- Horror Movie - Horror Homeroom

Posted on January 2, 2022

America’s Original Sin—Top Ten Movies About the Horrors of Settler Colonialism

Guest Post

“Once upon a time, there was a girl, and the girl had a shadow.”

-Red (Lupita Nyong’o), Us (2019)

We live in a haunted house. The founding of the American nation began with a moment of sweeping amnesia about its defining structure—settler colonialism, a form of colonization that replaces the original population of the colonized territory with a new society of settlers.[1] From depopulation to the reservation system[2], the residential school system[3] to the plantation system[4], settler colonialism as an ongoing process depends upon a constant flow of physical and cultural violence. Colonization is as horrific as humanity gets—genocide, desecration, pox-blankets, rape, humiliation—and it is the way nations are born. It is an ongoing horror made invisible by its persistence. And yet since the inception of film, the horror genre has, perhaps sneakily, participated in, portrayed, and resisted settler colonialism, ensuring at the very least that it remains visible. Horror movies invite us to rethink the roles that fear, guilt, shame, and history play in the way we conceive of the United States as a nation founded through settler colonialism.[5] They unveil the American experience as based on genocide and exploitation and force us to consider horror as a genre about marginalization and erasure. The ghosts in these films are “never innocent: the unhallowed dead of the modern project drag in the pathos of their loss and the violence of the force that made them, their sheets and chains.”[6] Most importantly, they force us to see them—the shadows of our sins. Read more

Posted on December 29, 2021

Falling into the Ethical Abyss of The Platform

Guest Post

Class hierarchy is the critical focus of Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia’s dystopic horror The Platform, but it should not obscure the film’s intrinsic exploration of interlocking existential and ethical instability. The brutal boost in social injustice in our own pandemic prison has given all the more relevance to The Platform’s sardonic scrutiny of human susceptibility to rationalized ruthlessness.

The current consolidation of class limits is accurately mirrored by the hermetically closed setting. Regulated by an obscure administration, the so-called Vertical Self-Management Center is an architectural allegory for economic inequality. Each of its stacked cells contains two inmates anticipating a specific gain from their voluntary detention. The Center’s purpose is said to be eliciting “spontaneous solidarity.“ Even though the narrative marks this piece of information as unreliable, solidarity — a concept commonly perceived as a socio-psychological remedy for precariousness — remains a focal point. Due to the recent renaissance of solidarity rhetoric, the plot’s implementation of this concept provides a poignant link to the present and might help us to reflect upon the nature of solidarity as well as the public discourse in which it is used. In a reality profoundly different from the pre-pandemic times of the film’s release, one that hinges social access on medical certificates and their local validation, the scene in which the protagonist Goreng (Iván Massagué) asks for a diploma in exchange for his detention seems much more momentous. A Quixotic hero in more than one sense, Goreng gets into a cell to gain “a degree” of freedom, just to become painfully aware that there is no such thing as a free lunch. Read more

Posted on December 25, 2021

Midnight Mass and Spiritual Abuse

Guest Post

Content Warning: This article discusses heavy spoilers for Midnight Mass, manipulation, and emotional and spiritual abuse.

Horror holds a mirror up to your psyche and dares you to look at your own risk: it’s a realization of your worst fears. Mike Flanagan’s Midnight Mass (streaming on Netflix) is no different. And for me, a devoutly religious person (Protestant, if you’re curious), the image within the dark mirror of my psyche is the specter of a trauma I’ve survived: spiritual abuse.

Most dedicated horror fans are well aware that abuse can be perpetrated through psychological and emotional means.[i] Spiritual abuse is a similar beast. WebMD defines spiritual abuse as: “Any attempt to exert power and control over someone using religion, faith, or beliefs.”[ii] And Midnight Mass is a veritable hit parade of red flags for spiritual abuse. This post aims to compare every bullet point within WebMD’s guide to spiritual abuse against what the residents of Crockett experience in Midnight Mass.[ii] Read more

Posted on December 19, 2021

Krampusnacht in Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania

Dawn Keetley

Krampus events are springing up around the US – raising the question of why? What draws Americans to this figure indigenous to the Alpine regions of Austria, Bavaria, and southern Germany?

The answer lies most obviously in the human need for ritual – that is, events organized on a calendrical or ‘natural’ rhythm that thus bypass the increasingly insistent presence of holidays controlled (and often created) by corporate interests. While not created by corporations, Christmas certainly seems to have been hijacked by them. In his book about the Krampus as an integral part of “the old, dark Christmas,” Al Ridenour points out that this commercialism may be a particular problem for those Americans “who came of age in the rebellious punk-rock era.” For this generation, the ‘savage’ Krampus “seems to express the requisite countercultural contempt for the Coca-Cola guzzling, bloated patriarch of all that is consumerist and parental.”[i] Krampus represents a darker seam of US culture, one that seeks a form of ‘authenticity’ in the face of a stultifying consumerism—a dark counterpoint to artificial light.

red, black, and white graphic image of two women and a man

Posted on December 13, 2021

Cut by Cut: Parallel Editing in The Hunger (1983)

Guest Post

The phrase “directed by Tony Scott” likely brings to mind images of slickly constructed action movies populated by A-list talent. Before his death in 2012, Scott directed a murderer’s row of stand-out blockbusters that include Top Gun (1986), Beverly Hills Cop II (1987), Enemy of the State (1998), and my personal favorite, Unstoppable (2010). Therefore, discovering The Hunger (1983), Scott’s second feature-length directorial effort, was a tantalizing surprise. The Hunger is an erotic arthouse vampire thriller starring David Bowie, Catherine Deneuve, and Susan Sarandon, components resulting in a film that is equal parts baroque surrealism and morality play. It also features the first prominent feature example of a filmmaking technique that would go on to define Scott’s action filmmaking in subsequent decades: parallel editing.

Parallel editing, the term for cutting together two or more scenes happening at the same time, is responsible for any number of memorable sequences. It is the backbone of The Godfather’s (1972) “Baptism Sequence” just as it is the foundation of the adrenaline-pumping fake-out that is the FBI arriving at the wrong house and leaving Clarice Starling on her own near the end of The Silence of the Lambs (1991). When deployed well, parallel editing can do anything from heightening suspense to drawing thematic parallels between characters all through editing. In The Hunger, Scott, and editor Pamela Power utilize parallel editing at various points to comment on the character’s vampirism and underscore the moral and philosophical aspects of what it means to be a near-immortal figure who violently feasts on human blood. Read more