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Posted on August 22, 2019

Horror’s Exotic Religion? The Marked Ones & Curse of La Llorona

Guest Post

The Conjuring universe had a bumper crop this year with two films being released within four months of each other. The Curse of La Llorona (Michael Chaves, 2019) is technically a spin off—and quite far spun out at that—from the diegesis established in the main Conjuring series and its popular Annabelle sub-series. La Llorona came out in April and the latest chapter on said doll, Annabelle Comes Home (2019), was released in late June. Having grossed nearly $2 billion dollars, the Conjuring franchise shows no sign of slowing down.

A certain intertextuality has long been recognized as a hallmark of horror cinema. The genre is notoriously self-referential. Even so, those who spent a few years drinking in the Paranormal Activity films (2007–2015) beginning in the middle of the last decade will perhaps notice some distinct similarities to The Conjuring franchise. Indeed, The Curse of La Llorona stands out from other films in its universe–similar to the way in which Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones (Christopher Landon, 2014) relates to the main story of its series. Both involve Hispanic communities, feature a botánica and even involve some of the same rituals associated with Hispanic folk tradition. This could reflect nothing more than the fact that religions that used to be called “syncretistic” bear certain similarities. Nevertheless, this particular form of religion in horror is a form of exoticism for the white mainstream, and it draws on very similar motifs in these two films. Some backstory might be useful right about now. Read more

Posted on August 6, 2019

La Maldición de la Llorona and the Essence of Horror

Dawn Keetley

In April 2019, New Line Cinema released James Wan’s production of The Curse of La Llorona, directed by Michael Chaves. It brought mainstream US attention to the important Mexican legend of “La Llorona,” or “the wailing woman.” In most versions, La Llorona is a banshee figure, often dressed in white, crying for her children whom she has killed after herself being betrayed by a lover. The figure has been connected to a broader history of colonialism in Mexico, as this excellent article by Dr. Amy Fuller explains. Numerous cinematic incarnations of the legend of La Llorona precede Chaves’s film, many made in Mexico. La Maldición de la Llorona, made in 1961 but released in Mexico in 1963 and in the US in 1969, and directed by Rafael Baledón, is a version worth watching despite its limitations. It should be stated up front that one of its principal limitations is that La Maldición is devoid of any taint of colonial critique; the film’s reference point is the Hollywood horror tradition more so than the historically- and politically rooted La Llorona of Mexican folklore.

Posted on July 4, 2019

Natalia Leite’s M.F.A. and Survival, Eastwood Style

Guest Post

In Natalia Leite’s 2017 M.F.A., a timid third-year Fine Arts student Noelle (Francesca Eastwood) voices the riposte, “I guess that depends on what law you break” to a women’s student group as its leader condescends to her frustration at Southern California’s exclusive Balboa (actually Chapman University) campus’s complicit rape tolerance policy by warning her that, “If you break the law, there will be consequences.”

This administration-friendly group endorses Rohypnol-sensitive nail polish and keeps busy raising funds to support a woman in Rio de Janeiro who was gang-raped by thirty-three men (the number of assailants and the distant crime site inspires them to name their initiative, ‘Heroes for Rio’): here, Noelle’s protest situates the logic of a truly feminist rape-revenge horror film: patriarchal systems of law force rape victims to take the law into our own hands in order to survive. Read more

Posted on June 26, 2019

We Have Always Lived in the Castle: Novel to Film

Dawn Keetley

In many ways, Stacie Passon’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle (2018) is a remarkably faithful adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s 1962 novel. Indeed, it is perhaps the most faithful Jackson adaptation to date –certainly more faithful than the three principal versions of The Haunting of Hill House, for instance (Robert Wise’s 1963 film, Jan de Bont’s 1999 film, and Mike Flanagan’s 2018 serial Netflix adaptation). In an interview, Taissa Farmiga (who plays Merricat Blackwood) explains “Part of the desire of everybody attached—the director, the producers and actors—was to stick as close as possible to the novel. And when we couldn’t, because things don’t always translate to the screen, we wanted to at least stay close to the essence of what the book is about.

The seemingly small ways in which Passon’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle diverges from Jackson’s novel, however, make a significant difference. Indeed, they shift the terrain of the narrative entirely from the enigmatic and even weird to the profoundly familiar. Passon’s film is still a very good film in its own right, but it simply doesn’t challenge and baffle its viewers the way that Jackson’s novel does.

Posted on May 31, 2019

Monstrous Relationalities in Alan Moore and Stephen Bissette’s Swamp Thing

Guest Post

In anticipation of the upcoming web television series Swamp Thing (set to premiere on May 31, 2019 on the DC Universe streaming service), we have been asked to offer a “teaser” of our chapter about the comic series published in the 2016 anthology collection, Plant Horror: Approaches to the Monstrous Vegetal in Fiction and Film, co-edited by Dawn Keetly and Angela Tenga. While the television series may draw from any of the various versions of the Swamp Thing character put forth since its initial creation by Len Wein and Bernie Wrightson in a 1971 issue of House of Secrets, our essay looks specifically to Alan Moore and Stephen Bissette’s version, which saw a complete overhaul of the Swamp Thing canon and included a small but significant twist in the titular character’s origin story. Read more