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Posted on April 12, 2021

The 40th Anniversary of The Evil Dead: Camp Horror and its Legacies

Guest Post

Forty years ago, Detroit’s Redford Theatre hosted the premiere of The Book of the Dead, a new film by Sami Raimi. A fan of the extravagant premiers popularised by William Castle, Raimi put on a show—custom-made ticket stubs promised the “Ultimate Experience in Gruelling Terror” and two ambulances were ceremoniously parked outside. If that were not enough, two wind tracks were set up to transport attendees to the film’s iconic setting: a dilapidated cabin in the woods. Two years later and the film, renamed The Evil Dead, would make over $29million worldwide; due in no small part to its dedication, on and off screen, to the kind of theatrical spectacle initially created in the Redford Theatre. Read more

Posted on April 5, 2021

Nightmare Normal: Lockdown Horror

Guest Post

When it comes to creating horror scenarios, statesmen and -women have always out-classed the creators of fiction. Now they’ve done it once again. As in some clichéd movie script, you go to bed one night to find the next day that the world has irreparably changed. Human rights are now “privileges.” People are not considered fellow human individuals but state-owned virus-transmitters. Soon a new passport could reconstruct and reshape an underclass defined by lack of an immunity which scientists can’t even confirm. Lockdown may well last forever. At least for those disadvantaged by one of the most momentous accelerators of systemic injustice ever. No matter how much you love horror, you don’t want to live it. Still, there are examples of filmic horror conveying some of the radically changed parameters of an utterly frightening reality. Their often perplexing plots, themes and systemic critique can help reassess an unhinged present, providing reflections on and analogues for the mechanisms of a new “normal” which is anything but.

Posted on March 31, 2021

“A World of His Own” and the Replaceability of Women in The Twilight Zone

Elizabeth Erwin

From the outset, Rod Serling’s vision for The Twilight Zone was a specifically political one. Understanding that the tropes of the science fiction genre made it the perfect vehicle to slip pointed social critique past television’s censoring bodies, Serling was long interested in using the series to push back against social norms. With a body of work exploring men escaping to worlds of their creation as a response to emasculation, Richard Matheson was the perfect writer to help execute Serling’s vision.[1] Of the 16 episodes Matheson wrote for the series, “A World of His Own” (broadcast in the first season on July 1, 1960) is the one whose framework is most readily reflected in modern dystopian narratives such as AMC’s Humans and Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale. As a reaction to the era’s shifting cultural power dynamics between men and women, this episode establishes a template for male domination over the female body, both psychologically and physically, that is still obvious in satire today.

Posted on March 25, 2021

Cosmic Slop: Before Peele Remade The Twilight Zone

Guest Post

With the rise of Jordan Peele’s Twilight Zone (2019-20) and Misha Green’s Lovecraft Country (2020), we are hopefully entering a golden age of Black horror TV, following decades in which the genre was marked by a lack of diversity. An exception appeared in 1994, however, in the three-part HBO horror/sci fi anthology, Cosmic Slop.

While Cosmic Slop was a unique example of a Black horror anthology made for TV in the nineties, it was not an isolated work of the genre. As Robin R. Means Coleman outlines, the nineties did give rise to numerous, albeit underfunded, Black horror films. Means Coleman makes the distinction between the labels “Blacks in horror” and “Black horror,” with the former indicating films about Black people but often lacking knowledge or political acuity and the latter comprising films created by Black people and that draw knowledgeably on “Black folklore, histories, and culture” while speaking to Black anxieties, aesthetics and viewpoints. Read more

Posted on March 18, 2021

Candyman: Essential Reading

Dawn Keetley

Conversations about the Candyman franchise will undoubtedly be ongoing as we await Nia DaCosta and Jordan Peele’s “spiritual sequel.” To that end, we’ll be collecting essential reading here – so send us any further suggestions.