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Posted on July 22, 2016

Barbra’s Monstrous Metamorphosis in Night of the Living Dead (1990)

His name virtually synonymous with the cinematic zombie, George A. Romero’s Dead series rewrote the rules of the undead monster. In the original Night of the Living Dead (1968), Romero’s core group of survivors battle each other as well as the zombies in a film which very much reflects the time in which it was made. As one of the group fighting for survival, Barbra is the epitome of the defenseless female. She spends the majority of the film either panicking to the detriment of those around her or catatonic. Her death, via consumption by her zombified brother, is almost a welcome reprieve from her complete ineffectualness.

Posted on June 21, 2016

The Terror of Motherhood in The Ones Below

Guest Post

David Farr’s The Ones Below (2015) has much in common with recent parent-horror treasures like The Babadook (Jennifer Kent, 2014) and Goodnight Mommy (Severin Fiala and Veronica Franz, 2014). While viewing each one, I spent much of my time thinking: “This film is doing a great job making parenting look like a terrifying nightmare.” The Ones Below is a film about the myriad of horrors facing modern mothers. With understated intensity, Farr documents the struggles of new parenting, and the potentially horrifying consequences of the persistent scrutiny that mothers endure.

The Ones Below follows a woman named Kate (Clémence Poésy) and her husband, Justin (Stephen Campbell Moore), in the last months of her first pregnancy and first months of motherhood. “The Ones Below” are their new downstairs neighbors, Jon (David Morrissey) and Theresa (Laura Birn). Like Kate, Theresa is in the second trimester of pregnancy. In spite of that shared experience, these women could not be more different. Costuming and makeup choices highlight the contrast. Theresa’s appearance is always pristine. Her outfits are bright and coordinated, often complementing her husband’s, and her makeup is always immaculate. She looks more like a model in an ad for maternity clothing than an average pregnant woman. While Kate is certainly beautiful, she seems downright frumpy by comparison. She wears oversized clothes, her hair is usually pulled back in a low bun, and her makeup is minimal. Kate’s experience of pregnancy is uncomfortable, exhausting, and sometimes not very flattering. Theresa is what popular media would have us believe pregnancy is: a beautiful woman joyfully enjoying her pregnancy, glowing at all times. Read more

Posted on June 16, 2016

Shock and Awe in The Walking Dead: Why AMC is Right to Shut Down Spoiler Sites

Elizabeth Erwin

Given the volatile outcry that accompanied the cliffhanger ending of The Walking Dead’s season six finale, it’s safe to say that the feelings of a sizable percentage of the show’s online fan base about AMC and the show’s top creators have been lukewarm at best. So it came as no surprise that when AMC decided to issue a cease and desist letter to The Spoiling Dead Fans, the show’s largest online spoiler site, rage almost instantaneously erupted. Fan outcry that AMC would want to shut down a site that has consistently and accurately spoiled key narrative developments is significant in what it suggests about fandom, ownership, and the way middle America consumes horror.

Before we discuss any of those things, though, let me be crystal clear. While I believe that AMC was within its rights to issue the cease and desist, I in no way excuse or support the harassment detailed by The Spoiling Dead Fans. If the abuse detailed in their post on that matter, which you should read here, is factually accurate, and I have no reason to believe that it is not, then AMC’s actions are a clear abuse of power and should be dealt with accordingly.

It’s also important that we define what actually constitutes a spoiler. A spoiler is not the same thing as conjecture. There is absolutely nothing stopping people from debating who is at the wrong end of Negan’s bat. Rather, the issue at hand, and the reason for AMC’s lawsuit, concerns confirmed intel that is derived either from copyright protected materials such as scripts or from revelations by people who have signed non-disclosure agreements. Given that The Spoiling Dead Fans has provided detailed episode synopses prior to episodes airing, it is more than likely that they have access to materials and/or credible accounts and that the knowledge they are sharing is no longer conjecture because it has been confirmed by a source.

Glenn’s fate was confirmed via spoiler sites well in advance of when the episode aired.

With those caveats in mind, I think it is worthwhile to consider more broadly how spoilers ruin the horror experience. The Walking Dead is a curious pop culture juggernaut in that its pedigree is unabashedly horror while many of its viewers are not fans of the genre. And it may be this disconnect that is fueling a great deal of the Internet rage being hurled at AMC for deigning to protect its investment.

Posted on June 13, 2016

Rosemary’s Baby and 60s Youth

Dawn Keetley

Born in the late 1960s, I am—for better or worse—one of Rosemary’s Generation. Historian Steven Mintz describes a “sea change” in behavior and attitudes in the youth of the 60s and 70s: “their parents’ concern for their well-being became translated into their own search for personal fulfillment.” Often characterized as “idealistic and rebellious,” 60s youth were also “uniquely self-absorbed, materialistic, and narcissistic.”[i] No single cultural product can define a generation, but Roman Polanski’s film, Rosemary’s Baby, released on June 12, 1968, certainly embodies something of 60s youth—as did, I would add, George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (also 1968) and Richard Donner’s The Omen (1976).

Headlines of the 60s worried about spoiled, defiant children and, as Mintz puts it about “parents who let their offspring bully them.” A 1960 issue of Newsweek asked “Are We Trapped in a Child-Centered World?” Other articles posed the questions “Is the Younger Generation Soft and Spoiled?” and “Child Monarchy in America?”[ii] Read more

Posted on June 7, 2016

Male Rape and Victimology in The Killing Kind (1973)

Elizabeth Erwin

Curtis Harrington’s The Killing Kind (1973) is quite simply a fascinating study of the politics of rape.

When it comes to the depiction of female rape in American horror, the line between violence and sex has been especially blurred. Whether the rape is part of a revenge narrative (American Mary, Girls Against Boys), a mode to distinguish otherness (Cannibal Holocaust, The Last House on the Left) or a means to convey a political point (The Entity, Deadgirl), the usage of sexualized violence against women in horror narratives is so pervasive so as to become an acknowledged trope of the genre. These scenes, while often explicitly violent, also tend to incorporate close-up shots of naked breasts and writhing bodies and function to make the moment expressly and uncomfortably linked to sexuality.

Conversely, the specter of male rape in American popular culture is relatively uncommon. Often linked to a specific setting such as a prison (The Glass House, Fortune and Men’s Eyes), problematically associated to homosexuality (The Mudge Boy) or immediately and uncomfortably repressed by the other characters (Deliverance), male rape is typically portrayed-when it’s portrayed (it’s telling that I needed to go outside the horror genre to locate films)-as expressly violent without the added sexual subtext. Even in those cases where rape is tied to queer identity, the act itself is shown as being specifically about dominance.

Given that frame of reference, it was with great interest that I recently watched Curtis Harrington’s excellent The Killing Kind. The film opens with the brutal gang rape of a young woman, Tina (Susan Bernard), on a beach. Terry (John Savage) looks on but does nothing to participate in OR to prevent the violence happening in front of him. He is then grabbed by the rapists, stripped, and thrust upon the woman being violated. Terry’s forced penetration of Tina means that in that moment he is both rapist and victim. Read more