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Posted on August 21, 2015

Why Sinister (2012) Is Much better Than Its Reviews Say

Dawn Keetley

Sinister 2 opens today (Friday 21, 2015) and I do not have high hopes for it—which is not a result of my less-than-positive feelings about the first film, released in 2012 and directed by Scott Derrickson. In fact, I think Sinister is a great horror film (in my top ten for 2012), and I disagree with the lukewarm response it earned from critics (only a 62% positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes). Indeed, my low expectations for Sinister 2 come precisely from my sense of how good Sinister is.

Sinister is about a true-crime writer, Ellison Oswalt (Ethan Hawke), who moves to the site of a horrendous murder—the owners and two of their three children were hung from the tree in their back-yard and their third child disappeared—in hopes of writing his next best-selling book. He discovers a case of film reels that detail other family murders spanning from the 60s to the 90s, and as he tracks down connections among the killings, he starts to experience strange things in his new house.

Posted on August 20, 2015

Sinister (2012) Offers an Unintentional Hero

Gwen

It goes without saying that mothers bear the brunt of blame in horror films. Most often it’s monstrous mothers to blame for allowing evil into the sacred temple of the family home. Sinister is one of the few films centered on the ineffective father. More importantly, it is part of a smaller subsect of horror films that critiques the biological father rather than the interloping step-father. Scholars such as Vivian Sobchack and Tony Williams suggest that the horrific father is often indicative of challenged patriarchal power. If indeed this is correct, then who is challenging the power and why?

Posted on August 16, 2015

Horror at the Edge of the Human: AMC’s Humans

Dawn Keetley

In the late 1970s, Robin Wood offered his famous argument that the “true subject of the horror genre is the struggle for recognition of all that our civilization represses or oppresses,” and for Wood that was primarily sexuality (notably bisexuality and female sexuality) as well as women, the proletariat, and racial and ethnic groups.[i] Thinking about two of the most interesting TV series of the summer—Channel 4/AMC’s Humans and CBS’s Zoo—it occurred to me that horror may be much less driven by gender, race, sex, and class in 2015 than it was in 1978.

Posted on August 12, 2015

Menstruation in Popular Culture: Part 1

Elizabeth Erwin

The spectre of menstruation in horror films has long been problematic. From the shameful and mocked first period of the titular character in Carrie (1976) to its role as the trigger that leads Ginger to sexually assault a boy in Ginger Snaps (2000), menstruation in horror is often used as a visual identifier of the threat women and their sexuality pose to society. With that in mind, I have been interested in looking at how this threat plays out on television and whether the perceived horror is any different from that found within horror films.

Posted on August 10, 2015

CBS’s Zoo: Animals Fight Back

Dawn Keetley

Based on James Patterson and Michael Ledwidge’s novel of the same name, CBS’s Zoo is my guilty pleasure of the summer. It’s a TV series firmly in the eco-horror / revenge of nature sub-genre, and its many flaws haven’t yet dispelled its power. Zoo has many of the flaws of network TV shows—some badly-written dialogue, an overly melodramatic plot, too frenetic a pace—but it’s really quite engaging, more so than other series I began hopefully after reading the novel (i.e., Under the Dome, The Strain, The Last Ship), only to abandon them after a few painful episodes.

Zoo tells the story of animals—lions in Botswana and LA, wolves in Mississippi, dogs in Slovenia, bats in Rio de Janeiro—who inexplicably abandon their habitual behavior and band together to attack the heretofore dominant species. And they aren’t killing for food or to protect themselves. Groups of animals across the globe engage in what can only be called premeditated and purposeful acts of murder. An eclectic group of “experts” is drawn together to figure out what’s happening—and why. The five main characters are likeable and the actors do a surprisingly good job given the sometimes cringe-worthy places the plot takes them.