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Posted on March 22, 2023

Before Norman Bates: Talking the Spiral Staircase (1946)

Podcast

In today’s episode, it is early horror with an unexpected feminist twist in 1946’s The Spiral Staircase, directed by Robert Siodmak. Set in 1906, the film follows Helen (Dorothy McGuire), a woman with traumatic mutism, who cares for Mrs. Warren (Ethel Barrymore), the difficult and bedridden lady of the manor. When a serial killer begins killing off women with so-called afflictions, Helen is warned that she may be next. Adapted from Ethel Lina White’s novel Some Must Watch (1933), the film takes up themes such as disability and masculinity while simultaneously challenging the notion that the modern slasher film began with Hitchcock’s Psycho(1960). We’re breaking it all down today with spoilers, so stay tuned.

Essential reading:

Anne Golden, “Robert Siodmak’s The Spiral Staircase: Horror Genre Hybridity, Vertical Alterity, and the Avant-Garde,” Recovering 1940s Horror Cinema: Traces of a Lost Decade, edited by Mario Degiglio-Bellemare, Charlie Ellbé, and Kristopher Woofter (Lexington Books, 2014), chapter 5.

Posted on September 8, 2022

Special Issue #6: Classic Horror

Dawn Keetley/ Elizabeth Erwin/ Special Issue #6

2022 is the 90th anniversary of the many amazing classic horror films that were released in 1932, among them Freaks, Island of Lost Souls, The Most Dangerous Game, The Old Dark House, The Mummy, and White Zombie. To mark this anniversary, Horror Homeroom’s sixth special issue takes up classic horror, which we’re defining as any film released prior to Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 film, Psycho – the film that saw the birth of ‘modern’ horror.

We have an array of fabulous essays that explore witchcraft and rise of documentary horror in Benjamin Christensen’s Swedish silent film Häxan (1922); the difference of James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931) – as well as the later Bride of Frankenstein (1935) and Son of Frankenstein (1939) – from Mary Shelley’s novel; Frankenstein as a film about autism; imperialism and the continuing struggle over artifacts in The Mummy (1932); the resonances of Tod Browning’s Freaks (1932) in American Horror Story: Freak Show; representations of mental illness in Bedlam (1946); the 3-D film craze that took off in the 1950s; nuclear holocaust and vaccination fallout in The Werewolf (1956); and representations of colonialism in Hammer’s Dracula (1958).

Our authors are: Erin Harrington, Alissa Burger, Margaret Yankovich, Jessica Parant (of Spinsters of Horror), Aíne Norris, Josh Grant-Young, Katherine Cottle, Zack Kruse, Justin Wigard, and Joseph Hsin-shun Chang. Our cover illustration is by Andrew Foley.

We want to thank them for their brilliant and thoughtful work.

Posted on April 21, 2021

The Greatest Witch of All: Examining the Character and Cultural Impact of the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz (1939)

Guest Post

The Wicked Witch of the West is perhaps the most famous incarnation of a witch on screen who also happens to be in one of the greatest films of all time. She may not have a cat, but she does have a fleet of winged monkeys. I can, of course, only be referring to the Wicked Witch of the West from the spectacularly glorious 1939 film, The Wizard of Oz. Originating from the timeless and much-loved book penned in 1900 by L. Frank Baum entitled The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, this depiction, embodied by an unrecognisable Margaret Hamilton, has served as universal shorthand for wickedness in popular culture for decades.

The Wicked Witch of the West is ranked at number 4 on the American Film Institute’s 50 best villains of all-time list, a startling achievement in that it also makes her the highest -ranking female villain ever to bewitch our screens! Her very title, in fact, denotes her importance, for she is not just a witch, but the Wicked Witch of the West, a name that with its heavy vowel sounds and alliteration carries an air of threat and menace. Unlike her adversary, Glinda, the Witch of the North, she is not humanized with a Christian name. Read more

Posted on December 17, 2020

Ten Classic Movies to Unlock the Uncanny

Guest Post

Seemingly normal, yet subtly menacing surroundings, anticipations of looming evil, the creeping notion of something or someone being not quite right – perhaps you … A new heyday of sophisticated horror, led by the likes of The Babadook, The Witch, Midsommar and Get Out, brings back a cinematic conception which not only predated the horror genre but helped incite it. The uncanny is rising to new screen prominence. Even before Freud wrote his eponymous essay about it in 1919, movie theaters had already begun to capitalize on its captivation. Uncanniness or Unheimlichkeit shaped a number of early European movies which are psychologically twisted and phantasmagoric. Unheimlich is a weird, complex perception, not simply a milder touch of fear. To be unheimlich something has to appear basically nice, comfortable and familiar while at the same time feeling a bit off. Better than listening to explanations of the uncanny is the experience of it. This list takes a closer look at the cinematic roots of the uncanny. Read more

Posted on September 1, 2017

Maniac (1934): As Crazy as It Gets

Guest Post

About halfway through Maniac (also called Sex Maniac, for no reason), a minor character gets an accidental shot of adrenaline and performs a monologue that has to be seen to be believed: “Creeping through my veins! Pouring in my blood! Oh, dash the fire in my brain! Stabbing me! Agony!” It goes on and on. The magic of 1934’s Maniac is that, despite its fifty-minute runtime, this isn’t even the craziest scene.

Is the craziest scene when the suicide victim comes back to life, licks her lips, and then is instantly forgotten by the rest of the cast? How about the cat-breeding next-door neighbor (a man in drag) complaining in total deadpan that the scientist next door keeps doing “queer” things like making too much noise and bringing dogs back to life? Perhaps it’s the big ending, which shamelessly rips off an Edgar Allan Poe story for no reason whatsoever.