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Posted on October 24, 2020

“Fucking Spic Bastard”: Zombies and the Latino Threat

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Zombies have become ubiquitous globally in film and television. This undead ghoul keeps returning and finding new ways to infect our screens. Here, I look at Cholo (John Leguizamo) from George A Romero’s Land of the Dead (2005), one of the few Latinx zombies in film, delving into what this ghoul represents.

In 1968 the zombie film forever changed with the release of George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. This black-and-white low-budget horror flick now marks the before and after of zombie films. Before Night of the Living Dead, zombie films saw a transition from the fear-inducing film White Zombie (1932) to more comedic zombie films like 1945’s Zombies on Broadway. After Night of the Living Dead, zombies not only morphed from a voodoo creation into undead ghouls of unknown origins but also moved from exotic lands, outside of the U.S., to Pittsburgh. Thus, zombies were no longer ghouls that inhabited “uncivilized” spaces where tourists, the military, and corporations were at risk but were now an integral part of the American landscape.

Posted on October 20, 2020

Wallpaper + Horror

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When Suzy Bannion (Jessica Harper) stumbles down a hallway in Dario Argento’s Suspiria (1977), we sense that the crimson flocked wallpaper is participating in a spell. In a blinding white flash punctuated in Goblin’s score by the word “witch,” a shard of mirror illuminates the dust that permeates the space with cognitive and respiratory menace. Suzy runs her hand along the flocked damask and clutches her chest as she struggles to breathe. In that moment, Argento’s Suspiria not only connects wallpaper to witchcraft, but also evokes, intentionally or not, the real-world pulmonary illnesses of wallpaper factory workers asphyxiated by flocking dust.[i] On screen and off, the allure of wallpaper has always been countered by disquieting side-effects. The bright colors of nineteenth-century wallpapers were made possible by arsenic, known to seep from the walls in damp weather and infuse a room with dangerous fumes. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century advice writers saw in wallpaper opportunities for the aesthetic and moral enrichment of the working class, even while fearing that the sensual impact of the wrong wallpaper might lead astray the sensitive soul. Oscar Wilde once remarked, “Why, I have seen a wallpaper which must lead a boy brought up under its influence to a career of crime”—a joke, perhaps, but one taken seriously by moralists, home decor treatises, and horror films.[ii]

Posted on October 16, 2020

The Legends of Sleepy Hollow

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When autumn rolls around horror movies awake. Among the most enduring of stories for fall frights is the short story by Washington Irving, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” The story is simple: an outsider schoolmaster, Ichabod Crane, comes to Sleepy Hollow and is smitten by Katrina Van Tassel. Katrina’s beau, Brom Bones, frightens the credulous schoolmaster out of town by masquerading as the headless horseman of local lore. This secular ghost story became a big screen hit with the addition of a religious element to the script. This addition fueled two seasons of Fox’s sleeper hit of 2013, Sleepy Hollow. It also may have contributed to the series’ demise. How did all of this come about?

Published two centuries ago in 1820, Irving’s story was the basis for one of the early ghost films of the cinematographic era—The Headless Horseman (1922), directed by Edward D. Venturini. While horror films have a longer pedigree than is generally acknowledged, this was clearly an early attempt to translate a ghost story to cellulite. Two other silent films addressed the topic as well, but they don’t survive in film. Read more

Posted on September 17, 2020

Is The Invisible Man What It Seems?

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Based on the 1897 H. G. Wells novel, The Invisible Man (2020), written and directed by Leigh Whannell, involves a woman who believes she is being stalked by her now invisible wealthy ex-boyfriend following his suicide. However, things may not be as they seem in this modern tale of trauma and psychological terror.

On the surface the film’s synopsis sees Cecilia Kass (Elisabeth Moss) leave violent boyfriend Adrian Griffin (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) and subsequently suffer the traumatic after-effects of a violently abusive relationship. She goes to stay with childhood friend Detective James Lanier (Aldi Hodge) and his daughter Sydney (Storm Reid) to make a fresh start. But it does not end there: even after Adrian’s supposed suicide, Cecilia believes she is being hunted by an invisible Adrian, and she struggles to convince her friends and family of her unseen torment. After suffering further at the hands of the invisible man, Cecilia is eventually admitted to a mental hospital following her sister Emily’s (Harriet Dyer) murder in a restaurant; Cecilia claims she is being framed for the murder by the invisible man. She manages to escape the hospital after confronting her unseen attacker, but he takes the fight to her friend James’s house. After Cecilia shoots the invisible man, he is unveiled as Adrian’s lawyer brother, Tom (Michael Dorman), and Adrian is discovered imprisoned in his home. Not convinced it was Tom taunting her, Cecilia arrives to have dinner and ends up adopting the invisible suit herself and murdering Adrian, making it appear to be suicide. Cecilia is free at last.

Posted on September 10, 2020

Us & the Horror of the Class System

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Privilege and classism are vivid themes of Jordan Peele’s second feature, Us (2019), both working as accompaniment to the core subject of social separation: topographically, physically and ultimately, by a drastic act of metaphoric self-restriction, mentally. By re-imagining an eerie scenario nearly as old as horror cinema itself (dating back to the earliest expressionist films like 1913’s The Student of Prague), Peele exposes the concept of social advancement as a fairy tale, established to silence the conscience of the advantaged and to denounce the frustration of the disadvantaged.

Although exploitative structures are less obvious than in Peele’s astute debut Get Out (2017), the Tethered’s puppet-like subjection to their upper-world doubles indicates the underprivileged’s subordination to the actions of the prosperous. In this world of Us – or ours, as Red’s declaration “We are Americans“ emphasizes – decline comes as easy as stepping on an escalator. However, the only way up from mind-numbing deprivation is hostile acquisition. Red turns out to be the little girl who entered the hall of mirrors in the prologue and now reclaims her place from an imposter.