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Posted on May 10, 2018

Top 10 Horror Protagonists Deadlier Than the Big Bad

Guest Post

The horror movie Final Girl (or Boy) is the character you’re rooting for! They’ve suffered brutal losses, witnessing their friends and loved ones succumb to whatever deadly consequence The Big Bad has in store for them. But what if the ones we’re supposed to be rooting for are just as capable of joining in the killing sprees if it means survival for them?

Well, here’s a list of the Top 10 Horror Protagonists (be warned, spoilers!) that you’d want to be near when something goes bump in the night!

Posted on April 30, 2018

Insidious The Last Key: The Demon of Abuse

Dawn Keetley

Insidious: The Last Key, directed by Adam Robitel and written by Leigh Whannell, is an iconic horror film of the #MeToo moment. While the film certainly has some failings as a horror film: it’s not terribly scary and the pacing seems a little uneven, it is eminently worth watching for two reasons: its centering of the story of Elise Rainier (Lin Shaye), whose compelling character is developed for the first time in the franchise; and its explicit rendering of men’s (sexual) abuse of women as what is truly monstrous. The Last Key puts women and women’s experience of abuse front and center, and all credit to Adam Robitel for making another horror film that features a complex older woman and that uses genre film to explore real horrors: he is the director who gave us the brilliant The Taking of Deborah Logan (2014) starring the wonderful Jill Larson as a woman struggling with both Alzheimer’s and the supernatural.

Posted on April 22, 2018

Ecohorror: The Nature of Horror

Dawn Keetley

A repeated visual motif in some recent horror films (actually ecohorror films) is the landscape that engulfs characters. These moments typically involve extreme long shots in which the characters are swallowed by their surroundings. They highlight, most obviously, the insignificance of humans in the face of an overwhelming nature. But they also represent, more ominously, how nature seems to be actively encroaching on the characters, actively threatening them. What happens in these moments is, I think, a distinct variant of ecohorror.

Posted on April 13, 2018

Disability in A Quiet Place: Hearing Not Required

Guest Post

Horror films include a diverse range of communication methods: anything from writing in blood, ghostly TV static, speaking in tongues, intense stares into the soul, opening puzzle boxes, reading from cursed books, dreaming, saying a name five times in a mirror, channeling spirits from beyond, passing around video tapes. The list could go on. There are also more typical methods, of course: screaming, crying, cackling. Among this list of strange and unusual ways to communicate, however, is a noticeable absence. A Quiet Place, directed by John Krasinski, may be the only horror film I’ve seen that so prominently features American Sign Language.

To encourage you to go see this movie, I’ve tried to avoid spoilers, though I do make vague mention of the end. The film starts mid-action, in the near future, the world already unrecognizable. Any remaining humans in this world cower in fear of violent and indestructible (gorgeously-designed) creatures, who appear to have already killed much of the population. The creatures are attracted to sound, which appears to cause them pain. In fact, their heads are comprised of teeth and an oversized, armor-encased ear. Whatever makes a sound is instantly destroyed. The tagline for the film is “silence is survival.”

Posted on April 11, 2018

Viewer Participation and Decision Making in Would You Rather (2012)

Gwen

The premise of Would You Rather is simple; eight guests meet at the home of Mr. Lambrick in hopes of becoming the next recipient of the Lambrick Foundation’s philanthropy. They meet under the guise of a dinner party, but what they don’t know is that there are no free handouts from this Foundation.

Would You Rather is broken down into two particularly interesting parts. Essentially these two parts consist of Iris’ (Brittany Snow) life outside of the game and her life inside the game. Outside of the game Iris is a young woman who moves home to care for her brother after her parents pass. Iris’ brother has leukemia and is in need of a costly bone marrow transplant. Prior to the game we see that Iris makes the conscious choice to become a caretaker by putting her life on hold to assist her brother. This same brother regularly makes comments about Iris’ sacrifice, “You can’t always be the hero, sometimes you gotta let go…Aren’t you sick of this, don’t you want a life?” Because of her inability to let go, Iris seeks out the money from Lambrick Foundation thus landing herself in the horrible game of would you rather.