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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.”

Posted on July 5, 2024

Considering Catholic Horror Literature

Guest Post

Gavin F. Hurley

I was a teenager when I first watched The Exorcist. It terrified me. Later, in my twenties, I read Blatty’s novel. It still terrified me. But its complexity began to seep in. While the story was entertaining and the style was easy to read, the novel was also intellectual and spiritually engaging. Energized by the horror genre, this balance intrigued me—and sparked my interest in Catholic horror literature.

As many of us know, horror fiction can motivate meaningful inquiry. We ponder imagination when reading Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho. We think about the nature of desire when reading Clive Barker’s The Hellbound Heart. We contemplate the cosmic expanse when reading H.P. Lovecraft’s The Colour Out of Space. But I realized years ago that Blatty’s novel motivates inquiry in a distinctive way. Not only is The Exorcist unapologetically Catholic, but it is also fueled by a classical approach. This is not too surprising. Catholicism has had a long partnership with the classical liberal arts tradition: one where theology reigns as regina scientiarum (queen of the sciences) with philosophy enlisted as her handmaiden. The Exorcist operates in a similar fashion. It is informed by both theology and philosophy. While it is written for popular audiences, many of its dialogues resemble Plato’s: they are fueled by Socratic Method. Moreover, both Chris MacNeil and Father Damien Karras wrestle with various tensions: between theism and atheism, religion and science, faith and reason, life and death, innocence and guilt, and hope and despair. This is the domain of the liberal arts. Meanwhile, the inciting incident—Regan MacNeil’s possession— stirs all these tensions into potent cocktail. Readers drink it down and become intoxicated by the horror of it all.

Posted on June 25, 2024

The Repair Women of Slumber Party Massacre

Guest Post

Johanna Isaacson

I first watched The Slumber Party Massacre (1982) decades ago, with too-high, too-pure expectations. As a devout horror fan and a dedicated feminist, I freaked when I learned Rita Mae Brown wrote the script. On top of that, the film was the first slasher to be directed by a woman, Amy Holden Jones. Surely, this was a feminist classic I had somehow missed.

Anyone who has studied second wave feminism or queer history will have encountered Rita Mae Brown, the author of Rubyfruit Jungle (1973), a groundbreaking queer bildungsroman. Although her politics grew tepid over time, during the seventies Brown was one of the most visible, charismatic, and defiant defenders of lesbian rights. She was known to call out homophobia in mainstream feminist organizations, such as NOW, and sexism in the nascent Gay Liberation Front. Eventually, in response to this lack of radicality and inclusivity in existent political groups, she helped form the lesbian separatist Furies Collective.

I didn’t quite know how the conventions of an eighties slasher movie could reflect these politics, but I was eager to find out. So, I was puzzled when the Slumber Party Massacre turned out to be what I would have expected from a male writer and director. The film was filled with scantily clad high school girls who are, one by one, penetrated by a sick serial killer’s unsubtle phallic weapon.

Posted on June 21, 2024

A Killer Perspective: Reconsidering the Neurodivergent Slasher Villain in In a Violent Nature

Guest Post

Cody Parish

WARNING: This essay contains plot spoilers!

The killer’s point-of-view (POV) shot is arguably the most recognizable convention of the slasher film.¹ Made famous in the opening sequence of John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978), the killer’s lurking POV shot has been reproduced in countless subsequent slasher franchises as a means to build suspense. It is noticeably absent, however, from Shudder’s new independent release, In a Violent Nature (Chris Nash, 2024), a slasher movie whose central conceit entails taking the perspective of its killer.² in her seminal monograph, Men, Women, and Chain Saws (1992, 2015), Carol J. Clover was the first to challenge gendered arguments claiming male and female viewers of the slasher film identify with the male killer and Final Girl, respectively. Instead, Clover argues that viewers identify initially with the slasher killer until more details about the Final Girl are known, at which point viewer identification, prompted by cinematography as much as by narrative development, begins to shift to the Final Girl (45). Of the killer, Clover writes, “[He] is often unseen or barely glimpsed, during the first part of the film, and what we do see, when we finally get a good look, hardly invites immediate or conscious empathy,” noting the killer is typically “masked” or “deformed” (44).

Yet, what distinguishes In a Violent Nature from previous slashers exploring the killer’s perspective, like Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon (2006), is that the film almost exclusively tracks the footsteps of its killer, Johnny (Ry Barrett), who becomes the narrative’s anti-hero as a result, while all other characters including the narrative’s Final Girl receive little backstory or development. The filmmakers strategically employ various cinematographic and narrative techniques to dehumanize and humanize Johnny as the de facto protagonist, oscillating between identificatory distance and proximity. Johnny explicitly embodies an ambivalent tension between revulsion and sympathy, one that has implicitly framed intellectually disabled slasher killers like Leatherface from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974-2022) franchise and Jason Voorhees of the Friday the 13^th (1980-2009) film series. In a Violent Nature thus challenges viewers to reconsider the dread of neurological difference connected to the killer in the slasher film.

Posted on June 11, 2024

What’s Actually the Problem with M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village?

Guest Post

JDC Burnhil

“Eventually the secret of Those, etc., is revealed. … It’s a crummy secret, about one step up the ladder of narrative originality from It Was All a Dream. It’s so witless, in fact, that when we do discover the secret, we want to rewind the film so we don’t know the secret anymore.”

(Roger Ebert, Review of The Village, 2004)

In most tellings of The Rise and Fall of M. Night Shyamalan, The Village (2004) is treated as Where It Started to Go Wrong. The cause, according to these theorists, was the great success the auteur director had had with films that incorporating a “twist,” such as The Sixth Sense (1999) and Unbreakable (2000); the effect was that he got cocky and made a film around a twist without realizing that twist was “witless.”

After studying the film and many viewers’ responses over many years, I’ve come to a different hypothesis. I believe that the dislike expressed for the “twists” (of which there are really three, not just one) is what doctors call “referred pain” – pain that is caused in one location, but felt in another. The actual cause of most viewer dissatisfaction is a set of much subtler missteps – coincidentally, also three in number.