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Posted on October 4, 2023

Feminine or Feminist? Abortion, Motherhood, and the Traditional Final Girl

Guest Post

It is generally accepted that the final girl in late-twentieth-century slashers evidences a “moral integrity mark[ing] [her] as special” (Gill 19). Less discussed, however, has been the final girl as a mother figure who, in contrast with her peers, shows traditional maternal values (Christensen 40). These maternal qualities include “female self-sacrifice and motherly love” (Nickerson 14). Traditionalists often emphasized motherhood as the most fulfilling outlet for women’s special qualities as “life-bearers” (Jepson 340). The final girl in slasher horror films exhibits many of the traditional womanly qualities of caretaker and comforter.

Posted on January 16, 2020

Academia in Midsommar and Black Christmas

Guest Post

In 2019, horror went back to school in a major way, with a couple of popularly-released films taking on the trappings of academia. Ari Aster’s atmospheric Midsommar takes us to a remote village in Sweden where the residents have sinister plans for the unwitting grad students functioning as tourists. Sophia Takal’s Black Christmas is a remake of the 1974 proto-slasher of the same name about murders in a sorority house, but acts as more of a spiritual successor than faithful adaption.

While these films take dramatically different approaches to horror and the delivery of feelings of unease, they share a certain thematic sensibility. Namely, both movies deal with themes of cults and cult-like behavior, and in doing so draw an interesting comparison between the occult behavior of the villains of the stories and the trappings of higher education itself. In short, the cults in the film hold up a mirror to the conceit of academia in both productions and ask hard questions about the behavior of the characters involved. Read more

Posted on December 22, 2019

Polarizing Politics: Talking Black Christmas (2019)

Elizabeth Erwin

What happens when feminists dislike a feminist anthem horror film? We’re finding out today in our discussion on Black Christmas (2019), the latest adaptation of the 1974 slasher that has grown to be a cult favorite. Directed by Sophia Takal, whose impassioned defense of the film’s PG-13 rating on Twitter launched debate over whether a horror film needs to be rated R to be enjoyable, the film draws explicitly on the #MeToo era. But is it effective? We’re talking political horror, Joe Bob Briggs and the importance of audience spectatorship on this episode, so stay tuned!

Posted on December 23, 2018

The Pro-Sex Slasher: Talking Black Christmas (1974)

Elizabeth Erwin

Holiday horror is a mixed bag. For every acknowledged gem (Rare Exports, Better Watch Out), there exist some seriously awful yuletide tales (Santa Claws, To All a Good Night). Occasionally though, a film will get it so right that it establishes a template for the films that followed. Such is the case with the cult classic Black Christmas (1974). Criminally overlooked, this film by Bob Clark is typically recognized for establishing some of the most well-known tropes of the slasher genre. But it is its transgressive female characters that really steal the show and leave us asking why these characterizations didn’t become the standard.

In this Horror Homeroom Conversation, we’re kicking it back to 1974 with the ultimate holiday horror film, Black Christmas, and considering how the depictions of women in horror might be different had this film had gone mainstream.

Posted on August 15, 2018

The other secret of Marrowbone: The domestically entrapped male in horror film

Guest Post

The recent film, The Secret of Marrowbone (Sergio Sánchez, 2017) exemplifies a trope that has become an active model within the gothic and horror film since the mid twentieth century: the lone male figure enclosed within the spaces of the domestic realm, observing the women and children in his absence from afar, on the periphery of society and haunting the spaces of the family home. Hidden in attics, basements and crawlspaces, the domestically sutured male at once supports the male gaze but is at the same time disenfranchised from and on the borders of the society that supposedly promotes that same gaze. From Norman Bates’ scopophilic peephole view of Janet Leigh in Psycho (1960) to the image of Bryan Cranston observing the consequences of his self-imposed exile in Wakefield (2016), 20^th and 21^st-century film has given birth to a new societal orphan.