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Posted on December 20, 2016

Reconsidering Disaster Films as Horror

Sharing a similar aesthetic, the line between horror films and disaster films has always been hard to pinpoint. From creepy sound effects to graphic violence to a cultivated atmosphere of menace, the characteristics of horror films and disaster films overlap in a very organic way. I’ve been interested in thinking about whether these two genres are distinctly different, or if it benefits us to think of them as similar.

I’m often surprised at how overlooked these movies are by horror film buffs. But with Hollywood attempting to resurrect the genre (World War Z, Olympus Has Fallen), I think it’s worth a look at whether some of the films that created the blueprint for the modern disaster film are also intimately connected to the horror genre. And while disaster films, much like horror, are designed to reflect the times in which they are made, the elements employed by both are startlingly similar.

Posted on December 13, 2016

“He’s inside me, and he wants to take me again!” Homosexuality and Gay Fandom in A Nightmare On Elm Street: Freddy’s Revenge

Guest Post

During my Masters’ degree, I decided to explore the nascent field of “queer horror.” This phrase may sound familiar, or it might sound entirely alien. Queer horror is the intersection between queerness – that is, non-heterosexual, non-normativity – and the horror genre. In 1997, a film scholar named Harry M. Benshoff wrote the seminal Monsters in the Closet: Homosexuality and the Horror Film. Benshoff explores the rich and deep-seated connections between homosexuality and horror, dating back to the earliest days of celluloid recording. One of the leading German Expressionists filmmakers, F. W. Murnau, was a homosexual male. He made film versions of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Dracula, and what is now considered an influential masterpiece of cinematic Expressionism, Nosferatu (1922). Yes, perhaps the most iconic image in all cinematic history was created by a gay person. I often get asked, “What is it about horror that’s queer?” I often respond, “What isn’t queer about horror?”

One of the most infamous queer horror films ever made is A Nightmare On Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge (1985), the first sequel to Wes Craven’s horror masterpiece A Nightmare On Elm Street from the previous year. Made during the height of the AIDS crisis, Freddy’s Revenge has been subject to rigorous analysis in relation to its homoerotic subtext. The film tells the story of Jesse, a sexually confused boy dealing with Freddy Krueger, a deformed monster who uses Jesse’s pubescent body as a vehicle for his killing. There are many great lines throughout the film, but its most quotable must be the unforgettable: “Something is trying to get inside my body!” Jesse has been identified as horror cinema’s first male “scream queen” (a prototypical role usually reserved for females), which goes hand in hand with the film’s homoerotic charge. There’s also the homoerotic relationship between Jesse and his handsome jock frenemy Grady, as well as Jesse’s gay gym teacher who has a penchant for young boys and BDSM. The latter of which leads to a scene in the film I still cannot believe made its way into a mainstream horror film in the 1980s, in which Jesse goes to a leather bar and sees his teacher kink-slapped to death in the boys’ showers. This actually happened. In 1985. Just let that soak in. Read more

Posted on December 5, 2016

House (1986) and House II (1987) Offer Insight into the Performance of Masculinity

Gwen

I initially delved into these movies with the aim of revisiting some great horror comedy. What I unearthed instead was an instruction manual for becoming a man in the 1980’s. These texts are just as rich with gender ideals as uncovering a 1950s Ladies Home Journal. Within both films I noticed a not so subtle description of what passes for appropriate masculinity. The narratives are different but the trajectory of the leading man is the same. In House, Roger Cobb (William Katt) has to overcome his failures in Vietnam to become man enough to have his family back. Similarly in House II Jesse (Arye Gross) isn’t even worthy enough to have a family until he butches up. Cue up your Betamax and your VHS as we are going to revisit the 1980s version of how to become a man.

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