“I have so much respect for anyone in the medical profession, like, any area. I really think it’s the most important thing you can do with your life. Almost.” –Maud
Saint Maud is only partially about religion. It’s also about the horrors of isolation, end of life care, and mental illness. During this crucial moment when we’re lauding our healthcare workers as heroes, it’s also about the trauma of caretaking work and the easy neglect of those who do it. Read more
Red Dot is a Swedish film released on Netflix US on February 11, 2021. Directed by Alain Darborg and written by Darborg and Per Dickson, Red Dot is a hybrid of survival horror, backwoods horror, and folk horror – more specifically, it’s part of a subgenre I call survival folk horror. Other examples include Deliverance (John Boorman, 1972), Eden Lake (James Watkins, 2008), and Calibre (Matt Palmer, 2018).
The film follows Stockholm couple Nadja (Nanna Blondell) and David (Anastasios Soulis), along with their dog Boris, as they decide to head north to isolated Bear Valley to ski, camp, and see the Northern Lights. On the way there, as they stop to get gas, they encounter two hunters who suggestively mock David as a “pretty boy” and eye Nadja, who is Black with a kind of contemptuous sexual aggression. Both David and Nadja are unnerved by this encounter, especially after David sees a gun and a severed reindeer head in the back of their truck. Pulling away from the gas pump, he bumps their truck, leaving a small dent. They drive away nonetheless.
Dr. Black, Mr. Hyde (1976, aka The Watts Monster), directed by William Crain (who also directed 1972’s Blacula) is a brilliant example of the power of Blaxploitation horror. It features Dr. Henry Pride (Bernie Casey), a successful physician and medical researcher. The son of a maid, Pride has managed to work his way into the affluent white enclave around UCLA, but he travels to Watts to see patients at the free clinics populated by the neighborhood’s poor, Black residents. In a more psychological form of return, Pride’s research efforts are directed toward a cure for cirrhosis of the liver, the disease that killed his mother. Pride’s mother worked in a high-class (presumably white) brothel[i] and drank to dull the despair at spending her days “cleaning up the filth.” Desperate to find human subjects on which to test his cure, Pride injects himself with his own drug and turns into a violent white monster, one who returns to Watts not to cure but to kill.
I’ve read a good number of horror novels, mostly modern classics like Rosemary’s Baby, The Shining, The Exorcist, and The Haunting of Hill House. They are all frightening works of fiction, but I haven’t lost much sleep over them. It’s different with horror films. They really freak me out. But I like much of what they have to offer, so I’ll come up with any number of excuses to get my wife to watch them with me. That way I won’t have to stick it out alone.
At least I’m not alone in feeling like this. Most people find horror films more frightening than horror literature. This is presumably because horror films can audiovisually represent cues to danger, such as needly fangs, rotting flesh, and loud noises—and humans have evolved to be sensitive to such cues (Clasen, 2017). By contrast, horror literature has to rely on the reader’s readiness and ability to picture the monster and imagine what it sounds like. To be sure, some readers’ imaginations are plenty scary, but even the words of a great horror novel don’t literally seem to be jumping out at you, whereas the cinematic horror monster often does. For this reason, I don’t know of anyone who can imagine themselves into a startle. (Of course, the reader’s imagination might potentiate a startle, making you jump at shadows, but that’s different.) Read more
Pet Sematary, at least at the time Stephen King wrote his 2001 introduction, was the most frightening book he’d written, according to the author. He explains that for any parent the death of a child is perhaps the most traumatic event they might ever face. The only thing worse would be if s/he came back to life, not him- or herself. Two major films were made based on this novel, one in 1989, directed by Mary Lambert and a second in 2019 by Kevin Kölsch and Dennis Widmyer. Resurrection is a frightening idea. It claws out of the ground of religion.
The entire premise of resurrection, to those in the western hemisphere, derives from Christian teaching. Among the many movie monsters, two revenants in particular—the resurrected and the zombie—inspire a special fear. Is it because religion tells us that at least the former is actually possible? Horror derives much of its energy from the fear of death, and the living dead of either stripe have religious origins and cross boundaries that are carefully guarded.
taking horror seriously so you don't have to
