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Posted on January 1, 2016

Beetlejuice and the Invisibility of Childfree Couples

Gwen

I’m going to be honest with you; I really just wanted to watch Beetlejuice (1988). What emerged was completely unintended. As horror reviewers and academics we tend to read into things for postmodern interpretations of the world around us. As horror fans, sometimes we just want to sit back and indulge in some of our favorite films. Unfortunately our brain doesn’t always get the message to just sit down and shut up. That is exactly what happened on the way to Winter River, Connecticut, when I tried to join the Maitlands for a lazy Sunday afternoon. For those of you nay-sayers, yes I know that Beetlejuice is characterized as Comedy Fantasy—but, it’s my party and I’ll review it if I want to.

While my brain was supposed to be turned off, I realized something about this movie: it is all about Lydia. The film reads like a foreign adoption story about a childfree couple wandering the earth until they are made into a real family via the addition of a child. What I found most interesting about Beetlejuice was the way that Adam (Alec Baldwin) and Barbara (Geena Davis) Maitland are devalued and almost irrelevant to the outside world until they find Lydia. This is by no means a commentary on their relationship, as Tim Burton masterfully paints them as an ideal couple before and after their introduction to Lydia. It instead reflects on the way that the world around them emphasizes and validates couples with children.

Posted on December 28, 2015

Formless Horrors: John Carpenter’s The Fog (1980)

Dawn Keetley

John Carpenter’s first three horror films—Halloween (1978), The Fog (1980), and The Thing (1982)—are not only exceptional films, but, taken together, they constitute a kind of trilogy in their similar exploitation of the horror of formlessness.

Halloween may be the film least self-evidently about formlessness (its monster is “human,” after all), but I would suggest that Michael Myers actually stands in defiance of all categories. He is called the “bogeyman” more than once, including at the climax of the film, when a traumatized Laurie (Jamie Lee Curtis) stammers out to Dr. Sam Loomis (Donald Pleasence)—“It was the bogeyman.” Kendall Phillips has astutely pointed out that the bogeyman occupies a position “at the boundaries of notions of cultural normalcy”—and that he “embodies the chaos that exists on the other side of these cultural boundaries.”[i] True to form (or, rather, true to formlessness), Michael-as-bogeyman is often portrayed at boundaries—at intersections, on the other side of a road, in doorways, at windows.

Posted on December 23, 2015

Silent Night, Deadly Night (1984): Connecting Depravity with Childhood Trauma

Elizabeth Erwin

The corruption of childhood by adults, both neglectful and deranged, is a predictable staple of American horror films. Throw in a murderous Santa Claus and a whip-wielding nun and the moral depravity gets ratcheted up ten-fold. Such is the case in Charles E. Sellier, Jr.’s Silent Night, Deadly Night. Residing between ridiculously quotable dialogue and an endless array of sexual, albeit creative, violence is a pointed commentary on the connection between depravity and trauma. The film’s message is clear: it isn’t so much the creatures of myth (Santa, The Boogeyman) children ought to fear but the adults who surround them.

You know a horror film has ticked all the right boxes when the PTA petitions to have it banned. Such was the case in 1984 when Silent Night, Deadly Night opened and immediately raised the hackles of media watchdog groups. Despite its opening weekend grossing more than A Nightmare on Elm Street, TriStar Pictures pulled the plug on its media campaign and the film quickly faded from theatres.

In many respects, the controversy surrounding the 1984 release of the film as well as its advertisements showing an axe-hefting Santa Claus emerging from a chimney seems an echo of a simpler time. People still picketed theatres and film critics still had the power to shape public perception. Consider Leonard Maltin who gave Silent Night, Deadly Night zero stars and predicted the next thing filmgoers would be subjected to would be the Easter Bunny as a child molester. Also weighing in were the notable film critic duo of Siskel and Ebert. Their eviscerating review of the film, in which they called out by name—repeatedly—the people associated with the film, is the stuff of legend:

Posted on December 16, 2015

Eden Lake (2008): Folk Horror For A Disenchanted World

Dawn Keetley

Eden Lake, released in 2008 and directed by James Watkins, has been generally classified as “hoodie horror”—a British sub-genre that exploits middle-class fear of hoodie-wearing, underclass youth.[i] Mark Featherstone aptly describes the way in which “feral youth” become stand-ins for the “poor or underclass,” forming the central “evil other” of “hoodie horror.”[ii] While there is no doubt that Eden Lake is indeed hoodie horror, the film also borrows liberally from folk horror.[iii]

The film follows Jenny (Kelly Reilly) and Steve (Michael Fassbender) as they travel to Eden Lake, a beautiful natural space that Steve frequented as a child but which is about to be converted, as the billboard tells us, to “a secure gated community of fifty superior New England homes.” Jenny and Steve have a couple of encounters with young hooligans on bikes, who then appear almost uncannily right beside them on Eden Lake’s beach. One thing leads to another and soon Jenny and Steve, trapped in the woods, are being hunted by the increasingly menacing children.

Adam Scovell has laid out the principal elements of folk horror on his website, Celluloid Wicker Man—and Eden Lake unambiguously exemplifies three of the four characteristics he identifies. It is set in a lush natural landscape; Jenny and Steve become isolated, removed from their familiar urban environment; and they soon realize with horror that they are beset by characters whose moral beliefs are at best bewilderingly skewed, at worst entirely absent.

Posted on December 7, 2015

Piano Keys to the House: Crimson Peak, the Gothic Romance, and Feminine Power

Guest Post

On the eve of Crimson Peak’s opening day, Guillermo del Toro tweeted, “One last time before release. Crimson Peak: not a horror film. A Gothic Romance. Creepy, tense, but full of emotion…”

Before seeing this film, I had read all about its Gothic, particularly literary, influences, and most particularly the influence of Ann Radcliffe. But, when I saw the trailers, which feature the heroine, Edith, pronouncing, “Ghosts are real,” as well as images of the ghosts themselves, I had to wonder what these influences could possibly be. Radcliffe championed the concept of the explained supernatural in her late eighteenth-century Gothic novels: her ghosts are intentionally not real. What her heroines first imagine to be ghosts turn out to be wax figures or wandering romantics, or some other easily-explained phenomenon. Crimson Peak, however, engages with these literary Gothic influences in a more nuanced way. It’s not that the ghosts aren’t real, it’s that the ghosts aren’t the real threat to our heroine. The real threat is flesh and blood.