- Horror Movie - Horror Homeroom

poster for unborn, woman looking in mirror

Posted on November 23, 2024

Ecumenical Exorcism in The Unborn

Guest Post

Steve A. Wiggins

For about three decades after The Exorcist (1973), possession movies tended to be Catholic. It was as if demons were a distinctively Catholic problem. Demons, in fact, are recognized worldwide in a variety of different forms, not all of them evil. In the three major monotheistic religions they do tend to be enemies of God and should be banished whenever possible. Historically speaking, Jews, Christians, and Muslims cooperated in exorcisms, something that is cited in The Unborn (David S. Goyer, 2009). Goyer’s movie features a Jewish exorcism involving an Episcopal priest and some nonbelievers. As such, it stands as another example of Jewish horror, albeit hybridized.

Posted on October 3, 2024

The Leech Woman: The Aging Female Body as Shock

Dawn Keetley

The essay below is drawn from an article I published in 2019 called “The Shock of Aging (Women) in Horror Film.” I’m excerpting (and adapting) part of the article here because the film it’s about, a very much undervalued film by Edward Dein from 1960 called The Leech Woman,[i] is not only a brilliant film but uncannily anticipates Coralie Fargeat’s equally brilliant film, The Substance (2024). You can see the outlines of The Substance in The Leech Woman, both in its structure and its preoccupations – and I’m surprised that more people aren’t talking about this earlier film. If this essay does nothing else, then, I hope it sends more people to The Leech Woman. But, more specifically, I think the arguments I make about The Leech Woman here are really relevant to The Substance.

Posted on September 29, 2024

Borderlands of Final Prayer

Guest Post

By Steve A. Wiggins

The 2013 folk horror found-footage movie Final Prayer (Elliot Goldner, 2013, released stateside as Borderlands) underscores the conflict of religions that fuels much of the genre. Even so, some of the choices on the Christian side of the formula are a bit unusual.

The Catholic Church, often in cases of canonization (or saint-making) investigates claims of miracles. Sometimes it investigates miracle claims on their own. That’s the premise here. Although set in England, Final Prayer is about a Catholic Church. The investigator Deacon (Gordon Kennedy) arrives to find his new colleague Gray Parker (Robin Hill), having already installed cameras in the cottage where they’re staying. Gray insists that they wear head-cameras throughout. It shortly becomes clear that a third investigator, Fr. Mark Amidon (Aidan McArdle) is also expected. Deacon is a religious brother—he’s basically a monk, but not associated with a monastery. Gray is a layman, only nominally Catholic, who took the job as a techie because it paid well. And when he arrives, it becomes clear that Mark, the priest, is in charge.

Posted on September 10, 2024

Liquid Visions: Salt, Saliva, Sperm and Sweat by Philip Brophy

Guest Post

by Patrick Zaia

Salt, Saliva, Sperm and Sweat was the debut featurette of Australian polymath Philip Brophy. Released in 1988, the film is an experimental and essayistic exploration of the body, specifically the physiological reality of the body as a messy soup of urges, sensations and emissions – “a soft machine” as William Burroughs famously described. When the film premiered at the Sydney Film Festival it proved to be incredibly divisive, with some critics dismissing it as boring and juvenile while others praised Brophy’s project as audacious and fascinating. One of the film’s most notable defenders was the revered critic David Stratton, who vividly described it in the press as “ a film with balls!” Because of its provocative content and polarising character, combined with the film’s relative obscurity, Salt, Saliva, Sperm and Sweat has garnered a thrilling aura of mystique and intrigue in certain circles of underground film and art culture. This alluring spell of anonymity, however, was ruptured roughly a year ago when a copy of the film suddenly surfaced from the tumultuous depths of the internet, appearing (of all places) on the popular video-sharing site YouTube. Finally, Brophy’s fluidic vision of the body is available for public consumption.

Posted on September 7, 2024

Fate in Film: A Deterministic Approach to Cinema, by Thomas M. Puhr

Guest Post

Below are the opening pages of a fascinating 2022 book by Thomas Puhr, Fate in Film, about determinism in film–much of which is horror, including Under the Skin, Hereditary, Midsommar, Us, Gus Van Sant’s Psycho, and Michael Haneke’s American Funny Games. We highly recommend.

INTRODUCTION

“You’ve Always Been the Caretaker”

When introducing compatibilism, my undergraduate philosophy professor drew a crude maze on the blackboard with a stick figure at its entrance. She traced the figure’s possible paths with diverging sets of arrows and explained how it had, say, a choice between left or right at a given T-junction (free will), but was prohibited from continuing straight (determinism). As this simple exercise illustrates, compatibilism’s deliciously ambiguous response to whether or not we have free will can be boiled down to: “Well, sort of yes, sort of no.”