- Horror Movie - Horror Homeroom

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.

Posted on May 30, 2024

Silver and Gold: The Quiet and the Storm Disturbing Hybridity in Agnieszka Smoczyńska’s The Lure

Guest Post

James Rose

Agnieszka Smoczyńska’s The Lure (2015) is, like its mermaid protagonists, Golden (Michalina Olszańska) and Silver (Marta Mazurek), a peculiar hybrid: part Horror, part Musical, it is an adaptation of Hans Christian Anderson’s The Little Mermaid that has been fused with biographical experiences from the director’s teenage years, all integrated into the landscape of 1980’s Poland. Combined, The Lure emerges as a coming-of-age narrative that charts Golden and Silver’s transition from teenage girls to young women through increasingly mature first experiences – the “first shot of vodka, first cigarette, first sexual disappointment and first important feeling for a boy.” It is these first attractions and sexual awakenings that form the film’s dramatic core; while Golden, the more aggressive of the two, engages in active seduction, lesbian sex, and savage assaults on men, Silver falls in love with Mietek (Jakub Gierszał), the drummer at the strip club where the mermaids have found themselves living and working. While this affection is reciprocated, the couple cannot physically consummate their love – not necessarily because of the complexities of interspecies sex but more because Silver is not fully a woman, for her body is a hybrid of a female torso and a fish’s tail. There is a further peculiarity about Silver’s body – when out of water she has human legs but between them is only a smooth curve of flesh that is, crudely, described as being “smooth as Barbie dolls.” It is only when she is in water that her human legs transform into the distinctive tail and her reproductive organs are revealed.

Posted on May 14, 2024

The Influence of Television Horror on Cinematic End Times: The Case of Kolchak

Guest Post

The interaction between movie and television horror is a complex one. The horror genre has long straddled the two media types (for which there is no collective name, surprisingly) for many years. Dark Shadows (ABC, 1966–1971) began as a television daily created by Dan Curtis, but then, near the end of the series, two independently standing cinematic stories emerged in House of Dark Shadows (Curtis, 1970) and Night of Dark Shadows (Curtis, 1971). The flow moves in the other direction as well. A couple of contemporary television movies, The Night Stalker (John Llewellyn Moxey, 1972) and The Night Strangler (Dan Curtis, 1973) led to the weekly television series, also on ABC, Kolchak: The Night Stalker (Jeff Rice, 1973–1974). Both movies were produced by Curtis. Although Kolchak lasted for only one season, it had tremendous influence.

Posted on March 16, 2024

The Fawn Response – A New Way of Thinking about Folk Horror

Guest Post

JDC Burnhil

Anyone who attempts to devise a definition of “folk horror” quickly discovers how peculiarly exasperating the task is. As much as readers and critics may agree that certain works definitely belong to the corpus – as much as we may sense that the corpus is bound by a common spirit – the bewildering variety of twists folk horror can take makes it difficult to confidently identify the key elements.

What is proposed in this essay is that, in fact, a majority of folk horror draws on a common root for its power and relevance, and that this connection has gone largely unappreciated before now. Moreover, it makes sense of the bewildering variety we just mentioned: in a very real sense, folk horror’s spirit may be defined less by “these are the boundaries it fits within” than “these are the boundaries it defiantly straddles.”