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Posted on August 25, 2024

Oz Perkins’ Longlegs as Folk Horror

Dawn Keetley

Oz Perkins’ 2024 film, Longlegs, is at first glance a serial killer film, with references abounding to Jonathan Demme’s Silence of the Lambs (1991) and, to a lesser extent, David Fincher’s Seven (1995). Perkins has been quite explicit in interviews, however, that he lures viewers in with this promise and then gives them something else. That something else is an occult horror film: some critics have pointed to the influence of The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973), but I see more pronounced echoes of Rosemary’s Baby (Roman Polanski, 1968) and The Omen (Richard Donner, 1976). The “Hail Satan!” refrain—which serves not least as the last line of the film—definitively evokes Rosemary’s Baby.

Longlegs is, though, also folk horror—and I will be developing this perhaps not-so-obvious claim at greater length in an article I’m working on. Thus far, no one has identified the film as folk horror, except for one brief post that compares it to Texas Chain Saw Massacre. (An interesting comparison!)

Posted on August 19, 2024

Terror In the Eyes: Jaws, Godzilla Minus One and Horror

Guest Post

Kevin Cooney

Godzilla Minus One (2023) altered many fans’ perceptions of the eponymous kaiju. Gone was the childhood joy of watching a man in a rubber suit wreak havoc on meticulous scale models, now overshadowed by a new sense of awe and dread. No longer was the irradiated monster humanity’s savior. Instead, Godzilla emerged anew as a horror villain, a mindless, destructive force with a consistent, murderous, unblinking gaze. However, the human characters have often dominated the conversations about Minus One. Those trauma-laden survivors of war, who must now face the incomprehensible terror of the towering monster, usher Godzilla Minus One back to its horror roots. To understand Minus One’s horror, we need only turn to Jaws (1975) to see how fear and dread reflected in the eyes of characters elicit shock in the viewer.

Posted on August 4, 2024

Radical Slasher: In a Violent Nature

Dawn Keetley

Canadian filmmaker Chris Nash’s 2024 In a Violent Nature is an effective, pared-down slasher. It is also a commentary – and at times a rather brilliant one – on the slasher.

The killer’s perspective . . .

Ever since Vera Dika’s and Carol Clover’s work in the 1980s and early 1990s, it has been commonplace to talk about the way that slashers take the point of view of the killer. Dika writes about the slasher’s distinctive “moving camera point-of-view shot,” which allows for identification “with the killer’s look” (88), and Clover mentions the slasher’s “I-camera [used] to represent the killer’s point of view” (45). Slashers that famously deploy this I-camera include Black Christmas (Bob Clark, 1974), Halloween (John Carpenter, 1978), and Friday the 13^th (Sean S. Cunningham, 1980). (In the early 1980s, Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert offered a famous polemic against exactly this characteristic of the slasher.) In a Violent Nature made me realize, however, how limited this claim actually is.

Posted on July 30, 2024

Horror’s Effaced Protagonists

Guest Post

By JDC Burnhil

What qualifies a protagonist as a protagonist?

The answer may vary depending upon whom we ask, and for what purpose. At one extreme, we find a very simple set of criteria, offered for functional purposes by author Robin D. Laws: “Any figure who the viewer wants to see succeed, both because they empathize with the character and because the character appears early on and in a large number of scenes, qualifies as the protagonist.” These characters “become the focus of our hopes and fears”, making the ups and downs of those characters’ fates impactful to the audience (Laws, ch. 1).

Yet Laws himself acknowledges that others have more rigorous demands for granting “protagonist” status, that “some [sources] argue … that the protagonist is the character responsible for the instigating action that sets the story in motion” (ch. 1) This is by no means the sole or most stringent set of criteria; to give an example from the other extreme, Michael Mackenzie explains why, in one of the two subtypes of giallo film he identifies, he deliberately chooses to not refer to the main characters as protagonists: “… the protagonist is considered to be the primary active force in any dramatic work, propelling the plot forward through their actions … the spectator typically shares the point of view of the protagonist … these conventions do not apply to the main … characters of the F-giallo …” (112-113). Others make the overlapping demand that a protagonist must have agency, and if this is not the case, “Your Story Is About the Wrong Character” (Ashkenazi).

Putting all these together leads to a puzzling picture: a corpus of works that conventional wisdom suggests are written in a “wrong” fashion, about the “wrong characters,” and yet they evoke substantial audience response. After all, it’s unlikely that Mackenzie would have had two dozen F-gialli to write about (228-232), if being centered around a non-“protagonist” had been a barrier to pleasing the audience; the environment from which the giallo emerged saw relentless copying of successes, not of failures.

Posted on July 16, 2024

Exploring a Filming Location: Alan Garner’s Red Shift – St Mary the Virgin

Dawn Keetley

Alan Garner’s writing is famously bound to the land. One of his best-known novels, Red Shift (1973) is set in Cheshire, Garner’s native county in north west England. Indeed, the novel features specific places and events in Cheshire: Mow Cop Castle, a folly built in 1754 in the village of Mow Cop, split between the counties of Cheshire and Staffordshire, and St. Bertoline’s Church in Barthomley, Cheshire, the site of a Royalist massacre of twelve suspected Parliamentarian supporters in 1643. When the novel was adapted (by Garner himself) for television for the BBC’s Play for Today series, directed by John Mackenzie and airing on January 17, 1978, the adaptation was filmed on Mow Cop, with the folly featuring prominently.

Even though St. Bertoline’s in Barthomley also features in the novel and the adaptation, it did not appear in the film. Instead, the crew traveled 140 miles north and east to film the church scenes in North Yorkshire. I discovered this fact after listening to a brief interview that accompanied the BFI’s DVD release of Red Shift in 2014, in which assistant director Bob Jacobs describes his search for the perfect church – and that he found it in the “North Ridings of Yorkshire.”