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Posted on April 11, 2020

Top 10 Horror Films to Watch on Easter

Gwen

My most awe inspiring encounters with nefarious rabbits include the first time I laid eyes on the massive black costume of “Bunny” while at a rave with Rabbit in the Moon and the first time that my innocent anticipating eyes consumed the film Watership Down (1978). While both of these are definitively scary (and potentially traumatizing), they do not encompass the spirit of Easter. If your family is anything like mine, nothing spells holidays like some old fashioned repression and subsequent bursts of aggression (or passive aggressiveness in our house). For all of you who can appreciate laughing at inappropriate times and poking fun at established traditions, then this list is for you!

Posted on April 10, 2020

Is CATS (2019) a Slasher in Disguise?

Guest Post

When the trailer for Cats (2019) premiered, so many tweets and parodies followed, but the one that stuck in my head was the one calling it a new horror movie. Then the movie actually came out and the audience was distracted by the special effects disaster as it showed in theaters to crowds appreciating it as they did The Room and Rocky Horror Picture Show. Now that it’s available to stream and we are all practicing social distancing, I finally got a chance to enjoy it. And I did enjoy it, because Cats is a straight up horror movie. That trailer was accurate. Again, remember I am talking about the film. ( I can’t speak to the stage production.) I understand that the addition of some plot was needed in order to bring Cats from stage to the big screen. Well, that plot is textbook slasher film, my friends.

Understand that I am jumping into the Cats canon blind. Instead, it feels like I am five Friday the 13ths in here. Yes, I understand they are cats and that each cat has something special about it. Some cats are more special than others. There is singing and dancing, which was very enjoyable. A bad cat appears, a problem is presented and solved. The choice is made and the movie ends. Read more

Posted on April 5, 2020

Vivarium Rewrites The Twilight Zone

Dawn Keetley

Shown at festivals in 2019 and released widely in March 2020, Vivarium is the second feature by Irish director Lorcan Finnegan and writer Garret Shanley. It’s a brilliant, albeit devastatingly bleak film that also happens to echo—as so many horror films do—one of the best episodes of The Twilight Zone.

Finnegan and Shanley’s first feature, Without Name (2016), is an eerie folk horror tale about a surveyor (Alan McKenna) who travels to the woods outside Dublin in order to assess it for development. Once there, though, he meets unwelcoming locals and an equally unwelcoming forest, which seems (at first, at least) resistant to his encroachment. As I said in my review, Without Name is slow-paced and eerie, and I’ve seen few films that so expertly draw on the landscape as a real force in the drama; shot in the awe-inspiring Glendalough National Park in County Wicklow, Ireland, it is a beautiful film.

Finnegan and Shanley’s second feature, Vivarium, is completely different. It is, however, equally provocative, and it’s a film you should be equally sure to watch. Vivarium is less akin to Finnegan and Shanley’s first feature than to their earlier short film, Foxes (2012), which you can watch here, and in which a couple is trapped in a housing estate and then lured away by foxes. It’s an enigmatic film that shares Vivarium‘s setting—a soulless housing estate.

Posted on April 2, 2020

Bless This Mess: Transgressive Untidiness in The Voices

Guest Post

Home is where the horror is. Some of the most iconic horror settings are homes, whether single-family houses in movies like Halloween and Poltergeist, sprawling estates like Manderley in Rebecca or Allerdale Hall in Crimson Peak, or inhabited hotels like the Bates Motel or the Overlook. The residence of interest in Marjane Satrapi’s 2014 film The Voices is a single converted apartment in an abandoned bowling alley, where Jerry (Ryan Reynolds) lives with his dog, Bosco, and his cat, Mr. Whiskers. It’s also where he butchers and stores the women whom his pets have told him to kill. However, it isn’t the murder or dismemberment that we’re made to find horrific; it’s the mess.

Jerry has an unnamed mental illness. He hears his pets talk to him, like an angel on his shoulder that needs to go on walks and a devil on his other shoulder that needs its litter changed. For most of The Voices, we see Jerry’s apartment as he sees it – a tidy one-bedroom apartment that’s an unremarkable background for his life. But in a few specific scenes, we see that this is in fact a delusion or a fantasy. The apartment is actually cluttered and filthy. Through the editing, acting, mis-en-scène, and the contrast of fantastic and realistic, the unseemly state of Jerry’s apartment is made horrific, more than the blood and body parts.

Posted on March 28, 2020

Blacula (1972): Flawed But Important

Guest Post

Blacula (William Crain, 1972) is an interestingly complicated watch; unlike many films at the time, Blacula was the product of a black director and was born out of and into the 1970s political terrain and within the explosion of “blaxploitation” as a subgenre. Blacula is arguably a pioneer of black horror, which might be thought of as the reinvention of the genre “from the vantage point of Blackness.”[i] More particularly, Robin Means Coleman offers that “in ‘black horror’ specifically, mainstream or White monsters, such as Dracula or Frankenstein’s the Monster, were purposefully transformed into ‘agents’ of Black power.”[ii] Due to the lack of representation of blackness with the film industry at the time, one can hardly refute the impact Blacula had on the audience and the industry, setting a “gold standard,” as Means Coleman puts it.[iii] I want to argue, though, that in spite of Blacula’s attempts to interrogate racism and embody black pride, ultimately, the film articulates a very limited definition of blackness, presenting the dichotomy of an African identity that is primitive and brutish and an African American identity that is respectable and professional. Both depictions of blackness are masculine and predicated on the violent reinforcement of stereotypes and the maintenance of hierarchy.