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Posted on January 16, 2020

Academia in Midsommar and Black Christmas

Guest Post

In 2019, horror went back to school in a major way, with a couple of popularly-released films taking on the trappings of academia. Ari Aster’s atmospheric Midsommar takes us to a remote village in Sweden where the residents have sinister plans for the unwitting grad students functioning as tourists. Sophia Takal’s Black Christmas is a remake of the 1974 proto-slasher of the same name about murders in a sorority house, but acts as more of a spiritual successor than faithful adaption.

While these films take dramatically different approaches to horror and the delivery of feelings of unease, they share a certain thematic sensibility. Namely, both movies deal with themes of cults and cult-like behavior, and in doing so draw an interesting comparison between the occult behavior of the villains of the stories and the trappings of higher education itself. In short, the cults in the film hold up a mirror to the conceit of academia in both productions and ask hard questions about the behavior of the characters involved. Read more

Posted on December 24, 2019

It’s a Wonderful Life – and a Horrifying Life

Dawn Keetley

Countless viewers this holiday season will be re-visiting Frank Capra’s classic 1946 film, It’s a Wonderful Life. I did so myself last night –and was particularly struck, this viewing, by the turn the film takes after George Bailey (James Stewart) drives to the bridge, determined to take his own life. This is, of course, where Clarence (Henry Travers), George’s guardian angel, appears and before long decides to show George what the life of Bedford Falls and its inhabitants would have been like without him. For a while, Capra’s Christmas classic turns into a horror film, and, in doing so, it illustrates the enduring meaning and importance of horror film in people’s lives.

Posted on December 19, 2019

Mick Garris: A Conversation with a Master of Horror

Guest Post

The first real horror film that I saw was Sleepwalkers (1992) by Mick Garris. I was 14 when I saw that film. When I met Mick in Copenhagen two and a half decades later – he was guest of honor at the Bloody Weekend film festival in the spring of 2019 – I told him that his film had messed me up none too gently. This, evidently, tickled his funny bone. I also told him that The Stand – also directed by Garris, and also, like Sleepwalkers, based on a Stephen King script – turned me on to the horror genre. I imagine I’m not the only horror film fan who has Garris to thank for their obsession.

Posted on November 12, 2019

Halaloween: A Muslim Horror Fest

Guest Post

Perhaps the most significant development in horror films since the year 2000 is the dramatic impact that filmmakers from outside of the US are having on the genre. Japan’s “J-Horror”, the French Extremity, and the horror-inflected fantasies of Mexico’s Guillermo del Toro all found audiences ready to try something different after the often underwhelming output of the 1990’s. Superb movies from this period like The Others (Spain), A Tale of Two Sisters (Korea), Let the Right One In (Sweden), and The Babadook (Australia) attest to the fact that excellent genre films are coming from all over the world.

The venerable Michigan Theater took the globalist trend a distinct step further in October of 2019 by hosting Halaloween, which, as far as I can tell, is the first ever festival with a lineup comprised entirely of horror films from Muslim countries like Turkey, Indonesia, and Tunisia. The festival was produced by The University of Michigan’s Global Islamic Studies Center.

Posted on October 30, 2019

In Two Minds: Stephen King, George A. Romero and The Dark Half

Guest Post

The 30th anniversary of Stephen King’s The Dark Half, published in 1989, seems to offer an opportune moment to take a look at the collaboration between King and George A. Romero that brought King’s novel about a writer’s alter ego to the screen.

It’s perhaps unsurprising that the late George A. Romero is so often associated with Stephen King. Having become firm friends in the 1970s – King even has a small cameo in Romero’s Knightriders (1981) – the two masters of horror first worked together on Creepshow (1982), a tribute to the colourful horror comics that they both loved in their youth. They collaborated again on its sequel Creepshow 2 (1987) and the cult anthology series Tales from the Darkside (1983–1988), which was designed to capitalise on Creepshow‘s modest commercial success (and was even intended to carry its title before Romero and his frequent producer, Richard P. Rubinstein, chose to rebrand the series for Tribune Broadcasting and avoid a potential rights dispute with Warner Brothers).