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Posted on August 12, 2016

Thirteen Women (1932): The Slasher that Started it All

Dawn Keetley

If you love horror films, you’ll want to watch the classic Thirteen Women (David Archainbaud, 1932). It’s a little-known film that, four decades before The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), Black Christmas (1974), and Halloween (1978), mapped out the contours of the slasher plot.

Myself and Gwen have recently written an article about the film: “Thirteen Women (1932): An Unacknowledged Horror Classic,” published in the Journal of Film and Video 68, no. 1 (Spring 2016). I’m just hitting a couple of the highlights here, so if you want more analysis, that’s the place to go.

We didn’t conjure our idea up out of thin air. Some film critics had already nodded to Thirteen Women’s anticipation of the slasher sub-genre. For instance, in his review of the DVD, which was released as part of the Warner Archive Collection in 2012, John Beifuss notes that Thirteen Women is “not exactly a horror film,” yet he goes on to map numerous of its “horror themes,” drawing a line to both Friday the 13^th (1980) and the Final Destination franchise (2000-2011). [i] We disagree with Beifuss’s hedging: Thirteen Women is in fact a horror film. Read more

Posted on August 9, 2016

What Makes a Great Horror Movie?

Guest Post

Author: John Young

Horror movies have a fan base unlike any other. On our Twitter account, @gorehorcom, we ran weekly polls in an attempt to figure out what elements make for a great horror movie.

Like any group of horror fanatics, we wondered what makes some films better than others. This led us to use our Twitter account to engage in a little market research. What we did was run weekly polls to see what our followers’ favorite horror films are. After four rounds, we ran a final round to pick an overall winner. The poll results uncovered some interesting trends. Read more

Posted on August 5, 2016

Dinosaurs and the Horror Film, Part 2: Carnosaur

Dawn Keetley

Dinosaur movies are typically categorized as horror films, but not all of them are—and so I thought I’d use two intriguing-in-their-own-right dinosaur films as part of my ongoing exploration of what makes a horror film. In [part 1 of this discussion], I argued that Disney / Pixar’s The Good Dinosaur (2015) is not only not horror but represents an explicitly anti-horror project. Carnosaur, on the other hand, a low-budget Roger Corman production, is unequivocally a horror film. Carnosaur was released on May 21, 1993, just four weeks before Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park—and it bears some resemblance to its big-budget competitor. While not as good a film as Jurassic Park, Carnosaur is vastly more interesting, especially for horror fans.

Carnosaur is a crazy film—and while it’s currently not easy to find, it’s worth the effort to try to get your hands on it. Diane Ladd plays Dr. Jane Tiptree, a woman whom one male character calls “the fairy godmother of military biotech.” Tiptree has been sequestered away, working to create a hybrid race of dinosaurs to whose eggs women give birth right before they die. Tiptree’s plan, it turns out, is to wipe out the human race for their sins, creating a new and more worthy species (genetically-modified dinosaurs) to continue life on earth. You might be forgiven for thinking that some of the finer points of Tiptree’s scheme are a little illogical—and my advice would be, well, to enjoy and not overthink it! Read more

Posted on August 2, 2016

Lights Out: Living life while trying to stay in control.

Gwen

PG-13 | 2016 | David Sandberg | 81 min | (USA)

If you are looking for a review of the film, you won’t find it here (but you will find plot spoilers so proceed with caution). While I found the film worthwhile, I was more captivated by the function of the monster rather than the storyline. Therefore, this piece focuses on the monster rather than the movie. It was clear to me that the film’s underlying narrative is about the struggles of living life with a major depressive disorder.[1] However, I could not help but see the film two-fold with the antagonist Diana (Alicia Vela-Bailey) serving both as a manifestation of Sophie’s (Maria Bello) debilitating depression as well as her abusive partner.[2] Let me elaborate.

In order for me to better explain my point of view, let’s review some of the background. Sophie grew up struggling with depression which led to a childhood admission to an inpatient psychiatric hospital. While in this hospital, Sophie meets Diana and forges a friendship as healthy as a host to its succubus. Diana is in the hospital for manipulating her father into killing himself by inserting her thoughts into his head. Once in the hospital, Diana locates her next plaything in the form of Sophie, and, as we come to see, Diana plays for keeps. During a mishap in the hospital, Diana passes away and somehow becomes fused into Sophie’s psyche. Read more

Posted on July 28, 2016

Review: Stranger Things (Netflix)

Guest Post

There’s a good reason your millennial friends and family have been obsessively posting about Netflix’s latest original series, Stranger Things, on social media. The Duffer Brothers, credited both with writing and directing, know how to tap into the nostalgia market. They want you to watch the series and fondly remember everything you loved about being afraid as a kid. The show doesn’t just take place in the 80s; it looks like it was filmed in the 80s. From the music, to the retro title font, to the grainy filters, the Duffer Brothers have done for VHS horror movies what Tarantino and Rodriguez did for grindhouse films of the 1970s. The storyline, too, culls from a whole host of horror, sci-fi, and cult classics that millennials grew up watching at sleepovers, including Poltergeist, Alien, Firestarter, It, The Goonies, and ET. Read more