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Posted on March 13, 2015

The Last Winter: The Revenge of….Fossil Fuel?

Dawn Keetley

The Last Winter, a 2006 film by Larry Fessenden, offers a provocative spin on the “revenge of nature” sub-genre of horror. The monster is . . .oil? Well, maybe. Set on a base in the “untapped” Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in northern Alaska, a group of environmentalists and oil company workers are mapping the region for locations for drill sites and access roads. Strange things start happening, though, and it’s precisely in the very strangeness of its events that The Last Winter gains much of its compelling force.

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Posted on March 12, 2015

Seeing and Slaughtering in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)

Dawn Keetley

Horror films have long been recognized for their ability to reflect troubling social and political concerns: it’s one of the many things that makes horror films valuable, makes them more than just a reveling in shock and gore. The most powerful horror films, moreover, continue to engage with social issues well after their particular moment of production. Tobe Hooper’s 1974 film, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, does exactly this. While the film is certainly on one level about the cataclysmic events of the late 1960s and early 1970s, it is also about the politics of meat-eating and industrial slaughter, both of which remain compelling issues in 2015.

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