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Posted on March 28, 2016

The Birds and Night of the Living Dead

Dawn Keetley

Alfred Hitchcock’s masterful film, The Birds, was released on March 28, 1963—fifty-three years ago today.

Among the many ways in which The Birds broke new ground, helping to shape the modern horror film, is in its profound influence on George A. Romero’s inaugural zombie film, Night of the Living Dead (1968).

Numerous critics have pointed out the similarities of the two films, and the ways in which The Birds created the narrative formula that would be emulated by so many zombie films. [i] The birds, like zombies, are dangerous en masse, as they flock and herd—and birds and zombies are also largely silent. Both The Birds and Night of the Living Dead, moreover, involve humans trying to board themselves up in structures that inevitably prove vulnerable: grasping dead hands and beaks always manage to penetrate their walls.

Both films also left in obscurity the origins of the mysterious attacks by the birds and the returned dead, each of which represented a grotesque overturning of natural law. As The Birds’ ornithologist, Mrs. Bundy (Ethel Griffies) proclaims, birds are “peaceful” and different species of birds would “never” flock together. Her definitive pronouncements (like those that insist the dead are dead) prove, of course, spectacularly wrong.

Posted on March 27, 2016

Easter in the Land of The Walking Dead

Dawn Keetley

Season 5, episode 3, “Four Walls and a Roof”

The above screenshot is taken from a scene in Father Gabriel’s church in the season 5 episode, “Four Walls and a Roof.” Rick and his group have laid a trap for Gareth and the other cannibals, who have just ambushed Bob and eaten his leg. Two of the Cannibals stand on either side of the door, where they think the survivors are hiding, and they’re about to break in and kill them. Rick has other plans, though. He, Abraham, Sasha, and Michonne will soon slaughter the Cannibals in what a horrified Gabriel calls “the Lord’s House.”

A list of Bible verses hangs conspicuously on the wall, and is featured in countless shots during the course of this episode. The Bible verses are below (at the end of this post)—and, as you’ll see, they all feature the dead who do not stay dead—the resurrected dead.

Posted on March 16, 2016

“Raised up from the Dead”*: The Walking Dead and Religion

Dawn Keetley

There is much to say about the role of religion in AMC’s The Walking Dead, but here I want to focus on the three crucial church scenes that have punctuated the series so far.

1. In season two, episode one, “What Lies Beneath,” the group is searching for Carol’s (Melissa McBride) lost daughter. They hear church bells and are drawn to the Southern Baptist Church, where, after killing the three walkers sitting in its pews, Carol and Rick (Andrew Lincoln) and even Daryl (Norman Reedus) ask God to help them.

Season 2, “What Lies Beneath”

2. In a much different scene in the season five episode, “Four Walls and a Roof,” the group lures those remaining survivors from Terminus who had captured Bob (Lawrence Gilliard, Jr.) and eaten his leg into Father Gabriel’s (Seth Gilliam) church and brutally slaughters them.

3. And finally, in the season six episode, “Not Tomorrow Yet,” Rick stands at the front of Alexandria’s church and exhorts the survivors that their very lives depend on a preemptive attack on Negan’s Saviors—that they must find them and kill them.

The most obvious point to make about the trajectory of these scenes is the dramatic increase in brutality on the part of Rick and his group, which goes hand-in-hand with Rick’s movement from supplicating Christ to taking his place.

Posted on March 9, 2016

Post 9-11 Horror Films Reveal Collective Anxieties About Children

Gwen

I frequently reflect upon how certain cataclysmic historical events permeate our popular culture. Since the turn of the century, the most notable American historic events have included 9-11, the subsequent wars, Anthrax, hurricane Katrina, the rise of social media, and recession. As someone who loves horror films and who tirelessly tries to understand the American family, this article investigates how post 9-11 issues are reflected through the family in horror films. I chose to primarily focus on the Bush presidency years because it spans most of the first decade of the century.[i] Those years also witnessed a series of notable unfortunate events that undoubtedly reverberated through our culture through the end of the decade. I argue that in the first decade of the 21^st century there was a rise in family horror films that surpasses previous decades. More interestingly, there was a surge in child antagonists who presented as more innately evil than ever before.[ii]The events after September 11^th, 2001 undoubtedly impacted the way we view our homes and our children.

Posted on March 2, 2016

The “Lifeless Eyes” of Seventies Horror

Dawn Keetley

I’m always interested in what horror looks like and what it means at any particular moment—what it says about anxieties brewing in the larger culture, and it’s in that spirit that I want to point out an interesting refrain through several high-profile horror films of the 1970s: Duel (Steven Spielberg, 1971), The Stepford Wives (Brian Forbes, 1975), Jaws (Spielberg, 1975), and Halloween (John Carpenter, 1975).

In The Stepford Wives, the protagonist Joanna Eberhart (Katharine Ross) moves to Stepford, Connecticut, where she soon notices women are, well, different—obsessed with cleaning their houses, for one thing. Joanna is a photographer: she’s intelligent, ambitious, and curious, and so much of the film involves her looking—the camera dwelling on her very human stare, as she tries to figure out what’s going on in her town. Joanna’s encounter with the “monster” at the end of the film is all the more horrifying, then, because what Joanna finally sees is her own robotic double—and as she looks in horror, her lifeless twin looks back with empty, soulless, black eyes. Joanna will soon become this “thing,” killed by the men in the town who sacrifice real women for inanimate, submissive machines.