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Posted on May 1, 2022

Hollow Wicker Tree

Guest Post

Horror movie makers sometimes consider religion as a cheap add-on to a plot. Little do they realize that a carefully constructed religion can convey very real fear. The Wicker Tree (2011), spiritual successor to The Wicker Man (1973), demonstrates this distinction clearly.

The Wicker Man, released the same year as The Exorcist, had something in common with that vastly more successful movie. The main theme of both is based on religion out of time. Father Karras doesn’t believe in demons, not in the modern 1970s! Meanwhile, on the island of Summerisle, Sergeant Neil Howie is confronting revivalist pagans who will eventually kill him as a sacrifice to their old gods. Such people hadn’t existed, he assumed, since the days of the Venerable Bede. The seventies were part of the pivot period for religion in horror. Certainly, religion has been part of horror from the very beginning (Dracula and his crucifix, Henry Frankenstein knowing what it feels like to be God), but it was brought to the foreground beginning in 1968 with Rosemary’s Baby.  Then The Wicker Man showed that religious plots could be transatlantic. The movie, however, had greater success in the United States than in the United Kingdom.

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Posted on April 23, 2022

Ratting out Disney: From Willard to Ratatouille

Guest Post

There are those who, growing up in the seventies, didn’t realize that Michael Jackson’s chart-topping single “Ben” was about a rat.  In 1971 one of the most successful films at the box office was Willard.  Apart from a remake in 2003, the movie fell from public consciousness despite its box-office success.  Ben (1972) was, of course, the sequel to Willard, named after the main rat in the initial film.

The lack of awareness of this connection suggests that in wider culture the influence of Willard is under-appreciated.  Consider Disney’s 2007 smash hit, Ratatouille.  Both the original Willard and Ratatouille have similar layouts and, upon close reflection, some very similar scenes.  Let’s begin with the socially awkward young man.  In Willard, it’s well, Willard.  His father started a successful steel mill that has been taken over by his shady second-in-command, Al Martin.  In Ratatouille Alfredo Linguini, a socially awkward young man, gets a job in the restaurant his father (whom he didn’t know) started.  Not only that, but the sous chef, Skinner, has taken the business over from the departed Gusteau.  Two young men are both working in their fathers’ businesses, which were unjustly taken from them.

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Posted on February 13, 2022

You’re Pissing on My People: Midsommar and the Revenge of the Research Subject

Guest Post

From The Body Snatcher (1945) to Black Christmas (1974, 2019), from Suspiria (1977, 2018) to The Blackcoat’s Daughter (2015), the academy serves as a common setting in the horror genre. But less frequent is the use of the academy not as a site of horror, but as a source of horror, particularly for those whose knowledges and customs the Ivory Tower simultaneously excludes and exploits. In Decolonizing Methodologies, Linda Tuhuwai Smith (2012) points to the failure of Western academic traditions to attend to the material realities of colonized peoples, all in the name of those Enlightenment requirements that research be objective, apolitical, and distanced from its objects. She claims, “Taking apart the story, revealing underlying texts, and giving voice to things that are often known intuitively does not help people to improve their current conditions. It provides words, perhaps, an insight that explains certain experiences—but it does not prevent someone from dying” (Smith, 2012: 3). Read more

woman walks alone
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

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