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Posted on July 27, 2016

Dinosaurs and the Horror Film, Part 1: The Good Dinosaur

Dawn Keetley

Sometimes you watch a film that helps clarify what a horror film is by not being a horror film. Disney / Pixar’s The Good Dinosaur (2015) is that film—and it set me thinking about the contested place of dinosaurs in the horror genre. Films with rampaging dinosaurs are often categorized as horror films. But should they be?

This will be the first of two posts that explore what makes a horror film by looking at two films about dinosaurs, identifying what is explicitly not horror (The Good Dinosaur) and what unequivocally is horror (Carnosaur, 1993).

To start with what is not horror: Disney / Pixar’s The Good Dinosaur. While it is not a horror film, The Good Dinosaur, like many Disney films, contains horror, the appearance and containment of which seems necessary to the film’s construction as something other than a horror film. Read more

Posted on July 22, 2016

Barbra’s Monstrous Metamorphosis in Night of the Living Dead (1990)

Elizabeth Erwin

His name virtually synonymous with the cinematic zombie, George A. Romero’s Dead series rewrote the rules of the undead monster. In the original Night of the Living Dead (1968), Romero’s core group of survivors battle each other as well as the zombies in a film which very much reflects the time in which it was made. As one of the group fighting for survival, Barbra is the epitome of the defenseless female. She spends the majority of the film either panicking to the detriment of those around her or catatonic. Her death, via consumption by her zombified brother, is almost a welcome reprieve from her complete ineffectualness.

Posted on July 19, 2016

5 Recent Horror Film Endings That’ll Shock You

Dawn Keetley

Endings are crucial in horror. During the reign of the Motion Picture Production Code (1934-1968), evil had to be punished, which obviously dictated a certain kind of ending—an inevitable and often abrupt closure that restored the status quo. (Remember the evil Rhoda Penmark in The Bad Seed [1956], struck by lightning at the end, a conclusion most definitely not in the novel.)

It wasn’t until 1968, after the demise of the Code, that modern horror saw its first truly shocking and nihilistic ending in George A. Romero’s The Night of the Living Dead. The protagonist of the film (Ben [Duane Jones]), who was the sole survivor of a night of carnage after a group trapped in a farmhouse were attacked by ghouls arisen from their graves, was shot in the head by a posse “cleaning up” the staggering zombies. There was closure here, but it wasn’t about the destruction of the monster but of the good guy. And, if order was restored (which is arguable), it was indiscriminately brutal. Then came the slashers of the 70s and 80s and, as great as many of them are, they did usher in the kind of ending that unfortunately still prevails in much horror: monster dies; monster isn’t dead; monster is even more angry; cue sequel. Such endings can be shocking, but the shock is cheap, and it really isn’t that shocking after you’ve watched enough of them. Read more

Posted on July 15, 2016

Top Ten Reasons Camping Just Isn’t For Me

Gwen

I should preface this by stating that I was traumatized by Girl Scout camp long before I saw any of these films. I was an awkwardly shy kid away from home for the first time in the middle of nowhere with only one friend. The food sucked, the lake was icky (reminded me of “The Raft” segment from Creepshow 2 [1987]), and I swear I pulled latrine duty every time. Frankly, I might take a night at Camp Bloodbath before I would go back to Girl Scout camp. By no means do I shudder from the great outdoors, but let’s just say I would take my chances in an urban jungle long before I would canoe down the Cahulawassee River looking to play Dueling Banjos with the locals. From a horror film stand point, I just feel as if things work out better for folks in the city than in the woods. Whether it is a vacation getaway in the woods, a week at summer camp, or some time to hone your cheerleading skills, these films offer little respite for the weary. As we embark on the summer of 2016, maybe some of these films will help you decide whether you would rather camp along the Appalachian Trail or book a room at the Hyatt this year.

Posted on July 11, 2016

And Then There Were None: The Agatha Christie Revival

Dawn Keetley

We live in an era in which it seems every horror is caught on video tape. Presumably that renders those horrors clear and unambiguous. Pictures don’t lie, right? Except it seems that every picture, every scene of footage that makes its way onto a news broadcast or social media, has a thousand interpretations. On the night of July 7, when five police officers were fatally shot in Dallas during a night of peaceful protest, Fox News was showing live feed of the demonstrations and happened to catch bodies clad in uniform lying on the ground, before anyone knew what was going on. The anchor, Megyn Kelly, clearly not sure what to make of the footage, said uncertainly, “We don’t know what we’re seeing here.” And, in truth, it seems we never know what we’re seeing when some newly videotaped horror makes it into the public domain. Or, we do (think we) know what we’re seeing but our neighbor sees something entirely different. The hope of transparency, of the unmediated “real” –especially the truth of a sin or a crime—always eludes us. In fact, now everything is caught on tape, it seems especially to elude us. And that’s where Agatha Christie comes in. In every detective novel she ever wrote, all of which begin with a crime (usually murder), Christie offers us “the truth.” We know exactly what happened, we know how, and we know why—usually laid out for us by the incomparable Hercule Poirot or Miss Marple. The new BBC adaptation of And Then There Were None is no exception. Read more