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Posted on October 31, 2018

Creepy CliffsNotes: October Edition

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.

Posted on October 15, 2018

Channel Zero: Dream Door is Dramatic, Silly, and Scary

Guest Post

The first three seasons of Syfy’s Channel Zero found clever ways to combine fears that veered closer to traditional horror film iconography with those based in the existential and emotional. Indeed, the show’s ability to do just that is certainly a part of why it is arguably the best horror show currently on television. While Channel Zero has cycled through evil puppets, monsters made of teeth, memory clones, cannibals, psychotic dwarves, and meat-men, it has also explored horror present in the everyday: the guilt of losing a loved one, fear of your own mind turning against you, the pain of lingering memories, etc. The emotional depths that Channel Zero so frequently explores are a huge part of what makes the more visceral horror elements work, investing us not only in characters’ safety but often their emotional well-being and ability to live a happy life.

And thus we open the Dream Door, the title of Channel Zero’s fourth season, directed this time by indie horror director EL Katz (Cheap Thrills, Small Crimes). While season one started with a nightmare sequence, and seasons two and three with more traditionally visceral horror sequences, this new season begins with a sex scene. And yet, the sequence feels uneasy: Katz starts with a shot of a conspicuously absent home, slowly and ominously zooming into nothing in particular. Additionally, the first sounds we hear are moans, but without seeing the individuals moaning, it’s tough to tell whether they’re sounds of pleasure or screams of pain. While the opening of Channel Zero: Dream Door departs from more traditional horror, it’s still clear that something is off here, and, to Katz’s credit, this mood never lets up; in fact, it snowballs into even greater tension as we are introduced to our cast of characters.