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darkened image where a man is faintly made out
Posted on September 8, 2021

Mike Flanagan’s Devotion to Negative Space

Guest Post

Mike Flanagan has developed into a writer-director at the forefront of contemporary horror, both in television and film. His work displays a horror auteurism that sets him apart from his contemporaries, with one particular stylistic marker rising above: Flanagan’s devotion to negative space. Negative space is everything around the main subject in an image. Positive space accounts for the subject of the image, that which we are drawn to focus on. Flanagan’s process suggests a careful deployment of negative space to build tension towards a terrifying payoff. Through an examination of two scenes from Flanagan’s oeuvre, one from the limited series The Haunting of Hill House (2018) and the other from the film Doctor Sleep (2019), I intend to lay out how Flanagan’s use of negative space defines his approach to filming horror.

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back view of a man who looks in the distance while a wolf howls
Posted on August 29, 2021

Surviving Winter and Nature in The Long Dark

Guest Post

In the dead heat of August, I often find myself longing for the depths of winter. With the tail-end of summer upon us, I’ve been satisfying that longing by playing Hinterland Studio’s The Long Dark, a video game set in a seemingly endless Canadian winter on an abandoned island where you are forced to fend for yourself. Perhaps survival isn’t your idea of escapism, but The Long Dark offers something much more unnerving than an idyllic tromp through the snowy woods. Specifically, The Long Dark’s horror as a survival game rests on the premise of ecophobia, the ever-present threat of nature, the very real limits of the human body, and the intrusions of the past. The Long Dark reveals that survival is a constant confrontation with the mundane horror of homeostasis.

The Long Dark is by no means a new game—it was released in 2014 as a sandbox-type survival game, and it is the survival mode that this piece will focus on. Later, Hinterland added a story mode, and by then it had gained a loyal following of fans. Survival mode has varying degrees of difficulty: Pilgrim, Voyageur, Interloper, and Stalker. While Pilgrim is fun for new players who want a more atmospheric experience, Voyageur is a good mix of animal-threat and atmosphere that will frequently push your character to its limits. Read more

Posted on August 22, 2021

Unraveling The Green Ribbon In Horror Stories and Movies

Guest Post

Marriage and relationships have always been a major theme in horror. How much can you ever REALLY know about the person you share your life with. How long can you last until a person’s true self is revealed. Yes, marriage is a murky mess. Oftentimes there is a simple yet impactful folktale that gets to the heart of a theme like this. One such story, one that has quite the history in itself, is a tale often known as The Green Ribbon.

I made a documentary about the Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark books, and so I’ve heard many people talk about the numerous folktales and urban legends in them. So many had a profound impact for children growing up, particularly in the 1980s and 1990s. The Green Ribbon is one that isn’t technically in those books (though featured in the same author’s easy reader) but it was one that came up again and again as a story that resonated with many people as a truly scary story that one ought to read in the dark. Over time I found that The Green Ribbon has some unique themes that closely relate to other modern tales in books and film. Read more

Posted on August 11, 2021

George A. Romero’s The Amusement Park and the Decline of West View Park

Guest Post

The twenty-first century has seen a growing interest in geriatric horror, not just perpetuation of stigmas against the elderly as grotesque and horrifying but also exposure of the act of growing old as a horror in itself. Films like Drag Me to Hell (2009), The Taking of Deborah Logan (2014), The Visit (2015), Anything for Jackson (2020), and The Relic (2020) are just a few examples that depict the financial, familial, and mental distress and confusion that come with getting old in a society that neglects rather than nurtures its elders.

As in most things, however, George A. Romero was ahead of this trend with his short PSA film, The Amusement Park, produced in 1973 and first screened in 1975. Not a traditional feature film, it was commissioned by the Lutheran Service Society of Western Pennsylvania, who were troubled by the neglect of the elderly by the political, economic, and social structures they served all their lives. To encourage young people to help the elderly, the Church hired a young filmmaker who had done commercials, segments for Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, several short films, a romantic comedy, and a few horror films. But, as Scout Tafoya writes, Romero “was never interested in subtly critiquing anyone; he went for the jugular and told you he was doing it.”[i] Working with scriptwriter Walton Cook, he made the film so disturbing that some sources say the Lutherans refused to show it, and so it was buried until 2017. Adam Charles Hart, Visiting Researcher at the University of Pittsburgh (which recently acquired Romero’s archives) speculates that local churches may have shown it, however. He claims that the film was never lost but just too weird to be shown with any regularity.[ii] The film has gotten a lot of attention this summer since it landed on Shudder. Here, I offer a personal commentary on the history of the amusement park itself, West View Park. Read more

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