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Posted on March 8, 2024

Children of the Corn: Where Fritz Kiersch’s 1984 Adaptation Gets It Right – and Wrong

Dawn Keetley

Fritz Kiersch’s adaptation of Stephen King’s 1977 short story, “Children of the Corn,” was released in the US on March 9, 1984. It’s one of my favorite Stephen King adaptations (somewhere in the top ten) – and its many strengths notably include an early starring role for the amazing Linda Hamilton, seven months before she appeared in the career-shaping The Terminator. It’s also a critical entry in the US folk horror tradition, defining (along with Mary Lambert’s 1989 Pet Semetary) what American folk horror looked like in the 1980s. On the film’s 40^th anniversary, here’s an assessment of some of the ways Kiersch’s Children of the Corn effectively interpreted and adapted King’s story – and a couple of the film’s missteps.

Posted on February 29, 2024

Lithic Nightmare of The Keep (1983)

Guest Post

Kevin Cooney

Tremendously flawed but much loved, The Keep (1983) was director Michael Mann’s first and only horror film thus far. For all of its cinematic beauty and meticulous production design, studio meddling and production delays turned the movie into a legendary failure. However, hidden within the mangled edit is a foreboding portrayal of evil. While The Keep falls short with its supernatural antagonist, it does turn an archaic place, the eponymous stone and slate keep, into a monstrous character unto itself, a malignant genius loci whose evil is matched by the characters in jackboots.

Two men look at a painting of an old time, bloodied sea captain.

Posted on February 21, 2024

Gothic Decay: Talking House of Usher (1960)

Podcast

In today’s episode, Vincent Price helms House of Usher, a dark tale of decay inspired by Edgar Allen Poe’s 1839 short story “The Fall of the House of Usher.” Released in 1960 as the first in the Corman-Poe cycle of films, the film follows Phillip as he visits the Usher mansion in the hopes of convincing his runaway fiance, Madeline, to return to him. But his efforts are continually thwarted by Madeline’s brother, Roderick, who warns Phillip that marriage to Madeline will result in total, personal destruction. Merging elements of the gothic sensibility that marked Poe’s illustrative career with a specific brand of 1960s film affect, House of Usher is a surprisingly overlooked film in the gothic horror canon. But should it be? We’re breaking it all down today with spoilers so stay tuned!

Recommended Reading:

Avelar, Mário. “The Colors of Melancholy in Roger Corman’s House of Usher.” The Edgar Allan Poe Review 11.1 (2010): 174-181.

Hendershot, Cyndy. “Domesticity and Horror in House of Usher and Village of the Damned.” Quarterly Review of Film & Video 17.3 (2000): 221-227.

Reyes, Xavier Aldana. “Gothic Horror Film, 1960—Present.” The Gothic World. Routledge, 2013. 388-398.

St. Armand, Barton Levi. “Poe’s Landscape of the Soul: Association Theory and” The Fall of the House of Usher”.” Modern Language Studies (1977): 32-41.

Thompson, James. “Alternative Treasures: The Fall of the House of Usher and The Terror within Roger Corman’s Poe Cycle.” Journal of Asia-Pacific Pop Culture 6.1 (2021): 168-190.

Posted on February 21, 2024

The Reproductive Imperative of Folk Horror: Robin Redbreast and Alex Garland’s Men

Dawn Keetley

In an early classic of folk horror, the 1970 BBC Play for Today episode, “Robin Redbreast” (written by John Bowen and directed by James MacTaggart), a middle-class professional woman, Norah Palmer (Anna Cropper), whose long-time boyfriend just ended their relationship, moves rather reluctantly to a remote cottage she acquired during the break-up. After discovering that she has mice, Norah sets off to look for a man named Rob (Andrew Bradford), who lives in the woods and can apparently take care of her mouse problem for her. As Norah walks through the woods, the camera isolates her and also marks her enjoyment of the scenery. She is jolted from this enjoyment by the sight of a man who is virtually naked; indeed, she will call him ‘naked’ when she recounts her experience to her housekeeper, Mrs. Vigo (Freda Bamford), later. Norah stares and, when he sees her – when he looks back – she turns and hastens away, unnerved, back to her house.

Posted on February 9, 2024

Give Us a Sign: On the Possibility of Non-Diegetic Ghosts

Guest Post

Andrés Emil González

If any single monster or supernatural entity has a claim to shaping horror film and literature as we know it today, it is almost certainly the ghost –and with good reason. The figure of the ghost or spirit embodies (so to speak) some of horror’s fundamental traits, including liminality between states of being, glimpses of a world or truth beyond our own, and a sense of powers that act on human lives without our awareness or comprehension.

Perhaps because of its ability to evoke such a variety of ideas, fears and even hopes, however, spirits in modern horror cinema have tended to take wildly different forms, often within the same film or television series. Most are familiar to any fan of horror. Many times, ghosts are only represented by their effects on the visible world: a chair slides across a room, the planchette of a ouija board moves on its own, or a person is dragged off by their hair. Other times, ghosts are made visible to some combination of audience and characters, as memorably occurs several times across James Wan’s The Conjuring series, to name just one example. In this case, ghosts may be visible only to one character, or to all, or they appear only for the briefest of moments. And while of course, there are myriad distinctions to be drawn between demons, ghosts, poltergeists and other assorted spirits, for our purposes all of these beings tend to be represented within this shared set of parameters.