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Posted on February 12, 2019

Mixed Media in Velvet Buzzsaw

Guest Post

The trailer for Velvet Buzzsaw is a chimerical thing. The first half sells a delicious send-up of the art scene. The “coastal elites” that America loves to hate lean toward expensive art. They murmur terms like “mesmeric” as they nibble their Armani frames. Halfway through the clip, the trailer rears its second head, revealing the campiest of horror as the apparently possessed paintings deliver unto these moneyed elites their bloody comeuppance.

The only through line, stitching these two movies together with Dr. Frankenstein’s hand, is thumping techno. The music, transitioning from sexy electro to dread-inducing industrial, convinces us that either of these movies would be a good time. But can they work together? Velvet Buzzsaw is true to the luxurious bite of its incongruous title. Like Frankenstein’s monster, animated by who-knows-what, pieced together from who-knows-who, this thing is alive, and it’s worth a look. Read more

Posted on January 27, 2019

Cam – Horror and the Double

Dawn Keetley

Cam is a quite extraordinary film, taking the horror genre into relatively uncharted territory. Directed by Daniel Goldhaber and written by Isa Mazzei, Cam centers on Alice, played brilliantly by Madeline Brewer, an “erotic webcam performer” (stage name of Lola), who is determined to move up the ranks at FreeGirls.Live. In one disconcerting moment, however, her world gets upended. She turns on her laptop to discover none other than herself performing live. What follows is straight out of a nightmare as Alice tries to get the service techs at FreeGirls.Live to fix the problem and then gives up and tries to fix it herself—all the while seeing on screen an exact double of herself. Alice’s double, moreover, seems determined to prove that she can succeed vastly better at being “Lola” than Alice herself.

Posted on January 22, 2019

Cosmic Horror in Lost Carcosa: True Detective as the Ultimate Weird Tale

Guest Post

True Detective, an American anthology of self-contained stories created and written by Nic Pizzolatto, exploded onto television screens in 2014. It has since developed into two further standalone series (2015; 2019) that failed to reach the same levels of critical acclaim. The initial eight-part mini-series starred Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey as a pair of former homicide detectives in rural Louisiana embroiled in the hunt for a mysterious and murderous far-reaching Southern syndicate. Fans of straight police procedurals soon found themselves caught in a captivating Southern Gothic tale that spanned several years and incorporated distinctly supernatural elements. In fact, with its direct references to the lost city of Carcosa from Robert Chambers’ seminal collection of short horror stories, The King in Yellow (1895), itself subsumed into H. P. Lovecraft’s literary canon of cosmic horror, one could argue that the series staked its place in mainstream popular culture despite its horror roots, and as a true example of Lovecraft’s philosophical and existentialist ‘weird tale’ (Lovecraft, 1973, p. 15).

The series begins with the pair being questioned, individually, by the Louisiana State Police Department in the present day: Hurricane Katrina destroyed the majority of evidence files relating to the investigation of the murder of a sex worker seventeen years prior. The interviews serve as a formal device for flashbacks, revealing key information about the men, the case, and their relationship. McConaughey’s Rustin (Rust) Cohle, a nihilistic alcoholic, is now a bartender. In his detecting days he was referred to as the ‘Taxman’ by colleagues, due to the large black notebook he carried everywhere, diligently and dispassionately working his way through successful cases. Harrelson’s Martin (Marty) Hart is a masochistic idealist, now a private investigator, who lives alone after neglecting his wife and daughters in favour of his workload and younger women. Read more

Posted on January 19, 2019

Have Recent Horror Films Accurately Captured Grief?

Guest Post

From societal issues to internal psychological havoc, horror has historically painted our micro and macro humanistic torments on the big screen. It creates new thruways for an alternative method of confrontation with what troubles us. However, there’s a particularly sinister and damaging emotion that each and every one of us likely has to meet with at some point in our life: grief. And grief hasn’t always been effectively depicted in film. There are tremendously individualized intricacies associated with grief that make it difficult to depict the introspective experience of grief rather than a voyeuristic expression. However, the horror genre is certainly one that has the capability to do so. While the complexities of grief stray far outside of fear, there are plenty who argue that horror should be defined by much more than how much it scares viewers.

Posted on January 7, 2019

Another Problem with Bird Box: Dying While Black in Horror Film

Guest Post

Shortly after watching Bird Box (Susanne Bier, 2018) one of my homies angrily texted me: “Why did Tom (Trevante Rhodes) have to die? And why did Malorie (Sandra Bullock) get to live?” While I knew exactly why he was so mad, I didn’t share his sense of surprise. Early on, after recognizing that the film alternated between the apocalyptic past and the post-apocalyptic present, and that Malorie was all alone with those children on that raft, my first thought was, “How many characters in this story will need to die to earn this white woman the empathy she should already have?”

This might seem like a cynical or reductive question from an admittedly jaded, black horror fan, but the implicit demand for Malorie’s salvation calls it forth. As I watched Bird Box with my family and they began to speculate about which of the characters might live, particularly the black ones, I felt sad already knowing that no one else in Malorie’s group (save the kids) would get out alive: I knew that making Malorie into someone capable of empathy was a call for blood.