- Horror Movie - Horror Homeroom

Posted on July 11, 2018

Horror Films to Watch Out for at Fantasia Festival

Dawn Keetley

The 22^nd Fantasia International Film Festival is coming to Montreal, Quebec, from July 12 – August 2 and, as usual, they have an amazing array of genre fare on display. Below are the horror films screening at Fantasia that we’re most excited about. The brief descriptions are from Fantasia’s website, and you’ll find more information by clicking on the link.

1. Chained for Life; dir. Aaron Schimberg; USA, 2018

“On the set of a horror film with artistic pretensions, made in the United States by a great European auteur, the beautiful Hollywood actress Mabel (Jess Weixler, from cult film TEETH) admits to being outside her comfort zone. She plays the role of a blind woman and the film she’s in, already anticipated by the media to be in bad taste, deals explicitly with deformity. The production has even brought on several disabled actors, including Rosenthal (Adam Pearson, seen in UNDER THE SKIN and DRIB), a nervous comedian with a major facial deformity. Mabel struggles to identify with him, but as their characters connect on camera, the actors do the same behind it. And as the film crew walks on the eggshells of political correctness and strange rumors begin to circulate about the abandoned hospital serving backdrop to the production, the boundaries between reality and fiction, fair representation and exploitation cinema, become excessively porous…”

Posted on July 5, 2018

The First Purge (2018) Review

Elizabeth Erwin

For as much as I enjoy so-called “prestige horror” such as The Invitation (2015), Get Out (2017) and Hereditary (2018), there is something to be said for the value of what I call “popcorn horror,” those movies that eschew all nuance for explicit depictions of carnage and social commentary. And if there is one horror movie this season that fits that bill it’s The First Purge (2018), the fourth film in the franchise that serves as its de facto origin story and explains how an America of the very near future turned to a yearly program of intentional lawlessness in order to combat cultural aggression. Directed by Gerard McMurray, the movie is a direct frontal attack on Trump’s America that pulls no punches in its depiction of class warfare. From pointedly associating the NRA with the villainous political party in power to a devious Spicer-like mouthpiece of the administration to a character literally being “grabbed by the pussy,” there is no question that this movie is designed to be a searing indictment of Donald Trump and those who support him.

How a viewer receives The First Purge is likely to depend upon where he/she falls on the political spectrum, and I suspect Rotten Tomatoes will be awash in both one star and five-star reviews. As a horror flick, the movie is slightly above average. Given that it is a prequel, it spends a good deal of the time situating and developing the characters—so much so that the actual Purge doesn’t begin until the movie’s midway point. One of the criticisms of the franchise has always been that the films advocate non-violence while simultaneously depicting in graphic fashion the spectacle of violence. But here, the opposite is true. While there are scenes of graphic brutality, it feels underplayed, especially in comparison to the other films. We’re also given heroes who understand that part of resisting is being prepared to fight back. Read more

Posted on July 4, 2018

Fallen Kingdom: Failed Experiment

Guest Post

Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (J. A. Bayona, 2018) is an experiment in nostalgia. Like many of the other franchises cluttering theaters these days, the latest Jurassic Park installment reawakens our admiration for its original. It elicits memories of prior experiences watching Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park (1993). I myself will never forget the first time I saw it, when at the age of four or five, I ran screaming from the theater because the T-Rex broke loose and ripped the lawyer off a toilet—“when you gotta go, ya gotta go.”

Like me, many Jurassic Park fans can similarly identify lines of dialogue with their moments in the film. Perhaps the dialogue was so well-written, so representative of their moments, and delivered so well—by fully fleshed-out characters with plausible motivations and complete backstories—that enthusiastic audiences can easily recall it. Several of the more intuitive lines, like those above, are spoken by Dr. Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum), who specializes in chaos theory and predicts the fall of the park. It’s no wonder, then, that the character returns in Fallen Kingdom, whose taglines read: “life finds a way” and “the park is gone.” The former is the oft-cited Malcolm line, the other something he insistently prophesizes.

Posted on June 30, 2018

The Devil’s Doorway and the Summer of Scary Nuns

Dawn Keetley

Stellar Irish horror film The Devil’s Doorway is the first feature film from Aislinn Clarke, a writer and director from Northern Ireland. Indeed, according to Morbidly Beautiful, which features an interview with Clarke, she is “the first woman in Northern Ireland to write and direct a produced horror film.” Devil’s Doorway was invited to showcase at BAFTA in London and was later screened at the Cannes film Festival. The film has secured international distribution, and will be released in the US by IFC Midnight on July 13, 2018.

The summer of 2018, it seems, is not only witnessing record heat but a surge of scary nuns. The trailer of the high profile film The Nun, directed by Corin Hardy, is doing the rounds at the moment. As a spin-off of the highly successful Conjuring franchise, The Nun (due to be released on September 7) will no doubt do well at the box office. But I doubt it will be as good as Devil’s Doorway. The trailer for The Nun suggest that the nuns in that film are exploited as jump scares, demonic faces appearing in the background, nuns rocketing like high speed trains from outside the frame. The nuns in Devil’s Doorway, on the other hand, are real nuns. And they are terrifying. Helena Bereen, in particular, delivers an utterly chilling performance as the Mother Superior of a Magdalene Laundry in 1960—a woman fully aware of the Church hierarchy and hating, in equal parts, the men above her and the women below her.

Posted on June 25, 2018

Hereditary and the Changeling Myth

Guest Post

Before we meet Charlie (Milly Shapiro), the younger of the Graham family’s children in Ari Aster’s 2018 film Hereditary, we’re already worried about her. It’s the morning of her grandmother’s funeral, and her father, Steve, played by Gabriel Byrne, can’t find her anywhere. Exasperated, he finally wakes Charlie in the treehouse. “You could catch pneumonia!” he warns.

“It’s okay,” she says, but Charlie is not okay.

She evinces a flat affect—Charlie is not so much passive aggressive as just passive. She couples this quality with a pathological carelessness. At 13, Charlie demonstrates less concern about her serious food allergy than many 5 year-olds. Constantly munching on sweets, she has an appetite for the types of food that could be fatal to her. Charlie’s radical insouciance seems to suggest that she has inherited the family’s history of mental disorder, but her troubles resist diagnosis. She doesn’t seem depressed. Is she on the autism spectrum? The characters of Hereditary overtly reference a number of mental disorders, but never one in regard to Charlie.