- Horror Movie - Horror Homeroom

Posted on April 17, 2017

Wait Till Helen Comes Review

Despite themes ranging from suicide to mental illness, Wait Till Helen Comes is ostensibly a horror film geared toward the PG set. Drawing heavily from its source material, Mary Dowling Hahn’s 1986 YA classic of the same name, the film deserves credit for trusting its audience to follow a somewhat complicated narrative structure. While there have been some exceptions, most notably the brilliant Lady in White(1998), horror films marketed toward younger teens have often relied upon jump scares and gross out shock scenes to move the plot. For example, the moment when the witches peel off their human masks in The Witches (1990) or when the maggot covered meat is revealed in Poltergeist (1982). Wait Till Helen Comes does the complete opposite. It is slow moving and picturesque with a sensibility that is more implied horror. And the end result is a very mixed bag. Read more

Posted on February 26, 2017

An Oscars Guide for the Horror Fan; It’s Short!

Dawn Keetley

I have a very broad definition of horror, which is why this (very short) list about the 2016 Oscars exists at all. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, true to form, ignored the many exceptional horror films of 2016, most egregiously The Witch (Robert Eggers), Don’t Breathe (Fede Alvarez), Under the Shadow (Babak Anvari), and Train to Busan (Yeon Sang-ho). All of which were brilliant.

That said, let’s move on to what we have rather than gnashing our teeth about the sorry taste in film of Academy members

All three of these films are categorized on IMDb as neo-noir, drama, or thriller—not horror, but there is a long tradition of shying away from calling horror “horror”—and there are veritably thin borders between horror and some of its adjacent genres.

Posted on February 22, 2017

Is Insidious Really about Race?

Dawn Keetley

The highly successful Insidious (James Wan, 2011) seems to prove the claim that the horror film is notoriously white. Hence I’m writing this in great anticipation of the release on Friday February 24 of Jordan Peele’s Get Out–a serious horror film that directly confronts racial difference and division. Peele has said that the idea for his film initially came to him during the 2008 Democratic primary and that, over the years, he became more and more convinced that “especially after Obama’s election . . . the U.S. was ‘living in this postracial lie.’” Peele’s target in Get Out, he says, is “the liberal elite,” who tend to believe they are above—past—racism.[i]

The release of Peele’s film, which takes aim at the idea that we are “postracial,” joins the recent publication of Michael Tesler’s book, Post-Racial or Most-Racial?, about the increasing racialization of the US during the course of Barack Obama’s presidency. Tesler points out that before Obama’s election in 2008, “race-based and race-evoking issues” were “largely receding from the national political scene.” Obama’s two terms as president, however, have ushered in what Tesler calls “a ‘most-racial’ political era” in which Americans are more divided “over a whole host of political positions than they had been in modern times.”[ii]

If America has become still more profoundly divided by race over the course of the last nine years, it’s worth asking, where is the evidence of that divide in the horror film, a genre that has long been (rightly) declared to be adept at representing the social and cultural conflicts of its historical moment but that, in the eyes of some, has failed when it comes to race?

Posted on February 10, 2017

Death on the Roads: Defining The Highway Horror Film

Guest Post

The Interstate Highways Act of 1956 may not automatically sound like the most fascinating topic in the world, but the unprecedented act of road building that followed its passage actually had a much bigger impact upon the American horror film than one might think. What I’ve called the “Highway Horror” tradition encompasses a range of films that critique the ostensibly positive benefits of the culture of mass automobility that the Interstate Highway System helped inaugurate. In the Highway Horror film, journeys made via the highway inevitably lead to uncanny, murderous, and horribly transformative experiences. The American landscape, though supposedly “tamed” by the highway, is by dint of its very accessibility, rendered hostile, and encounters with other travellers (and with individuals whose roadside businesses depend upon highway traffic) almost always have sinister outcomes.

Posted on February 6, 2017

Don’t Knock Twice and the New Horror of Motherhood

Dawn Keetley

Don’t Knock Twice is an interesting film that is lifted up by its exceptional performances and cinematography and by the way it taps into what I think is an intriguing new trend in horror film: the horror of motherhood.

Directed by talented Welsh filmmaker Caradog W. James (best known for the 2013 sci-fi film The Machine), Don’t Knock Twice centers on the relationship of Jess (Katee Sackhoff, of Battlestar Galactica) and the teenage daughter she abandoned nine years ago, Chloe (Lucy Boynton). The film opens with Chloe and her boyfriend Danny (Jordan Bolger) being inexplicably drawn to a house nearby where a woman named Mary Aminov used to live. Convinced that, years ago, she kidnapped and killed a boy who lived in their group home, Chloe and Danny harassed her long after the police decided they had no case. They drove her, it seems, to suicide, and now a legend has flourished that something demonic lives in her house. If you knock twice on the door, it will come to get you. Danny, of course, knocks twice. And then the demonic witch comes to get him. In terror, Chloe flees to her mother’s home—even though she had earlier brutally refused Jess’s plea that Chloe come live with her. But the witch pursues Chloe even to her mother’s house—and so Jess ends up fighting for her daughter’s life.