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Posted on April 14, 2018

Watership Down & Eden Lake

Dawn Keetley

Martin Rosen’s famous 1978 adaptation of Richard Adams’ 1972 Watership Down turns 40 this year, and no doubt there will be numerous tributes to the brilliant film that traumatized a generation of children. Indeed, there is a conference planned in November 2018 at the University of Warwick, The Legacy of Watership Down, organized by Dr. Catherine Lester (@CineFeline; @watershipdown40).

I’m very interested, specifically, in Watership Down’s legacy within the horror tradition, and this post just points out one small connection between Rosen’s film and a later important British horror film, Eden Lake (James Watkins, 2008).

Posted on April 13, 2018

Disability in A Quiet Place: Hearing Not Required

Guest Post

Horror films include a diverse range of communication methods: anything from writing in blood, ghostly TV static, speaking in tongues, intense stares into the soul, opening puzzle boxes, reading from cursed books, dreaming, saying a name five times in a mirror, channeling spirits from beyond, passing around video tapes. The list could go on. There are also more typical methods, of course: screaming, crying, cackling. Among this list of strange and unusual ways to communicate, however, is a noticeable absence. A Quiet Place, directed by John Krasinski, may be the only horror film I’ve seen that so prominently features American Sign Language.

To encourage you to go see this movie, I’ve tried to avoid spoilers, though I do make vague mention of the end. The film starts mid-action, in the near future, the world already unrecognizable. Any remaining humans in this world cower in fear of violent and indestructible (gorgeously-designed) creatures, who appear to have already killed much of the population. The creatures are attracted to sound, which appears to cause them pain. In fact, their heads are comprised of teeth and an oversized, armor-encased ear. Whatever makes a sound is instantly destroyed. The tagline for the film is “silence is survival.”

Posted on April 11, 2018

Viewer Participation and Decision Making in Would You Rather (2012)

Gwen

The premise of Would You Rather is simple; eight guests meet at the home of Mr. Lambrick in hopes of becoming the next recipient of the Lambrick Foundation’s philanthropy. They meet under the guise of a dinner party, but what they don’t know is that there are no free handouts from this Foundation.

Would You Rather is broken down into two particularly interesting parts. Essentially these two parts consist of Iris’ (Brittany Snow) life outside of the game and her life inside the game. Outside of the game Iris is a young woman who moves home to care for her brother after her parents pass. Iris’ brother has leukemia and is in need of a costly bone marrow transplant. Prior to the game we see that Iris makes the conscious choice to become a caretaker by putting her life on hold to assist her brother. This same brother regularly makes comments about Iris’ sacrifice, “You can’t always be the hero, sometimes you gotta let go…Aren’t you sick of this, don’t you want a life?” Because of her inability to let go, Iris seeks out the money from Lambrick Foundation thus landing herself in the horrible game of would you rather.

Posted on March 30, 2018

Annihilation, Cellular Degeneration, and the Horror of an Indifferent Universe

Guest Post

When your directorial debut is something as beautiful, trippy, seductive, and amazing as Ex Machina (2014), you have big shoes to fill. Alex Garland has surpassed every expectation with Annihilation (2018). In a world of renewed interest in science fiction and horror (see Mute, The Ritual, Bladerunner 2049, Valerian, etc.) there are a lot of flops (see Mute). Thankfully, Annihilation is one of the most visually stunning and amazingly-realized science fiction/horror films to hit the screen to date. As a director, Garland seems to enjoy twisting our understanding of reality. Annihilation does not disappoint. The film thrives on terrifying questions regarding the importance of humanity in an uncaring universe.

The story of Annihilation seems simple. Something falls from the sky and crashes into a lighthouse in an undisclosed location. After it crash lands, this object begins to spread outwards creating a visual wall, named the “Shimmer.” Lena (Natalie Portman), Ventress (Jennifer Jason Leigh), Radek (Tessa Thompson), Thorenson (Gina Rodriguez), and Sheppard (Tuva Novotny) are sent into the Shimmer to investigate the cause of the supernatural event and find information that could end its spread outward.

Posted on March 27, 2018

Fortress and Classroom Horror

Elizabeth Erwin

When people ask me what’s the scariest film I remember from my misspent youth, they’re always surprised when I reference Fortress (1985), a little seen Australian thriller that inexplicably became an HBO mainstay in the late 1980s. Based on a novel of the same name by Gabrielle Lord, the movie centers on a classroom of children and their young teacher, Sally Jones (Rachel Ward), who are taken hostage by a band of homicidal, mask wearing men. With moments of pronounced violence, the film is worth another look by horror fans for the way it leverages its classroom setting to instill fear.

Because horror grapples with the collective anxieties of the time, how a space is viewed by an audience is contingent largely upon the events of the day. For instance, to an audience in the 1930s watching The Lady Vanishes (1938) for the first time, the claustrophobic setting of a train car reads very differently than it does to a millennial audience who may lack a real world understanding for how it feels to travel by train. As a space, the classroom historically represents not only a place of learning, but also a place of security. While this perception has altered radically in the wake of Columbine and Sandy Hook, in the 1980s the classroom did not instantly connote a sense of fear. Read more