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Posted on August 3, 2015

Sacrifice and the Horror Film: The Wicker Man and The Cabin in the Woods

Dawn Keetley

Sacrifice is a central component of the horror narrative. We’re not talking about heroic self-sacrifice here (though that is sometimes on display): rather, horror films dramatize some seemingly primordial need, which runs through stories of the very earliest human cultures, to sacrifice others. Sacrifice is usually about appeasing “gods”—indeed, William Harmon has written that sacrificial killing is “inherent in the religious worldview.” The motif of blood sacrifice, though, has “frequently been disguised or attenuated” in the modern world, Harman continues. [i] And here’s where the horror film comes in, with yet another of its crucially important cultural functions. The horror film represents both the persistence of blood sacrifice and its “attenuation” or “disguise.” Sacrificial violence is indulged in, yet is displaced from the realm of the real to the realm of film (although the line separating those two realms is often much thinner than we might think).

Posted on July 29, 2015

Zelda in Pet Sematary (1989) Revives Images of Family Repression

Gwen

Stephen King’s Pet Sematary (1989) revives the Gothic literature trope of the madwoman in the attic. This is not to say that it has not appeared in other facets of popular culture prior to his film but rather that Mr. King’s representation is arguably one of the most memorable. There is discussion of the madwoman character in feminist circles that view her as part of the binary representations of women in Gothic literature (as either putrid or pure). This article sidesteps this dialogue to suggest a more basic argument that horror film families repress difference through this same character. In the case of Pet Semetary, difference and/or imperfection is represented through a proverbial “black sheep” in the family. This member challenges the status of the family and must be locked up like a literal skeleton in the closet.

Posted on July 27, 2015

Horror Rewatch: Ringu (1998) and The Ring (2002)

Elizabeth Erwin

Unlike many horror fans, I was not too impressed with The Ring (2002). As the story of a possessed video that once watched curses the viewer to death by a demonic spirit, the film is more interested in conveying a sense of dread than it is in creating bloody spectacles. And while I’m not necessarily against that approach in horror, I just never found the essential horror being explored all that compelling. And so it was with very little expectation that I went into a viewing of Ringu (1998), the Japanese film that The Ring remade. What I discovered is that watching these two films as companion pieces instead of as individual films yields a much more interesting commentary on the connection between community and monstrosity.

Posted on July 22, 2015

Cat People (1942): Coding Lesbianism Via Otherness

Elizabeth Erwin

For every lesbian horror victim, such as Brandy in Hallow’s End (2003), there exists a murderous lesbian, such as May Canady in May (2002), to remind us of the perversion traditionally associated with lesbian desire. Previously we looked at how Dracula’s Daughter coded its lesbian narrative in order to escape censor from the Legion of Decency. This week we will take a look at how Cat People (1942) established markers of “otherness” in order to code its queerness.

Just as in Dracula’s Daughter, the main character of Cat People, Irena Dubrovna, struggles against a part of her true identity she fears will render her an outcast. Irena, a Serbian immigrant, believes she is descended from a cursed tribe in which any woman who has her passions aroused will shape-shift into a killing panther. Irena’s life is complicated when she impulsively marries Oliver, a New York architect. Unable to be intimate with him for fear of the curse, Irena is sent to a psychiatrist in search of a cure. The audience is left guessing whether Irena’s paranoia is the result of sexual repression or whether her fears may be well founded.

Posted on July 9, 2015

Shark Horror, Part 2: The Shark in the Human World

Dawn Keetley

In my first post on shark horror, I wrote about “naturalistic horror,” which puts us firmly in the terrain of the shark, in a world relatively indifferent to humans (except as food), in which the good guys don’t necessarily come out on top (or even alive), and death is random. In this post I want to write about something very different, what we might call “humanist horror.” In this variant, sharks come into our terrain, events (including death) seem governed by human rules (a few unsavory jerks or insignificant extras are eaten), and the good guys come out on top. These films tend to be horror-comedy—and really not that scary.

The hallmark of these films is that they eschew the existential dread invoked by sending humans out into the ocean—into the shark’s world. Instead, they bring the shark to where we live.