twenty-first century.[i] Indeed, The Icarus Girl remains Oyeyemi’s most overtly Nigerian novel. Less recognized is The Icarus Girl’s contribution to two of horror’s big turn-of-the-millennium booms – creepy kid movies, which were having quite a moment with offerings like The Ring (2002), The Sixth Sense (1999), and The Others (2001), and children’s gothic literature, whose prominent titles include The Series of Unfortunate Events (1999-2007) and Coraline (2002). Oyeyemi’s melding of these three disparate subgenres and their expectations creates a distinctly postcolonial and humanized uncanny child.

Posted on July 17, 2020

“Don’t be scared”: Change, Evolution, and The Beach House as Ecohorror

Guest Post

Jeffrey A. Brown’s The Beach House has been getting a lot of attention, largely positive, since its recent release on Shudder. As others have noted, Liana Liberato’s performance as Emily is excellent, and the film features an effectively creepy atmosphere, wonderful cinematography of the ocean (both from the beach and underwater), and one truly disturbing moment of body horror. (This is also a movie worth watching without knowing much about what you’re getting into, so please note that this is a spoiler-heavy discussion rather than a straightforward review).

Despite its tranquil-seeming title, The Beach House is fundamentally a movie about change and how we respond to it. The story begins with a young college-aged couple, Emily (Liana Liberato) and Randall (Noah Le Gros), taking a weekend trip to Randall’s dad’s beach house. They are at a transition point in their relationship and trying to reconnect (one key tension is between his dropping out of college to avoid the typical life of job, marriage, kids, and her plan to finish her degree in organic chemistry and go to grad school for astrobiology). Soon after arriving, they discover that another couple – Jane (Maryann Nagel) and Mitch (Jake Weber), friends of Randall’s dad – are already at the beach house. This couple is also at a transition point, making one last trip to the beach as Jane battles a serious illness and appears to be dying.

Posted on July 14, 2020

From Poltergeist to Pennywise: Why Creepy Clowns Scare Us

Guest Post

In 1982, my family piled into our Ford station wagon and headed for the local theater to see Poltergeist. I was ten at the time, the youngest of four children. Ten is an age where you begin to fear things on a deeper, more cerebral level. But the movie was rated PG, so we went with it.

Today, this movie would easily warrant the stronger PG-13 rating. But there was no PG-13 in 1982. It was either G, PG or R. So the Motion Picture Association went for the middle ground. Bear this in mind, as we revisit the movie through the eyes of a ten-year-old.

Posted on July 9, 2020

Relic Brilliantly Portrays the Horror of Dementia

Dawn Keetley

Relic (2020) is a profoundly disturbing Australian film that tackles the horror of aging more effectively than any other film I’ve seen. Indeed, it exemplifies how horror film as a genre is uniquely adept at exploring—at making its viewers viscerally feel—the things that really scare us.

The first full-length feature for director Natalie Erika James, who also co-wrote the film with Christian White, Relic features an astounding performance by Robyn Nevin as Edna, an elderly woman living alone in a large house and suffering from worsening dementia. She wanders her house, which is filled with tangible signs of all her memories, and yet she struggles to remember things—who the people are in her photographs, whether they are real or not, alive or not, and even who she is: the camera finds a label on which is written “My name is Edna.”

Posted on July 8, 2020

The Beach House: Contemporary Climate Crisis Horror

Sara McCartney

For all that any movie even vaguely about contagion and isolation will have special resonance in the Coronavirus era, I’ll spare you the topical commentary on The Beach House. This isn’t a new entry to the canon of outbreak horror. What The Beach House aims for instead is to be a Night of the Living Dead (George A. Romero, 1968) for the climate crisis, as four unsuspecting vacationers face an extinction event, complete with an homage of radio updates. Director Jeffrey A. Brown serves up a beautiful apocalypse, but a tonally and structurally imbalanced story.