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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

Posted on October 7, 2016

Trick-or-Treating in Halloween (1978)

Dawn Keetley

In Murray Leeder’s provocative short book Halloween, published in 2014 as part of the Devil’s Advocates series, he points out that for “a film called Halloween, there is remarkably little trick or treating depicted in it” (57). Leeder mentions two moments relatively early in the film in which Laurie (Jamie Lee Curtis) does see trick-or-treaters—as she is walking to her house after school and then after she has left her house to wait for Annie (Nancy Kyes) on a street corner. As Leeder points out, the first instance, in which Laurie stands poised to go into her house, evokes a kind of nostalgia for childhood (57). Laurie says, wistfully, “Well, kiddo, I thought you outgrew superstition,” looking at the costumed children, who are laughing, clearly identifiable as children and walking with an unmasked adult.

The second instance is slightly more tense; to quote Leeder, “the anxious cutting introduces an element of menace that is echoed in the uneasy look on Laurie’s face, since she is now becoming more attentive to Michael’s presence in Haddonfield” (57). Read more

Posted on October 2, 2016

Rationality, Masculinity, and the Death of Penny Dreadful

Guest Post

Guest Author: Cayla McNally

Please forgive my lateness with this post, dear Reader; I was blindsided to discover that Penny Dreadful’s season 3 finale was, in fact, its series finale, and have been spinning my wheels trying to write a proper send-off ever since. In my last post, I said that wherever this show goes, I will follow. I didn’t realize that it would fade into the black, where there is no following. So, even though it hurts, let’s dive in, one last time.

While the previous two seasons focused on creation, this season explored the idea of unmaking. The core group of characters- Ethan (Josh Hartnett), Vanessa (Eva Green), Malcolm (Timothy Dalton), and Victor (Harry Treadaway)- are far flung and left to their own devices. Forced to forge friendships of convenience, each of them makes a series of choices that hurtles the plot towards its ultimate tragic end.

Ethan is brought back to the New Mexico territory by Inspector Rusk to be tried for his crimes. He manages multiple bloody escapes, aided by his father’s goons and Hecate the witch (Sarah Greene). Hecate is hoping to sway Ethan to the dark side, and convinces him that killing his father (Brian Cox) and damning himself is the best option. Meanwhile, Sir Malcolm is followed to Africa by Kaetenay (Wes Studi), an Apache man who is determined to bring Ethan back around to the light side. Making their way to New Mexico, they follow Ethan to his father’s house. It is revealed that Ethan- somewhat unwittingly- previously led Kaetenay to his father’s house, where the Apaches killed most of his family. A shootout erupts, Rusk and Hecate are killed, and Sir Malcolm kills Ethan’s father in order to save Ethan from eternal damnation. Read more