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Posted on December 2, 2016

TV in Horror Film

Dawn Keetley

It’s hard to overestimate the profound effect of the TV on American culture; it may be rivaled only by the Internet or the smart phone. Television was introduced into US homes in the late 1940s and, according to James Baughman, “No other household technology, not the telephone or indoor plumbing, had ever spread so rapidly into so many homes.” The “number of homes with TVs increased from 0.4 percent in 1948,” Baughman writes, “to 55.7 percent in 1954 and to 83.2 percent four years later.” By the mid-1950s, “‘Television had established its place as the most important single form of entertainment and of passing the time.’”[i]

Given the rate at which TVs spread through US homes, it’s actually rather surprising that they don’t make an appearance in a horror film until George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead in 1968—a decade after they had insinuated themselves into over 83% of our homes. (Having said that, I’m eager to hear from people who know of horror films before 1968 that weave TV into their plot.) Since 1968, the TV has been a regular in the horror film, and so here I just want to sketch out some of the highlights of TV’s role in US horror, tracking how it has manifest our culture’s changing anxieties about that box that has transfixed us for almost 60 years. And if that last sentence sounds elegiac, it is—because TV’s power is on the wane. Read more

Posted on November 21, 2016

28 Days Later and the Enduring Power of Frankenstein

Dawn Keetley

James Whale’s Frankenstein was released on November 21, 1931—85 years ago. The film not only began the American horror tradition but has remained enormously generative. Its influence can be seen not only in its contemporaries, like King Kong (1933), but also in films of the 1950s such as The Thing from Another World (1951) and The Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954), and in still later horror monsters such as Texas Chainsaw Massacre’s Leatherface (Tobe Hooper, 1974) and Halloween’s mute and malevolent Michael Myers (John Carpenter, 1978).

Frankenstein has also clearly had a powerful influence on the zombie film: it’s hard not to see the specter of Henry Frankenstein’s creation in the first “ghoul” of George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968), for instance. Both Frankenstein’s creature and Romero’s ghouls were born in the graveyard, born from humans doing what they should not. Read more

Posted on November 20, 2016

Stephen King’s “The Raft” and the Stickiness of Objects

Dawn Keetley

Stephen King’s story “The Raft,” published in Skeleton Crew in 1985 and part of the horror anthology Creepshow 2 (Michael Gornick, 1987), is deceptively straightforward. Near the end of October, four teens—Deke, Randy, LaVerne, and Rachel—have a few drinks, smoke some pot, and decide to swim out to a raft in the middle of a deserted lake. Once they’ve all reached the raft, Randy sees a strange black shape in the water: it looks like oil—an oil slick is the closest he can come to naming it—but it’s not an oil slick; it’s too perfectly formed. Randy tells his friends that the one oil slick he has seen was “just this big sticky mess all over the water. In streaks and big smears.” He insists it did not look like the shape that is lurking on the lake: “It wasn’t, you know, compact.” This strange mass, which seems to sense their movements and their vulnerabilities, is a dense blackness—and the story tells of its relentlessly oozing over the teens, one by one, dissolving their flesh, pulling it off their bones, until only Randy is left. Read more

Posted on November 15, 2016

Saw, Hostel, and the Death of Manufacturing

Dawn Keetley

Shortly after the 2016 presidential election, I ran across Michael Moore’s prescient article predicting Donald’s Trump’s victory. Moore described a possible “Rust Belt Brexit,” claiming that Trump would do well in four traditionally Democratic states—Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Michigan—home to many “angry, embittered working (and nonworking) people.” And indeed, against all expectations, Trump won all four of these states. There’s one sentence in Moore’s piece, as he’s describing this part of the country (as well as the Midlands of England), that resonated profoundly with me, not least because I’ve lived in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania and grew up in the industrial Midlands of England: “From Green Bay to Pittsburgh,” Moore writes, “this, my friends, is the middle of England – broken, depressed, struggling, the smokestacks strewn across the countryside with the carcass of what we use to call the Middle Class.”[i] This image, of smokestacks strewn across the landscape, seems to be front and center in the visual imagery of both Saw (James Wan, 2004) and Hostel (Eli Roth, 2005). Read more

Posted on October 9, 2016

Georges Méliès, the Film That Makes You Go Mad, and the Birth of Horror

Dawn Keetley

One of the films I am most excited about screening at the upcoming Brooklyn Horror Festival (October 14-16) is the 2016 French documentary directed by Fabien Delage called Fury of the Demon (La Rage du Démon). This is how IMDb describes the film:

“A documentary investigation on the rarest and most controversial French movie in the history of early cinema: a fascinating, lost and dangerous short film which causes violent reactions to those who watch it.” Read more