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Posted on November 2, 2018

Exclusive Full Chapter Preview from Scared Sacred

Guest Post

We are very pleased to bring you this exclusive chapter preview from the forthcoming House of Leaves publication, Scared Sacred: Idolatry, Religion and Worship in the Horror Film (out next year).

In this chapter, Samm Deighan explores the directorial work of William Peter Blatty (author of the 1971 novel The Exorcist) in The Ninth Configuration (1980) and The Exorcist III (1990).*

The chapter is previewed below, and we also want to urge you to consider supporting this indie horror endeavour. You can pre-order the book from House of Leaves Publishing’s website.

You can also check out a video trailer for Scared Sacred below.

Posted on October 31, 2018

Creepy CliffsNotes: October Edition

Elizabeth Erwin

While every day around these parts feels like Halloween, it’s nice to be in the official throes of the one month of the year when people don’t look askance at us for loving horror! So in between haunted hayride jaunts and attempting to pumpkin carve an homage to The Golden Girls, we’ve been busy mainlining all of the great horror that seemingly dropped overnight. Horror television, in particular, is having a moment ya’ll and we heartily recommend you clear your schedule and marathon The Purge and Haunting of Hill House immediately. We’ll talk more about each of these in the future, but trust us that you won’t want to be spoiled.

It’s enough to make even Vincent Price crack a smile, I tell ya!

Posted on October 29, 2018

Get Out and the Subversion of the American Zombie

Guest Post

Much has already been said about the connections between George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1960) and Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017). Critics have so far, however, missed a vitally important thread between the two: they’re both zombie films.

Jordan Peele is pretty open about the connections between these two films. In an interview with the New York Times, he describes Night of the Living Dead as one of the major inspirations for Get Out, and traces a number of links between Night of the Living Dead’s protagonist, Ben (Duane Jones), and Get Out’s Chris (Daniel Kaluuya).

Posted on October 26, 2018

The Walking Dead’s Hyperreal Hillbilly

Guest Post

AMC’s The Walking Dead is back for its 9th season. We’re going to run a series of posts about the series that are distilled versions of the arguments of chapters in our edited collection, The Politics of Race, Gender and Sexuality in The Walking Dead, recently published by McFarland. This collection is not at all the last word –and we’d like to open up more conversations about all these things in the show, especially as the issues raised in the book–and the arguments that get made–change as The Walking Dead narrative continues. To that end, we’re inviting submissions to Horror Homeroom that enter into conversation with this series of posts taken from our book. How do these arguments play out in seasons 8 and 9? If we publish your submission, we’ll send you a free copy of the book.

The third post in the series is from Carter Soles and Kom Kunyosying . . . This is what they have to say: Read more

Posted on October 21, 2018

A Rage-Filled Halloween for Our Time

Dawn Keetley

From what I’d read before going in to David Gordon Green’s Halloween (2018), I was expecting a portrait of the deep and lasting effects of grief and trauma. The film chooses to ignore all the sequels to John Carpenter’s 1978 original and picks up the story of Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) many years later, after two failed marriages, a daughter (now estranged), and a granddaughter. Instead of a complex study in the lingering after-effects of trauma, however, Green’s Halloween gives us simple, unalloyed rage. A fitting Halloween, perhaps, for our own anger-filled post-Trump moment.