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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

Posted on May 29, 2019

Stephen King’s Radical Rewriting of Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery”

Dawn Keetley

Shirley Jackson’s 1948 short story “The Lottery” is a well-known cautionary tale about the dangers of blindly following tradition, about conformity, and about an innate human violence that needs to be appeased. (The Purge franchise clearly picked up on Jackson’s vision of the efficacy of regular cathartic releases of violence.)

In Jackson’s “The Lottery,” and its film adaptations, however much tradition, conformity, or violence may be pressuring individuals to act, it is clear that it is indeed humans who are acting. At the end of the story, after the sacrificial victim has picked her paper with the black dot, we see characters deliberately pick up stones from the pile gathered in the town center. “Mrs. Delacroix selected a stone so large she had to pick it up with both hands.” The town’s children had already taken their stones, and “someone gave little Davy Hutchinson,” the victim’s son, “a few pebbles.” The infamous last line of the story, “and then they were upon her,” makes it clear that the characters act –with purpose and intention. Jackson’s story is a humanist story: it doesn’t necessarily elaborate the more attractive parts of human nature, but we see human free will and human choice in action.

Posted on May 14, 2019

Val Lewton and Oz Perkins: The Downward Road is Crowded

Guest Post

What distinguishes the remarkable films of Val Lewton is not just the sorely needed life that they injected into the horror genre in the 1940’s. Nor is it that Lewton and his inner circle fashioned a unified aesthetic that, even in their lesser films, produced evocative imagery and memorably scary set pieces that still stand up today. Rather, it is Lewton’s resolute darkness of vision that sets his work apart from all others. Movies like Cat People (1942), Isle of the Dead (1945), and I Walked With a Zombie (1943) are shrouded in “an unshakeable apprehension of death’s hold on life”[i] that moves to the foreground in almost every film. The feelings that linger are horror but also a palpable sadness.

Until recently I assumed that this quality could only be found in the Lewton catalogue. But the first two films from director Oz Perkins, The Blackcoat’s Daughter (2015) and I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House (2016), are assured outings that also possess an unflinchingly despondent outlook that perhaps goes Val one better. Could Oz Perkins be the second coming of Val Lewton? Let’s take a look.